My client wanted to have extra forms on their user registration page on their WordPress site so they could capture more information about the visitors who signed up for their website.

In the past I had used a plugin called Register Plus Redux, but unfortunately it’s not supported any more. Because of the popularity of WordPress there’s usually a similar plugin available. That was true and easily found with a quick search called Cimy User Extra Fields.

The next problem that I had was that my client was not happy at all with the look of the standard WordPress registration form. It’s pretty easy to change the look of the standard registration page, but there are many people who want it to have the same look and feel as the rest of their pages and posts. A custom registration page for WordPress, not an unreasonable request.

Unfortunately this was no easy chore, but after many hours of searching I came across a plugin called Theme My Login. What a find! It is simple to install and worked great. It’s very simple and can be used in it’s default format, but is also highly customizable.

I can see where I’m going to use this for many clients.

My wife bought me a $25 gift card from McDonalds for Christmas.
When I tried to use it the day after Christmas for a coffee they told me it had a $0 balance.
When I looked it up online, it activated on Dec 20th with $5 & was used up on the 23rd (My wife bought the card on the 24th)

I called their corporate office and the woman there just kept apologizing over and over and saying that since we didn’t keep the receipt there was nothing she could do. I probably was meaner then I should have been to the woman, but I asked her several times to stop apologizing, it was just making me mad, but she kept on and on. When I asked for a supervisor she told me that it was the corporate headquarters and there was no one above her (like they would let a supervisor answer the phone first). I was so mad I hung up and called back a couple of days later after I calmed down and found the credit card receipt. They promised they would speak to the store owner and get right back to me. Still haven’t heard anything.

Couldn’t they contact the store and see if the register was over $25 that day? or something? anything? How else could I have spent exactly $25 that day? Was there an Arch card issued at that time? I called the local store, twice and was told that the Arch Cards were handled by corporate, but at least she told me that she would try and check into it. I haven’t heard back from them either. We do have a credit card statement and we’ll see if they can help, but all I wanted was for McDonalds to look into it and get back to me.

This has been very disappointing and I’m sure my lack of business won’t mean much to McDonalds going forward, but comon, get your act together. This is 2013, you guys are tracking everything and negative social media can be a monster.

I did hear something from them today when I used the #McDStories hashtag on Twitter. Something that’s been called a huge marketing fail, but it may do some good for me, along with this post (or maybe not).

Update 1-18 – Spoke to Kim Musgrave with customer satisfaction. She apologized for taking so long to get to the bottom of this and said a new card is on the way. They saw where someone had tried to reload the card three times and it failed. I’m glad it seems to be settled, was just an error and not something nefarious, but I agree with Kim that this took way too long

Update 2-1 – Arch cards arrived along with a couple of extra freebees. Thanks to Kim, but still a long and very annoying process. I may give away the cards, not sure yet if I’m going back.

My wife Nancy is on the board of the National MS Society WPa chapter. She is also someone who lives with this disease.

As the holiday season approaches, the local MS chapter is kicking-off their Annual Holiday Gift Program!

Each year the NMSS coordinates this program to provide gifts to people living with MS who reside in long term care facilities.
Knowing that nursing homes and personal care homes can sometimes be lonely places, they strive to put smiles on the faces of these individuals and let them know that the National MS Society is thinking of them.

If you would like to help or just know more, please visit the site

Thanks for listening and Happy Holidays to all.
–
Cheers,
Jim Lillicotch

I wrote a while back about trying the NetTalk device for my home phone. At first I thought it was working well and wrote a good review, but more and more people that I spoke to were telling me that they had a hard time hearing me. I discovered WiFi didn’t work well in either direction, so I plugged it into my router. Then incoming calls seemed to work better. Later I found out with outgoing calls the other person could had to struggle to understand what I was saying.

Things seem to have gotten worse and outgoing calls are pretty much unusable. At this point I’m not sure if I’m going to try another VOIP box. I was very happy with T-Mobile’s @Home service, but I may just dump the home phone altogether and send my number to Google Voice.

Either way, forget what I said earlier and stay away from from NetTalk.

I’m usually not the kind of alarmist that tells you there is this horrible new malware out there that will eat your children if you open this attachment, but….

I am reading more and more about folks finding flash drives, plugging them in and getting bad stuff in their machines from them. Sometimes it’s done on purpose, others it’s folks with computer viruses just losing their memory card. Either way it can be bad for you.

This is not something new. I wrote about it back in 2006. The real problem is that Windows machines come with autorun turned on by default and anything that you plug in, just runs automatically. Exactly the opposite of good security. If your computer does that you should consider turning it off (XP) right away.

People ask me all the time what the best way to “Optimize” their website. To be found by the search engines.

When I think of the word “optimize”, I don’t think of the search engines, I think of my human visitors.
What’s the best and easiest way for them to get what they want.

This is a great way to think about it
Website Optimization Basics on search engine watch

A customer of mine wants to have a video site for lessons.

Video is in a state of flux these days. Up until recently you could just embed a Flash stream.
Then, Apple decided not to support Flash and now your iThingy won’t play it.

It’s not such a bad thing. The web is much more open with html5, but for now, until the best one shakes out, video has to be encoded three different ways to be seen in all browsers

• mp4 for Safari / iOS video
• ogg for Firefox / Opera / Chrome10
• and finally a fallback to Flash for any others

YouTube would have been the easy answer, but the customer didn’t want his students to be able to share his videos and that’s not an option with YouTube.

It’s not that hard to do it yourself if you’re comfortable converting your videos to those formats.
If you’re going to host the files at your server, check your account to make sure you have a high or unlimited
bandwidth website hosting account. Videos can suck up a lot of bandwidth if they get popular.

I did some searching and business video hosting can get pretty expensive.
One that I see in many places is Vimeo. Their price seems reasonable, $199 a year (250,000 plays) and they give you full control of your embedded video.

I’ll let you know how this works out.

I’ve been writing about my new NetTalk box for local and long distance calls.

As I mentioned I got the box and it worked well, so I put it away and waited for them to port over my existing phone number to my NetTalk box (for free).

Yesterday was the day and about 10PM my current phone stopped working, so I plugged in my NetTalk box and connected the phone. The number was still the same, but in about 10 minutes it switched. Seems to be working well, good sound quality on WiFi. All for $65 for the first year and $30 each year after that.

I plan to take it with me on vacation to see how well it travels. More to come.

I also want to mention that my credit for returning the MagicJack box came very fast.

Last week I wrote about the MagicJack and the poor experience that I had with it. While researching a way online to get it to work I found a competitor called netTALK. I sent back the MagicJack and ordered the netTALK DUO WiFi.

Unlike the MagicJack the netTALK setup was a breeze. The box arrived yesterday, I registered and then…

• I plugged it in to my computer and it worked
• I plugged it in to my network and it worked
• I downloaded their wireless networking software, plugged it back into my computer, set the wireless settings and it worked

There was one small bug. After I registered, the link to the setup instructions was broken. I called, got a live person right away and he gave me a new link that worked fine. He said he would make sure the link got fixed.

I was going to wait and test the netTALK DUO WiFi out for a while before I ported my home phone number to it, but since it worked so well and the sound quality was excellent (even on WiFi), I did it right away, without any problems and unlike MagicJack, porting was free (for a limited time at least) and very easy to do.

I put the box away until my number ports. They say it takes eight days, but can’t happen on a weekend or holiday.

I’ll follow up on this again the day after Memorial Day when it’s due to port, but so far NetTalk looks like an excellent product.

I am expecting my beta invitation from Republic Wireless very soon.

In case you don’t know Republic is a new cell phone company. They want to pass off most of your wireless services to WiFi. I think that’s a great idea and I’m mostly close to a WiFi signal when I’m using my phone. In exchange they have a really good rate ($19/month). I’ll write more about this experiment once I get my new phones

What does this have to do with MagicJack you ask?

I’m currently a T-Mobile customer, I also use T-M for my home phone. They have a really cool VoIP telephone service called @home that works really well. They give you a router that accepts a SIM card (or 2) and I ported my home phone to that card way back when porting your number was new. You plug your phone into your router and it just works. You makes all your phone calls over the Internet. It costs $15/month up from $10 originally. It’s still a good deal, but I’m not sure they will let me keep it if I drop my cell phones.

I thought I would check out MagicJack as an alternative. It seemed like a good deal, you don’t need to plug it in to a computer anymore and I figured VoIP is VoIP, so the quality should be the same.
My MagicJack arrived and I spent several hours trying to get it to work.

I plugged it in to my computer, installed the software, got my phone number and activated it. I plugged the MJ in to the power and my network, then plugged in the phone…
Nothing, but a message saying it couldn’t connect to the Internet. I plugged it in to my router and my switch. Nothing worked. I plugged my computers into the same wires and they worked fine, so I know that the network was connected to the Internet.

Near as I can tell, the problem may lie with port forwarding or my DNS settings. I love OpenDNS and wasn’t about to mess with that, so I started looking for other options.

That’s when I bumped into NetTalk. They offer the same service as MJ, but their prices are better and shipping is free. For $5 less than the MJ+ I can get a box that connects to the Internet by WiFi (if it works). That can save me a router port and let’s me put the box many more places. NetTalk also gives you a lot more free stuff with the basic plan (29.95/yr) including: Voicemail, Call Waiting, Caller ID, 3-Way Calling, 411, e-911, and more.

I also found out, in advance, there was a $20 charge to port my current phone number to Magic Jack. I thought was high, but not really a big issue. Then, I was really mad to find out after I got the unit that there was an additional $10 a year charge to keep that number. They only have to do that once, I thought that was much too much. Looks like it’s free to do that with NetTalk, for the time being, at least.

So, if it works, there’s no contest. I sent back the MagicJack and Ordered the NetTalk box.
I’ll let you know what happens.