This is nice source to see how your email ranks before you send it.

http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/

Off the top of my head while I was thinking about it…

btobonline.com
Marketing Sherpa
Marketing Profs
Search Engine Watch
clickz

I spent over an hour last night on the phone and online trying to figure out exactly how to use my Borders gift cards online. Still, I don’t know.

If you type in borders.com you are redirected to amazon.com. It’s not exactly clear what books you can or can not order here using your borders gift card. I tried to order from the new/used third party. That didn’t work (but is wasn’t totally clear). Then I tried ordering from the new books, and I received an error that said something like you can’t use borders gift cards on non borders items. Now that was clear, but the reason still isn’t.

Hmm. So what isn’t a borders item after getting redirected from borders.com is still a mystery.

So I called Borders. The woman was nice on the phone and transfered me to an amazon rep who was great and gave me a $25 credit on my amazon account as I was not the first to experience this very entertaining issue.

But I still have 2 gift cards from Borders that I can’t seem to spend online. Or can I? I don’t know.

I think I’m going to try to exchange them for their value at the store with a nice customer. Then with the cash, I will come back home and either buy from amazon who made a great customer save last night or at barnes and noble online because this doesn’t happen there.

I have about 5 books totaling about $100+ in my cart at the moment, but I’m not going through with it because Borders online won’t take more than one gift card.

This means I need to go order them from the store directly so I can use multiple cards.

Does Barnes and Noble online do this too? Who else does this? This is a very annoying feature.

browsershots.org

This is a nifty little tool that you can use to check how your site looks on a PC and Mac with multiple browers. It’s free, so you know what that means.

I’m not saying there are other venders in the online cheap school books world that great, but I could have sworn that I have gotten emails saying, sorry, the book you thought you ordered, and thought you paid for last night isn’t in stock. You’re out of luck.

Which as lame as it is to be out of luck, it sure is nice they sent me that email.

Unlike razorbackbooks, with whom I thought I fullfilled my order. And yes, I should have emailed them by a certain date if I didn’t get the book, but typically the books you order for school online through various book stores around the country arrive late, so I wasn’t too concerned. My bad.

It wasn’t until I received my credit card statement that I found out that my card was charged and refunded the next day. Which, I may ad, razorbackbooks was happy to point out when I contacted them about the whereabouts of my missing book.

So the moral of the story. I don’t remember who sent me the email saying, your ordered a book from us but you are out of luck, but I sure remember the one who didn’t send me an email to let me know I better order from someone else if I didn’t want to fall chapters behind in reading.

Thank you razorbackbooks. You are tops.