Design, graphics *sigh* what can I say? I’m just no good at them and when it comes to business cards… let’s not even go there. In the past I’ve always opted for the uninspired plain old boring white card with a dash or color in the text perhaps and some cheesy art that the card printer suggests. I’ve gone as far as adding a photo to my cards and that’s about it. Then… I found MOO! I’d spend hours just admiring those beautiful cards. Take a look at these. Aren’t they gorgeous? Question is, can I the geek and just about anyone who is design challenged make such lovely creations? You see, one of my problems with business cards is, I do so many things within technology. How can I pack all that in a card? Seriously, it hurts when I have to tell people “I make websites” because what I do is way, way beyond that. I decided to try. There’s something about MOO that gives birth to inspiration. The grand idea – use word clouds. I headed over to Tagxedo. You can use Wordle too but I like Tagxedo better because you can make shapes out of your words.

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After a long day this week, I decided to tear myself away from the desk but alas, there was preparation for our tech training class to be done. So, I pulled out the iPad, got cozy on the bed and fired up two apps. The Tools One of them – believe it or not – is an app I bought for my daughter. It’s called Drawing Pad. She absolutely adores it and despite my challenge with drawing and graphics I love doodling on it too. The other is AirSketch. This one is a work tool. AirSketch is essentially a whiteboard type application but it has a neat feature that allows you to broadcast your whiteboard locally so anyone in your office can just pull up a web browser, type in the IP address for the app and voila! Everything you draw or write shows up on their browser. It is so very cool. The How How can these two apps replace PowerPoint? Remember, I said I was not working on the computer but I still wanted something that look like slides. Step One Using Drawing Pad, I loaded a fun background and used a brush to write my slide heading.

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A lot of web work require graphics but I’m so graphically challenged it’s not funny. So it’s always a problem when you need a mock up for your own work or clients and don’t have something to put in its place to indicate there is a graphic coming soon. Today I found a tool to solve that. Woo hoo! It’s very flexible. You can change the colors, size, add text all on the fly. Below are some placeholder images generated. Check out, bookmark and use Placehold.it.

According to Wikipedia… “Deep Linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a web site instead of the home page” A real live example is in the paragraph above. I just deep linked to Wikipedia so you will land on the exact page explaining this term. You may not even think twice about it when you’re on blogs and other people’s site. You may even be actively doing it because it helps make your content rich and relevant. Deep linking is also good to establish usability. The last thing you want to do when creating content is to frustrate readers and make them search for the page or item you’re referring to. People expect logical continuity when they click on a link. As an affiliate, I always love it when marketers allow me to use deep links to their content and still cookie my referral. It makes me want to talk about that program, their content and link to their stuff everywhere in all types of content I create – videos, blog posts, reports, tools, landing pages etc. In short – deep linking is good for you and your affiliate. Many shopping cart and

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It seems like there are so many sales letter and landing page themes and plugins popping up everywhere. One of the latest to join the fray is WP Sales Letter. What attracted me to it is The headline, guarantee, opening text, PS suggestions. You won’t believe how much I struggle with these It can work with my existing theme (or most themes) Pre-Written Copy Suggestions The moment I got my hands on it, I ran a quick test and managed to cobble up a landing page in 15 minutes. Obviously, I’d need a lot more time when writing a real opt-in or sales page. However, I can already see how much it will speed up this process for me. You need to understand that for me, writing a sales page even a simple landing page is like asking me to jump off a cliff. The result – big time procrastination and that’s never good. With copy suggestions, the plugin helped me start and re-start my thought process as I work through the different sections a landing page should address. It is like a little nudge to keep me going. That is just as important as getting started – to keep

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When I upgraded from Firefox from version 3 to 4 and now Firefox 5, I lost ColorZilla – an essential tool I rely on everyday to do my job. That was beyond disappointing. It is something I just couldn’t function well without. That and a few others things initially forced me to downgrade back to Firefox 3. Months later, I bit the bullet and made the effort to switch hoping this time the developer would have fixed it already but no such luck. It’s a long story but it interfered with the way Firefox windows would open. In my desperate search for a replacement, I found Rainbow. At first, it didn’t seem like what I wanted – guess you just get so used to one tool you know but today I am so glad I stuck with it. I love how it shows you the color code as you hover your mouse over the color you want. This is really helpful when you’re trying to make sure the color you are using in your stylesheet is the same as the one you want to use. It’s also kinda cool to watch the color changes as you move your mouse. The

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This is embarrassing. As an early adopter of RSS both as a reader and a publisher, I lost interest in keeping up with my RSS subscriptions years ago. I still keep Google Reader ‘stocked’ and promise myself to read it regularly but the reality is, if I drop in there once every 6 months, I’m doing good. As a result, this is what I often see when logged in. When I got an Android phone, one of the first apps I installed was the Google Reader app. I thought it would solve my problem but alas it did not. I found myself opening the Kindle app more than any other. I’d almost given up hope of ever reading RSS feeds again until the day I decided to check out some Chrome Extensions and found Feedly. How can you possibly believe an app can change your reading preferences? I scolded myself. But try it I did. I can’t explain it, but I’m reading my feeds again! Not only am I reading I look forward to reading them every chance I get. At first I thought perhaps it’s the way Feedly displays the articles. In an attractive manner that I can quickly scan the

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When Backup Buddy released a coupon for 30% off a few months ago, I absolutely jumped at it. Partly because I had the Builder theme and was using it to build a clients’ site and I knew I needed something like it to easily move the site from development site to the final destination. Well the client is finally ready and we just did a backup and restore process. WOW. It rocks! One of the things I was most worried about was the images because the client has a ton of images. In the past, what I would do a direct copy of the database then go in the database to search and replace. While that worked, it’s easy to miss things. With Backup Buddy, the process was seamless it did everything and I was done in minutes. The process was simple. I did a full backup Clicked the Restore/Migrate button to download the importer script Downloaded the backup Uploaded both the backup and importer script to the new site Create a mySQL database on the new site Ran the importer script Then, simply followed the instructions through the 7 steps. Even though there were 7 steps they wasn’t really

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How we ended up with a Fivespot wireless mobile hotspot is a long story. It was not something we went shopping for when we left the house that day. More of a favor for my dad. He didn’t drag us into the deal kicking and screaming though. We had wanted a wireless mobile hotspot for quite some time. Before we brought the Fivespot home, the guys at Best Buy advised us to get a Geek Squad install pack with it because he claimed it is known to be rather tricky. Now me being the geek said no. Tricky? Pfft! That simply means a good challenge. Bring it on! When we finally had it fully charged and ready to go, I hooked it up and was soon rocking and rolling without much problems. We were pretty satisfied. Connected With No Internet Access Then, we went on a nearby short trip to a friend’s place, whose house we had never been to. We thought we’d try the Fivespot out on the road. And that was when we hit some snags. It was not the signal by the way. We just could not connect – at all. Actually, it would connect but Windows

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