Sometimes the solution or the path to a solution is right under your nose. While on the job, one of my friend’s clients asked if she knew of a way to make the photos on her site be displayed it does on iPhoto. This posed a problem because my friend doesn’t use a Mac. There are screen shots all over the Internet of course but that’s still not helpful because from what I understand, there are several ways iPhoto displays them. I don’t have the iPhoto app installed and couldn’t help her either. There are many different screens within the iPhoto app. Which portion is the client talking about? When outsourcing, the old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is so true. Many times in classes, interviews, webinars, writing etc, my favorite advise is – “Don’t tell, show“. It’s not just for your sanity. It’s for your team’s sanity too. You can show what you mean by grabbing a screen shot or making a screen recording. Here are some tools you can use. Tools to grab static screen shots: Snagit Screenshot Captor SnapDraw Photoscape Tools to record screen videos: Camtasia (Windows and Mac) Jing (Windows and Mac) Wink (Windows) Capture FOX

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Last week, I managed to jump on a call with Kelly McCausey of SoloSmarts who wanted to talk to me about detoxing a WordPress powered site. Kelly had some fabulous questions such as: Why keep up with updates. Are some plugins no longer necessary? Is my theme hopelessly outdated? How to deal with broken links? How to deal with non-automated spam. This one is tough as most spam filters are good at detected automated spam, not human generated spam. We had a great conversation some good info. Listen in here (nothing to pay). P/S: To expand on plugins that are no longer necessary, here are some I used in the past but no longer because new WordPress features have rendered them unnecessary for our projects. Exclude Pages. We now use the built in WordPress menu feature. Page Links To. This plugin used to help create navigation menus that redirect to outside sites etc without having to edit code. Again we just use WordPress menu. However there are times this is still useful. Plugins to close comments on old posts. This feature is now built into WordPress.

This is a continuation of a Cross-Blog-Conversation with good friend Kelly McCausey. She wrote a wonderfully insightful post in reply to my last question. Loved it. Kelly – let’s just say I’m very, very glad to know that you do it despite the anxiety and you do allow yourself time to ache over a project that is going bye-bye. Now I won’t feel so bad when I do! Now on to the question she asked me in return it’s actually two parts so let’s tackle the first part: Part One: So many people rely on you for your tech expertise. How are you going to balance helping others with growing your own business projects in the new year? Years ago, very early in my business, I decided I was not taking in new clients. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why. That’s how inexperienced I was. All in all, it worked out great. I charged enough to keep money coming in but high enough that I didn’t exactly need a gazillion clients who’d take up all my time. This was great because it allowed me time to give the handful of clients full focus when I was working on their

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My friend Lexi is a fantastic blogger, often coming up with some of the most interesting posts and I do enjoy her blog – a lot. Yesterday, she inspired me to write a ‘Best of’ post. Instead of focusing on me, I thought I’d share other people’s posts I discovered in 2011 and found extremely helpful. These are ones I refer to many times throughout the year and have them bookmarked or clipped. Note:  Some of these posts are not necessarily posted in 2011 but I only discovered them in 2011. Another testimony why good posts bring you traffic again and again. Pretty CSS3 Button This one is almost 2 years old by now but still very good. I have the code snipped and these buttons make into a lot of my sites. There are a lot of CSS button tutorials but I like this best because it’s easy to understand and edit. WordPress Tutorial – Load The Template You Want It’s one of the best illustrated posts about template_redirect in WordPress. Extremely helpful to me for developing plugins, could definitely be used in themes too. Just a fair note of warning this stuff is pretty geeky. Google Web Fonts

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