I recently helped a family member point her GoDaddy domain name to her blog. The instructions that GoDaddy or Blogger provided was not straightforward, so I want to ahead and post some helpful instructions that I found from eHow and TSKSOFT.

Things you’ll need:

* GoDaddy Domain Name
* Blogger Account

How to set up your GoDaddy settings:

1. Log into GoDaddy and go to Domains > My Domains.
2. Click on the domain that you want to use for your blog.
3. Find the “Total DNS Control and MX Records” link and click it.
4. Under the “Total DNS Control Panel,” locate “CNAMES(Aliases).”
5. Click on the pencil icon to edit it.
6. Set it as these settings exactly: “Enter an Alias Name: www” & “Points to Host Name: ghs.google.com” If you don’t know what TTL is, just leave it at 1 hour.
7. Hit OK.
8. Now we need to go back to the previous screen, the one where you found “Total DNS Control and MX Records,” but this time find “Forwarding:” and click on the link below it.
9. You will get a “Forward and Mask Domains” section pop-up at the top. Enter your URL with appended “www” as http://www.yourdomain.com, then tick “Update my DNS settings to support this change. (Recommended)”
10. Clicking the “Advanced Option” will show you that your URL is permanently forwarded (permanent redirect 301) to your specified http://www.yourdomain.com. You can click “Forward with Masking”
13. Finally, hit OK.

How to set up your Blogger settings:

1. Log into Blogger, go to “Dashboard,” pick a blog, and click “Settings.”
2. Under the “Settings” tab, click the “Publishing” tab.
3. Find this: “Switch to: • Custom Domain (Point your own registered domain name to your blog),” and click on “Custom Domain.”
4. Under the orange text that says “Buy a domain for your blog,” look for “Already own a domain? Switch to advanced settings.” It’s on the right side. Click “advanced settings.”
5. For your domain, enter your godaddy domain in the input box. It should include both the www. and the .com. An example would look like this: “www.domain.com”
6. Enter the word verification code, hit “Save Settings,” and you’re finished!

You’ll need to wait a few minutes before you can test out the forwarding and up to 24 hours before the domain name resolves to your blog.

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Go to http://rubberbanditz.com and check it out.

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Color Scheme Designer 3

ColorJack

Color Combos

Six Revisions – A look into Color Theory in Web Design

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It took me the full 90 minutes allotted to complete the 50 question test.  Of course, the exam threw some questions that were more difficult than others.   I had to make a concerted effort to manage my time to complete all questions.  I enjoyed the lab simulations more than the multiple choice type questions.  I found myself more interested in diving into command prompt of a router or switch to troubleshoot a network scenario rather than choosing which answer best fits the multiple choice question.   Nevertheless, I survived the brutal 90 minutes and passed the test.  The certification arrived in the mail this afternoon and it marks the first milestone of my technical education in the IT Networking field.  Thanks to everyone, my co-workers, and my wife for helping me start this journey.

What’s next?  I am on the next Cisco Press book – ICND2 and I will be working towards the exam for a CCNA certification – Cisco Certified Network Associate.

CCENT – Cisco Certifed Entry Network Technician!

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Bert Monroy provided a lecture and trained us on some new features that CS5 has to offer. One of the useful tools he covered is the brand new Content-Aware Fill.  The best part is that this tool is extremely easy to use.

Take a look the photo below.  This is one of the engagement photos I took for my friends, Kevin and Leigh (see my last post).   In this photo, you’ll notice the orange construction tape hanging in between two trees in the back right – something that could be easily removed in Photoshop.

By traditional Photoshop approach, there are a combination of different tools to fix this – clone stamp tool, magic eraser, healing brush, and/or the smudge tool.

However, Adobe Photoshop CS5’s Content-Aware Fill makes this process much easier!

• Use the Regular Marquee Tool (or any selection tool) to select your area to fill.
• Go to Edit > Fill.

• Choose Content-Aware under Contents and press OK.

• Press CTRL+D or CMD+D to deselect and you’re done!

It’s that easy!   However, note that it’s not always perfect.  You may get some imperfections depending on the photo and what’s around the area to fill.  However, this quick-and-easy fill can eliminate many unecessary steps that you have been performing in earlier versions of Photoshop!

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I have a strong interest in photography, but I am by no means a professional photographer! Below are some of my favorite shots that I took of them. I used a Canon Rebel XSi for shooting and I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 (didn’t have CS5 until recently) to give them more of a vintage look. Hope you enjoy them – let me know if you have any feedback!

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I guess that’s the million dollar question huh?

First off, it’s the quality of followers or following… not the quantity!

I read articles every day on Twitter from some fantastic people that I am following.  (Check out my Worth Following list here: http://twitter.com/jerbuen/worth-following)

It’s difficult to write an all-encompassing list of how to do this, but I want to share some of my random thoughts:

Promote your RSS, Twitter, and Facebook accounts with attractive icons

If you send emails to your clients or publish articles on your website, make sure to include links with attractive icons that invite people to find you on other Social Media avenues.   That way the relationship doesn’t end with that email or news article.   Get them to follow you so they continue to see your updates through their preferred social media tool.

Useful and relevant only

On Twitter, don’t be shy to tweet an article that you find interesting.  Make sure to tweet relevant and useful information, though.  Useful can mean comedic as well.   You are what you tweet.   Tweeting too much will lose followers… tweeting too little will not attract followers.

RT! (Re-tweet)

If you find something interesting, don’t be shy…Retweet it!   Give the person credit as well – it can help open up the lines of communication and they may be willing to Retweet one of your tweets in return – therefore getting more exposure and more followers.

Check out this website to find out your retweet rank:
http://www.retweetrank.com

Analyze yourself

Evaluate your Twitter behavior.   There are some tools on the web that can help you do this – Twitter graders are one example.  Here’s a good one that evaluates your twitter behavior.  This tool uses an algorithm to weigh in factors such as number of followers, power of followers, number of updates, follower/following ratio, and engagement.

http://twitter.grader.com/ – to learn more, read How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Rankings?

Note: Your twitter rank doesn’t mean everything!   It’s just a tool to help you keep in mind how you tweet.   Remember, the key is really to engage with your followers!   Don’t follow everyone just to follow.   Build REAL relationships.

Use the hash

Use hashtags with your topics.   Simply put a # sign in front of any keywords within your tweet.   Or you can put the # with a keyword at the end of your tweet.   For example, you can write “The #Tarheels win again in the NCAA# Championships! http://bit.ly/tarheels” or “RT @jerbuen Tarheels rock the tournament http://bit.ly/ngc #ncaa #basketball”.  This allows your tweets to be easier to find through searches and fall into trending topics.  Read more about hashtags and why to use them here: http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309

Schedule the Tweets!

This is absolutely not required, but is a nice tool to use if you wish to use it.  Let’s say you tweet a new blog post you wrote sometime before you went to bed.   Well, overnight, your tweet may be pushed to the side by the 100s of other tweets over night.   Then what happens in the morning?  Your tweet was missed.   Twitter is real-time and is fast moving.

To give your tweets more presence, set up Tweet schedules to automatically repeat the tweets that are important to you.  Here are some Tweet Schedulers that you can try out:
http://rtweeter.com/Schedule
http://www.socialoomph.com

Follow GoodBye, Buddy

When you follow @Goodbyebuddy, you will be emailed whenever someone UNfollows you.   This can be a great sanity check. If you are consistently losing followers, you may want to evaluate your Twitter behavior.  Are you tweeting too much?  Are you tweeting useful information?  Did you say something negative in a recent tweet that turned some of your followers off?

Find out your TweetEffect

Find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you.  Basically this tool analyzes your tweets in correlation with your change in the number of your followers.   I personally do not think that it’s 100% indicative of the effects of your tweets because people can unfollow or follow you coincidentally.   Regardless, it’s still an interesting tool to look at if you are seeing a pattern.
http://www.tweeteffect.com

Find the TwitterTrends

Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world.  You can see what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing in real time.  Use this to target your tweets on the latest trends.  This will help increase followers who do searches on these trends: http://trendsmap.com

ENGAGE!

If someone RTs one of your Tweets, always check the mentions and reply back with a Thank you for the RT.   Even better, follow up with a question that can start a conversation.   This helps build a network and helps conjure and retain more followers.  People like to see that there is a REAL person behind the twitter account… even if the auto-tweets are setup!

Check out my previous post on “Building a Real Network On Twitter“.   It’s short and it’s worth a read.

Others?

As always, I would love to hear from you.   I welcome your comments and additional thoughts on the topic!

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Menu Block

So… have you ever used the Primary and Secondary links feature on your theme and wondered “how the hell do I display any menu items deeper than that?”

Well, that’s what this module does. It provides configurable blocks of menu trees starting with any level of any menu. And more!

So if you’re only using your theme’s Primary links feature, you can add and configure a “Primary links (levels 2+)” block. That block would appear once you were on one of the Primary links’ pages and would show the menu tree for the 2nd level (and deeper) of your Primary links menu and would expand as you traversed down the tree. You can also limit the depth of the menu’s tree (e.g. “Primary links (levels 2-3)”) and/or expand all the child sub-menus (e.g. “Primary links (expanded levels 2+)”).

Protected Node

With protected node module the users can restrict the access to a node accessible only with a password they provided when the node was created. On node creation you can set a node protected, supply a password and verify strength of the password(via JavaScript).
If somebody wants to view the node or download an attachment of the node, will be redirected to a password query. If password is right, the user will be redirected to the originally accessed page. Authorization is stored in session, so don’t have to enter the password over and over again if once it was provided right.

Search Config

This module started out as a simple means of configuring the display of the advance search form. A few features have been added since thanks to the contributions of others.

In simple use cases the search_config module allows site admins to decide which fields to display on the advanced search form when enabled. This does not stop astute users from entering the search criteria directly into the search text fields. There is also the option of selecting which node types not to index. Once selected they are also automatically removed from the advance search form. This gives more control over the content that can be searched to those who need it.

Webform

This module adds a webform nodetype to your Drupal site. Typical uses for Webform are questionnaires, contact or request/register forms, surveys, polls or a front end to issues tracking systems.

Submissions from a webform are saved in a database table and can optionally be mailed to a nominated e-mail address upon submission. Past submissions are viewable for users with the correct permissions.

Webform includes some simple statistical tools to help in form design and evaluation and also allows the whole table to be downloaded as a csv file for detailed statistical analysis.

Privatemsg

Privatemsg allows your site’s visitors to send private messages to each other. Perfect for community oriented sites, such as forums and social networking sites.

Current features

1. send and receive private messages on a site (between multiple recipients);
2. threaded conversations (make it easier to keep track of messages and replies);
3. search private messages;
4. tagging and filtering (helps organise conversations);
5. user blocking;
6. e-mail notifications of new messages;

Printer, e-mail and PDF versions

This module allows you to generate the following printer-friendly versions of any node:

• Printer-friendly version (webpage format) (at www.example.com/print/nid)
• PDF version (at www.example.com/printpdf/nid)
• Send by-email (at www.example.com/printmail/nid)

where nid is the node id of content to render.

CAPTCHA and CAPTCHA Pack

A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human. The purpose of CAPTCHA is to block form submissions by spambots, which are automated scripts that post spam content everywhere they can.

The CAPTCHA Pack module contains several CAPTCHA types for use with the CAPTCHA module. The CAPTCHA Pack module is meant to provide lightweight, yet effective alternatives for the traditional image CAPTCHA, which is undesirable in certain situation (e.g. bandwidth restrictions, cpu restrictions, accessibility constraints, etc).

Google Analytics

The module allows you to add the following statistics features to your site:

• Selectively track certain users, roles and pages
• Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto)
• Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages
• Cache the Google Analytics code on your local server for improved page loading times
• Track user segmentation from Drupal profile data
• Site Search support
• AdSense support

Views

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted.

This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.

Among other things, Views can be used to generate reports, create summaries, and display collections of images and other content.

Conclusion

By all means, this is far from listing all the excellent Drupal modules out there.   Do you have any to share?  Please post them here!