LASTPASS

Put simply, you need a tool that will manage your passwords among other things. LastPass does just that. What is more, it is free (read priceless).

LastPass can do so much for you. The following is an indicative (not exhaustive) list of things that it can do for you and aid your online life, online business and blogging:

• You don’t have to remember or note innumerable passwords. Just remember one master password to access the LastPass vault and the rest is professionally taken care of by LastPass. Your sensitive data is encrypted and only your master password can unlock it.
• Generate secure passwords; choose tough combinations from numbers, letters, special characters.
• You can set up multiple profiles and do automated filling of web forms on various websites. Get one click login to your favourite sites.
• It is easy to use, safer, multi-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux), free and secure. The LastPass premium version (for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows mobile etc.) costs only 1 $ per month.
• Among other things, you can save and sync passwords between your browsers, easily import and export data (from and to other password managers), safely share logins with friends, screen keyboards and one time passwords (to protect you from key loggers), identify weak passwords (“bulletproof your online life” with the LastPass comprehensive analysis of your passwords) and stay secure the LastPass phising protection.
• It is a must-have Firefox extension. “Awesome tool, life saver,” says a review of LastPass. Use it to know why everybody  who uses it loves it.

LastPass is the 46th item in the PCWorld’s 100 best products of 2009. It has also been applauded by Lifehacker, ZDNet, PC Mag editors, the Economist, CNET and other reputed entities. Your can see the complete set of support screencasts on their website before embracing it to get an idea of the utility. You can also follow the LastPass blog for updates on LastPass and passwords scams and issues on the internet.

Embrace LastPass for peace of mind!

Use LastPass for password management and peace of mind


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

As a long-time Chrome user, this has been a very exciting time for me and I, as well as many others, have gone a bit crazy installing new extensions. Part of this is the excitement and part of this is because it is so easy to do, not even requiring a restart to add, deactivate or uninstall new extensions. Best of all, they don’t seem to impact the performance of Chrome.

Still, as a blogger, extensions are more than just fun toys, but also serious tools. As such, here are my top five Chrome extensions (to date).

5. Adthwart!

Part of my day job as a copyright and plagiarism consultant is that I have to visit a lot of spam blogs and plagiarist sites, as such I don’t want to load their ads. Chrome, up until now, has not had a means to block unwanted ads short of using a proxy. Adthwart, however, puts a stop to it.

There’s not much to say about Adthwart other than it works and works well. It’s simple, effective and easy to switch on and off. It’s the most popular ad blocking extension for Chrome right now for a very good reason.

Alternative: Adblock – Largely the same, but more meant to be a follow up to AdBlockPlus on Firefox.

4. ChromeMuse

Link shorteners are nothing special for Chrome as you’ve long been able to use bookmarklets to add your favorite URL shortener to the browser. However, ChromeMuse lets you add all of them or at least very close.

ChromeMuse is simple, effective and lets you use a dozen URL shortening services, including most of the major names. It even lets you use your Bit.ly account if you are tracking your clicks through it. The only drawback is that it doesn’t have any Twitter integration at all, meaning all you can do is copy the generated link.

Still, it works well, works fast and can use almost any service you can think of.

Alternative: Goo.gl Shortener – Pretty much any service you can name has at least one extension for it, but since I’m using Goo.gl right now, this woiuld be my alternate pick.

3. Shareaholic

Shareaholic does exactly what you might think. It allows you to share links with dozens of different services including blogging, social networking, social news, microblogging, etc. Nearly every service you can think of is in this application and it is easily customized to fit your needs.

In short, this extension is what you want it to be.

Granted, Shareaholic doesn’t seem to integrate neatly with many of these services, opting instead to direct you to the correct pages, but that is far from a terrible crime. It would also be a good replacement for ChromeMuse if it picked up some of the missing URL shorteners, especially Goog.ol and allowed you to connect to your Bit.ly account.

All in all, a very powerful, very customizable and very worthy extension for Chrome.

Alternative: Diigo Bookmarks – Simple, fast and effective but only works with Diigo and, through it, Delicious. Also, this extension lacks access to some of Diigo’s more powerful features. Despite that, fast and effective.

2. Google Mail Checker Plus

With literally dozens of Gmail extensions for Chrome, Google Mail Checker Plus (GMCP) stands out from the crowd by offering features others don’t, including the ability to preview, delete, archive or spam your unread mail without going into your inbox. It can also ensure mailto links open up in your Gmail account and, best of all for me, it works with Google Apps.

My one gripe would be that, at first glance, the settlings page is a bit overwhelming. Though it isn’t too bad once you take a moment, it can take a bit of work to make this extension really sing.

All in all, it is a great app that has enabled me to actually close and leave closed my Gmail tab.

Alternative: Google Mail Checker – With so many Gmail extensions already available, it’s hard to pick an alternative, so I went with the official and most popular one.

1. Chromed Bird

I won’t talk too much about Chromed Bird as Charnita covered it well in her article. It’s worth saying that is the most popular and probably the best all-around Twitter extension available for Chrome today.

It’s fast, light and relatively powerful. Though it could use additional features, such as list integration and searches, it has most of the critical tools including access to home, mentions and direct messages as well as the ability to reply, retweet and direct message users.

Alternative: Brizzly – Brizzly has the features Chromed Bird lacks but is both much more sluggish and has a more confusing interface.

Bottom Line

If you’re a Chrome user and you aren’t using the developer’s version that enables extensions, you truly are missing out. There are so many great extensions out there and we are only really at the very beginning of the Chrome extension revolution.

Almost certainly, this top five list will need to be completely written in 6-12 months as new extensions come online and the industry around Chrome grows.

In short, it is a very exciting time to be a Chrome user. With easily the best extension experience I have ever had with a browser and so many new ones coming out every day, I can safely say I’ve never been happier with my browser.

My Top Five Chrome Extensions


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Woopra

Woopra is split into two services, a desktop client program and the traditional for web analytics, web server application. Woopra radically decreases the load on network resources by using the power of your desktop to process and  display graphic charts, graphics, and analysis.

Live Chat

The features that I am most interested in are the proactive and reactive chat functionality. You will be able to remotely start chat sessions with visitors, or embed “Click-to-Chat” buttons within a site to accept inbound requests.  This feature will allow webmasters and bloggers to literally break down the virtual wall between visitor and webmaster – for no cost.  There is no installation of software by the visitor.   For bloggers who want to learn more about their visitors and perhaps even be extend their customer service offerings, Woopra will be a great addition to the site.

Real Time

Woopra is bringing live, real-time analytical and site statistical data to the webmaster. Most other free web analytics programs like Google Analytics are updated only once a day. Real time analytics have long been available with expensive Omniture and WebTrends solutions, but Woopra is reducing the wait time for the “little” guys.  Webmasters can track over 40 different statistical events and analytics.

Manage Multiple Blogs

Woopra provides nice integration of for multiple blogs and websites. Through the quick site tabs at the top of the Woopra panel, you have one-click access to your registered blogs and websites.  Even the high end web analytics don’t provide this type of ease for multiple site management.

The Price

So, you were wondering what the catch was?  Well, it’s not a free product so don’t expect to see a mass exodus from Google Analytics.  However, if you have a desire to get better reporting tools, faster data, chat and more, than Woopra is reasonably priced when you consider some of these features sell for thousands of dollars from Omniture and WebTrends.

The basic or free account requires an invitation and I expect those invitations will remain heavily sought after!

Woopra – Affordable Real Time Web Analytics


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

PostRank Analytics hopes to help bloggers get an integrated picture of the impact of their content – right down to each story – across the social web.   They take your Google Analytics data and show you the pageviews, Twitter followers and “engagement score” for the day before. You can see also see this analysis by week, month or quarter.  Blog posts are featured on the appropriate days.  Moving the mouse over a particular day reveals the exact numbers for that day, while clicking on a specific blog post will show deeper measurements for that post.

The most valuable part of PostRank Analytics comes when you evaluate specific blog posts. This allows you to see your total page views, unique visitors, bounce rate and average time on the post for each entry while also seeing how many people have tweeted about the post, how many comments it received, if there are any FriendFeed or Reddit reactions, was it re-posted on Tumblr and more.  Beyond analytics, the inclusion of research on commenters is also useful for people trying to decide whether to respond to individual conversations.

To use PostRank Analytics you first need a PostRank account where you have verified ownership of your blog.  You will also need to share access to your Google Analytics account and share your Twitter username with PostRank.   The service is $9 USD a month and provides a 30 day trial.  For any blogger who wants to grow their blog traffic and truly understand which posts are the most successful, it is certainly worth a trial if not an ongoing subscription.

PostRank Integrates your Blog Analytics


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

It was only a few months ago that I launched my first eBook. I was kind of late to the party in many respects so before I could even start to write the first book, I had to do a lot of research. I researched many things like the fonts which are used in eBooks, formatting techniques and the best way to design the eBook cover.

The two most popular methods used to create an eBook cover is manually via a graphics program like Photoshop or automatically using eBook cover design software. Creating an eBook cover manually via Photoshop didn’t seem too difficult but since I am not a designer, I was not keen on going down this route as I would inevitably spend a lot time getting it right only for the finished article to be average at best.

I spoke to Nate from Unique Blog Designs about designing a cover but the more I looked into the whole thing, the more I wanted to do this myself so that I wasn’t relying on anyone else.

So my attention turned to an eBook creation program. Photoshop action scripts like Cover Action Pro looked too complicated for what I needed whereas other scripts produced covers of questionable quality. I finally decided on a eBook design application called Box Shot 3D

Box Shot 3D

Box Shot 3D is an design application which lets you design eBook covers, software boxes, DVD boxes and more. You can even create brochures and business cards and put your logo on bottles and cans too.

The application retails for $60. When compared to more expensive programs or hiring a designer, it proves to be a real bargain. The main thing that convinced me to buy it though was that I could try it out.

You can download a complete version to use at your leisure. The trial version has everything that the premium version has but the final image is rendered with a copyright. This allowed me to design a few covers to see if it was what I was looking for, and I quickly realised it was.

Here is an example of how easy it is to create an eBook cover with Box Shot 3D.

First thing you need to do is decide on what shape you want:

You then load the image you designed for your book and load up each section. You can load a unique front cover, side, back cover, paper leaves and headband.

At first I thought that designing the image would prove to be difficult. Thankfully, Box Shot provides a template image for every shape you can use. All you need to do is edit the default template to your liking, making sure you keep the dimensions the same (you could obviously design one from scratch but I found this to be the most practical way of designing the cover).

Here is the image I used for the front and side of my last ebook. I simply chose this image for the front cover and the side of the book, and Box Shot 3D put it all together.

After choosing the camera angle, lighting and shading; you need to decide on the quality of the image. The higher the quality, the longer it will take for Box Shot 3D to render the final image.

As you can see, the whole process is quick and painless. I haven’t used all of the eBook applications out there so I am not going to say that this is the best available to you. However, it is the one I decided to purchase and I am very happy with it.

Box Shot 3D currently retails for $60 and is available for both Windows and Mac. You don’t need a particularly powerful computer to use the application though it’s worth downloading the trial version first to see how your computer handles it (and to try the software out too!).

If you have any questions about Box Shot 3D please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them

Link : Box Shot 3D

The easy way to design an eBook cover


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Prefinery

Prefinery manages the entire process of collecting and fulfilling requests for invitations for web sites in private beta.  They got their start doing this for PC software and have migrated to the support of web based software.  Prefinery’s goal is to create a positive first impression for beta testers and help startups collect information that will result in a better product.

Prefinery is the kitchen sink of testing as it handles every aspect of a  beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form, create an automatic welcome e-mail message, register signups into a queue, approve users, generate invite codes and send emails out to participants.  Reading the Prefinery blog gives you insights into Prefinery’s focus on testing and analytics to help you understand the results of your beta tests.

Currently Prefinery is free during their beta, but they are planning to work with a freemium and monthly subscription model which will allow them to serve small blogs and web sites with a freemium model and growing startups with a subscription model and a full range of services.

Launchset

Launchset offers a variety of tools to help sites manage beta programs.  Launchset makes it easy to find and invite users, create invitation codes and even set up a waiting list.  Launchset recognizes that social media sites could be a key component of attracting interest so they provide tools to invite people through Facebook and Twitter.  You can control the size of your testing group by inviting a certain number of people on a first-come-first-served basis or by selecting users from your waiting list based on their profiles.

One of the ways that Launchset is trying to differentiate itself is by building a community of testers.  Registering with Launchset means that you can try out cool new services before anyone else does.  If you already have existing power users who are interested in beta testing than you don’t need Launchset’s community.  If you want to get a group of testers and a group that is highly likely to actually test and comment, than this community could be valuable.  However, consider that Launchset’s community is not a random unbiased community – but a collection of folks who like testing which probably means they are not “average” Internet users.

The Launchset user interface needs work. While it is not clear if this is a design issue or the result of not testing in all browsers,  most folks will notice that in several places there’s text running onto pictures and the pages are not well organized.  Also, it is a bit confusing as to which form to use to register as a site or to register as a potential community tester.

Which Software to use for a Beta Program

Currently the ultimate irony is that both Launchset and Prefinery are themselves in or just coming out of beta testing.  While the sites are likely to continue to evolve, unless you need the community of testers, it looks like Prefinery is the more complete tool.  However, either service will allow you to do far more testing than you are likely to do on your own!

Beta Testing Made Easy


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The next phase of how information will be viewed is coming along with the pending introduction of Google Wave – but in the meantime several other products are exploring the space of “where your inbox meets the web.”  That’s the tag line for Gist as it attempts to save you time and giving you an edge in managing your communications.  Gist wants to help you build stronger relationships by allowing you to connect your inbox, with its emails and attachments, to the web’s blog posts and news.

Gist provides a way for you to manage your email and provides a linked dashboard of information about your contacts.  Gist integrates recent news about the person, recent blog posts written by the person, recent tweets and recent email communication and attachments.  The idea is that with all this data integrated you can make more effective the data that is hidden in all the emails, blogs and web pages that you either read (or should be reading) as you look for ways to grow your relationships with colleagues both inside and outside your organization.

One of the theories behind Gist is that when you have access to the right information, you can get “personal” that much faster for a more fruitful relationship.  From my testing, this has the potential to offer a great deal if you are client-facing, but at the same time the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are trying to glom onto social media as well.  From a corporate perspective it is much more likely that the CRM systems will be the tool selected by the enterprise.  However, for a small organization – often a sole proprietor, Gist can help you discover these insights that otherwise might only be available to a larger corporation with a big CRM system in place.

Gist is still in beta and it some of the features are not perfect yet – but even as I visualize the features all working together I don’t see myself giving up on my Feedly RSS reader or my Outlook email just yet.  So that means I’ll be that blog reader who keeps reading your post as you meant it to be read.  However, with Google Wave heading towards shore and Gist flush with venture capital – odds are good that more and more people will be looking for ways to further integrate their blog reading, Twitter reading, email and web reading.

Gist – Part of the Wave of Information Managers


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

DIY (Do It Yourself) Chart

DIY Chart is a Web-based, simple and powerful online tool to create interactive charts and graphs from static or dynamic data.  The service is free, although you registration is required.  You can upgrade to a paid service to get the ad removed and the ability to store more and larger charts.

DIY Chart offers an array of options from simple pie and bar charts to pyramid and funnel charts – 28 different charting styles in all.  The interface to create the charts is not fancy – but it provides the flexibility to control every aspect of the chart from size, to titles, to legends.  Likewise the publishing offers great options: save as a image file, generate simple HTML code that links back to the chart of their web site or create a dynamic chart.  You host the data file on your web site and if you update the data file – the chart is dynamically updated.

ChartGo

ChartGo states “Our goal is simple, allow users to create graphs online quickly. Create bar graphs, line graphs or pie charts. Simply paste your data in the graph data area and hit the create graph button.”  They have a clear goal and they achieve it – with a free and even registration-free service.  You have fewer options with ChartGo, but for the one time or maybe occasional user this service is great.  You can truly create a chart in a matter of minutes.  You can save the chart as an image file or use a URL to display the graph from their site.  If you want just the basics and know you want a pie chart you might also consider Piecolor.

Rich Chart Live

While I prefer the simple yet clear chart, Rich Chart Live will allow the non-programmer to create charts with a little more flash and then you can actually publish them in Flash or for PowerPoint.  The service is free, but if you upgrade to the paid service you can remove their advertisement. The image below is just a static image – using all the features of Rich Chart Live you can have animation – such as each of the pieces of the chart sliding in to show the chart build itself in stages.

Mind the flash – focus on clarity

As you look to add graphical presentations of data to your writing, I encourage you to consider the words of Edward Tufte, perhaps the leading expert on the art of presenting data and information, who said “And if your images aren’t on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won’t help.”  So don’t use every bell and whistle in these tools (especially with Rich Chart Live).  If you use these tools wisely to clearly and succinctly display your data, you will help your reader understand the topic in ways that far exceed what could be done with paragraphs of text of pages of numbers.

Chart your way to readable blogs


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Pictaculous takes an image that you upload and based on the colors in that image it generates a selection of color palettes. So with one upload you can get expert advice on a design palette.  To show this in action I created a screen capture of Blogging Tip’s header and uploaded this to Pictaculous.

Pictaculous created a primary palette made out of colors directly extracted from the image – the five large color blocks on the top shown in the screen shot above.  This alone is an awesome resource as now you know the hexadecimal codes to use in order to match text and other website or blog components to the exact colors.  If you are using an Adobe product for your design, you can download these colors right into Adobe products by using the Adobe Swatch File (.aco) for the palette you’ve just created.

Pictaculous also taps into the design site Kuler from Adobe and ColourLovers to suggest ten related color palettes that coordinate with the colors of the image you uploaded.  This feature is the key reason why I use Pictaculous – it’s like Garanimals for web design.

Beyond Pictaculous, Colors Palette Generator is another excellent option.  While missing the ability to recommend  a specific matching color palette, it does a great job of matching the color palettes for the image you upload. Actually, you don’t even need to upload the image as Colors Palette Generator will work with an image you provide via a URL.  The web based application creates three palettes with light, medium, and dark colors to match your image.  You can export it as either a Photoshop swatches file or as a CSS stylesheet.  If you don’t use Adobe, the CSS option is a key reason to use Colors Palette Generator over Pictaculous.

Firefox users might also consider the Colorzilla add-on.  With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.  There is a palette browser that allows you to choose colors from pre-defined color sets and save the most used colors in custom palettes.  Colorzilla is more geared towards a developer with a very frequent need for this type of tool.

As with every genre of web based applications, the universe of options is quickly expanding beyond just these applications.  However, these applications are free, easy to use and don’t require any signup.  If you are color-challenged (or colour-challenged), you will love these web sites!

Color Coordinate Your Web Pages


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Pinboard is a basic bookmark manager.  When I say basic, I mean basic.  There are no bells, no whistles, no cool Web 2.0 features – all Pinboard does is help you manage your bookmarks.  That’s it – plain and simple.  While there is a way to see recent bookmarks entered into Pinboard, that’s optional and there is no ranking or voting on the bookmarks.  In this regard, Pinboard has been labeled that “anti-social” bookmarking tool.

Like everybody I’ve tried del.icio.us, or delicious.com as it is now known, but it’s all about sharing.  Frequently I’m bookmarking so I can come back later and check it out – not so I can share an unknown site/article with the world.  I was using the Firefox add-on Read It Later and that was my favorite till Pinboard.

You’ll have to splurge for $2.84 USD but I think it’s been worth it.  No ads.  No socialization – I just get to save my bookmarks and find them when I need them for any of my computers – at home or at work.  I look at Pinboard as the Craigslist of bookmark management.  While wildly successful, Craigslist is an example of how substance wins out over style.  Craigslist has no Web 2.0 features and no whiz-bang functions – but the simplicity has attracted millions.  Check out the home page below:

Pinboard takes the same approach as Craigslist.  Though approach might be to strong a word as Pinboard is no startup.  It’s not a dream in search of funding – it’s nothing more than a side project by a developer, Maciej Ceglowski. Ceglowski’s claim to fame is that he was a former Yahoo Brickhouse engineer and he designed and built an internal data warehouse for Twitter.  I think Ceglowski could put a bit more effort into the Pinboard Blog – there’s plain and then there is plain!  Perhaps we can get him to start reading Blogging Tips!

If you want easy bookmarking and tagging – give Pinboard a try.

Pinboard Wizard – Basic Bookmarking


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Back in March, I posted an article entitled 5 GMail Labs Features for Bloggers. It focused on five of the “beta” features of Gmail that can be very helpful to those of us who run their own sites.

However, today Google announced that they were pulling the “beta” label off of Gmail and, honor of that occasion, I’m going to take another look at how Gmail can help bloggers and other power users, this time by listing 5 features of the service itself that everyone should know about.

To be clear, all of these features are built directly into Gmail (and/or Google Apps) and you should be able to take advantage of instantly, without enabling any beta features. In short, they are ready to go right now.

5. AIMing Inside Gmail

Most people have seen the chat feature built into Gmail’s interface and is aware that they can use Google Talk directly in their browser. But Gmail also supports conversations on AOL Instant Messenger as well.

Once you sign into chat, open up your settings and click on the “Chat” tab. Once you’ve done that, the last option should be to enable AIM for that account. Clicking that link will open up a pop up window where you input your AIM username and password and are then good to go.

Bear in mind that AIM is currently the only service that you can do this with and that, unlike Google Talk, AIM is very particular about you only be signed on to one place at a time.

Still, for those who prefer chatting in a browser and have an AIM account, it may be a very promising feature, especially since AIM chats are saved into your Gmail account just like your Google Talk ones are (provided you have that option enabled).

4. Use And/Or to Make Filters More Efficient

If you get a lot of email, you probably need to use filters to make sense of it all. However, having too many filters can be unwieldy and Gmail has a limit on the number of filters that can forward to another address.

Fortunately, you can combine filters very easily using Gmail. For example, if you have five people you want to send their mail to the trash, there is no need to create five separate filters.

Instead, go to your settings and to the “filters” tab. There, create a new filter and, in the “From” box type “a@domain.com OR b@domain.com OR c@domain.com” etc. This works as long as you want to take the same action on all of the email addresses.

Then, when you need to add another address to that list, simply edit the existing filter rather than creating a new one. This keeps your filter list clean and easy to edit.

Also, if you need some suggestions for common filters, Lifehacker has a list of 10 Must-Have Filters for Gmail. However, importing them will require you to enable a Labs feature.

3. Send/Receive Email From Other Accounts

If you’d like to use your Gmail account to centralize all of your mail, you’re in luck. It is possible to have Gmail receive mail from other services (provided they have POP access available) and to even send email from Gmail as those accounts.

To receive email from other accounts, open up your settings and click on “Accounts”. From there, click the link that says “Add a mail account you own” under “Get mail from other accounts” and add that site’s POP information. This also works with other Gmail accounts, provided you have POP turned on, which can be found under the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

Once you do that, you can choose to have your Gmail put these messages under new labels or even have them skip the inbox altogether.

If you want to send email from another email address, on the same tab, click the “Add another email address you own” under “Send mail as” and fill in the information. You will receive a test email that you have to confirm to show the account is yours. When that’s done, you can choose the account under the “From” heading in the compose page. You’ll also be able to tell Gmail to either make the new address your default or tell it to, when replying, automatiacally send email from the address the original message was sent to.

This is a great way to consolidate all of your email into one account, making Gmail all you need when it comes to your mail.

2. Use Gmail on Your Domain

If you have your own domain and want to use Gmail, there are two options.

1. Forward Your Mail: Set up your server to forward all of your mail to your Gmail account and, using the steps above, instruct Gmail to send mail from that account.
2. Use Google Apps: Create a free Google Apps account and have Google actually host your email for you.

Google Apps, for their Standard Edition, is a free service that lets you host all of your domain’s email services on Google. It requires some very basic DNS tweaking, which Google walks you through, and will require some time for the setup to be complete, usually just a day, but once it is ready, you don’t have to worry about your mail servers again.

The advantage of this is that, should something go wrong with your mail server (IE: server outage) your email will continue to work.

This is much more reliable and much more professional as it Google Apps doesn’t reveal your Gmail account in the message header, as it does with Gmail accounts sending mail under another address.

1. Advanced Search

Imagine you quickly need to find that email from your friend that has your travel itinerary for a trip you’re taking. How do you find it fast, especially if it was sent months ago and you’ve had dozens of emails since.

Easy. Gmail’s advanced search features can help you out. These search tools make it trivial to parse your way through countless thousands of messages quickly.

Some of the highlights include:

• has:attachment – Looks only for emails with attachments.
• filename: – Looks only for messages with that specific filename as an attachment.
• after: and before: – Narrows your search’s date range.
• subject: – Searches only the subject of the email.
• is:read/unread/starred – Can be used to search only messages that are starred, read or unread.

Be sure to check out the full list for even more suggestions.

Bottom Line

As Gmail removes its “beta” tag, it does so as a powerhouse mail service and email client.

The real beauty in Gmail, especially those for large mail volumes, is in how deep it is. There are so many features and tools below the service, many of which are in beta, that it seems like it can do everything but answer your mail for you.

If you’ve been using Gmail for a while, now is a time to give it another look and see if there are any features you’ve missed. After all, there may be even more ways Gmail can help save you time and energy when it comes to your communications.

5 Gmail Tricks Everyone Should Know


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

However, if you are already using Google Reader and Firefox then the Feedly Firefox extension will add a new level of ease and enjoyment to your blog reading.  Imagine the difference between a text book and People magazine – that’s the difference between most RSS readers and Feedly.

I have used numerous RSS readers like Google Reader and Bloglines, but none come close to the Feedly interface that makes aggregation more familiar and easy to use.  Feedly it segments and sorts the content flows into the columnar magazine format many of us are familiar with.

Feedly Blog Dashboard

Forget about even reading all the blogs you subscribe to, just remembering what blogs you subscribe to can be a challenge and hard to view in most RSS readers.  But check out how with one click on the dashboard link you get a crystal clear index style overview of every blog you subscribe to.  And managing your blogs is simple – click on the star on the left of the source name to mark is as favorite. Click on the X box to unsubscribe (your decisions are passed along and synchronized with Google Reader).  The dashboard can quickly show you details on your reading – light blue background means that you have shared some article from that blog during the last 30 days. A light red background means that you have not read any articles from that source for the last 30 days.

Feedly Integration

Since Feedly sits on top of Google Reader you right away get the sense that integration is key to this product.  I have to admit that I have been spending so much time reading more blog posts that I have no fully explored all of Feedly’s options.  However, you can integrate with Twitter, Ubiquity, FriendFeed and Google Apps.  You can even watch College Humor,  Hulu videos and Daily Show videos in an inline mode – viewing the videos right within the Feedly interface.

Feedly is ahead of it’s time

If you take the Feedly plunge than you should check out the Feedly Blog because they use their blog very effectively to seek out customer feedback as to how to prioritize new Feedly features.  As you can tell, I think Feedly is pretty good right now, many like Robert Scoble have even said that Feedly is ahead of it’s time.  So it’s now time for you to take the plunge and test it out!

Feedly – Blog Reading in Style!


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Just earlier this year Jonathan Bailey wrote about Skitch: The Mac Blogger’s Best Screenshot Tool and 3 Firefox Screen Capture Tools.  While those tools are great, I’m impressed with the features that the web based Aviary is bringing to the table. Aviary just won a Webware 100 award for their photo editing service, but they are certainly not letting the award encourage them to rest on their laurels.  Indeed, less than a month after winning the award they have rolled out an addition which adds even more features to their screen capturing tool.

You can now capture any webpage at all, from any browser, by simply putting Aviary.com/ in front of the URL! So if you want to capture Blogging Tips homepage you just change http://www.bloggingtips.com to Aviary.com/http://bloggingtips.com. Your browser will open a new tab or window with the Aviary web-based image editor ready to go.  With the Aviary editor you can edit it, add simple markup like text and save the image to your desktop or host it online.  The capture worked on every page that I tested it with, using both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and even with pages that were Flash driven.

Using the URL to create the screen capture is just one of three ways to activate Talon screen capture.  If you want additional options like capturing a page at different resolutions or to only capture a portion of the page you can click Screen Capture on Aviary’s home page or just bookmark and go directly to http://aviary.com/launch/talon to start up the screen capture and editing service.  For even faster screen captures, Firefox users can install their Firefox addon which allows you to place a SCREEN CAPTURE option on your toolbar for quick access to the screen capture utility.

The Aviary editor screens are a bit cluttered – it doesn’t have the simple elegance of a Skitch for the Macintosh of Jing for the PC.  Also with all these features, the screen capture is a few seconds slower than other software – but it provides you access to free screen capturing, image editors, color editor, effects editor and more.   If you have not yet invested in a screen capture program, then Aviary is one to test out.

Aviary Screen Capture


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

On the 16th, as most iPhone users were gearing up for the release of version 3.0 of the iPhone OS the next day, Tweetdeck launched the very first version of its iPhone client. Many, myself included, were interested to see how Tweetdeck, an application known for taking up a great deal of screen real estate, would pare down for the iPhone.

However, many were pleasantly surprised by just how elegant Tweetdeck for the iPhone turned out to be. Tweetdeck is known for being sluggish and memory intensive on the desktop, so finding a light and effective, though still feature-rich app on the iPhone was a welcome discovery.

The fact that it is also free was simply the icing on the cake.

But does Tweetdeck for the iPhone really live up to its hype? Well, I’ve been using it for the past two days and I think I can safely say that the answer is, for the most part, yes.

Tweetdeck Basics

On the desktop, Tweetdeck is best known for its use of columns to display information. This makes it easy to view all of your Twitter-related information, including your timeline, mentions, messages, searches and any groups you created, all at one glance. However, this has always come at the price of screen space and at the risk of information overload.

Tweetdeck for the iPhone brings its columns with it, but in a much more controlled way. To work on the limited iPhone screen, Tweetdeck displays only one column at a time and lets users “flick” through them with a swiping motion.

For the most part, this feels very natural. The app moves very well on the iPhone and still manages to have a very robust feature set including everything one would expect from an iPhone Twitter app including TwitPic integration, following users, replies, searches, etc. Though it lacks location awareness, its overall a feature-complete app that can do just about anything other Twitter apps can.

However, Tweetdeck for the iPhone has one very special feature that sets it apart from the pack, synchronization with its desktop client.

Syncing Up

One of the best features of the Tweetdeck desktop client is its ability to create groups and add custom searches as permanent new columns. This way, you can follow specific users more closely and keep on top of your topics of interest, all without taking an eye off of your usual streams.

The iPhone client has this feature as well but, if you register for an account with Tweetdeck, the iPhone app will synchronize with your desktop one, making them a cohesive unit. All one has to do is register for a Tweetdeck account, which is separate from your Twitter one, and watch as your phone updates with your computer’s information or vice versa.

This means, for example, if you add a column on your desktop client, it will be available on your phone the next time you open it up. Similarly, if you add anyone to a group from your phone, they’ll be in the group when you get to your computer as well. All of this is done automatically and almost completely seamlessly.

This means that, as you move from your phone to your computer(s), your Twitter environment stays the same. You don’t lose your groups or custom searches and don’t have to configure every computer by hand. This also means you have a backup of your settings should something go wrong later.

It is a very compelling feature and, looking around, I have not found another iPhone Twitter client that has this. Mixero is working on an app that will have this functionality with their desktop client (See: Previous Mixero coverage), but none are available yet.

However, this isn’t to say that Tweetdeck is perfect. though it is a great app, it does have some minor flaws, most of which could probably be worked out in an update down the road.

Some Hiccups

In my use of Tweetdeck there have been a few minor issues that have jumped out at me, first being that the UI, at times, can be very confusing and unecessarily complicated.

For example, when you open Tweetdeck, you are initially in what is known as “Column View”, which looks like the phone is zoomed out from the actual text. The tweets are still readable and you can see the sides of the neighboring columns. However, all you do in this view is select a column and tap it to zoom in.

You can still swipe to go between the columns when zoomed in and there seems to be little use for “Column View” except for the fact that there are some functions you can only access within it, such as editing columns, adding people to groups, etc. This can lead to a lot of confusion if you’re in the wrong view and trying to perform one of these tasks.

Speaking of user management, it was also confusing learning how to follow and learn more about a user. By tapping on an individual Tweet you are given a “Quick Follow” options (under the “More” arrow) to follow other users by typing their name, but not necessarily the one in the Tweet. To do that, you have to go to their profile, namely by clicking the small arrow near their name.

However, the biggest problem, in my usage, is a series of bugs within the application.

First, tweets seem to disappear and reappear from within the application. This was a major problem earlier today as I waited the verdict in the Jammie Thomas retrial. I would see tweets appear in my stream, leave to go do something else, such as answer a text message, and when I returned the relevant ones would be gone. However, opening up the user’s profile in Safari showed the Tweets were still there.

Whether this was an issue with Twitter or Tweetdeck is unclear, but I’ve noticed it a few times over the course of using the app and it is not something I’ve noticed with Tweetie.

Even more frustrating was a reliability issue that would simply cause the app to crash at seemingly random times. I could not trace it to any one problem but sometimes, for no reason, it would just close, often when I was in the middle of reading a stream.

But despite these issues, Tweetdeck remains an, overall, very solid and reliable app as well as one that offers features no other iPhone Twitter client can match at a price that can not be beat.

Bottom Line

Though these issues are annoying and take some of the sheen away from Tweetdeck, the app still remains one of the best Twitter clients for the iPhone. Period. In fact, it has already replaced Tweetie on mine.

Whether one finds Tweetdeck useful will likely depend on whether or not you would want to add any extra extra columns in the first place. If you just visit your timeline, mentions and messages streams, you likely will find Tweetie on the iPhone easier to use, more stable and, most likely, slightly faster. However, if you’re a power Twitter user and you want groups, custom searches and additional streams, there really is no contest.

But what is perhaps most amazing about Tweetdeck for the iPhone is that it may cause many who had shied away from the desktop application to give it another try. Those, like myself, who had left it due to memory and other issues, are now giving it a second shot to take advantage of the synchronization.

Whether that will be a viable strategy for the long haul, especially as competitors start to create similar products. Most likely, Tweetdeck will not be alone for long in this field and it could, more than anything, signal the future for iPhone Twitter applications.

Review: Tweetdeck for the iPhone


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Norway based browser maker Opera had promised that, today, they were going to reinvent the Web. The fruition of that promise was it debuting its latest browser, Opera Unite.

However, Opera Unite is not simply another better/faster/smarter browser, it is also a server that turns your browser into a two-way communication tool.

In short, Opera Unite, a preview of which is currently available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux, hopes to blur the lines between browsers and servers and change the way the Web works.

However, there are serious problems and questions about how Opera Unite would fit into the new Web and whether it really is an improvement on existing services. Still, it is an interesting new idea that is worthwhile for all heavy Internet users, including bloggers, to take a look at and see if it can fit with your needs.

How Opera Unite Works

When you first install Opera Unite and open it, it looks and feels much like any other browser, In fact, if you use the Opera browser regularly, there will be hardly any noticeable difference.

However, once you enable Opera Unite, either via the menu or the button in the status bar, the changes become almost immediately clear.

First, you are given the option of signing up for an account or using an existing My Opera account if you have one. That in turn creates a new sub-domain on their site. You then select which computer you are using and you are given a URL for that particular machine, which looks something like: http://computer.username.operaunite.com

Once that is done, you’re given the option of enabling various services. Currently, there are six available including the following:

• File Sharing: Shares a folder of files.
• Fridge: Allows others to put “sticky notes” on your computer.
• Media Player: Streams MP3 files from your computer.
• Photo Sharing: Share images from your computer.
• The Lounge: A simple chat system.
• Web Server: A very basic Web server that lets you host HTML files.

Each application can have its own privacy setting including “Private”, meaning only you can access that application, “Limited”, which password protects the application (this is the default setting) and “Public”, which operates the service just like a regular Web server.

It is important to remember that, in each of these applications, the files/content are being served directly from the user’s computer, not from a third party Web server. Even the URL that Opera Unite creates points directly to the computer, eliminating the use of middlemen.

The question is whether we actually have a need for this service and if it is any better than the current alternatives.

The Big Problems

Though what Opera Unite is attempting to do is indeed a very grand gesture. It has one major problem, it is trying to make servers out of computers and connections that were never intended to be used in that fashion.

Consider the following issues:

1. Reliability: Very few home/office users leave their PCs on 24/7 and even fewer keep their browser up too. Without both those things, these features do not work. Also, home connections tend to be less reliable than ones to datacenters, which are redundant typically, causing additional availability issues.
2. Connections are Inadequate: Not only are home connections slower than those seen at datacenters, which usually use multiple T1 lines, home connections have intentionally limited upload speed. You don’t notice this when viewing Web pages because you upload very little, but when you try to use your computer as a server it becomes more clear.
3. Security: If there is a security flaw in your Flickr account, someone gains access to your images. If there’s a flaw in your “Photo Sharing” application, someone can have access to your whole machine.

All of this combines to make Opera Unite fairly useless for truly public sharing. Though it could have a great deal of use for an individual to share items between two computers or even a small office that is working at the same time, for sharing on the broader Web, there seems to be too many problems.

For example, if you send your grandmother photos using your Photo Sharing application or, even worse, use it to host images on your site. If anyone tries to access those images after you’ve shut down your browser or turned off the computer, they’re going to get a “file not found” error. Also, even if your CPU is turned on, the files are going to load relatively slowly when compared to a regular server, which is designed for upstream bandwidth.

To make matters worse, for every service, there are other, viable services on the Web. For example. I could use the file sharing service to swap files between my home and work computers, but I already have Dropbox, which is free, has additional features and doesn’t require me to keep both computers running.

Likewise, you can use a variety of services that can host MP3 and other files for streaming. You can also get free Web hosting which is significantly more powerful (all Opera Unite does is display regular HTML pages, not suitable for blogging yet) and, of course, there are also countless chat systems.

Though the burden of uploading the files to these cloud services is annoying, it is a one-time expense, the reward for which is access to the file, 24/7 whether or not the machine is on or off and never having to upload or stream it again.

In short, Opera Unite, in its current form may be useful for certain niche needs, but for every problem that they hope to solve, there are better, more reliable solutions already written for most people.

Bottom Line

The real potential in Opera Unite, that I see, is in the developer platform. The very basic applications available now are simply self-hosted versions of other services. Developers may come up with something truly powerful and compelling that really doe stake advantage of Opera Unite’s structure, in the meantime, it’s a poor answer to a question almost no one asked.

Opera Unite is not going to be a good host for your blog, it isn’t even capable of that kind of advanced hosting at this time, nor will it likely be your image host or your media host. It’s just not ready to replace Flickr, Imageshack, Rapidshare and other services to the like.

But even if Opera Unite’s new features fail to overwhelm, the browser itself is pretty good. I’ve used it to do this post and found it speedy and reliable. I don’t know if it will replace Safari on my Mac as my main browser, but it certainly feels better than previous versions, including the earlier betas of Opera 10.

In the end, it is unclear if Opera has actually reinvented the Web. It hasn’t done so at this time but, if it is able to attract developer attention, that could change.

it could be that this is just the first shot in the beginning of a new revolution.

Opera Unite: A Pratical Look


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/