So you have decided it is about time you jump into this whole internet fad and make your millions online by selling your widgets to the world. Well my friend you will need a online shopping cart system. I am not going to describe the pit falls and advantages here of taking your business online. But I am going to start off by bringing up a point you should consider before you even do your first Google search for an online store system or online shopping cart.

No matter how great of a product you have, or how awesome your website and online store / shopping cart is. If you cannot get people to look through it, or even at it for that matter you are not going to make any sales. Okay with the dismal news aside lets’ talk about what you actually need to process a transaction online.

For the purpose of this post we will assume you have a website which is acting as your store front. Now you need a way of tracking the items your customer selects, adding the total and allowing them to pay for it. Well an online shopping cart does some of that work but not all of it. This is where a lot of my clients who do not have brick and mortar stores get confused. You see the online shopping cart collects the items your customers select, sometimes suggests related items, and sometimes calculates shipping. I say sometimes because this will depend on the shopping cart software you select and how you configured it. The shopping cart should also securely collect the customers information. But the shopping cart DOES NOT process the transaction.

So to relate this to a brick and mortar store. Your customer has the items they have selected in their cart and they are now at the register waiting to pay for them. Now this is where things get tricky. When you pay at a store and use your credit or debit card, which the cashier or yourself swipe. That information is carried through secure (we hope) wires to a financial institution where the money is removed from your account and deposited into the merchants account (minus the credit card or banks fees).

With an online store we need to transmit that information securely to someone or some company that will process this information taking the money from the customer and paying us minus their service fees. Now it is a little more complicated sometimes when you involve a payment gateway. A payment gateway would be the same as those secure wires. Fortunately most companies that will process the credit card (merchant accounts) also provide gateways as part of their services.

Now you might be saying “Hey I have bought stuff online before ad never seen any of this taking place.” . My answer to that is good, that means everything was set up correctly. If you have bought something using a Pay Pal account then all this might seem to register in your head.

Okay so where is the meat of the post? How do you select a shopping cart? What features should you look for? Well my friends those questions will both be answered in a future post. But before we get to that good stuff we should discuss the topic of taking your business online…… to be continued……

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Pod casts and pod casting is nothing new, and has been around for some time on the web. I have often thought that sometime I might try my hand at creating one. The problem you see is that I haven not really listened to many of them. That is until now. While using I-tunes at work the other day I had realized I had left my USB drive at home. Alas I had no music with me, so I decided to check out what I-Tunes had listed for pod casts.

Well I was pleasantly surprised to find hundreds if not thousands on interesting pod casts, in various categories. I was listening to health pod casts, business pod cats, and even some graphic design pod casts. I haven’t even begun to check out the video pod casts.

Some great pod casts I have found are below, check them out you might enjoy them too:

If you have suggestions of other pod casts I should check out please leave a comment.

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While glancing over my shoulder at work the other day I noticed something very Mac like on a Windows XP machine. Now I should point out that I work in an environment that has a little bit of every flavour of operating system running in some form or other. My work environment is also highly creative and it is not uncommon for extremely strange things to be happening.

What I saw was a dock which looked very similar to the application dock on Mac OS X. I had to ask what exactly it was – it was Rocket Dock. Its a really cool little application that proves extremely useful. I tend to have several windows and applications all opened at once. In fact I tend to have so many windows across two monitors that I lose track of them all. But Rocket Dock also me to minimize windows right to the dock and keep track of them. It really is a great piece of software. Did I mention it is FREE?

Having developed “FREE” software before I know how much it really costs. As I like this little application so much I have even ordered a t-shirt. It is a karma thing, you have to support developers who develop great software. Plus you get a t-shirt to boot. Check out Rocket Dock, I am sure you’ll like it as much as I do.

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If you have been surfing the web for a while, or have a site on the web you have no doubt heard the term PageRank. If you own a web site and have not heard about PageRank now is a good time to learn.

What is PageRank?

Essentially PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by Google. PageRank was designed to make search results more relevant to the person using the search engine. It works by assigning a value to a web page based on what sites link to it. However it goes much deeper than that. PageRank also looks at the weight it has assigned to the linking pages. From the number of links to web page and the value of the pages linking to that site, PageRank determines the value it assigns for that page.

Sound complicated? That is because it is complicated. In fact my brief description does not really do it justice. Plus add in the fact that the engineers at Google are always updating the algorithm to prevent it from being abused. Not long ago Google rolled out a few changes that had dramatic effects across the web. Sites that had a PageRank of 7 (PageRank is out of 10) went to a PageRank of 3 overnight. needless to say it was a shock to a lot of people.

How does PageRank Affect a Website?

Well firstly PageRank will affect where the web site shows up in Google search results. As you probably already know the higher up a site appears in search results the more traffic it will get. But if you have or want to have advertising on your site it is also important. A lot of advertisers look at a websites PageRank when determining if they will advertise there or not. I also believe Google AdSense takes into account a sites Pagerank when determining which adds to place on the site.

At one time TenaciousCreations.com had a PageRank of 4. At the time I was upset that it was only 4, but now not having any PageRank I would gladly go back to having a PageRank of 4. However when this site had some PageRanking I consistently had Google placing higher paying ads on my site. As my PageRank decreased so did the price per click of the ads Google Adsense placed on my site.

How Do I Improve My Websites PageRank?

Okay so now we know what PageRank is and why it is important us. But how do we improve our sites PageRank? Well if you have followed my site at all you will know I always stress good content. If you have good content, that people can benefit from and want. You will have other websites deep linking to your site. More relevant links == more PageRank. Link exchanges can also work. However I feel Google has got smart on this and now puts less weight to a link exchange than they do a deep link with in another site. When ever i created a new Photo Shop tutorial I always submitted them to a bunch of tutorial sites. Most of these tutorial sites are nothing more than a collection of links. For a while I enjoyed a very good PageRank, however at the time of writing this article I have a pretty dismal PageRank.

You have to remember search engines are always trying to improve the way they work in order to provide better search results for their users (ie customers). A search engine wants to make sure when a user enters his or her search terms, the search engine will turn up the results they want. If you keep this in mind and provide quality content I am very confident that will also improve your PageRank.

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Well a lot has happen since my last post in April. I have moved to a different city, and taken on a different (but coolest in the world) job. However as I said in the last post I want to once again get tenacious Creations rolling.

Maybe even get some page ranking back. Although I am pretty impressed that even with an almost total lack of new content this site still attracts 200 or more visitors a day. Most of my visits are for my photoshop tutorials. With the one about making a better virtual tattoo receiving the most traffic right now.

I guess that goes to show that if you have content the traffic will come. I only wish I knew then what I know now about Search Engine Optimization. I am sure I could of made all those photoshop tutorials rank a fair bit higher in the search engines.

So what am I going to do to get traffic back?

If all goes well I hope that with in two months I can increase the traffic to this blog to 400 hits a day. Not to big of a goal, and one that should be easily accomplished. As always if you have ay suggestions on how I can increase the traffic to this blog please feel free to let me know.

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 Well after months and months of no activity here on Tenacious Creations I thought I should write a post of what has been happening. As well as maybe a glimpse into the future of Tenacious Creations. First off I want to thank all of you who keep coming back to this site even though there has been no new updates. Surprisingly my traffic has not dropped off as much as I thought it would.

 Secondly I want to apologize to all those whose blogs I used to regularly read and comment on. I just have not had the time to keep up with them. Although I have been able to rearrange my schedule a bit so I can start regularly reading a few blogs again. So look for my comments to start flowing once again.

 So what has been happening around here. Well I was running a small tech company on the side and that was taking up a lot of my time. However I have scaled back operations with it which has allowed me free time to start taking care of this blog some more.

 Here are some of the upcoming posts I am working on and which should be published soon, but not necessarily in this order:

 So those are a few of things I will be posting articles on in the near future. Hopefully you, my readers, will find them interesting and useful. If you are worried about missing these posts I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed. I hope to hear comments from you all, and if you are a new reader I hope you will keep coming back for more.

Till the next post!

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 As of late there has not been much action going on with the Tenacious Creations site. Other projects and hobbies have place constraints on my time. Unfortunately Tenacious Creations has kind of been left out in the cold.

 But as another year comes to an end it is time to take a look back at some of the most popular posts of the year.

 These were the top three posts of 2008. I am hoping to get some new posts happening in 2009. However as with most New Years resolutions this one may get broken before it is started.

 Thank you to all who have read and commented on my posts through out 2008, I wish you a prosperous New Year and I hope you will continue to rad my posts for 2009.

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 For those of you who are still checking this site every now and again you may have noticed a few changes. First off there is no longer an EntreCard widget in the top right hand corner. As I have not had the time to do regular updates EntreCard has decided to deactivate my account.

 To be quite honest this really does not bother me in the least. I seem to be have some many things to do and so little time to do them in. You will also notice the the lower right hand corner is now devoid of the BlogRush Widget. As some had suggested quite some time ago BlogRush was slowly dying. Well now it is dead and gone.

 So what does the future hold for Tenacious Creations? Well as there are still some pretty decent tutorials here. The site will remain active. As for updates, well hopefully I will get some extra time in which I can add some new interest tutorials on various subjects. If you have suggestions for new tutorials please leave them in the comments.

Thank you

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 I am sure just about everyone has heard of Skype and perhaps a lot of you are already using it. Now it is not too often that I give a product rave reviews but once again Skype has performed above my expectations.

 For some time now I have been using Skype as an instant messenger and for some conference calls. Yes that is right you can do conference calls with Skype. Not all your participants in the conference call need to be on a computer either. You can use Skype dial out service (for a reasonable fee) to call participants and involve them in your conference call.

 But what has impressed me the most about Skype is that this morning I used it for an online conference call with two other people. Now this may not sound that amazing, but when you factor in that one person was in England, the other in Japan, and me here in the center of Canada. It is pretty amazing.

 There was virtually no lag time and I could hear each person clear as a bell. In fact the clarity was much better than I have found on land line international calls. It was so clear that when one of the participants cell phone rang I almost thought the phone was right beside me and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

 If you are only using Skype online than you cannot beat the price, its free! If you are in North America or most places Skype has monthly packages if you are calling land lines. The price verys from place to place but I find it is extremely reasonable.

 My only complaint is that I cannot get a land line phone number here in Canada for land lines to call me. That’s right if you live in the US or England, and a few other places you can get a phone number that regular phones can call. You can answer these online or have them forwarded to a phone number of your choice.

Hopefully Skype will be offering this service in Canada soon. If you have never tried Skype, give it a try. Oh I also forgot to mention that you can also do video chats with Skype. It is an excellent piece of software that I highly recommend.

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 If you read about improving traffic to your site or selling a product you have no doubt heard about branding. When I think of branding I am remind of growing up on the farm. I can still smell the mixture of red hot metal and seared flesh. Just like the brand on cattle identifies them as some ones property establishing a brand for your web site or product does the same thing.

 Examples of this are the golden arches of McDonald’s, the apple of Apple and I am sure now that you think of it several more come to mind. An effective brand will create an emotional response in the consumer. Why an emotional response? Well research has proven that if an advertiser can create an emotional response in the consumer the consumer will have a great chance of remembering the message.

 I recently found this article from Microsoft about branding with in a piece of software. If you are a programmer this is really an interesting read and I would recommend reading it.

 Branding seems to be extremely important to marketing people. For some reason I never seem to fully grasp the marketing concepts. However now that I am building software as an independent developer this has become more important to me. If people do not know about my products they surely will not buy them.

 So how do you let people know about your products? Well that is an easy one to answer, you advertise. But wait a minute, how do you make sure you get the most effective advertising? How do you advertise on a budget? Should you focus your advertising to your potential market?

 These are important questions that need to be answered. To be honest I am not 100% sure on the answers to these questions. If you are a marketing guru please use the contact form at the bottom of that page to contact me. I do know I have to do some more research on marketing so that I can answer these questions. I would hate to invest more money into advertising than I am going to generate from software sales. But I guess it is a risk one has to take.

 My biggest decision has been if I should brand my software under the Tenacious Creations name or use a new name. To that extent I having even researched some over names. I was shocked to see how many of them already have domains registered with that name. No web site there, just people holding onto the domain name hoping to make a quick buck. That is where Tenacious Creations has an advantage, it has been registered for a few years and is easy to remember. The down side is it is difficult to spell and easy to misspell.

 Next is a logo, I don’t really have a logo for Tenacious Creations. Unless you count the coyote.

 In any case it looks like learning about marketing is going to be an interesting adventure. Plus it should make for some good blog posts. I plan to post what I learn so maybe other people can learn from my successes and failures. I hope I get a lot of comments and suggestions from you the readers.

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 If you have been following my blog then you know I have been in negotiations to sell some software that I have created. While I still cannot talk about that do to various non-disclosure agreements. I will try to give a vague enough update so as to skate around the non-disclosure agreements.

 I will be getting paid a significant amount over two years. It was kind of like winning the lottery in a lot of ways. But due to the fact this is a large amount of money I knew I had to make sure it would be handled right. Instead of going out and buying that new house, new car and new motorcycle I went and talked to some accountants and financial planners.

 So instead of going on a wild spending spree I went on a wild investing spree. If things go as planned I should be seeing returns on those investments in six months to a year. Once this starts happening along with some other software (I have written some mobile home park management software) sales I have happening I should be able to quit my day job and work from home full time.

 Work on what? You may ask. Well I have several other ideas for software projects that I just have not had the time to do the market research for. Having the time to work on the while still maintaining a decent income is my end goal.

 I want to be in the position where I can choose to work four to six days straight on a project. Then take three or four days off to be a bum and wander around town. It is an ambitious goal but I am sure I can reach it.

I hope this provides a brief update as to what is happening around here and blows some dust off this site.

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 Well I thought I better write a quick update as nothing has changed on this site for a while. As some of you might remember I was working on some software to work with AdSense a while back. Well I am happy to report that a company, that I can not name (nondisclosure agreements and all), and I are currently negotiating the sale of that software.

 Due to the fact of that software running on this site and the legal negotiations I have been very reluctant to post anything. In fact I cleared this post with my legal team before posting it.. I will try to keep you my loyal readers updated as much as I can as things progress.

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 If you have been following my blog, you know that I have repeatedly reported on how evil FaceBook is.

 You may also know that I had disabled my profile on FaceBook. Well if you know me on FaceBook you may of noticed that I did indeed re-enable my profile a couple months ago. Now I know this sounds a little bit hypocritical. Well the reason is I was coerced into developing a couple of FaceBook applications with a business partner.

 These applications (which I will not name) did quite well and generated some decent income. They derived most of their income from data mining and selling the information gathered from our users. All through the process i did not feel right about doing this. I tried to convince myself that this was okay. My partner would say things like “They are going to call you a prick anyways, they might as well call you a rich prick.”.

 For a while I somehow managed to settle my conscious on this. But always in the back of my mind I knew it was wrong. Hell I used to be one of those guys developing encryption software so people had the tools to protect their privacy. Now here I was invading the same privacy I once was trying to protect. In some ways I felt like I did indeed sell my soul.

 Now don’t get me wrong I do not think making money is evil. But I do think it should be done in an honourable way. I felt like a spammer by using peoples personal information in a profitable way. Sure I didn’t take their information, I didn’t force them to reveal so much about themselves. Its not my fault that they don’t know any better. I mean I don’t even know them so why should I care?

 Well I still do not know why I care and why it bothered me so much. However I am happy to annouce that as of 13:00 h today I have sold off all my interests in these FaceBook applications. I will no longer be developing FaceBook applications.

 Maybe it was dumb to get out of a money making enterprise. Maybe I just don’t want success. In any case I feel much better about myself now.

 I was tempted by the dark side, lured by the money. However I am a JEDI and will never turn to the dark side.

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 Contrary to the fact that there has not been a new post in a long time, Tenacious Creations is still alive. I was temporarily overwhelmed with the completion of several projects all at once. Not being the most organized person on the planet my life was completely overwhelmed.

 I was starting to feel like I was on the same road to burn out that I had followed once before. Things were going really well yet chaotic in my life. I could barely find my desk beneath the paper and other assorted items that had built up upon it. I seem to have the problem of once I get started into a field of work I get totally absorbed by it, and nothing else seems to matter. This in itself is a very unhealthy behavior.

 By chance I was talking with a friend of mine. My friend told me that he had this book and audio series that I really needed to read and listen to. I politely told him, “Hey man I don’t have time to brush my teeth let alone read a book.”. My friend being a very calm and collected individual calmly replied to me “That is exactly why you NEED to listen to this and read the book.”.

  The book was titled “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It is known by many people on the web as “GTD“. Well I started reading it (still haven’t finished it completely), and listening to the audio CDs (I have finished these). Well I am not going to tell you things like it has revolutionalized my life or made me a millionaire. But I can tell you that it has allowed me to have a clean desk – everyday. I now also have an excellent reference filing system. In fact for the first time ever (that is with out having an executive assistant) I can find things that I have filed, and have an awesome method for filing things that I want for reference.

 The Getting Things Done Book has also allowed me to maintain an empty in box. Not only that it has trained me to not use my entire office as an in box. I not only get things done in my professional life but also things I want to get done around the house. It has taught me how to set up and use a tickler file (the best thing ever), to process items that need to be processed at a later date. But the best thing ever is it has doubled my ability to be creative and come up with new ideas. I highly recommend you check into it if you are constantly disorganized.

 Getting things done or “GTD” seems to be really popular in the techie geek world even though it emphasizes the use of low tech means. Now if you don’t know about GTD then the next little bit may not mean a lot to you. But currently all my list are paper based and the only high tech means I use is e-mail. David Allen recommends to start low tech. Complicated systems do nothing but steer you away from using the GTD system.

 So for about the past two weeks I have been using low tech means to follow the GTD system. It has worked great. I am getting more accomplished than I ever have before. My mind is much more free to come up with creative ideas. I don’t feel over burden by the enormous work load I have been shouldering. More important than all that I am now able to blog again.

 Whats next on my horizon. Well I am hoping to upgrade some of GTD practices to my old Tungsten E Palm Pilot while I await the arrival of my new Palm TX with wireless keyboard. I am in the process of giving Tenacious Creations a make over, so look for a new site look soon. I have a bunch of posts written that will begin appearing on Tenacious Creations. The Tenacious Creations Word Press AdSense Plug in will become publicly available in the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple other helpful word press plug ins that I have written. So in short the future looks bright for Tenacious Creations. I hope that you my loyal readers will continue to read and respond to my post. Sorry to the long absence of regular posting.

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 Do you often work in multiple languages? Are you learning a new language? Have you ever had the need to translate something quickly and on the fly?

 Well if you answered yes to any of the above questions and you are working with English/German/Russian/French or Japanese and running Mac OS X then I have a great solution for you. All you Windows users I think you should petition the author of this software to release a version for Windows as it truly is a great application.

 Jisho 2.3 has just been release I have been fortunate enough to get the author of this great software to answer a few questions for me. Even if you are not interested in this great dictionary software the author has some unique insights of life and things in general. Now to the interview….

1. Can you please describe what Jisho is?

   At its core Jisho is a Japanese-English dictionary. Beyond that though, it supports Japanese-German/Russian/French searches as well. It can also search in the reverse too, so English/German/Russian/French-Japanese.

2. Who would be the primary user of Jisho?
   Jisho is primarily intended for people who are interested in Japanese culture (video games, manga, anime, etc..) and language learners as they would have the most obvious benefit from a program like Jisho.

3. How can your users benefit from using Jisho?
   The immediate benefit that I see, and this is from my own experience, is I am more willing to look any and every word I see or hear that I don’t understand. Especially with it’s integration with OS X I can look up words by just selecting it and pressing a key command. I can’t count the number of words I have learned because of ease and speed of looking up words.

4. What was your motivation to write Jisho?
   I originally wrote Jisho before getting into university as I knew I was going to study Japanese and would need a dictionary. Since I found it quite useful I thought others might as well so I decided to release it publicly.
5. How much time would you say you have invested in the programming of Jisho?
   Oh I don’t even have a clue. A lot of time. Hundreds of hours at least.

6. Jisho has undergone many changes since its conception. Can you describe some of these and explain how the changes you have done make Jisho a better program?
   Jisho started out as a confused mess I think. The major changes is the adherence to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, and adopting some Apple technologies that allowed me to completely redesign the interface in literally a few hours and still have a fully functioning application. I actually got a post on the Sugoi Soft blog that demonstrates the differences at http://www.sugoisoft.com/blog/2007/10/02/how-far-jisho-has-come
7. Even though this is the latest release of Jisho, I know myself as a developer I am always focusing on future changes. What changes does the future have in store for Jisho?
   The future for Jisho is going to be expanding to more dictionaries to make it even more comprehensive. I also want to integrate Jisho more with the system and their life better. I’ve been toying around with making Jisho play well with the iPod and other juicy stuff like that.
8. Where/how did you learn how to program?
   I learned to program by mostly teaching myself. I did take some classes at the local community college back when I was a freshman in high school, but that was more basics and data structures.
9. What has been the best part of developing Jisho?
   The best part of developing Jisho has been knowing that I make a product that people are passionate about. That my work can help improve people’s lives is still incredible to me. Of course the monthly checks are pretty good thing too.

10. What has been the worst part of developing Jisho?
    The worst part of developing Jisho has been the dealing with criticism of Jisho. Especially after the 1.0 release of Jisho as it was my first time to take such criticism of something I had poured so many nights and weekends into. It felt like a direct criticism to myself. Overtime though I have learned to extract the valid points and steal their good ideas to future incorporation.



11. How often do you use Jisho yourself?
    I use Jisho everyday, many many times day.
12. Do you have any plans to release a version of Jisho for platforms other than Mac OS X?
    I’ve thought about it, I’ve even gotten a few requests for Windows versions, but I feel my energy would be better spend on making great software for the Macintosh.
13. How did you come up with the name Jisho?
    I wanted a name for Jisho that was different. Something that encapsulated what Jisho does in a word. Something like Dictionary is boring (and already taken). Luckily for me though foreign languages are rife of words that we don’t use in English. Thus I picked Jisho, which is Japanese for dictionary.
14. Do you have any comments you would like to share with the readers of Tenacious Creations?
    

    Yea, thanks for taking the time to read the interview and if you use a mac give Jisho a whirl. If you decide to buy, input the coupon TCTHANKS and receive 10% off Jisho through Sunday.

 If you run a mac I highly recommend that you give Jisho a whirl as the developer suggests. James Van Dyne is the man behind Sugio Soft and Jisho and I would like to thank him for his time for this interview and the discount he is giving to Tenacious Creations readers.

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 You may remembering my post FaceBook is pure evil that I deactivated my Facebook account. Now when one deactivates their account you would tend to think that all your information would be deleted. Not so with FaceBook.

All your messages, the stuff on your fun wall, super, wall your photos etc. are still there available to other FaceBook users. FaceBook maintains this is so you can seamlessly reactivate your account when you decided to go back to FaceBook. Lately this little feature of FaceBook has been prevalent in the news. Many newscasters referring to it like the song Hotel California “You can check out, but you can never leave.”.

 So what can you do to get out? Well if you are like me and have already deactivated your account you have to reactivate it. Go in and line by line delete all the information in your profile. Delete all the applications that you may have signed up for such as Fun Wall and Super Wall. Delete all your inbox and sent messages, delete all the photos you may have uploaded. Once you have done all that deleting once again deactivate your account.

 But your presence is still not completely gone. Facebook maintains back ups of this information on its servers. In order to have this removed you must e-mail FaceBook. From what I have read this is no easy process, and some people have even resorted to legal action in order to get themselves removed. Do you need more proof that FaceBook is evil?

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 While serving in the military I picked up a good number of sayings and expressions that I still use today. One of them was the 7 P’s rule.

 What exactly is the 7 P’s rule. Well it stands for Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This rule can apply to anything you are doing from blogging to taking a trip some where. A little bit of planning can prevent a lot of frustration later.

 Lets’ take a blog post for example and apply the rule of the 7P’s. So in order to write this post I first have to choose a topic, in this case the 7P rule. Then I gather or create any images that I will use. From there I write a brief out line of what I want to say in the post. Now I know we all disliked writing outlines in school but it does help. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just out line the points you want to cover. This is my outline for this post.

 By planning what I need and locating resources before I write I am able to just write. I have every thing at my finger tips and I do not waste time looking for things. I often times have a great idea for a post, so I will write it down and do a quick outline. That way I can be on the look out for relevant resources for that post while doing other things. When I am ready to write my research time has been minimized. To me there is nothing more valuable than time, it is the one resource than I cannot replace no matter how hard I try.

 When you save time you are indeed becoming more productive. For example let us just say that you want to build some shelves in your home. Now you could just go to the hardware store and buy the material that you think you need. But I am quite confident that this will result in you having to make additional trips to the hardware store. This costs you in time, fuel and wear and tear on your vehicle.

 Now lets build the same shelves and employ the 7P rule. First we would take measurements so we know how much material we will need. Then we would make a list of the mounting hardware, screws etc. From this list we could also determine if we will need any additional tools to install these shelves and add that to our list. Now list in hand off we go to the hardware store to buy our supplies. If the store has knowledgeable staff (this is becoming harder and harder to find) we could ask them to go over our list and suggest anything we missed. If we properly planned our project we should not have to make any additional trips to the hardware store. We save the time, fuel and other associated costs. Not to mention the frustration caused by not having everything we need at our disposal.

 A little bit of planning before hand can save time, money and most of frustration. When you start any project remember the 7 P rule.

• Proper
• Previous
• Planning
• Prevents
• Piss
• Poor
• Performance

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 A short time ago I wrote a post on how much I love white boards or dry erase boards. Well Julia the founder of Kleen Slate got in touch with me to tell me about some products she has created for white boards / dry erase boards.

Julia saw a need and filled it with her revolutionary idea of having erasers attached right on the dry / erase marker. No more having to hunt around for the eraser when you make a bumble while writing, or worse yet using your fingers to wipe off the writing.

 Now before you go telling me that it is just easier to use your finger let me relate this anecdote to you. While attending a conference the presenter was making extensive use of the dry / erase board to explain some formulae. Well he occasionally made a blunder and would wipe it quickly off with his finger. However one time after doing this he wiped his face and left a green mark across his face. Well no one in attendance told him and he went the rest of the day with a green mark on his face. I am sure this made him lose some credibility in the eyes of his audience.

 The first product I want to discuss is the KwikChek II. This is essentially a paddle with a plain dry / erase side and a lined dry / erase side. My wife who works in a nursing home immediately saw the advantage of this when she saw it. She told me it would be an excellent tool for communicating with her patients who are hard of hearing or have difficulty speaking.

  I think it is really well designed for many applications. It is one of those items that once you have it in your hand you can think up endless possibilities for it. A few are listed on Kleen Slate’s web site. I do like the fact the it has a holder for the marker, this way you can always have the two together.

Other possible uses that I can think of right now are:

• To relay time information to runners / bikers in a race.
• To display the channel information for R/C enthusiasts.

 The erasers on the small markers are incorporated to the cap. This makes them extremely versatile. Once you remove the cap and place it on the end you have both your writing end and erasing end. Much like a pencil. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase eraser I have used. They remove all the ink with no trace leaving a clean dry erase surface. As for odour from the dry / erase markers they are not any worse or any better than those already on the market.

 The big markers do not have the erasers attached to the caps. A feature I would of really liked to have seen as I tend to be a little bit absent minded and can fore see myself misplacing a cap from one of the markers. This can be an advantage as you will be able to easily reuse the erasers from these markers with new markers. Again the erasers perform exceptionally well and are very nice to use. The odour again is much like other dry / erase markers out there.

 All things considered if you regularly make use of white boards (dry / erase boards ) I would recommend using these products. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase erasers I have ever used. I will make sure that all my dry /erase markers in the future are equipped with these erasers.

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 The other night I was talking with some colleagues and they were complaining about having to deal with so much e-mail every day. I naively asked them how much e-mail they get in a day. I was surprised when the answers ranged for 10 to 50. I sometime wish I only got 50 relevant important e-mails a day. The fact is I get close to 100 or more a day, and that is not including spam. They all require my attention, but thankfully not all of them require a response. So how do I deal with them?

 The most important tip that I cannot stress enough is to not deal with them as they arrive. Set a specified time when you will answer e-mails, and also be sure to set the amount of time you will devote to answering e-mails. I normally give myself two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening to answer my e-mails. When you get snail mail delivered you don’t immediately answer the mail. PLus the first thing most people do is sort their mail before opening it. If it works in the non digital world, what prevents it from working in the digital world.

 One of the hardest things I had to learn when dealing with large amounts of e-mail is to not feel compelled to answer each and every e-mail immediately upon reading it. After I read the e-mail I assign it to two different categories. The first being the nature of the e-mail. For example if it is an e-mail having to deal with this blog it is assign as “TCBlog”, if it has to do with Google Adsense I tag it as “Adsense”. The next category that I assign it is the priority it requires an answer.

 If you ever take an emergency responder or first aid course they always teach you to survey the situation. After your survey you perform triage and deal with the most life threaten situations first. This is similar to how I deal with e-mail. I have different levels of priority for my e-mails.

• Requires Immediate Action – These are e-mails that require urgent decisions and as the name says immediate action. I try to use this category sparingly. Things that would fall into this group would be responses to contract offers, emergency support etc. I will sometimes answers these right after reading them, if not the are top of the list when I am done sorting my e-mail.
• Requires Follow Up – These are e-mails that do require me to act on them but there is no urgency. If they get answered today or tomorrow all is well. Most of my business correspondence falls with in this category.
• Requires next day Follow Up – The e-mails that are tagged here are mostly of a personal nature.These will be the first e-mails I will answer tomorrow after sorting my e-mail and dealing with the R.A.T.S.
• No Follow Up – These are those e-mails that are alerting me to something, or from mailing lists that I follow. They don’t require an answer and are not time sensitive, but they are still of value to me. I read these at my leisure. Or something new that I have been trying is to have the computer read these out to me while I am performing other tasks. So far this is working very well, but I’ll save that for another post.
• Junk Mail – This is where I dump my spam, e-mail chain letters and any other e-mail that is of no value to me. Generally speaking this is my spam folder.

 Up front this may seem like a whole bunch of extra work just to answer e-mail. The hardest part is setting up the system and working with it. Once you get it going however you time savings is clearly evident. I have found I am more productive answering my e-mails this way. It has greatly reduced me stopping in the middle of something to answer an e-mail. Not completely however because there are times when after a phone call or something I am expecting an e-mail that require immediate attention. I have found the time it saves as well as the distraction it prevents to greatly increase my productivity.

Tell me your suggestions on how you deal with large amounts of e-mail.

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 Well it is time for the weekly photoshop post on Tenacious Creations. Filters and Actions are tools a photoshop artist can use to speed up their production. Although all the things that actions and filters can do can be done manually with photoshop (and most times a better result is achieved). Filters and Actions can greatly reduce the amount of time required to do these things.

 There are some things that I find just so much easier to use filters or actions for and some cases where I would prefer to do it by hand. I have a mix of bought filters and actions as well as free ones. Here is a list of sites of actions and filters that I find useful.

1. Action Central – this is the main site I use for many free actions.
2. The Plug in Site – another good resource with several free and commercial plug ins and filters
3. Alien Skin – These are all plug ins you have to buy but they are well worth it. They have 30 demos of most of their plug ins available for download from their site. I have all of their Eye Candy plug ins and they are probably the plug ins I use the most.
4. The Light is Right Studio – this site has numerous tools that make my life easier. From scripts, and plug ins to brush presets. This is definitely a resource you should check out.
5. Panos Fx – While making sure these links work for this post I noticed there are a bunch of new filters and effects listing here that I really want to try out. This is yet another excellent resource for photoshop artists.

 These are the five sites that I have drawn over 90% of the filters, actions and plug ins that I use for photoshop. I am always keen to check out other resources so if you have some please share.

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 After a lot of prodding from various online friends I finally relented and joined Project Wonderful.

 Project Wonderful is all about making online advertising more profitable and easier for everyone involved. They say it is a transparent system for both the advertiser and publisher. It eliminates click fraud by getting rid of paying for clicks. Basically the advertiser bids for space on the site or sites of their choice. While they are the high bid their ad is displayed on the site. Ads are bid on a per day basis. For example at the time of writing this post if you look to the top left corner you will see the project wonderful ad. Currently is costs $0.20 per day to advertise on Tenacious Creations.

 As a publisher I get $0.20 less 25% per day for that ad. But here is the thing, during the day some one may decide it is worth more than $0.20 to advertise on my site (I think it should be worth at least $2.00 a day). If they place a bid for higher and I accept their ad then their ad would replace the current one. So in theory I could make more for that day. Project Wonderful charges and pays by the second or that is at least what they say. I cannot confirm nor deny this at this time because I have not yet been paid.

 I should also state here that you can set minimum prices for your ads. Now after you have $10.00 in your project wonderful account you can with draw it and so by make money from your site. At this point I will be looking at 50 days before I can with draw anything. But I do not actually plan to with draw it. I am going to use it kind of like EntreCard and buy some ad space for Tenacious Creations. Reinvest the profits so to speak.

 If you are a stats freak like me you’ll like that project wonderful has good stats for both publishers and advertisers. As an advertiser you can set up a campaign to go across multiple sites all at the same time. You set what your max bids should be and you can set a limit to how much you spend. All in all it appears on the surface to be a good system.

 You can also add funds to your account through Pay Pal. This can be handy if you are planning on world wide dominance and launching a huge campaign. I look forward to buying a bunch of ad space to promote my new suite of AdSense Plug Ins through project wonderful. From my vantage point now I would recommend project wonderful for both publishers and advertisers. I think it can be a real cost effective method to advertise. If my vantage point changes you can be sure I will keep you informed. I would love to hear your comments on Project Wonderful good and bad.

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 If you have ever had one of your posts Stumbled Upon or Dugg you know how much traffic a social networking site can bring you. If you are a stats fanatic like me then you have seen first hand the results Stumble Upon can have on your posts. My photoshop tutorial on peeling an image away to reveal another image was Stumbled Upon and the traffic soared. A few other posts of mine have been linked by other social networking sites. You can definitely see the traffic increase from this. So of course you want your readers to use social networking sites to mark your posts. But how do we make it easy for our users/ readers to do this?

Well in steps Joost de Valk. I am really starting to like this guy, I would like to call him a friend but I have never met him. However he has breathed new life into the Sociable WordPress plug in. You can see it in action at the bottom of this post.

 The plug in is great and offers a huge selection of social networking sites to display icons for. Your users/readers can just click on the icon of their favorite social networking site and voila just like that add your post. Go ahead try it out with this post and your favorite social networking site. If your favorite social networking site is not displayed leave me a comment and I will make sure it is.

 Thanks again Mr. de Valk for another great plug in. By the way I am kind of weird because before I install a plug in I always look at the code. Mr. de Valk does an excellent job with his code.

Note: If you wonder why there are two equal signs in the title, let me tell you now that it is not a mistake. Other programmers will know what I mean.

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 Repetitive Stress Injury, or R.S.I. is something that most of us have heard about but tend to dismiss. Most of us know someone who has had to get surgery for carpotunnel syndrome. Or we have seen or heard of ergonomic designed chairs, desks, and computer keyboards. But it something that we general dismiss not give a second thought. However each year millions of man hours are lost due to preventable repetitive stress injuries.

 A lot of bloggers myself included spend vast amounts of time in front of their computer screens happily typing away. I am particularly bad for this because when I get coding (I feel there is a huge difference between programming and coding – perhaps this will be a future post) it is not all that uncommon for me to put in 20 + hours at the keyboard with out a break. In my younger days this never seemed to bother me. However as I age I notice that my eyes, fingers and even sometimes my arms feel the strain from these coding marathons. When you are in pain or uncomfortable it can make it difficult to concentrate and both your creativity and production drop. In today’s post I am going to give you some tips to prevent repetitive stress injuries when it come to working with a computer.

 First lets discuss the lighting in the area where you generally do most of your computer work. Fluorescent lights and computer monitors just don’t mix. If you are viewing a computer monitor under fluorescent lights you will find that you get tired much quicker than if you are using incandescent light. Some one once told me this had to do with the fact that the refresh rate of the monitor and the speed of the flicker of the fluorescent tubes work in concert to speed up your brain waves. While I am not sure if there is any truth to this I can tell you that by working in natural light (when available) or with incandescent lights I find I have less eye strain. Plus I feel better come the end of the day.

 What do I use for a light? Well I have a desk lamp with a 60 watt bulb in it. Plus I turn the lamp so that the bulb is facing the ceiling as opposed to the desk. This gives me more reflected soft light and a nicer atmosphere to work in.

 The next vital piece of office equipment to discuss is your chair. The most important factor to choosing a good chair to use while working at the computer is that it has arms for you to rest your arms on. Lets’ face it, you will spend the majority of your time sitting on that chair so choose a comfortable one. A chair with a high back is preferable as this will support your back more. You will notice a difference after a day sitting in a chair with a low back as opposed to sitting in a chair with a high back. While we are talking about chairs this a good time to bring up a foot rest.

 A footrest offers proper positioning of the feet in relation to the rest of the body. Use of a foot rest can help reduce the strain on back and neck muscles. Choose a foot rest either 3″ or 6″ high as best suits your needs. You can buy these, or if you are cheap like me just use an old box that some computer hardware came in.

 Now we got you set up to be comfortable but we are not finished yet. You need to take breaks and stretch through out your day. That is where workrave comes in. Workrave is an awesome little utility that you run in the background on windows and most UNIX machines. It has timers built in that remind you to take breaks. You set up the timers in accordance to what will suit you for micro breaks and rest breaks. First let us look at the the micro break, this is just a short pause. An alert sounds telling you it is time to take a micro break, you can take the break ignore it, or post pone it. Then there is the rest break, again you can ignore it, take it, or post pone it. The neat thing with the rest break is workrave also instructs you to do a couple simple exercises. You follow these to an animated character on screen and then go take your break.

 I have been using workrave for just over a week now. It took a little while for me to get the timers set to where I like them. But after that I must say it has dramatically improved the way I feel after a long day on the computer. The biggest thing I have noticed is that my eyes do not get near as tired as they used too. Now it should be mentioned that I have been working with a healing crushed finger the past little while. The first few days where murder to type. Now with the healing and taking the breaks I have noticed a great improvement too.

 So how much would you pay to feel better after a long day toil on the keyboard? $50.00, $100.00, $1000.00 ? that’s the best part workrave is free and open source. I highly recommend you give it an honest try. It might take a bit to get your timer settings right, but once you do and use it for a while I am sure you will thank me.

Note: if there is some one out there who reads my blog and has a new ergonomic high back office chair they would like to donate to me in exchange for a review of it go to my about page and contact me. Hey a guys got to try right?

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 Admit it you could not wait for Sexy Pirate Women – Lesson Two in Keywords. Well in this lesson we are going to look at how and why to use keywords. If you haven’t read the first part of this I suggest you do — Pirates are Sexy – Lesson One in Keywords.

 As I am a blogger and the majority of my readers are bloggers I am going to focus on using Keywords from a bloggers perspective (however if I keep doing Sexy Pirate Women posts my traffic demographic may change). It is still my belief that no matter what you do in your blog, in the end good content will get you more traffic and regular readers than anything else you can do. But you have to let people know that your content is there, and that is the job of the search engines. However if you use keywords properly you help the search engines along.

 Keywords however are not just for the search engines. If you are running adsense your ads are also based on the words you use in your posts. What it boils down to is that if you have keywords that attract the demographic of people you are after your ads will also be targeted to the same demographic.

 Most bloggers I know track their sites stats be it with Google Analytics or some other tracking system. This is a good way to gauge if what you are doing on your site to get traffic is working.

For example as illustrated in the graph to left only 10.58% of my traffic comes from search engines. This may not sound like a high number but compared to my November 2007 stats which indicated only 3.04% of my traffic came from search engines I have increased it significantly.

 Not only is my traffic up from search engines but I am also getting more adsense clicks. No it is not because the sexy pirate women are intimidating my readers to click on the ads. It is because the ads are becoming more tailored to my readers and offering them products and services they actually want.

 Now I know your saying to yourself “Okay thats great but tell me how to do that.”. Well the first step is to get to know your audience. Who are you targeting your writing to? What is your niche in the blogoshpere? For me these were hard questions to answer. Who am I writing for? Well anybody who is willing to read my blog. What is my target niche? Well I try to target people who enjoy being creative and are looking for resources to expand their creativity.

 For me each post I do is focusing on a unique group of people, kind of like sexy pirate women. So when I choose a topic to post on I ask my self these questions.

1. What am I providing in this post that will be deemed useful?
2. Who will this be useful to and in what way?

 Although this post mentions sexy pirate women a lot I doubt it would be of any benefit to them. My intention with this series of Pirates are Sexy – Lessons in Keywords is to inform my fellow bloggers on how I learned to use keywords to benefit me. Hopefully they can use what I have learned to benefit themselves.

 Knowing that my target audience is bloggers allows me to figure out which keywords to go after. There are terms that most bloggers are familiar with – traffic (in the sense of visitors to a web site), keywords (no not words that unlock things), post (not the kind you build fences with). Outside of the blogging world these terms mean different things, this is something you have to keep in mind when you write, or speak for that matter.

 I am an active member of my local Toastmasters club. If you don’t know Toastmasters is a group that helps you improve your public speaking by you giving speeches to your fellow Toastmasters. One thing that I have learned is terms that are familiar to me (baud, RAM, coder, EOD, HLVW, etc) are not to the majority of people. So to make my speeches appeal to a broader audience I make sure to explain these terms.

 Like wise when you are writing posts and trying to optimize your keywords you have to keep in mind you want to attract the larger audience. The classic example is with airlines. “Low fares” is more of an industry term in the airline industry, and although it is searched for, it is nowhere near searched for as much as “cheap flights”. My point – know your audience, and try to predict the terms that they would search for. Once you have determined that, then it is time to use resources like Googles Keyword Tool to see which terms are the most searched for. These are the terms your audience is using. By using them you are not only going to get some of those searches directed to your site, but you are also going to communicate with your audience better.

 In Pirates are Sexy – Lesson 3 I will discuss how placement of your keywords in your post affects there performance.

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 I frequently get asked what web sites I use as resources when I use Adobe photo shop and if I can pass them along. Well the truth is I have over two hundred different sites book marked in my photoshop resources folder. Now some contain multiple different tutorials and some are just photoshopped images that I use as reference. So to pass these one would be quite useless.

 Instead I thought I would present a list of sites I submit my tutorials too after I write them. Now this is only a partial list, but these sites have many tutorials listed. In some cases the tutorials may be repeated from site to site. That is because other photo shop tutorial publishers like myself tend to submit their tutorials to all these sites. Any ways lets get on with the list.

 Here they are in no particular order:

1. http://tutorials.tutorialblog.org/
2. http://www.tipclique.com/
3. http://www.tutorialman.com/
4. http://www.fstutorials.com/
5. http://life2pixel.info/
6. http://www.tutorio.com/
7. http://www.photoshopdepot.com/index.php?id=submit
8. http://nututorials.com/tutorials/Photoshop
9. http://www.tutorial-index.com/
10. http://www.pslover.com/



11. http://tutorialoutpost.com/tutorials/photoshop/
12. http://www.totaltutorial.com/cat/1/adobe-photoshop-tutorials/
13. http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Photoshop/1
14. http://www.tutorialkit.com/categories/Photoshop-Tutorials-All-Tutorials.html
15. http://www.pixel2life.com/
16. http://good-tutorials.com/

 With in that list I am sure you’ll find hours and hours of photoshop fun and inspiration. I would like to say that is the complete list that I submit too. However I have a list of over 60 different sites that I submit too, but these tend to send me the best traffic and have the most tutorials. If you have other resources please include them in the comments.

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