Just think of the power that comes from having incoming emails automatically generating new tasks or new calendar appointments, or having a completed task automatically email your boss with the updated status report from the task description.

If you do it right, you can cut your entire day’s workload by a boatload just by automating things in an intelligent and efficient way.

If you follow my writing here, then you know that in the past I’ve covered things like integrating web browser features into Excel, automatically maximizing application windows, or automating chart updates in Excel.

Well, in this article I’m going to cover another automation task – actually one that I’ve used often more recently – to automatically update an Excel spreadsheet with all of your remaining active Outlook tasks at the end of the day.

Feeding Outlook Tasks To An Excel Spreadsheet

There are a lot of reasons you may want to do this. Maybe you want to track your unfinished tasks on a daily basis in a format that you can quickly mail off to someone (not so easy to do with Outlook tasks). Or maybe it’ll become part of a larger report that you’ll be typing up in Word.

Whatever the case may be, the ability to capture and output uncompleted Outlook task information is a useful thing.

For this example, here’s my sample Outlook task list with 5 remaining tasks that I still haven’t completed yet.

Everything we’re going to do here, is in VBA. In Outlook, you get to the VBA editor by clicking on “Tools“, then “Macro” and then choosing the “Visual Basic Editor“.

The code that you’re going to use to capture your task list and export it to Excel is actually not quite as complicated as you might think. The first step is to plug into both Outlook objects and Excel objects by creating the necessary variable definitions. Then, using the workbook object you’ve created, start off by creating the header in your spreadsheet.

Dim strReport As String
  Dim olnameSpace As Outlook.NameSpace
  Dim taskFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
  Dim tasks As Outlook.Items
  Dim tsk As Outlook.TaskItem
  Dim objExcel As New Excel.Application
  Dim exWb As Excel.Workbook
  Dim sht As Excel.Worksheet
 
  Dim strMyName As String
  Dim x As Integer
  Dim y As Integer
 
  Set exWb = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("c:\temp\MyActiveTasks.xls")
 
'  exWb.Sheets(strMyName).Delete
'  exWb.Sheets.Add (strMyName)

  Set olnameSpace = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
  Set taskFolder = olnameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderTasks)
 
  Set tasks = taskFolder.Items
 
  strReport = ""
 
  'Create Header
  exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(1, 1) = "Subject"
  exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(1, 2) = "Due Date"
  exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(1, 3) = "Percent Complete"
  exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(1, 4) = "Status"

So, here’s what the new spreadsheet looks like. Your Outlook app just created a new Excel file called “MyActiveTasks.xls” in the C:\temp directory, and created a header for the tasks that you’re about to insert.

So, now it’s time to extract your tasks and insert them into the Excel file. I use a “y” variable starting at two in order to make sure the first row that’s used isn’t the first, because I don’t want to overwrite the header.

y = 2
 
  For x = 1 To tasks.Count
 
       Set tsk = tasks.Item(x)
 
       'strReport = strReport + tsk.Subject + "; "

       'Fill in Data
       If Not tsk.Complete Then
 
        exWb.Sheets("Ryan").Cells(y, 1) = tsk.Subject
        exWb.Sheets("Ryan").Cells(y, 2) = tsk.DueDate
        exWb.Sheets("Ryan").Cells(y, 3) = tsk.PercentComplete
        exWb.Sheets("Ryan").Cells(y, 4) = tsk.Status
        y = y + 1
 
       End If
 
  Next x

What this script does is searches through your entire list of task items in Outlook, checks to see whether the item is completed yet, and if it isn’t, then it inserts that task information into 4 cells of the spreadsheet. If you wanted to, you could insert more information. Just explore what task information is available by typing “tsk.” and then browsing through the list of properties that pop up.

Now here’s what the sheet looks like.

Being a bit of a perfectionist, there’s still a problem. Notice how column A clipped the last task subject?” I don’t like that. So let’s add a little bit more code to autofit all columns in the Excel table.

'Autofit all column widths

For Each sht In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
    sht.Columns("A").EntireColumn.AutoFit
    sht.Columns("B").EntireColumn.AutoFit
    sht.Columns("C").EntireColumn.AutoFit
    sht.Columns("D").EntireColumn.AutoFit
Next sht
 
exWb.Save
exWb.Close
 
Set exWb = Nothing

The Save and Close methods in those last few lines will save the sheet and close it so that it doesn’t remain locked by the application, otherwise it would be difficult to open the Excel file until you closed Outlook.

So, now here’s what the finished spreadsheet looks like.

When do you set the script to run? Well, I set it up to run on the “Application.Close()” event, which runs when you exit Outlook at the end of the day. This will make outlook produce the Excel spreadsheet report at the end of the day, all on its own.

Can you think of any other cool uses for this technique? Maybe automatically firing off an email with the list of tasks, or outputting them to an HTML file and FTPing it to your web server?

With a little creativity, it’s amazing what you can pull off with a bit of scripting automation. Share your own thoughts and ideas in the comments section below!

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This is how people often produce written reports based on data that’s accumulated and updated in an Excel spreadsheet. We’ve offered a lot of really cool tips and tools for Excel over the years, such as Saikat’s article on producing professional looking charts, and Steve’s article on cool Excel templates for project management.

In this article, I’m going to dive a little more into the background VBA scripting that allows you to actually program connections between data that might be stored in an Excel file and Word documents where you may be producing reports.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to accomplish this once you know how to add the right references, and how to lay out the syntax of the background VBA code.

Integrating Data From Excel Into Your Word Document

In this example, I’m going to start out with a fairly simple Excel spreadsheet. In reality, the Excel file can consist of multiple spreadsheets with lots of data, it doesn’t matter.

So long as you know where the data resides in the spreadsheet, you’ll be able to reach in and grab it using VBA.

Here’s what my sample spreadsheet looks like. It’s a list of expense totals that have been calculated throughout the entire year.

Now, lets say you have a manager that would like to see a nicely formatted report that describes the expenses, grouping together like items and laying it all out in a layout that’s a little more pleasing to the eye (and easier for the big boys upstairs to understand).

You can do this by incorporating objects like textboxes or labels into your Word document. When you’re in Word, just click on the Developer menu tab, and then select “Design Mode” in the Controls box. Use the Legacy Tools dropdown icon to find where you can insert labels into your document.

Once you have the label placed in the document where you want it (not always an easy task), you’re ready to program the data feed. But first you’ll need to name the label so that the VBA can identify it. Right click on the label and go into Properties. Find the “(Name)” field and call it something that you’ll remember.

Now, add a Command Button from the same Legacy Tools dropdown list, place it in your document, and double click it to open up the VBA editor. When you get your code working later, you can modify it so that the code runs on the Document Open() event. You’ll see that in the object dropdown boxes in the editor window.

To get started connecting Word to Excel, you’ll need to reference Excel. Click on Tools, and then References. Scroll down the list until you see the “Microsoft Excel 12.0 Object Library” and select it.

Once you’ve done this, the rest is just a matter of writing a ridiculously simple VBA script to pull in data from an Excel spreadsheet and automatically update the label caption with the data. Here’s how that works.

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
Dim objExcel As New Excel.Application
Dim exWb As Excel.Workbook
 
Set exWb = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("c:\temp\expenses.xls")
 
ThisDocument.yrTotal.Caption = exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(12, 2)
 
exWb.Close
 
Set exWb = Nothing
 
End Sub

See how that works? The “exWb” Excel application object opens the Excel file at the path you provide it, and it’ll go right into the specific sheet and cell number, extract the data, and place it into the Caption property of the label that you named “yrTotal“.

Here’s the VBA macro in action.

The hard part with dealing with labels in Word is that it’s sometimes hard to align it at the end of a sentence or alongside any other text.

One way of overcoming that is actually incorporating some of the text alongside the data in the VBA code itself.  As you can see here, I’ve put the static text right into the Caption when I create the label itself.

Now, all you have to do is include that text when you update the label with your VBA script, and just append the data from the Excel file to the end of that text. Here’s what that kind of code would look like.

Dim objExcel As New Excel.Application
Dim exWb As Excel.Workbook
 
Set exWb = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("c:\temp\expenses.xls")
 
ThisDocument.yrTotal.Caption = exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(12, 2)
ThisDocument.totHotels.Caption = "Hotels: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(5, 2)
ThisDocument.TotDining.Caption = "Dining Out: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(2, 2)
ThisDocument.totTolls.Caption = "Tolls: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(3, 2)
ThisDocument.totFuel.Caption = "Fuel: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(10, 2)
 
exWb.Close
 
Set exWb = Nothing

You can use the string concatenation “&” symbol to place connect the static text with the data extracted from the Excel sheet. Here’s what the final results look like in the updated Word document.

Again, if you don’t want to have a big, ugly grey command button in your word document, just have the data-update script run on Document.Open(), and it’ll all take place behind the scenes.

In fact, in many cases you could create the initial document once, and then you’ll never have to create it again. All you’ll have to do is open it, and all of the labels will automatically update for you with the data from the updated Excel file. All you have to do is click to Print, and submit the report to your manager. A 30 minute report just turned into a 1 minute printout!

Can you think of any other cool uses for this data-integration technique using VBA? Share some of your own ideas and thoughts in the comments section below.

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In the past, I’ve used email a whole lot in my batch jobs and other automated scripts, just like I’ve described in past articles here on using tools like Sendmail or Blat to issue emails straight from the command line, or from within a command line script.

These are great for those times when you have a script that’s monitoring the health of a computer or the status of a specific process, but what if you want to automate sending emails from within Office products like Word or Excel?

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to do so. Maybe you have staff that update documents or spreadsheets on a weekly basis, and you’d like to receive an email notification of when those updates take place, and even a report of the data from within those sheets. There are a few techniques you can use to program automated emails from within Excel, but my favorite remains CDO.

Sending Emails From Within Excel

You’re probably thinking that scripting outgoing email into an Excel VBA script is going to be painfully complicated. Well, that’s not the case at all.

CDO is a messaging component used in Windows for a few generations of the OS. It used to be called CDONTS, and then with the advent of Windows 2000 and XP, it was replaced with “CDO for Windows 2000″. This component is already included in your VBA installation within Word or Excel and it’s ready for use.

Using the component makes sending emails from within Windows products with VBA extremely easy. In this example, I’m going to use the CDO component in Excel to send out an email that will deliver the results from a specific Excel cell.

The first step is to go to the “Developer” menu tab, click on “Insert” in the Controls box, and then select a command button. Draw it into the sheet and then create a new macro for it.

When Excel opens up the VBA editor, you’re going to need to add the reference to the CDO library. You can access this in the Tools menu, and then scroll down the list until you find “Microsoft CDO for Windows 2000 Library“. Select the checkbox and click OK.

Now you’re ready to use CDO to issue emails from inside Excel. To do this, you first need ot create the mail objects and set up all of the fields that will be required for sending the email. Keep in mind that while many of the fields are optional, the From and To fields are required.

Dim CDO_Mail As Object
Dim CDO_Config As Object
Dim SMTP_Config As Variant
Dim strSubject as String
Dim strFrom as String
Dim strTo as String
Dim strCc as String
Dim strBcc as String
Dim strBody As String
 
strSubject = "Results from Excel Spreadsheet"
strFrom = "ryxxxxxx@xxxxxcast.net"
strTo = "rdxxxxxx@gmail.com"
strCc = ""
strBcc = ""
strBody = "The total results for this quarter are: " & Str(Sheet1.Cells(2, 1))

The cool thing about this is that you an build up any string you want to customize a full email message and assign it to the strBody variable. Piece together components of the message by using the “&” string to insert data from any of the Excel sheets right into the email message, just like I’ve shown above.

The next section of code is where you will configure CDO to use any external SMTP server that you want to use. In this case I don’t need to use SSL because my SMTP server doesn’t require it. CDO is capable of SSL, but that’s outside the scope of this article. If you need to use SSL, I highly recommend Paul Sadowski’s awesome writeup on using CDO.

Set CDO_Mail = CreateObject("CDO.Message")
On Error GoTo Error_Handling
 
Set CDO_Config = CreateObject("CDO.Configuration")
CDO_Config.Load -1
 
Set SMTP_Config = CDO_Config.Fields
 
With SMTP_Config
    .Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2
    .Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = "smtp.metrocast.net"
    .Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserverport") = 25
    .Update
End With
 
With CDO_Mail
    Set .Configuration = CDO_Config
End With

Now that you’ve configured the connection to the SMTP server for sending the email, all you have to do is fill in the appropriate fields for the CDO_Mail object, and issue the Send command. This is how you do that.

CDO_Mail.Subject = strSubject
CDO_Mail.From = strFrom
CDO_Mail.To = strTo
CDO_Mail.TextBody = strBody
CDO_Mail.CC = strCc
CDO_Mail.BCC = strBcc
CDO_Mail.Send
 
Error_Handling:
If Err.Description <> "" Then MsgBox Err.Description

So there you have it. There won’t be any pop-up boxes or security alert messages, which can happen when you resort to using the Outlook mail object. CDO simply puts together the email and utilizes your SMTP server connection details to fire off the message. It’s probably the easiest way I know to incorporate email into Word or Excel VBA scripts.

Here’s what the message looked like that I received in my inbox.

No hassle – just the data straight from within the Excel sheet delivered right to my email account. If you’re creative with how you put together the body string variable with all sorts of data from your Excel sheet, you can just imagine the cool automated email reports that you could put together. And if you don’t want to use a command button, just have the script run on the sheet or application close event.

Can you think up any cool uses for CDO in your own Excel, Access, or Word projects? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

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The days turn into weeks, and then the weeks turn into months. Blogging become a chore. You realize that you are spending most of your time trying to format your posts so that they look professionally done.

Then you hire a writer, and then two. Soon, you have a team of writers sending you posts every week, and you’re now spending all of your time editing and formatting those posts to look the way that you want them to look on the blog that has become a labor of love.

The problem is that all of this editing and formatting has taken away all of the time that you used to have for what you loved to do the most – write.

WordPress is a brilliant invention, and has made it possible for more and more people to have amazing websites, with beautiful themes. However, there is still the matter of the content area, which still needs to be formatted for pictures, ads and well-spaced content.

Formatting Your WordPress Content with a Template

A while back, I described to you how you could automatically insert an ad into every single post using the In-Post Template Add-on for WordPress.

This works brilliantly if you are starting with a new blog – but if you’ve already been inserting ads into your posts, it’ll go back and re-insert a new ad and completely mess up all of your old posts.

Don’t worry – there is another solution that is even better. By simply editing one of your standard WordPress PHP files, and then creating a style sheet, you can create your very own carefully formatted content template that will appear every time you click “Add New” in WordPress. All your old content will remain untouched.

Here’s a sample of all of the formatting work that I have going on in my own blog.

I’ve got a header image that needs to be carefully sized, with padding around it and left justified. I’ve got the “more” break, followed by my in-post Google Ad. Then, throughout each post I have additional images that are sized to suit and right justified. For the most part, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been doing all of this manually – including all articles that my writers send in.

Here’s what such a post looks like when it’s published.

As you can see, the formatting is a little tricky because in one area I have the image left justified, and in the next section I have the ad right-justified. Then all additional images are right-justified as well. I like this setup for my own blog because it’s easier on the eyes and flows well. You may have your own preference for your particular WordPress blog.

The first step to create your template is to back-up your functions.php file (you’ll find it in the root directory of your theme), and then open it for editing.

You’ll see a bunch of code in here – all functions currently used by your current blog theme. You’re going to insert a new section between those functions. Find the end of the first function, and then insert the code that I’m going to detail next.

Now, I have to give credit where credit is due – I actually got this idea from David Hansen over at Smashing Magazine, who wrote an article on this back in October. In this case I’m going to expand on his idea by showing you how to tweak that template for things like ads and pictures.

add_filter('default_content','custom_editor_content');
add_editor_style('editor-style.css');
 
function custom_editor_content( $content ) {
 
$content = '
 
    <div class="content-col-side">
 
<img class="alignleft size-full " style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" title="placeholder" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/imageplaceholder.png" alt="content template" />
 
 
     &nbsp;
 
     </div>    
 
    <div class="content-col-main">
 
    Insert your introduction here
 
    &nbsp;
 
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-google-ad">
 
    <span id="more-98442"></span>
    <div style="float: right;">
    Enter Google Script Here
    &nbsp;
    </div>
    </div>
 
   <div class="content-section-two">
    Here is second section content
    &nbsp;
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-image-three">
<img class="alignright size-full " style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" title="placeholder" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/imageplaceholder.png" alt="content template" />
    &nbsp;
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-section-three">
    Here is third section content
    &nbsp; 
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-image-four">
<img class="alignright size-full " style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" title="placeholder" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/imageplaceholder.png" alt="placeholder" /></a>
    &nbsp;
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-section-four">
    Here is third section content
    &nbsp;
     </div>
   ';
   return $content;
}

Notice how the alignment actually works best using the image alignment built into your theme style, and in the case of the Google Ad, you should use the second div with the style attribute to align where you’d like it to go. It just works best. However, as far as sizing, padding and placement, you’ll need to create the css file.

Here’s the styling for each section defined above.

body {
   background: #f5f5f5;
}
 
.content-col-main {
float:right;
width:70%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-col-side {
float:left;
width:210px;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-google-ad {
float:right;
width:20%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-section-two {
float:left;
width:70%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-image-three {
float:right;
width:210px;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-section-three {
float:left;
width:70%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
img { /* Makes sure your images stay within their columns */
   max-width: 100%;
   width: auto;
   height: auto;
}

You can use either percentages or pixels for sizing. I prefer pixels for images, but it really comes down to preference. If there’s too much space between the pictures and text, just tweak the content percentages a bit until it looks good.

After you’ve saved your .css file, open up a new post and you’ll see that your perfectly formatted content template is already in place for you.

All you have to do is click on the image and upload the one you want to use, and then fill in all of the content areas. It really is as easy as that. Everything is automatically aligned and placed where they need to go.

All right-justified Google Code or images are already there – all you have to do is update the content. The time it will take you to put together a post with all of this already done for you will drop by a huge factor, guaranteed.

Updating all of the images on the template is as simple uploading the pictures that you want to use to your blog using the media upload tool, and then clicking on the image and pasting the URL to those images in the “Source” field.

Of course you’ll want to update the title and alt tags as well. As you can see here in my test article, writing an article is now just a matter of filling in each of the content areas. I can’t tell you how sweet it is to be able to just concentrate on writing, knowing that all of the proper formatting is already in place to make the article look its absolute best.

The final result? Here is my first test article using the new WordPress content template. All images and ad code is inserted, aligned and spaced perfectly.

If you didn’t know any better, you would think that nothing at all has changed on the blog. The formatting looks identical to the way it looked when I slaved over them for an hour or more. Now, all of that effort and trial-and-error formatting is already inserted right into the WordPress content template.
So now all that’s left is sitting back and doing what you’ve always loved to do – writing.
Does this WordPress Content template lessen the load on your own blog? Do you have any other formatting tips that people can use in their own templates? Share your thoughts and insights in the comments section below.
Image Credit: Shutterstock

Unfortunately, there is one difficulty with connecting with so many people across the world – time zones. You may want to be available to interact with your readership or to do business with potential clients, but at some point, you have to sleep.

Enter the chat bot. A chat bot can serve as your front desk digital secretary when you aren’t available to accept IM requests. The intelligence of this digital “secretary” really only comes down to how well you’re able to program the dialogue into your chat bot.

MUO has previously covered ChitterIM, which is essentially a chat bot that accepts IM commands from you in order to interact with Twitter. This is just one example of how a chat bot can automatically perform tasks for your site or your business, but in this article I’m going to show you the basic steps to make your own chat bot for your own site or business.

How to Make a Chat Bot

By far, the best available tool for doing this is IMified. We’ve briefly covered IMified in the directory, and Mark covered how to use the prebuilt IMified bot to use a whole list of premade applications that the folks at IMified already offer.

However, you can also create your own customized chat bot by signing up for a new account, and then clicking on the “Create a New Bot” button on the right menu.

Setting up your own customized chat bot is as simple as creating an ID for your bot, and defining the URL where your bot’s chat code will reside. In my case, I’m storing the PHP code for the bot programming on my own website, so I’ve provided the path to that PHP file.

When you’re done, you’ll receive a long “Bot Key” that you can use when you get more deeply into integrating your bot into various services, such as programming your own Twitter features. However, for now we’re going to focus on creating that basic PHP file where you can program your bot to interact with your users.

To show how this basically works, I’m going to explain how the basic PHP file offered by IMified works. Here’s what the basic interaction code looks like.

<?php
switch ($_REQUEST['step']) {
case 1:
{echo "Hi, I'm the TSW Support bot, do you already know what service you want?";
break;}
case 2:
{echo "You've requested service " . $_REQUEST['value1'] . ", is that correct?";
break;}
case 3:
{echo "Thank you for requesting service " . $_REQUEST['value1'] . "<br><br>You said " . $_REQUEST['value2'] . " that you know.<reset>";
break;}
}
?>

If you step through this sample code you’ll see just how simple it is. The IMified bot lets you take the conversation through several “steps”, and you can force navigation. You can allow the user to type something and continue to the next step by doing nothing and just ending that section with “break;”. If you end your echo with a “”, it’ll reset the bot (and the conversation) back to the start. Your bot will forget everything that was recently said.

IMified also lets you use a “goto” command to go to a specific step in the conversation, and will force the conversation one step back (I’ll show you how this works below).

But first, here’s what the bot conversation will look like. The bot is called “tswdesk”.

Of course, you’re going to want your chat bot to be a little more intelligent (and interesting) than this simple example. However, since you are controlling the conversation using PHP code, just think of the possibilities. Based on the conversation, you could perform different services for your readers or your clients. Send out an email, log “feedback” test to a file, or provide the user with requested information. The possibilities are really unlimited.

Here’s a sample PHP bot code where you can provide the visitor with the option to select from a menu of “services” that your bot offers.

<?php
switch ($_REQUEST['step']) {
case 1:
{echo "Hi, I'm the TSW Support bot, do you already know what service you want?";
break;}
case 2:
{
if ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "yes") {
    echo "Cool, go ahead and type your request.";
    break;
} elseif ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "no") {
    echo "Here are our service commands:<br><br>1-Subscribe to newsletter<br>2-Request to talk to editor<br>3-Submit Feedback<br>4-Subscribe to RSS Feed<br>5-Request a phone call<br><br>Please type your request:";
    break;
} else {
    echo "I don't understand your answer, try again. <error>";
    break;
}
}
case 3:
{
if ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "1") {echo "Thank you. I've subscribed you to our newsletter using your IM email account. Have a nice day.<reset>";}
if ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "2") {echo "Thank you. I've let our editor know that you would like to speak with him. Have a nice day.<reset>";}
if ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "3") {echo "Thank you. Please type your feedback now.";}
if ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "4") {echo "Thank you. Add our RSS url to your Reader to subscribe: http://www.topsecretwriters.com/rss. Have a nice day.<reset>";}
if ($_REQUEST['msg'] == "5") {echo "Thank you. You've requested a phone call. Please type your phone number.";}  
 
break;
 
}
 
case 4:
{
   echo "Thank you. Your information has been submitted. Have a nice day.<reset>";
   break; 
}
}
?>

Now that there’s a bit more logic and information in the background code, you can see how much more intelligent the bot will appear to users, as shown in the conversation below.

Now, carrying out some of these tasks may be as simple as writing to a logfile or sending out an email to the editor using PHP, but if you want to have your bot serve you by accepting Twitter commands or issuing alerts to all chat “friends”, it will require using some of the IMified APIs. That’s outside the scope of this article, but we’ll get to those cool features in an upcoming article.

Have you ever used IMified to customize your own bot, or have you used any other similar service? Share your chat bot experiences and insights in the comments section below.

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Recently, I started exploring the potential of using bots on my website to interact with my visitors. After accomplishing that task, I thought that it might be worthwhile to explore what other bots still exist out there that might have some useful features. Most people have their chat client always open and sitting off to the side or at the bottom of the screen, so why not put that chat client to use while it’s open?

The Ebb & Flow Of Chatbots

If you’ve ever started using chatbots even just a few years ago, you’ve probably noticed that a vast majority of them have fallen by the wayside. All sorts of bots that used to let you do things like search different search engines, get task reminders or get RSS feeds via IM are now no longer active. These days, it’s pretty difficult to find a service that offers up RSS feeds via IM.

That seems to be the case for Gtalk bots, but not so much Twitter. Kyle wrote about 10 Twitter bots here at MUO back in 2008, and those Twitter bots are mostly all still active. But in my opinion, having access to information in Google Talk is really useful, and thankfully there are still some really good Gtalk bots out there.

ExclaimBot

If you just want to make quick updates to your Twitter profile, then ExclaimBot is the way to go. It’s actually spelled “excla.im“.

What I like about this Bot is its simplicity. You visit the site, provide authorization for it to post to your Twitter account, and you’re done. Just add exclaimbot@appspot.com to your friends list in Google Talk, and everything you send that user will get posted to your Twitter account instantly.

The only drawback is that you won’t be able to automatically shorten URL links, but using some external service like Bitly, that’s not a problem.

Now you don’t have to open a new browser or any desktop client to post a quick Twitter update, just type it up in Gtalk, hit enter and you’re done. Another good service for this, by the way, is ChitterIM. Either service works just as well.

Google Guru

If you’re looking for an all-around useful bot that does a whole list of tasks, you can’t go wrong by adding guru@googlelabs.com to your buddy list. Send the command “weather boston, ma“, and you’ll get the current weather conditions, as well as a quick forecast for that area. Send it “define ironic” and you’ll receive a definition of the word. Type “web Android” and you’ll get a Wikipedia blurb of the term as well as a mobile link to full search engine results.

There’s just a short list of commands available – score, weather, define and translate – plus you can type in math calculations and the guru will solve it for you.

Get RSS Feeds With Push-Bot

After hunting around for hours to find a Gtalk bot that would serve up RSS feeds via IM, I was really excited to discover that Push-Bot is still available. Most of the popular ones written about at sites like Lifehacker and Labnol are no longer active, so I was getting very disappointed before discovering Push-Bot.

Using the service is ridiculously easy. Type /subscribe or /unsubscribe followed by the URL to add or remove a feed from your list. Use /list-subscriptions to see all of the feeds that you’ve subscribed to. Whenever one of your feeds updates, you’ll get a message in Gtalk from Push-Bot with the update and a link. This is my favorite Gtalk bot.

Xpenser For Tracking Business Expenses

At this point in my life, I have to track several areas of expenses. When I’m off to training for my day job, I need to keep track of all costs so that I can fill out an expense report. For my online business, I need to track all expenses for tax purposes. In either case, Xpenser gives me the convenience that I need to record those expenses right from my phone using Gtalk. This is my second favorite Gtalk bot.

First, you’ll need to sign up for an Xpenser account where all of your entries will get logged.

After that, add xpenserbot@gmail.com to your buddy list. All you have to do is send it the expense, the amount, and ending notes. The bot will fill out that record for you on your expense report in your Xpenser account.

You can log in later to see all of the entries you’ve made while you were away from your computer.

This is easily the fastest and most convenient way to log expenses right away before you forget. Firing off a one-line instant message is even easier than most of the mobile apps available today that will do expense tracking for you.

Take Quick Notes With MayaFile

If your memory is anything like mine, then the mayafile Gtalk bot will be a lifesaver for you too. Using it couldn’t be any easier. Just add talk@mayafile.com to your buddy list, and then use the command “store <note>” to store the message you want to remember later.

Then, just type “find” to see all of your notes, or use “find <keyword>” to retrieve a specific note or notes using a keyword search. It’s like having a memory in your Gtalk client.

Have you ever used any of these IM bots? Do you know of any others that work well in Gtalk? Share your thoughts and insights in the comments section below!

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It’s a lot easier when you’re in your teens and twenties to keep that body up, but it’s nearly impossible once you have a house, a wife, children and a demanding job. What’s a geek to do? The same goes for women – the demands of a motherhood, a new career or a marriage can consume all of the time in the day and leave little time to maintain those curves of youth. Is it too late?

Get Back Into Weight Training & Get Your Youth Back

We’ve offered some exercise apps and tips before. Bakari shared RunKeeper for iPhone with us, and Dean covered a few sites that can keep us motivated. If you have an Android, I’m going to offer you a list of 5 Android apps that can give you the tools and the support you need to make regular weight training a part of your daily life. It’s never too late.

1. Start Your Day With Push-Ups Pro

To get started in the morning, the first thing I do to warm up for the day is push ups to get the blood flowing. Part of my efforts are going to include logging everything – so to log push-ups, you’ll want to download Push-Ups Pro.

This is one of the simplest, yet most creative exercise apps I’ve seen in a long time. Basically you lay your Android flat on the floor underneath you, and as you do pushups, you nudge the yellow circle with your nose. Each time you tap the app, it counts your push-ups for you.

Not only does the app count and log your push-up efforts, it also develops a training regimen based on your past push-up results.

Encourage Yourself With Fit Radio

The next phase of exercise for me is motivating and encouraging myself to just make it to the gym. Music motivates me. I love having time to just enjoy about 30 minutes or so of music, so having something like that to look forward to will get me there. That’s why I was pretty psyched to discover the Fit Radio app.

Fit Radio is a mobile radio station configured specifically to boost your workout routine with adrenaline-fueled music. You’ll find bass-heavy hip-hop, dance music or high-energy rock music. Whatever gets your blood flowing and your heart pounding, you’ll find it here.

Each radio station is a playlist of songs – listen straight through, or pick individual songs.

Optimize Your Reps With 1 Rep Max Calculator

There’s no sense working your tail off if you’re not going to reap the full rewards for those efforts. The way to do that is make sure that you’re pushing yourself to your full potential and your ultimate limits. 1 Rep Max Calculator will help you do that.

First, choose your optimum weight – say 25 pounds doing single arm curls. You can do 12 reps before full muscle failure. Once you enter this, the app will tell you the estimated weight for full muscle failure with one rep. This is your maximum 1-rep weight – and that’s the weight to beat.

Use the percentages tab to see how the app calculated your “effort breakdown” for a single rep – meaning, 65% of your power to lift 23 pounds a single rep.

Log Your Lifting Efforts With Fit77

So now you’re at the gym and you’re lifting nearly every day. You know your weight limits, you know your goals, so now it’s time to log your efforts so you can track your progress. The best Android app for that is called the Fit77 Lifting Log.

Using the logging app is very easy. Just select from the list of included weight-lifting exercises and enter in the weight that you used and your total reps.

Those green buttons let you tap the buttons quickly while working out without the need to type. The app also includes a full body measurement feature where you can track whatever measurements you want – weight, waste size, arm or leg size – everything.

You can track your results out over time. There’s nothing quite as motivating as watching your waste size or weight drop off in a sweet graph that looks like a ski-slope.

Get Yourself To The Gym Every Day With KeepTrack

One of the hardest things about starting a weight-training regimen is going to the gym every day. Hold yourself accountable with KeepTrack.

KeepTrack lets you track absolutely anything, but it is perfect for logging how well you stick to your daily exercise rituals. You could track cardio, weight training, or anything else.

The app will provide you with both a spreadsheet of your information as well as a graphical view of your progress. Here’s the gradual climb of cardio effort – going from 20 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day over the course of a month.

You can even add boolean items to track, like whether or not you did weight-training each day. You can see how well you’re doing by checking out the pie chart – you want to see far more “Yes” than “No”!

Fight with your stubborn laziness and make that “No” pie slice shrink down to nearly nothing.

As you can see, each app listed here offers just a little bit of help in your daily efforts to improve your health. Weight-training is a critical part of any exercise program, so make sure that you have as many tools at your disposal to succeed.

Do any of these weight training apps help with your own fitness goals? Do you use any others that you really like? Share your insight and tips in the comments section below.

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The first is that keyword phrases do matter and will always matter, to an extent. Search engines will always need the ability to extract relevant and important information from the web. The text of your site makes up the content that must get judged, one way or the other. The last two truths are just as important. The first is that social networking also drives relevance. If you aren’t taking advantage of that, then you’re letting your site stagnate. The second is that links still matter as well.

Evaluating Your True SEO Ranking

With those three truths in mind, I’m going to help you judge your own site’s accurate SEO ranking. I did not call it “PR” ranking, or pagerank, because that is truly an artifact of the past. There is a new sort of “ranking” that you should use based on all factors that search engines take into account. In this article, I’m going to help you determine the true SEO value of your site.

Make Sure You List Highly For Important Keywords

You should already have a list of about 5 to 10 critical keywords that you want to perform well for in Google. They should be focused on the content of your site.

Take those keyword phrases and search the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines for them. File through the listings and determine what position you land in. But beware of false rankings when you are logged in, such as shown here.

When I’m logged into Google, I rank #2 for the search term “secret societies”. That’s a false positive. If I log out, I find that I actually list somewhere around #10 for that term. However, when logged out of Google, conducting a search for “top secret cults” shows that I really do list second, so that’s an accurate result for that term.

Go through each of your keywords and then give it a score based on the following formula that I developed. (x is placement position)

(100/x) * .60 = Google score
(100/x) * .20 = Bing Score
(100/x) * .20 = Yahoo score

If you rank 10th in Google, 5th in Yahoo and 4th in Bing, then your “keyword” score is  6 + 4 + 5 = 15

Anything above 10 is good, 30 is very good, 50 is excellent and above 70 is top-tier.

Determining Your Incoming Links

There are countless tools that help you determine your number of backlinks. I’ve covered Traffic Travis previously, and a while back Linda covered a number of sites that will show you your incoming link count. A couple of my favorites are Domain-Pop, as shown here -

- or Backlink Watch, as shown below. This is one of my favorites for a quick overview of my most recent stats for incoming links.

By far, my favorite tool – because you can get the most accurate picture of incoming links to your site – is definitely Google Webmaster Tools.

Take a look at the “Total Links” and also pay attention to “How your data is linked“. Those links can show you what people value about your site and feel compelled to link to.

Judge Your Influence On Social Networks

Today, more than ever, social networks are playing a giant part in how search engines judge you. Only a year or so ago, only Twitter and Facebook were key. More recently, Google Plus is critical. So, to determine your value to search engines, you need to evaluate your site’s value on the social networks. Mahendra wrote a great article listing some great tools for this. My favorite is Klout.

I love Kout because it incorporates everything – Twitter, Facebook, Google + and more – add whatever networks you want to use, or leave any of them out.

You can use your Klout score as a baseline to work on improving your overall social networking score. The higher you can move this score, the higher you will rank in the search engines, guaranteed.

Of course, if you really love Facebook, you need to have a Facebook Page for your site, and so you should be using Facebook Insights.

It’s the best way to see what impact different posts have on how many people link or share your articles – so use it, study it, and learn from it.

Check The Number Of Broken Links

Once again, the single best tool to analyze your site links is Google Webmaster Tools. Just click on “Diagnostics” and “Crawl errors” to see a report of Google crawler errors. Most of these will be broken links – 404 not found errors. You should work hard to get this list to zero.

The number of broken links listed here is another factor for your overall “SEO Ranking”. For every broken link, you are hurting your search engine value significantly. A part of any good SEO regimen is going back constantly and removing or fixing broken links. Do this, and you’ll see your search engine placements skyrocket.

There are many issues that determine your value and relevance to search engines – far too many to list in this one article. However, the four factors that I’ve listed here are the four issues that will have the greatest affect on your SEO quality over any other factor out there. Just improve any one of these factors, and you’ll almost immediately notice results (or at least the next time your site gets crawled).

So give it a try and let us know if you were able to improve your standings in the search engines. Do you have any other tips for readers in addition to these? Share your own thoughts and insights in the comments section below.

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I am also intrigued by the other way around – devices and apps that have the ability to affect your brain. Jackson seems to be equally as intrigued as I. In 2009 he wrote a couple of cool articles covering just such apps, like his list of apps that help you sleep, relax or concentrate. His list of 9 iPhone apps that help you sleep were along the same lines as well. This week, I was complaining at work about being tired and not getting enough sleep, and one of my colleagues mentioned that I might want to consider trying binaural beats.

Improving Your Life With Binaural Beats

“Binaural what?” you ask.

That’s right, binaural beats – sounds of varying frequencies that, when played in each ear, supposedly produces a sort of “resonant frequency” in the center of the brain that can actually induce a specific mental state. The evidence for this interesting brain artifact comes from published research at the University of Florida, the University of California, and discussed in publications like the MIT Press and Scientific American.

If you want to try this phenomenon for yourself and you have an Android, you can. The goal with the apps I’m going to review in this article is to play those frequencies long enough to induce your brain toward that desired mental state.

Binaural Beats Therapy

If you’re ready to try this out, I highly suggest you first download my favorite app, Binaural Beats Therapy. This app consists of 7 preset frequency configurations that will play a carefully modulated tone in each ear, in order to produce the desired mental state that you choose in the main menu.

The display screen while the tone is playing is fairly boring – just flashing dots on the screen or the entire screen may flash different colors.

The audio itself is pretty high quality, and with this app there doesn’t seem to be any lag at all, even for audio that lasts about 2 hours.

Brainwave Tuner Lite

A similar app is Brainwave Tuner Lite, which has only three selections to choose from – one for each major “state of mind”. That includes “sleep and healing”, “meditation and relaxation” and “Focus and Learning”.

It took me a while to choose between using this one or the previous app the majority of the time that I was writing this article. I like the constant tone of Binaural Beats Therapy – Brainwave Tuner fades in and out, which I don’t particularly like. However, it does have a more creative screen while the sound is playing, which I do like.

One of the things that my colleague described to me is an iPhone app he uses to run through an entire program of frequencies. That’s really what I want to do, so I continued hunting for just such an app.

Binality

I found such an app in Binality. Like the previous two binaural beat apps, Binality offers a decent list of target mental states that you may want to pursue. These include concentration, lucid dreaming and meditation and more. Although, I’m not so sure about the “out of body experience” option…

What I really like about this app is the display while the tone is playing. It shows you the entire programmed frequency range as the program works its way through it.

You can jump around if you’d like by choosing a spot on the control bar, but I hear that you get the best results if you allow the entire program from start to finish.

edenBeats

Another interesting binaural beats app is edenBeats. It offers far fewer options as far as preset frequency tones – the menu only lists four at the moment – but the app is much more flexible because it allows you to alter each frequency as you see fit.

The tone generation screen allows you to turn off or on each base and beat frequency settings if you want to.

Best of all, you can create your own custom binaural beats from scratch if you want – and if you really know what you’re doing.

One-Use Binaural Beat Apps

There are two other apps that I should mention briefly. These are intended to be used for one particular purpose – as very targeted therapy. The first app is called Confidence Now. Be forewarned, when you first launch the app, you’ll need to download multiple large files, so try to do it while on Wi-Fi.

Confidence now offers a very long session created by certified hypnotherapist David Ridgeway, which takes you through relaxation, hypnotic induction, and the main session where Ridgeway makes hypnotic suggestions to improve your confidence, with a binaural beat in the background.

The last app is one that claims it can help people that suffer from depression, called Depression Help. This is a very simple app that just plays one preset setup of tones which the app creators claim can eventually alleviate symptoms of depression.

As to its effectiveness, I can’t really say. The comments area for the app has about half of the users saying it worked and half saying it did zilch.

So why not give binaural therapy a shot, and see if you notice any impact in your daily life. If you’re always tired, groggy or distracted, maybe one of these apps could give you the mental boost that you need. If you do give any apps a try, let us know how it works out. And if you know of any other cool Android apps similar to these, please share them in the comments section below.

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So, he performed an experiment. Using a equal number of solar cells, young Aidan laid out the solar panels side by side in sunlight. One, the typical flat panel that people use today, and the other his unique “tree” design – a metal structure shaped like a tree branch. Young Aidan hooked up a meter to each, and to his surprise, he saw a higher voltage reading from his tree design. It was a remarkable finding, he thought.  So he decided, with the support of his parents, to enter it into a national science competition – and he won.

The Internet Attacks Dreams

What happened next is something that those of us that have been on the Internet for a long time now would not find very surprising. The story about the science competition hit the Internet, and everyone from PhD researchers to armchair scientists took a look at young Aidan’s design, and the flaming began.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Aidan’s introduction to the world of online commenters didn’t go too well.

“Commenters and bloggers attacked Aidan with vitriol usually saved for political enemies and the Kardashians. Blogs decried his experiment as ‘bad science’ and ‘impossible nonsense.’ Someone called him ‘an alien—a cool one, though.’”

Reading the article made me remember some of the stories that I used to write about years ago, such as science scams and other silly claims throughout the fields of Ufology and the paranormal. I’ve always felt justified, as an engineer, in my online attitude. In fact, I’ve been one of those vitriolic writers before, trashing poorly designed scientific theories and various silly claims like alleged “free energy” findings.

Here is a blog post of mine in 2006, publicly ripping apart a guy who constantly claimed there were connections between UFO stories and the CIA and other government agencies.

I called him an idiot, a moron, liar…

This was back in 2006, and in the next 5 years, I gradually – for lack of a better word – “matured”, to some degree. And writing for MUO helped, because I started noticing what it’s like to be at the receiving end of all sorts of nasty accusations and cruel comments.

Why People Feel the Right to Be Cruel Online

The truth is, I really don’t think that I would talk that way to people in real life. I don’t think many people would. The guy I was slamming above – if we were sitting together in some cafe having coffee – we would probably have a pretty interesting intellectual conversation – disagreements and all.

But there is just something about the Internet that feeds hate and anger. For me, it’s people that flip out and draw premature conclusions over so-called scientific “discoveries”. I’m sure that’s what angered the many PhD academics and skeptics in Aidan’s case. But do we have to be so cruel about it? Even here at MUO – a community that I consider to be very intellectual and mature – there is a contingent of people that have a certain arrogance, and feel justified in calling someone they don’t even know a moron.

Here’s an MUO Answers commenter calling the questioner stupid.

Or this commenter in another article calling another reader retarded.

And yet another spat between commenters on another article, issuing pretty nasty jabs back and forth.

What has scared me the most, since writing and reading posts and comments from other writers here and elsewhere on the web, is that the cruelest comments that I’ve read remind me….of me. It is a sobering realization, and one that dampens my comments as the years go by, although I am still known for losing my temper with others now and then. I don’t know if it’s genetic, or maybe just a curse.

Mistakes Lead To A Pig Pile

What I’ve noticed is that two things seem to incite a greater level of vitriol, the likes of which poor young Aidan had to experience. The first is making a mistake. Online folks are very unforgiving when it comes to making mistakes. Aidan’s mistake was that in his entry into the science competition, he only measured voltage. Unfortunately, voltage alone doesn’t equal overall power – so his findings were questionable. That one single mistake led to an influx of attacks and name-calling.

The other factor seems to be anonymity. Anonymous posts are almost always particularly harsh…cowards are always so brave with their words when they don’t have to use their real name. Would those same people have spoken those same words directly to the young boy’s face, in the presence of his parents? I doubt it.

And if Aidan goes on to accurately measure the power of his test contraption, and he is proven correct in his theory, will all of those arrogant, nasty people respond again and apologize to young Aidan? Will they be remorseful for attacking a young child that is motivated enough to explore science at such a young age? Probably not.

Why do you think people get off on trolling and posting hateful comments online?  Have you ever done it yourself and regretted it? Let us know your thoughts and insights in the comments below.

Image Credits : Wall Street Journal, Shutterstock