Stefan Helander

Incoming mail to Outlook.com / Hotmail.com / Live.com is visible in the webmail but doesn’t show up in the Outlook.com for Android app

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I was developing a php script that should send emails to a receiver. It worked great with a number of email services, like gmail for example. But with Outlook.com, aka Hotmail.com or Live.com the emails I sent to an account was only visible when logging in to the account through the web. If the same account was configured in the Android app Outlook.com the emails never showed up.

After some headscratching I found the reason. The problem was that my php script sent the emails using only html (Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 in the email headers). When the script was changed to send it as a multipart message, both html and text, the message showed up in the Android Outlook.com application also. Even though the Android app had no problems displaying the html-version of the email, it was just ignored if it wasn’t a multipart message with both html and text.

An example on how to send multipart emails in php can be found here.

Stefan Helander

Facebook has changed my e-mail address

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Recently Facebook decided to hide all other e-mail addresses but your @facebook.com address on your Facebook profile.

After all, Facebook is a free service, so you should consider yourself "the product" rather than "the customer". Facebook’s real customers are their advertisers and not you, so they can do more or less anything with your account and all you can do about it is to cancel your Facebook account if you don’t like it. Annoying but that is how the free services works ("you get what you pay for" and "there are no such thing as a free lunch" and so on).

It is a bit irritating but easy to fix. This is how you do it:

  1. Go to your Facebook profile page
  2. Click on About
  3. Scroll down to Contact details and click Edit
  4. Click on the small circle to the right of your @facebook.com address and select Hidden from timeline
  5. Click on the small circle to the right of your preferred email address and select Shown on timeline
  6. Click on the Save button in the bottom of the popup box
Stefan Helander

My YouTube videos not displaying in related / suggested videos anymore

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I have a YouTube channel where I post videos from different strange things I am up to. Suddenly I noticed the video shows dropped significantly. The statistics (analytics) showed that the majority of my video views came from "related videos" (also sometimes referred to as suggested videoes). 

Some Googleing on the subject didn’t really turn up with a reason or solution but I found people with similar problems and someone said YouTube has a function to disable your videos from related videos if you view your own videos repead number of times, possibly trying to "boost" your view counter. 

This wasn’t happening in my case but I do use to visit my own channel as it is a quick way to see it’s number of views. The featured video on my channel is on autoplay – so yes, every time I visited my channel I also triggered one of my own videos. 

After that I haven’t visited my own channel for two months and last week the statistics starts to show that the views coming from related / suggested videos are climbing back to the levels two months ago. 

I haven’t been able to verify this with YouTube but my advise is – don’t visit your own YouTube channel or your own videos unless you are logged out from your YouTube account.

Stefan Helander

WordPress Media crop button greyed out

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In WordPress Media it is possible to edit the images in some basic ways including cropping. To use the tool you must fist make a selection in the image by clicking and dragging across the image. The selection must be wider than the smallest image setting in WordPress. Otherwise the crop tool will stay greyed out. Once a large enough selection has been made the crop button becomes clickable. This is not always logical to the user who often try to click the crop button first.

Cropping images in WordPress

Stefan Helander

Google Wave – what is it all about?

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A while ago I recieved a Google Wave invite from a friend who had like 7 or 8 of them. Google Wave invites are not (yet) hard to get as the Spotify invites are. My first thought was that Google Wave was a service like Spotify where you can listen to music online. The word “wave”  made me think of  sound waves. How wrong could I be.

Google Wave preview

So what is Google Wave all about? I think Googles problem with Google Wave is that it not directly clear what it should be used for. The name is a bit confusing and when you’re in there it is not really obvious at a first glance. Maybe that is Read more

Stefan Helander

How does Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) work?

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By the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) it is now possible to register domain names on the Internet, containing regional characters, like for example www.räksmörgås.se.This is possible for a number of the Top Level Domains (TLD), like .se and .nu.

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