- Surveying the e-card Landscape
- Choosing your e-Holiday Greeting Cards
- Ed's E-card Pet Peeves
- Tips and Tricks to Enhance E-card Usage
- 'Tis the Season to be ...
Tips and Tricks to Enhance E-card Usage
While some of my suggestions may not fit your preferred methods of working, all have been helpful for me this holiday season as I attempted to practice what I preach herein. Remember that advice is like drugs or alcohol — it only has an effect if you take it! Therefore, feel free to ignore any or all of the following:
Really organized e-card senders build text files that use whatever separator the card engine recognizes to distinguish among multiple addresses — commas and semi-colons are the most commonly recognized such separators — within text files. Such files can then be pasted into the recipient address box with ease (and re-used on other occasions, better still).
I've found it useful to create birthday files (people who share a common birthday) and card preference files (senior, current, and junior generations of relatives, all of whom have different taste in e-cards, but are most quickly handled en masse anyway) to improve how I handle e-greetings to more than one person at a time.
Most e-card sites permit you to create customized greetings or sentiments, but restrict you to a maximum character count. For automated spell- and grammar-checking, plus excellent word and character counting features, I build this text in my favorite word processor, perform all necessary clean-ups, then paste clean copy into the card engine.
I use the calendar and reminder features in my e-mail package to remind me when it's time to send e-greetings. If you're willing to sit down with your e-mail package (and if it provides such features) for a couple of hours some time over the holidays, you can get ready for all the special occasions in your life for the next year (and with recurring reminders) for years to come thereafter. Works for me!