Untethered Dreams

My New Clipboard Management Tool (Souped-Up Cut, Copy, Paste) for Windows: Ditto

kjh — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:28:17 +0000

If you’re a blogger, then you probably do a lot of copying and pasting and sometimes it’s the same stuff over and over. I had been using ClipX pretty successfully for a long time, but recently had major issues with it, probably due to some recent Windows XP update. That meant I had to go searching for a replacement (free and ideally open source).

I narrowed it down to 2: Flashpaste Lite and Ditto, which is an open source project. I decided on Ditto as it was much more powerful than Flashpaste and more customizable, particularly with keyboard shortcuts to quickly paste pre-canned chunks of text.

I noticed some other folks on the Web not caring for Ditto because of its complexity, but hey, the more complex it is, then the better the chance that it’ll do what you want. I’m of the school that believes that power is accompanied by complexity. Take the time up front to learn the tool and you’ll be rewarded by many hours of improved efficiency.

References:

Other Possible Apps that I considered:

ShareThis

Post-Mortem on GetFriday (Virtual Assistant Company)

kjh — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:33:56 +0000

Almost a year ago, we started our trial of GetFriday, a ‘virtual assistant’ or ‘outsourced assistant’ company based in India. Their fees start at around $10/hour and go down from there the larger the monthly plan you get. We eventually decided to part ways with them, mainly due to a few factors: 1. cost-cutting on our part, and 2. our need for more technical skills.

Here’s what we learned, which you can use in many ways when looking for a new VA:
(more…)

ShareThis

Tutorial on setting up the Google Custom Search Engine on your Wordpress blog

kjh — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:43:00 +0000

In all likelihood, you’ve seen where you perform a search on a website and the results look just very much like what you get when you do a search on Google. Well, in case you’re wondering how that works, Google has a product called Google Custom Search that lets you do just that. There are 2 versions, 1 free with ads, and a for-fee version that allows for more customization and much larger websites.

If you’re running a blog, that is based on Wordpress for example, then you can use the power of Google search on your site. While Google has decent documentation for how to do this generally, there don’t have specific docs on how to do this on a blog. Canadian blogger Maki who runs Dosh Dosh has put together a pretty thorough tutorial with screenshots that walks you through the process.

About the only thing we would emphasize some more in his tutorial is embedding the search box code in your site. This is the code that creates the search box and button.

You may also be interested in the Google Custom Search Wordpress plugin. It redirects all searches to GCS and automatically creates a new search results page in WP. Our advice is to take the time to learn about GCS and create everything yourself. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. The plugin is nice, but doesn’t allow for easy customization.

ShareThis

References to help you decide on a replacement Blog Commenting system

kjh — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:30:00 +0000

We recently decided to replace the built-in commenting system that comes with Wordpress on Gizmos for Geeks due to its limitations and that we were spending too much time dealing with spam comments. We looked at the 4 most popular/capable comment replacement systems available now: IntenseDebate, Disqus, Backtype and JS-Kit’s ECHO. We briefly considered Facebook Connect, but since at least ID already supports FBC, we didn’t bother with it.

We ended up picking IntenseDebate, which by the way is made by the same company (Automattic) that produces Wordpress. We won’t go into all the reasons why we picked ID, because your reasons will end up being different from ours and it’ll be worth the time to research them properly and understand what they can do.

Instead, here are some useful references that we used to help us decide. Good luck.

And if those aren’t enough to help you decide, then you can hit up Google to find additional discussions. How apt.

ShareThis

The Power of the “Season”

kjh — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:45:19 +0000

I love this graph. It is so telling. This is a track of our visitors to one of Halloween costume websites. Look at how it rises steadily to the height of traffic on Halloween day (interestingly enough - probably from people looking for last minute ideas) and then falling precipitously the next 2 days (the end date on the graph is Nov 2).

It’s pretty simple what this says - plan for seasonal events. Traditional vendors do it, and so should you.

ShareThis

Insurance Money well-spent: a concrete example

kjh — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Over a year ago, we wrote about being ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’, or rather advising not to be! Well, I have another very concrete example of how spending a bit more money up front saved me a whole lot of time and by extension, money.

I’ll nutshell it up front:
I built my computer with the operating system on a RAID 1 array. One of the physical drives in that array crashed hard, so I pulled it out, sent it back to the manufacturer (it was still under warranty), got a new one and replaced it. That’s it. No rebuilding the operating systems, no reinstalling applications, no recovery from backups, pretty much very little heartache.
(more…)

ShareThis

Bloggers must now disclose when they receive free samples

kjh — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:22:49 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided that bloggers need to disclose if they’ve received ‘freebies’ that they blog about or write reviews on. Otherwise they would be liable for fines on the order of $10 to $20,000.

In addition, testimonial advertisements now need to be more explicit in what customers can reasonably expect when they purchase the products. No longer can they only contain glowing reviews with a disclaimer saying that the results aren’t typical for all consumers.

The new regulations go into effect December 1, 2009. It’s a good idea to read through the changes, the first of its kind since 1980. However, if you’re a blogger and want to be on the safe side, then simply disclose whenever you do receive a freebie and write about it. Your readers will appreciate your honesty and your trust factor will rise as well.

References:

FTC Press Release
FTC Guides concerning the use of Endorsements and Testimonials (filled with examples) [PDF]

ShareThis

Google Sitelinks extended beyond 1st SERP

kjh — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:40:42 +0000

In case you’re not familiar with Google’s Sitelinks, it’s those ‘additional’ links that (up to recently only) show up for the 1st result in Google’s search results if the site in question had distinctive categorized content. Ok, that was a mouthful. Here’s a concrete example. One of the sites that we run, MvixCommunity, which is a forum for discussing Mvix products shows up as the 1st result when you search for ‘mvix forums’, and it has additional sitelinks under the result. Here’s a screenshot:

Google recently decided to share that love a bit, and now sites further down in the listings will also get Sitelinks if they are so deserving. They won’t get the full treatement, but at least they’ll get a line with up to 4 such links.

So far, Google does not describe exactly how those links are auto-generated, but you can block some of those links via Google’s Webmaster Tools.

ShareThis

$35M Injected into Twitter

doug — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:09:32 +0000

An estimated $35M has been injected into Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging service, in Twitter’s latest VC round. The funding comes from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners according to Biz Stone on the company’s blog.

According to Stone, Twitter’s active users have increased 900% over the past year. Traffic through the APIs has been amazing and are said to be twice the web traffic to Twitter, Twittering via SMS is becoming more and more popular.

With the VC injection, Twitter’s 29 person staff and infrastructure will grow to support the incredible growth and build revenue-generating products. There has been a lot of speculation about how the service will eventually make money, but so far the company has declined to comment on exactly what it will do.

Let us know what you think by taking our poll.

ShareThis

Bootstrap Don’t Borrow

doug — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:37:59 +0000

At a recent Meet the Angels event in Atlanta, the panelists made sure entrepreneurs knew that angels “should be a last resort”. While this was shocking for the entrepreneurs, the panelist described working with Angels is “expensive and onerous” and suggest that if you can avoid it, you should. So what’s an entrepreneur to do?

The panel suggests that you bootstrap your company so you can concentrate on solving the problem your business targets rather than working to raise capital for your company.

It almost goes without saying, but Angels are scrutinizing every deal much closer than only six to nine months ago due to investor exits flatlining because of the credit market paralysis.

Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle

ShareThis