Often during the course of the day, I’ll do something on the computer where I’ll think “that’s really cool, there’s probably a lot of people that don’t know you can do that!” I have a Facebook Page called Craig’s Classroom where I often post these tips and you can follow if you are interested. Meanwhile, my favorite tips are often too small in themselves to create a whole article on. I decided to start this blog series where I compile 5 tips at a time. Here is the  Part 2 of this series. (see bottom for links to Part 1 of series)

If you missed

Part 1 of this series, you can click that link to see it.

Often during the course of the day, I’ll do something on the computer where I’ll think “that’s really cool, there’s probably a lot of people that don’t know you can do that!” I have a Facebook Page called Craig’s Classroom where I often post these tips and you can follow if you are interested. Meanwhile, my favorite tips are often too small in themselves to create a whole article on. I decided to start this blog series where I compile 5 tips at a time. Here is the first of this series.

Of the total time that you on your computer in a day, a good portion of that is spent online… perhaps a major portion, right? Selecting a browser  then is an important choice.

If you are a windows user, you start off with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) until you discover (or get shown) that this is not your only choice. This is Part 2 of an ongoing blog series for me to highlight points about MY browser of choice – Google Chrome. If you missed it you can see [Part 1] by clicking that link.

Google Chrome first came out in 2008. The designers had a several goals in mind one of which was a a clean interface. When you look at it, you can see that every pixel was really thought out in a minmalist, “only what you really need” way. As another example of minimalist design that works,
just look at the google home page – “less is more” concept in design often works quite well.

In the screenshot (below) of ActiveRain in Chrome, you can see a little about the browser layout. The individual tabs can be closed by clicking the x on each. Also, you can drag a tab to reorder the sequence and you can drag it right out of the window to create a new separate window (e.g. sometimes you want to see two sites side by side)

The address box is where you (obviously) go to type in a website. But here’s is where chrome shines! They call it an omnibox because of all thatthe one box can do for you. First of all, it learns your frequented sites. I  can type in a SINGLE letter, e.g. A for activerain and it suggests www.activerain.com for me and I all I need to do is hit enter. Note, you might say “my other browser (insert Firefox, IE, or otherwise here) does that too.” But does it? or do you have to find and click the item in the dropdown list? Chrome puts the best choice right there and all you need to do is press enter. Some sites  will compete as your  favorite for the “first letter only trick”, so you’ll have to type TWO or maybe THREE characters. Example. AM and enter gets me to amazon.com.

With this in mind, you hardly need your bookmarks bar. You can have oneif you want, but I find I rarely use mine now.

The other very cool thing about the omnibox is that it has google search built right into it. So you do NOT need to first go to google.com and then type a search. Type your search right in the omnibox and the results will be immediately shown to you.

Talking about well thought out design and good use of your SCREEN real estate. If you don’t watch yourself, your browser window will look something like
what is seen here. Seems like everyone has a “free toolbar” that they want you to install – Yahoo, Bing, AOL, your antivirus program, etc, etc. Just say “no” You don’t need them and besides they take up system resources you can
better put to use. Laptops especially do not have the vertical resolution that a desktop computer has. A desktop computer typically has 1280 pixels of
vertical space whereas a laptop usually has around 700 pixels. With all the toolbars installed (the screen shot is an exaggeration, but I’ve easily and often seen half this much in helping users), there is little space left for actual content.

Stay tuned for more articles in this series. If you need to download the chrome browser, use the link below.

Google Chrome (my choice) www.google.com/chrome

Which browser are you using right this very minute?

Ask yourself: Of the time that I spend on my computer, how much of that time is on the internet? When you answer, you’ll realize that choosing a browser should be an important decision!

If you have a Windows computer, you by default start off with Microsoft Internet Explorer. This is an “ok” choice, but you can choose so much better. This article series will tell you why I have switched and why my personal choice in the browser war is Google Chrome.

For starters, Chrome is downright fast. Starts up fast, loads pages fast, runs JavaScript programming on pages fast. (Did I say it was fast?) Try it and you’ll see. If you hate that hourglass spinning, you’ll apreciate this choice.

Google did a funny video ad series competing the browser against various things, like LIGHTNING and a POTATO. funny video (watch and you’ll better understand how they can compete). You can see
the video by clicking the link above.

Chrome has been around a while and is gaining “market share” quickly. Here is a recent chart showing the popularity of the different browsers. King of the hill, Internet Explorer (IE) is losing ground!

Now you might find that some main sites have yet to allow anything other than IE (how annoying is that!!) It might be your bank, it might be your MLS (for realtors reading this). Ahh, patience, just a matter of time they will need to conform. Meanwhile, like me you might need to keep BOTH icons handy to launch either IE or Chrome - so you can launch IE for “those sites” that still require it (but only those sites).

Anyway, I am going to continue this series, so stay tuned to get more information about Google Chrome.

Below, in fairness, I will give links to the 5 major browsers. If you must use IE, do a favor for all the web developers in the world (including me) and at least upgrade to the latest version IE (version 8 at time of this writing). Web developers hate hate hate version 6 and with good reason.

Here are the links:

Google Chrome (my choice) www.google.com/chrome

Firefox www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox

Safari www.apple.com/safari

Opera www.opera.com

Microsoft Internet Explorer www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer

In a recent blog post, I had written about creating lists in Facebook so that you can keep up with your friends’ latest news. Sometimes your news feed throws so much at you in a news feed TIDAL WAVE that you might be missing quite a bit that certain friends are posting  (see that article here) Sometimes you say to yourself, “hmmm- I haven’t heard from so-and-so lately. Let me see what they’ve been up to in  Facebook”. So what do you do? You go to “friends” on the menu, scan all over for where your friend list is, finally find it, then SCROLL through your LONG list. A minute OR SO later, you eventually find them.

I did that for a while until I thought, “there sure must be an EASIER and FASTER way.”. I slowed down to look again (sometimes we need to slow down and look around). I noticed the search box at the top of every facebook page. I typed just one letter (sometimes two letters, usually no more than three letters!) and there’s the friend I wanted to find. It was right under my nose. Glad I found that out – I wanted to share it with you too!

(I like how facebook designed the search results. It shows the friends you are connected to first and then afterward it suggests people based on friends of friends)

Information Overload – We all suffer from it in the internet age. Soooo much information out there, wouldn’t you agree? But if you’re like me, you are constantly being amazed at “wow, I’m really glad so-and-so posted that article on their blog – I really learned something USEFUL”. So that person mentally gets added to your favorites, but what are the odds you are going to catch the next great article from the same person. The odds are extremely HIGH if you take advantage of RSS feeds. You’ve seen the little orange RSS icon all over the internet – now let me show you how to take advantage of it.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. Most sites that produce a stream of new content will provide a URL to the RSS feed so that you can subscribe to the feed. The very first thing that you will need to take advantage of RSS is a “feed aggregator” or application that lets you see all your feeds. You can download apps that do this (and even Outlook has the feature) I’ve tried some different ones and my personal choice is not an installed app but a “cloud app” called Google Reader. If you have a Google account head on over to
www.google.com/reader and if you don’t have a Google account, what are you waiting for! (google accounts are free and have a simple sign up) I’m a big Google fan – Reader, Google Earth, Maps, Analytics, GMail, Picasa, Web Albums, YouTube etc etc – more things to blog about! ahhh, but let me stay on topic here: Google Reader

In the diagram below, you can see a few of my interests: Photography, Real Estate, and Technology. I have created folders for each of these topics in my Google Reader. Notice the layout – the left pane shows your feeds and the right side pane shows you the results of whatever you click on the left. I can click the Real Estate folder heading and it shows all the posts that fall under that category. Or I can click on a specific feed (like I have clicked here on Tech Savvy Agent) and you can see all the posts from that team.

The appearance of Reader window might remind you very much of an email window, the “unread” posts appear in bold and it shows you a number (or a count) of how many you have not read. Now… there’s NO way you are going to actually read all the posts, but you should scan the headlines and read the ones of interest. Afterward, what I do is click the “mark all as read” button at the top so it clears out the “what’s new” highlighting and that way when I come back, I’ll focus on what ever is new since I last looked.

As you’ll see above also, when you click on an article heading – the article will expand so that you can actually read it. Once open, you can click on the blue Title which is a link and takes you to the source site. Sometimes I like to do this so you can see it in context and learn more about the author from his or her site.

If you find a really terrific article, you can click on the star for the article so that it bookmarks it for you. You can then go back to review all your “starred” articles later.

Now that I’ve found ActiveRain (a Real Estate Site), you can be sure that I will be building a folder for my favorite bloggers on that site. This is how you too can do it… On any person’s blog page, scroll down and watch the right hand side. Underneath the links to all the archives you will see the icon noted RSS. When you click on it, it takes you to a page full of raw/unformatted text - smell that? that’s pure RSS! What you want is the URL for the feed, so head on up to the address bar in your browser to copy the URL to the clipboard.

Next, head on over to Google Reader. At the top left of the window you will see a button to Add a Feed. Paste your feed URL and press Enter. This will add the feed and show you the contents.

The very next thing that I always do is to put it into a Folder to categorize it. In the left pane where you see the feed name, click the arrow at the right of the name where you get options. Here you can add to existing folder or you can choose to ”create a new folder” if it is the first feed of it’s kind. Note: you can actually mark feeds with more than one category, for instance you might tag it as both Real Estate and ActiveRain as both categories apply.

Finally, you might think that if you follow somebody in Twitter and/or Facebook, “why would I care about RSS feeds” Well, I still recommend that you follow your favorites there also. But, as you know the news feed rolls by so fast that you are bound to miss something along the way. Wtih RSS feeds, you don’t have to be so worried about it. You wont miss anything.

So go out there and start subscribing to some RSS Feeds!

Once you’ve been on Facebook for a while, your friends list will have grown large. Do you feel like with so MUCH information flowing into your newsfeed that you are for sure missing out on some posts that people most important to you have been making?

Besides people, you no doubt have “liked” (subscribed) to many other business and group pages. For your business, your main clients (active and previous) are probably in your friends list (they should be) and certainly your family is there. Before I discovered lists in facebook, I felt that I was missing out on posts by people. Sometimes the large volume of posts from all your subscribed pages drown out the people. In the figure below, the “pages” are posting so much, there is no actual “people” shown. These types of posts are good and instructional BUT you might be missing posts that you don’t want to miss.

So… If you haven’t discovered this yet, don’t miss this button!
when you click on “Friends” on the left side navigation, note the button you get over at the top right…

You will get a pop-up box where you can select the people that you want to put in a particular list. For example, I have lists created for my side of the family, my wife’s side of the family, clients, and one just called “people” which is EVERYONE except all the pages for businesses.

Once you have your lists, then you’ll be amazed as you start to use them! Now when you open Facebook in your browser, go over to the left side navigation menu and click the Friends link which then expands all your list options directly below. Start selecting your particular lists to filter your news feed and you’ll be surprised about all the “people” news that you’ve most likely been missing!

(PS – moving forward, as you accept new friend requests, right away put them into the lists that you want them in otherwise you might accidentally overlook the “newcomers”)

Picasa is the free photo organizing and editing tool by google that you have seen other classroom posts on this website before. You can download Picasa here. Be sure to check out the Picasa category on the sidebar menu on this site for other useful articles about the program.

Redeye correction is one of the many tools within picasa. Look for it on the basic tools palette on the left side of picasa when you have a specific photo open. Click the Redeye tool and watch it search out the persons red eyes and highlight them for you. If for some rare reason it doesn’t draw the eye boxes automatically, you can drag a small box around each of the  person’s eyes to identify.

Notice the results once you apply. This is now a much different and BETTER photo!

To get started, you need to pick your favorite photos that you want to use. Just a few will do… too many and you quickly can overclutter (unless that’s the look you want!). I use the “star” feature in Picasa to tag all my favorite photos. There is a special album you’ll see in Picasa that gathers all your starred photos together in one place. This is a good starting point to create a collage from.

Select the photos that you want to use. (Tip: Click your first photo and then Ctrl+Click each additional one – this allows you to select multiple photos into one set). When you are done selecting, click the “Collage” button which you’ll find on the ‘actions’ toolbar at the bottom of the Picasa window.

Notice at the left side of your window is a pane with various tools and settings. Let’s start at the top. You can choose the type of collage that you want (feel free to experiment). However, the “Picture Pile” setting works great for desktop backgrounds. Next, why not choose a good background color. I find that the darker hues are less of a strain on your eye.

If you choose the “Select All” button at the top of the window, then you can apply the same setting to all the photos. Try out the “Picture Borders” settings. I like the one in the middle which puts an even white border all the way around.

In the “Page Format” list, choose a setting that matches your monitor. You can choose the “Widescreen Monitor” setting or the “Current Display” option in the list depending on what type of screen you have. The “Draw Shadows” setting also creates a nice effect.

Next, let’s work on the presentation of the photos. At the bottom of the screen are two buttons: “Scramble Collage” and “Shuffle Pictures”. These are ok and you can play with them but their randomness never quite gets the exact results that I like. So when you are ready you can take over and fine tune: position, size, rotation.

If you select a specific photo, you can drag it wherever you want it to be. Also, don’t overlook the right-click menu. “Bring to Top” and “Move to Bottom” are two commands that will get the right placement in your “stack”. Notice also when you select a photo that you get a rotation and sizing ring. Grab the handle and notice how you can rotate the photo. If you drag the handle to the right, the photo gets larger (to the left, it gets smaller). Use a little creativity with size and rotation to create your photo stack.

Finally, if the desktop is your destination, click the “Desktop Background” button on the left side pane (or if you are looking for a printout, choose the “Create Collage” button)

That’s it. Enjoy your creative collages!

In Outlook, go to the tools menu and choose Options. In the dialog box, choose the “Mail Format” tab. Look for the “Signatures…” button and click it.

On the next dialog, you can create a signature. Click the “New” button. Type a name to identify the signature. For example, you can simply type your first name. If you have multiple email accounts, you might put additional reference to which signature applies.

In the lower part of the box is where you can type the information about how best to contact you. If most of your correspondence is electronic, you may choose just to put your email, web, cell and/or tel references. I find it also useful to display more than one item in each line thus keeping it tightened up vertically. If you have a very tall signature, it makes it harder to see the original text and your reply all in one screen without scrolling.

At the top-right of the dialog box, you can choose to include the signature on new messages (that’s for sure) and also if you want it on your replies. If you reply back and forth many times and put a signature on EVERY message, your conversation thread becomes a little distracting with signature info. However, you can choose to include signature on replies and then choose to manually delete it as needed in the cases of long back and forth conversation emails.

As a final note, many times persons are inclined to put a logo image in their signature. As tempting as this might be as part of your branding, this has some problems inasmuch as this can cause some complications for the recipient. It often happens that the logo gets tagged as an “attachment” (paper clip icon in your email list view). The problem with this is when you are searching for that one email where someone had sent you an attachment but ALL the messages have an attachment, the search becomes harder. For me, it is much simpler and nicer to not do logo graphics. There are some complex techniques around it, but that will be possibly for future discussion!