My Screen Recorder Pro records to AVI or WMV. You can also create self playing executables to put on CD’s or DVD’s for distribution.

It has some pretty nice features like…

• Schedule recordings to automatically start and stop at a specified time
• Launch and record a URL at a specific time
• Screen draw to highlight or mark important items
• Record one or more monitors on a computer system with more than one monitors

This software retails for $99.95. Works on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 and if you purchase, is delivered online so no waiting.

If you’d like to give My Screen Recorder Pro a whirl, click to download a free trial version.

It walks you through all the steps you need to do if you installed WordPress in one folder – say /blog/ or /wordpress/ and want to move it to the root of your site. You don’t have to re-install or move WordPress at all. Of course you can if you really wanted to.

Grab your checklist here.

After I sent this checklist out, I had people ask what about redirects. Great question!

Admittedly, the method in the checklist works best if the blog is new. I usually use this method to develop new sites or sites where there is existing non WordPress content, develop it in the background and change everything to the official URL when the site is approved and ready.

If the blog is an existing one then yeah you would have to do redirects and it can get tricky. Depending on how the URL is changed, it is a probably a good idea to find someone who knows how to write proper redirect commands so that you can have your content redirected and still be able to access your WordPress admin panel. If you have an established site with lots of content, it is probably just better and easier overall to physically move WordPress from one folder to another. The effect is still the same, you’d still have to redirect your URLs but the redirect commands are easier.

To get it into WordPress, I have to spend hours on the design. Or, I could outsource it. There are some very talented template coders who charge very reasonable fees. Still, unless I’m in a hurry, I like to DIY or find an easier way to do it.

Today I stumbled upon Divine. It is a Windows software and PhotoShop plugin that helps you convert your PSD designs into WordPress quickly and easily. Looks really interesting.

It seems like you’ll need PhotoShop for it to work well which I do not have. Maybe it will be helpful to you.

ZoneAlarm has a free scanner to help you get rid of registry gunk among other things. Visit their pick up page and click on the Start Free Scan button to download the free scanner.

But I soon realized as I worked on other blogs that aren’t business centered – product focused blogs for example, that special placement of the affiliate link it not as crucial. Even on this blog, sometimes, I want to have an affiliate link on certain keywords that I repeat often throughout the blog.

That’s what WP Affiliate Pro does. It seeks out keywords within your blog and turns them into links. You decide what the keywords are, you decide what link to use when it finds the link. It even turns the keywords found in comments to your affiliate links. Now that I am using Disqus as the comment manager, this doesn’t happen anymore but it will if you are using WordPress comments.

Installing the plugin is easy – just like an other plugin. Upload to your wp-content/plugins folder, activate from your admin area. No problems there.

Once activated, under Settings, you will see a new WP Affiliate Pro link. This takes you to the general configuration where you can set up the default behavior of the plugin. You can also assign a special CSS class for these links so that you can style them in your theme style sheet. Why might you want to do that? Well, maybe for transparency or disclosure purposes, you want to show people which are affiliate links, you can do that by having the affiliate links styled differently than your normal links.

To add keywords, under the Tools menu, there is another link to WordPress Affiliate Pro.

From there, you simply complete the form. Enter a keyword you’d like to pair up with your link and enter the affiliate link. You can also ‘mask’ this in the browser statusbar. Then, you need to tell it how many times the keyword should be made a link. My personal preference is to enter a number here because sometimes, you may mention the keyword very often in one post. If the post is long that’s one thing but if the post is short and you mention the keyword very often, then your post turns out looking kinda spammy because of all those links.

You can also give this keyword a weight. This helps the plugin decide which links come first. Then, you can add a rel=nofollow to the links which I usually do.

Finally, you can also use this as a tracking tool to see how many clicks the keyword received. I don’t normally do this as I track everything through Pretty Link. But it is an option. Click on Add Keyword and you’re set.

You will need to repeat this for each keyword you want to replace with links.

What Could Be Improved

As mentioned, each keyword need to be added manually. I wish there was a bulk importer kind of thing.

Keywords are replaced even on Pages – which is something you may want but on most of my sites, Pages are reserved for utility stuff like thank you pages or opt-in pages where I don’t want any affiliate link to appear. What would be nice if there is an option on each Page to turn off automatic keyword replacement.

What Is Nice

It is super easy to use. You’ve already seen the steps outlined above. It really is that simple.

There are minimal configuration options which can be a good thing. Sometimes too many options just complicate things.

You can install the plugin on as many blogs you own.

Overall, it definitely had helped reduce some work. For example in this post, I know the plugin will do the job automatically for me and I don’t have to remember to link to the product or hunt up the affiliate link. I like it.

Because the files are also backed up using Mozy to their servers and I can restore them anytime. Yes, the external drive was backup and storage. I also had Mozy come back to do a 2nd backup. Scenarios like these are exactly the reasons why you should have an immediate on-site backup so you can get to that data immediately. Mozy is like extra insurance so if both the hard drive and external drives fail, there’s one more fall back. Also, if (God forbid) something happens to the home office, I can always get my data off from Mozy.

How does it all work?

It’s quite simple really. After signing up with Mozy, you download and install a piece of software. Using the software, you tell Mozy which files and folders you want to back up. You don’t have to select everything. As a matter of fact, I don’t. I only select the folders where I save my data to and email folders.

Next, you tell is when and how often it should backup your files and it will do it’s thing in the background all on its own.

Have a lot of Gigabytes of data and worried about cost?

That’s what is nice about Mozy (home). They weren’t kidding about the unlimited, for a flat $4.95 a month.

What you need to know

When you first install the Mozy desktop software and start backing up, it could take days to backup all the files you want it to. There are several factors at play. Like you can choose when the software should backup so it won’t interfere with the times you are using your computer the most. Another factor of course is your own Internet connection. If you have many Gigabytes please do sign up ahead of time and let it do it’s thing. It took me around 5 days to get everything backed up. Once you get through that, then the daily backups are quick because it doesn’t do it all over again, simply backup what has changed or is new. So… if you think your drive is failing or are facing a time crunch, I don’t think this will work too well.

Does it work on Mac?

Yes, they released a new Mac version recently.

Can you backup your external drive?

Yes, if you hook it up directly to your computer. But if your external drive is one that is attached to the network (plugs in your router), then that would be considered a network drive. Network drives can be backed up if you use MozyPro for business.

I have been a customer for more than 2 years and been a happy camper so far. It already saved me once. If you want to try it out, you can get a free account with 2GB worth of storage.

• Didn’t like that others controlled my most important links that I wanted to track.
• Wanted to tweet links my friends trust to click through without fear of malicious content (my domain, my brand).
• Wanted to be prepared for affiliate program policy changes since some affiliate programs were already talking about or started to add a clause in their policy where we couldn’t use our affiliate links with a domain we do not own/control.

So Pretty Link came into existence at the right time for me. It looked really, really good that later on, they released a Pro version, I jumped directly in it. Here’s my experience with it.

Installation and use

Easy. Anyone who has installed a WordPress plugin can do it without a problem at all. You can get the free version first and when ready to go Pro, after purchase, all you need to do is click on the Pro link in your installation then enter the username and password. No re-install required.

Creating links is also super easy. You can create them manually.

The process is simple, like creating a link in any URL Shortener. Enter your target URL – the URL of the page you want people to go to. Then you enter a code for the pretty link – see the red circle? Pretty Link automatically generates a short random code for the URL. You can edit it and make it something more descriptive if you wish. I generally like to create short descriptive ones for affiliate links since they will be used and re-used again and again. Easier to remember. For pages and other redirects, leaving them random works.

The title and description is optional. Description is for your own reference. Click submit and you’ve got a new pretty link. Simple huh?

Features I Like

There are quite a few things inside Pretty Link Pro that I like a lot, while I can’t cover them all here, these are highlights of the biggest reasons why I went pro.

Pretty Bar feature

This is not a Pro feature. You get this in the free version. I like that I can have a small bar on the top of redirected links that allow me to add my own messages before they leave my site completely. I’m thinking of adding a newsletter subscription on the bar. I know some people do not like this at all, the argument is, it interferes with the user experience and maybe even some affiliate programs’ policies because you are technically, displaying the site in an iframe. I’m still chewing on that one. For right now, it is an experiment to see what works/don’t work.

Rest assured, you can turn the Pretty Bar feature off so you won’t be having any problems with any affiliate programs or any user complaints. As for as editing the bar goes, it is not that easy. Pretty Link does give you the option to edit the graphic, colors, background etc but I wanted more customization. I did it by hacking the plugin which is not recommended for general use because updating will be a problem, and you could break the plugin. Other than that, Pretty Bar, I like… for now.

Keyword Replacement (Pro only)

This works a lot like the affiliate link URL replacement plugins. Basically, you tell it what keywords to be aware of, set the link that keyword should associate with, then it automatically replace any text on your site with the link. Time saver.

Auto Link Creation (Pro only)

This is nice to save time, basically every post or page you create can have it’s own short URL. It can generate these links for you. You can even have a Twitter badge with these generated short URLs and you can Tweet the links as well. I don’t use this option yet because right now, I’m only using this to centralize affiliate links and as my personal redirect service. But it is nice when I need it.

Public Link Creation (Pro only)

This was one of the major things that attracted me to it because I thought of creating a short URL service just for my affiliates to use. What it means – you can use this plugin to help you create a short URL service, your very own TinyURL.

Customize Base URL (Pro only)

This is more technical and therefore appealed to me. If the URL where this plugin is installed in is long, you can purchase or use another domain, and ‘map’ it to Pretty URL – yeah like I said, it’s heavy geek stuff though very neat.

Other things I like – Nofollow which I set as default. I don’t want these links indexed. Rotate links so you can do split testing. Grouping to organize things and of course tracking!

Overall, I am quite happy with the plugin. I think you will get a lot even if you for the free version. I find the Pro price tag of $97 a little hefty but on the other hand, the developer has been very active in releasing updates and supporting the plugin so really, you’re not paying for the plugin only you’re also paying for a lifetime of updates and support – this is true at time of writing. Also, you can install on as many blogs as you own so it could work out as a nice deal overall. I’m giving it a thumbs up.

You don’t need expensive software like Nero or MyDVD if all you want to do is simply burn or save data, music or videos to the disc. I’ve been using this small and simple DVD burning software, Infrarecorder for a long time now. It is also open source which makes it even sweeter.

Then it returned on my radar screen as a completely different software altogether and boy am I glad it did because this time, it is everything I had wanted it to be.

So what is Evernote?

It’s a bunch of stuff all in one. Essentially it’s a note taker. It lets you capture notes in many different ways. You can type it, use your Tablet PC to write it in your own hand writing, it can clip web sites, take screen shots of web pages. With the mobile apps it can also let you store pictures and audio as part of your notes.

It is cross platform. Windows, Mac it works. But even more, they extended it to mobile phones too. They have apps for Windows Mobile, iPhone, PalmPre and BlackBerry. If our phone is not supported, you can also always visit the mobile version of the web site to access and create notes. What’s fun – you can also Twitter notes into your Evernote notebooks. I’m thinking this is a fantastic way to store or clip tweets you want to go back to blog about or just remind yourself about.

I find it a fantastic tool to:

• Help me store or remind me of blog topics which can come in any shape or form. For example, you may be out and about and notice a funny sign what you want to take a picture of and write about.
• It also helps me save interesting landing, thank you pages that I think are great and want to emulate.
• Help you remember the hours of a certain store when you’re out in town.
• Help me write a book, a report or create a product by storing all my research and interesting tidbits in one place.

Just a ton of uses for work and personal life. This is such an impressive tool that I’m afraid the only good way is to show you how it works. Here’s a video intro from Evernote about their software and service

Click here to view the embedded video.

Evernote is free and if you need more storage and options you can upgrade to Premium for only $5/month or $45/year. Small investment to get stuff off my mind and into a space that is safe and can come back to anytime.