Gmail now natively supports rich signatures (with images, font size and colors, links and so on) . Just go to 'Settings' and customize your signature under the 'Signature' section. Here is an image of my new signature:

Some tips

Finding icons: Want to find icons to put next to your details? Here is a special Google search (opens in a new tab) that will help you find small icons. Just type the name of the services you're looking for in the search box, and you'll get icons size images you can copy and add to your signature.

More than one signature : Note that you can set up more then one signature if you have more than one email address associated with your Gmail account.

Track website traffic: If you have a website, you can monitor how many people get to it from the link in your signature. To do that, you need to tag the link, so that Google analytics (if that's your analytics application) will recognize the visit source. For example – to tag the link in my signature, I could add this tag:

http://www.productivewise.com?utm_source=MailSignature

To monitor clicks to your site, just replace the base  address in the example above, and add the link to your signature.

But there is a problem with using images

Note, that until the recipient actively  allows images in the email to be download, your signature might look somthing like that (tested on Outlook 2007):

That is, instead of the icons you've added to your signature, they might see just a placeholder….

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how it works

To use Delicions you will first need to sign up. Then you can start adding links, along with some meta-data such as tags and notes about these links.

Part of your organization's web presence

Using Delicious as a link aggregator has some prominent advantages. You can add links no matter where you are (even if you're not at work, for example). It is  really easy to share these links because they are not bound to your bookmarks bar. Tagging the links makes them  easier to find and categorize. Finely, you can embed them in your website using  two lines of JavaScript code.

Share links on your website

To share your links with your readers, you can display a snippet of your latest links on deciduous using a Linkroll. Go to Linkrolls to get a script you can easily embed in your website. You might want to customize how it looks like first (see example in the image below).

display options for the delicious embed script

If you are already using an RSS aggregator to display content in your website, you can add your delicious RSS feed to that aggregator. Find your RSS feed at the bottom of the "bookmarks" page when you are logged in to delicious.

Save links to delicious with a browser extension

Delicious extensions let you save new links with a few clicks. To get an extension for your browser, go to Browser buttons for saving bookmarks in delicious.

When you find a website you like, clicks the 'Save as bookmarks to delicious' button. It will take you straight to the submitting form and we'll extract as much information about it as possible. All you have to do is add notes and tags (if you wish to) and click save.

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Create a friends list of all the people who doesn't speak your native language, and filter out the message that they can't understand.

Let's see how to do this. [For the sake of this post I will use Hebrew as a native language, and English for friends from other countries].

Create a list of people who doesn't speak your language

Filter out messages not in English

Now, all you need to do when you want to write a status message in your native language, is tell Facebook not to show it to the people who can't read it. Follow these steps to do it:

Click the the lock icon on its left hand side of the 'Share' button

1. Write the a status message as usual.
2. Click the the lock icon on the left side of the 'Share' button, and click 'Custom' (see image below).
3. In the pop-up window that opens, under 'Hide this from', type the name of the list of people who doesn't speak your native language.

   under 'Hide this from', type the name of the list of people who doesn't speak your native language

4. Click 'save settings' and once the pop up window closes, click the 'Share' button.

That is it. Only people in the list you specified will not see this status message. The rest of your  friends will.

Make these your default settings

If you wish to make these your default settings (that is, that by default People in this group will not see your messages, unless you specify otherwise) – go back to step three in the previous section and check 'Make this my default setting' at the bottom of the window. *note that these settings will apply to all the status messages you have ever written, not only to new ones!* I suggest following the last section in Amit Agarwal's post How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings to make sure the new settings works correctly.

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Alternate name on Facebook

As Facebook explain, the alternate name in your account "is only used to help people find you in search and will not show up in your profile". Use it "for a former name or a name in another language." Here is how to add an alternate name to your Facebook account:

1. When logged in, choose "Account Settings" under "Settings" (you'll see it in the top right corner of the screen).
2. Next to "Name," click "change."
3. Enter a full name in the "Full Alternate Name" filed, and click the "Change Former Name" button below.

Once done, you'll see a note saying that "Your alternate name has been saved and will be used to help people find you in search."

IM screen name

To add your instant messaging nickname to your Facebook account, do as follows:

1. Go to your profile page.
2. Below your profile picture, click "Edit My Profile."
3. Click "Contact Information."
4. Choose your instant messaging accounts and fill in your nickname in the "IM Screen Name(s)" field (for some reason, you can only choose AIM, Google Talk, Skype, Windows Live, Yahoo, ICQ and Gadu-Gadu [?!]).

you might also want to read 20 Social Media Practices to Use in Your Daily Life [Presentation].

[Via Search for names on Facebook (the link is to the English translation of the original post, which was written in Hebrew).]

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CheckUserNames is a service that can help you choose this single username. CheckUserNames goes through tens of social media websites to check if the username you chose ia available [Update 4/1/2009: Namechk is a similar service, you can also use it].

It’s a good idea to use CheckUserNames and register to the leading websites, even if you are not planning to use them right away – just in case you will in the future (this lesson I had to learn the hard way, as my username was already taken in some of them…)

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By customizing the default template you can save a whole lot of time spent on formatting and also you can insert your brand characteristics so that they will automatically appear in each document you write. The best thing is that it is really easy to do, so let’s get started.

This is an excerpt of a guest post I wrote. To read the full post visit Edit MS Word default template to save time and get better branding on Online Tech Tips.

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To display the name and address of your site or blog in your LinkedIn profile:

1. go to Edit My Profile and click “edit” next to “websites.”
2. Choose “other“ in the websites section and write your sites name and address.

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