So what to do when they ask you for your phone number? It’s easy. Bite your tongue, smile, don’t argue, just give them a number, and hope they will never bother you again because you gave them a wrong number.

Here are some prank phone numbers to get you out of the dilemma, without having to reject, embarrass and/or disappoint your bad date at the spot. For ease of use they are sorted by location.

North America

Rejection Hotline

The Rejection Hotline was created by Humor Hotlines.

The page provides a long list of prank phone numbers for over 100 cities in many different states in the US and one number for Victoria, Canada. Although this post found a few more numbers for Canada on Rejection Hotline, they must have meanwhile been removed.

Here is a small selection:

858-492-8002 San Diego, CA, USA

904-879-8012 Jacksonville, FL, USA

617-861-3962 Boston, MA, USA

347-689-1270 New York City, NY, USA

713-866-6249 Houston, TX, USA

250-984-0686 Victoria, BC, Canada

Please see the complete list for more numbers. In case your state isn’t listed, the Rejection Hotline recommends to use an excuse like “It’s where I went to school” or “I haven’t changed my cell phone number since I moved.” That should work perfectly fine.

Outsourcing

Humor Hotlines has a few more funny prank phone numbers that you might want to consider. How about outsourcing your friendship to India?

Here are the numbers:

267-436-5128 Philadelphia, PA, USA

267-436-5123 Philadelphia, PA, USA

401-285-0701 Rhode Island, USA

413-497-0071 Western MA, USA

The Rejection Line

Are you in New York? Then you may use this official New York Rejection Line.

212-479-7990 New York City, NY, USA

Australia

The Rejection Line

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well, this rejection line is for the folks down under.

In Australia there’s less hassle with area codes in the case of cell phone numbers. They simply don’t give away where you’re from, they only reveal which provider you’re signed up with. So that’s why one number fits all:

0419-317446 Australia (cell phone)

The people who set up this page had a very neat idea. All text messages sent to that number are displayed on the website. It’s hilarious! Even better, you can query the site for numbers that have texted this line.

Germany

Frank geht ran

Similar to Australia, German cell phone numbers are provider-specific and independent of location. Next time you feel forced to share your phone number, use this neutral number and Frank will answer the phone for you (Frank geht ran):

0163-1737743 Germany (cell phone)

Frank will politely tell the person calling that you do not wish to be contacted by them. It’s neutral and can also be used in all sorts of situations, for example in forms. You can preview Frank’s message here. It’s German of course.

Telefonpaul

An alternative to Frank geht ran is TelefonPaul. The concept is the same, a polite and neutral message for anyone who asked your number and didn’t deserve to get the real one. Paul provides both a landline number for Stuttgart, Germany and a German cell phone number.

0711-50885524 Stuttgart, Germany

01577-1599624 Germany (cell phone)

You can preview Paul’s message on his website.

United Kingdom

The Rejection Line

Here we have another clone of the original NY Rejection Line. This is the one for the UK and the number is:

09061-100596 UK (service number)

How to Give a Fake Phone Number

This page at eHow has advice on how to give out a fake phone number in a bar/club situation. A good read for all the girls and possibly some of the boys out there.

I tried my best to cover as many countries as possible. But due to the nature of language barriers, this list is far from comprehensive. Do you happen to know of similar services in your country? Please go ahead and add the respective resources in the comments. We will all love you for it!

Last but not least a disclaimer! Being in Germany myself, I could not test all of these prank phone numbers. Thus I do not give any guarantees as to their functionality. Furthermore, it’s your responsibility to find out about calling fees. They might be reasonable, they might not. Please query the respective websites. Finally, call or give out these numbers at your own risk!

Oh readers, if only you could see me now. You’d be looking at a guy with three day stubble on his face, a pile of junk food in his stomach and a half-finished WordPress website sitting on his hard drive starting a daunting article for MakeUseOf that he has avoided for several hours. You’d be looking at a guy who managed to set up a local host on his PC, uploaded WordPress to it and developed a site as though it was live on the internet.

I’ve been doing quite a few posts about blogging lately but this one take a step outside the amateur ‘how-to’s I’ve done like the one about improving your Blogger blog. This article is inspired by the website I’m building that’s due to be launched in a month or so – and it’s not for tech newbies, this guide.

Many of us have personal blogs or blogs that make us a second income. And we don’t want to go upsetting our readers by coding and developing them on the Internet. Imagine if every time you visited MUO there were design changes, buggy issues or features constantly being moved about and deleted!

So developing your WordPress blog offline is the best option because you don’t interrupt readership (assuming the blog is online already and you’re simply updating), you don’t have to upload pictures and media and you can view your blog easily without it being live on the internet for everyone to see you shoddy design work. The easiest way to do this is to learn how to set up a blog offline. This is done by creating a host on your PC which acts like a host on the Internet such as GoDaddy.

First of all, to set up a blog offline you have to download some PHP Hosting software. There are several well-known options but I’ve gone for XAMPP because I found I had the least hassle with it. You can download it here from SourceForge. Once you have downloaded and installed it like you would any other piece of software, open it up from the ‘All Programs’ menu. The window shown below will appear.

Beside Apache and MySQL, select ‘Start’ so that they are both running like in the screenshot. Now, your local host is up and running and is available to be prepared to accept WordPress. First however, we must make a database for WordPress to be saved in on the host.

To do this open your browser and enter ‘http://localhost/‘ into the address bar. This will bring you to the screen shown above. From the menu bar on the left, select phpMyAdmin as illustrated.

In the centre of the screen is the section where you create a new data base. Name your server and select collation from the dropdown menu if it’s not already selected. In the second dropdown menu select ‘uft8_unicode_ci’. I cannot emphasise how crucial it is that you do not overlook this. It is not selected as default so ensure you have it selected. It’s the last one in the list. Without it, the host won’t communicate with WordPress and you’re in a world of problems my friends – if you can’t tell I’m talking from experience. I spend an hour yesterday trying to figure out what the problem was!

Once your server is created you’re ready to embark on the world-famous ‘WordPress five minute install’ and finally set up your blog. Download WordPress from here. When you have the .zip file, extract its contents to this location:

C:\xampp \htdocs

Your final folder structure should look like this:

If it doesn’t, open the XAMPP program file and drag the extracted WordPress file into it manually. It must be in there in order for your newly created database to detect it. Then, edit this file using Notepad:

C:\xampplite\htdocs\wordpress\wp-config-sample.php

Scroll down to the part where it asks for database name, username, password etc.. Fill in the details below:

DBNAME: *whatever name you gave to your database*

DBUSER: root

Password: ‘ ‘ (This should just be left as two opposing apostrophes)

Then, save the file as wp-config.php instead of the original wp-config-sample.php.

Now, open your browser and enter in the following URL:

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

This will take you into the WordPress installation just like you were online. Remember, when you’re returning to your PC to do more coding ensure you have Apache and MySQL turned on – otherwise http://localhost/ won’t exist!

Oh and now a health warning: Coding and toying with WordPress is addictive. Prolonged exposure may cause excessive caffeine consumption, personal hygiene and grooming to go out the window, social commitments to follow and a truly awesome WordPress site ready to go live.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

What if you’re looking for an efficient and simple tool to communicate that will not clog up your inbox, steal your attention or be complicated to use. Is there any hope? Would I be writing this if there wasn’t?

Re:Subj is a group communication tool. It serves as a temporary inbox, allowing people to exchange information outside their ever crowded standard inbox. Before I expand all the advantages of Re:Subj, let me give you a quick run-through and explain how it works.

Setting up a temporary group inbox is easy as pie. Go to the website and fill in the blanks, i.e. a subject line, recipient eMail addresses, a first message, and your own eMail address. You can decide whether the inbox shall be public and whether you want threaded comments. If you’re unsure, don’t worry. Everything but the subject and your first message can be changed later on! Once you’re done hit the Create an Inbox button.

Re:Subj will instantly mail all recipients and yourself a link to the temporary inbox, as displayed in the screenshot below.

The cool thing is, you can choose whether you want to reply through your standard eMail and eventually check the entire list of replies and comments, or whether you prefer to read and reply through the website only. That way, everyone gets what they want.

Following the link in the eMail, you will enter the temporary inbox and see an overview of what everybody has had to say so far.

You can post a new reply or, in case threaded comments are enabled, reply to a previous comment. If you’ve had enough and no longer care about the discussion, you can use the respective link in the right-hand menu to leave this inbox.

The following screenshot shows what an temporary inbox will look like after a few replies and comments have been posted.

As the creator of a temporary inbox you will see a different menu to the right of an inbox than everybody else.

To add more participants, you can send invitations to their eMail address. You can also remove participants by clicking the red-Xed blue man next to their eMail address.

As promised earlier, you can change the inbox settings, i.e. enable or disable threaded comments or make your discussion public after all.

Finally, when the discussion has been completed, you can also delete the inbox.

There is a small menu in the top right corner of the website. It shows you with which eMail address you’re currently using Re:Subj and you can access your inboxes and your profile.

As you move into My Inboxes, you should notice that the top right menu link changes from My Inboxes to Create new inbox. The list of your inboxes shows when new comments or replies were added to one of them. You can also hide messages to shorten the entire list of inboxes.

The My Inboxes overview is especially handy if you decided to not receive eMail updates. This can be done in your profile. And in case you didn’t yet notice the green window asking you to associate a name with your eMail, don’t worry, that can also be edited in your Profile.

And basically, that’s it. You now know everything about Re:Subj. It’s that easy!

And the advantages should be quite obvious by now, but let me sum it up for you:

• no signup, an eMail address is sufficient
• receive eMail updates and reply through eMail
• disable eMail updates and read or reply whenever you want
• leave the “mailing list” anytime

So when everybody and their mothers has an idea or comment to a simple question, you won’t have to sit there helplessly as your inbox clogs up with silly replies. Re:Subj returns some control and you can focus on serious eMails.

What do you think? Does it sound useful to you?

Re:Subj

RackSpace provides excellent API to manage your cloud services. Unfortunately there are no language binding library released yet (for Cloud Server). But they’ve mentioned that they are developing one for python.

So we have spend our time for last two days and developed a PHP client library to use RackSpace cloud server API from inside a PHP application.

This client library is released under New BSD license. And is available to download/svn-checkout from it’s project page at http://code.google.com/p/phprackcloud/

There is plenty of documentation and example included. The code is mostly self explanatory. Please dont forget to check the Wiki page to get some idea on how to use this library and how far you can go. We have covered all available methods by RackSpace cloud server in our client library.

Happy clouding.

Project Page and Download: http://code.google.com/p/phprackcloud

The message reader header is the most important part of the email client. Users guess the whole email only by reading it’s header. By default Thunderbird header shows excerpt of the subject, thus you can’t read the whole subject unless you don’t open the email. If you get lots of the emails and you scan them all by reading their subjects, then it is very easy to miss an important email whose subject is not properly shown.

Header Design is a newly developed plugin for Thunderbird that solves this problem. Just as the name says, it displays a concise view of the message reader header. So what does it do? It can wrap long subject, show the link(if included in the subject), displays message tags, remove message tags, allow search by message tags, and more.

You can easily switch the style between – Icons & Text, Icons, and Text view.

Screenshot above is taken from developer’s page

Download Header Design

At the moment it only works with Thunderbird Thunderbird: 3.0pre – 3.1a1pre. Enjoy!

Generating a Post by Email Address

Before you can publish by email you must generate a special email address.  This address is unique to you and must be kept secret.

1) Dashboard > My Blogs

2) Locate the blog that you wish to publish to and click on Enable.

You now have a special email address.  If you want to add the address to your addressbook you can download it as a vCard:

Sending Emails

Once you have your Post by Email address sending an email is simple:

The email subject is used as your post’s title, with the body being the post contents. A few minutes after receiving your email you should receive a notification email informing you of the published post’s details.

Please remember to send the email to your secret email address, not to the example given in the image above.

Your email can be plain text or formatted.  As much formatting as possible will be retained, although the Post by Email system will strip unnecessary HTML tags so that your email is displayed correctly.

Attachments

Image attachments will be included in your published post as follows:

• Single images will be displayed inline (a single image is defined as an image without an image immediately following it).
• Multiple images will be displayed as a gallery.

Multiple galleries and single images are allowed in the same post. Note that using the [nogallery] shortcode will disable all galleries.

If you have purchased the Space Upgrade then the following additional attachment types will be supported:

• Supported audio files (mp3) will be displayed using the WordPress Audio player.
• All other files (doc, PDF, etc) will be displayed as links to the attachment.

Additionally, if you’ve purchased VideoPress Upgrade you’ll be able to send mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg and m4v files as attachments which will then be displayed using the WordPress Video player.

Note that all attachments are subject to space limitations.

Shortcodes

Special shortcodes can be embedded in your email to configure various aspects of the published post:

• [category x,y,z]
• [excerpt]some excerpt[/excerpt]
• [tags x,y,z]
• [delay +1 hour]
• [comments on | off]
• [status publish | pending | draft]
• [password secret-password]
• [slug some-url-name]
• [title Your post title]
• [end] – everything after this shortcode is ignored (i.e. signatures)
• [nogallery] – disables the auto-gallery and displays all images inline

Shortcodes can be included anywhere in the body of your email and must be in lowercase.

Specifying the Category

The category shortcode will match the start of category titles, as well as category IDs. For example:

[category Hol, Fo]

Will match ‘Holiday’ and ‘Food’. Note that categories must already exist on your blog.

Specifying Tags

Any number of tags can be added to your post, each separated by a comma:

[tags one potato, two potato, three potato, more]

This will add four tags: ‘one potato’, ‘two potato’, ‘three potato’, and ‘more’. Note that your tags do not need to exist elsewhere in your blog and new tags will be created automatically.

Delaying Your Post

The delay shortcode will accept any time allowed by PHP’s strtotime. For example, you can:

[delay +1 hour]
[delay +2 days]

Providing a post title

The title of your published post is usually taken from the subject line of your email. In some instances, such as when sending an email from some cell phones or via a MMS-Email gateway, you may not be able to provide a subject. In this instance you can set your post title directly inside the email:

[title My Fancy Post]

Signatures

Post by email will automatically remove any email signatures that match the standard signature block pattern:

--

(that is dash dash space)

It will also remove anything after a <hr/> HTML tag.

If your email system attaches a signature that does not match any of these patterns then you can manually tell Post by Email to stop including text by adding the special [end] shortcode.  Anything after this will be removed from your post.

Example Email with Shortcodes

The following email will be published in 2 days time to the ‘WordPress’ category, with tags ‘announcement’ and ‘wordpress’:

Welcome to Post by Email, the easiest way to blog!

[tags announcement, WordPress]
[category WordPress]
[delay +2 days]