Jul
28
A Bone to Pick With e-Business: The Thirty Day Challenge
Filed Under blog, social, thirty day challenge, vlog | 1 Comment
Join the eBiz revolution at www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com and learn to make $10 this August with no spending involved (no credit card required). Work together with other towards the same goal using social platforms online, among other technologies, to start your own business online.
Jul
27
Learn some basic Google Search techniques to improve your ability to find what you are looking for. PLUS, learn how you can use Google is several other ways that you probably did not know about… like using it as a calculator, currency coverter, dictionary, and more!
Stay tuned for changed down at Tech-Bites!Â
Jul
20
RSS Feeds: Using Google Reader with RSS, Atom, & XML Feeds
Filed Under Productivity, episode, feeds, google reader, how-to, rss, screencast, tutorial | 1 Comment
Episode 10 -
If any acronym can boast full penetration from geekdom to the rest of the world… it’s “RSS”. Everyone has a “feed” these days and they expect you to know what to do with it! Feeds -be they RSS, Atom, or XML- allow us to “pull” information from the web without having to visit the sites ourselves. It also prevents us from having to go “check” a site for updates because their feed would alert us of any updates.
Feeds are especially useful in the context of blogs, but other popular ways to use feeds include news updates from major news sources, new products at your favorite shops, weather forecast updates, or alerts for when your friends have added pictures to their online collections. It’s like having a private “digest” version of the internet, tailor-made for you. It eliminates time sinks like surfing and allows you to consume information much more quickly than you might have without it.
Although there are many readers, Google Reader is possibility the fastest and most accessible. It’s part of your Google account and can be accessed from any computer online. Not only that, but thanks to Google Gears, you can use it offline too (to read feeds you have already downloaded) and you can integrate it into Gmail using the “Better Gmail” firefox add-on from Lifehacker.
Get Your Google Reader Account Set Up Here
Add/Remove Feeds
Perhaps the most basic and important part of using site feeds is knowing how to add and remove them from your reader.
Add-
To add a feed to your collection (once you have your Google Reader account set up) simply visit the site you want to add in your browser and look for one of these icons (or a similar variation):
Generally, feed icons are orange and look similar the the examples above. Some browsers will “automagically” detect feeds. I discourage using this feature of your browser because many sites use multiple feeds or several versions of one, so it is better to use the feed they display on their page.
Clicking a feed will bring up a page that looks like this (in Firefox).
Just choose “Google” from the list and check “Always use Google…” so that you won’t see this screen again.
Finally, click “Add to Google Reader” and you’re done!
Remove-
In the event that you should like to “unsubscribe” from one of the feeds you added, click the “Manage subscriptions” link at the bottom of the reader.
Then simply click the little “trashcan” icon next to the feed(s) you want to remove.
Browse and Star (using shortcuts)
One of the most important things about a feed reader is how quickly and easily you can process your feeds each day so that you don’t become a victim of “information overload”. In relation to most online readers, Google Reader is exceptionally fast and one of the few that uses keyboard shortcuts.
I use the following method for reading my feeds each day. It takes two passes.
Pass 1 (filtering)
- Open Google Reader and click “All Items” (also set reader to show new items only, next to “Show:” at the top)
- Use “j” and “k” to browse my unread feeds (j=next and k=previous)
- If I think a feed item is worth reading I “Star” it by pressing the “s” key (same as clicking the “star” icon, it toggles the star “status” on/off)
Once I’ve completed steps 1-3 -which should only take a few minutes- I can make my second pass… either right then, or later that day. Sometimes I do not have time to read anything for several days. This is why I use the “Star” tool. I can go to “Starred Items” from now on to find the feed items worth reading. When I go to actually *read* my items, it looks like this:
Pass 2 (reading)
- Open Google Reader and click “Starred Items”
- Use “j” and “k” to open each item and flip through them
- When I’m done with the current feed item I press “s” to remove it from my “Starred Items”
Sharing
Sometimes, while I am reading an item I enjoy very much, I use the email function to send the item to a friend. It’s much faster than composing a new email myself and integrates with my Gmail account which means it’s saving me time!
Beyond This
Google Reader is highly flexible and there are numerous things you can do to enhance your experience. Here’s some you may find useful:
- Better Gmail – Are you a Gmail user? With the excellent “Better Gmail” Firefox Add-on from Lifehacker.com, you can have Google Reader integrated right into Gmail! It feels very natural and helps me consolidate all my data (emails and feeds) into one online interface.
- Better GReader – That’s right… Lifehacker.com again. These guys are somethin’ else. This makes “some welcome GReader tweaks like maximizing the viewing area, skipping Google’s default subscribe mechanism, and adding keyboard shortcuts.“
- Go Here to add your Gmail inbox as a feed to Google Reader (could be good if you use your reader more than email).
- Google Reader Search – Funny though it may seem, Google Reader has no search function! Thanks to Greasemonkey scripts, you can get your search box here.
- Google Gears – If you use a laptop and frequently need to be away from an internet connection, you can use Google Gears to read your feeds while you are offline (plane trip, bus ride, etc).
Stay tuned for my next article and video episode. For more tips and tricks, sign up for the Official Tech-Bites.com Newsletter! You will be the first to know whenever I release new articles and videos and receive special subscriber only articles and product reviews.
Jul
13
Del.icio.us – Store and Share Your Bookmarks from Your Browser
Filed Under Firefox, add-ons, bookmarks, del.icio.us, episode, how-to, screencast, sharing, social, tutorial | Leave a Comment
Episode 9 -
Anyone who has lost their bookmarks from a computer crash or accidental deletion knows the pain of losing those “blazed trails” on the Internet. Bookmarks help us keep our bearings in the very big world that is the Internet. So, it makes sense that we should not only back them up, but use them to their fullest in today’s web world.Welcome to the world of social bookmarking.You’ve probably heard of “Del.icio.us” and wondered what it was and whether it could be useful for you.
“First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you’re at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend’s computer.
Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private — only viewable by you — if you like.)
Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember — which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.” – Del.icio.us
This method of bookmark-management is quickly becoming the defacto/preferred method for millions of people. Del.icio.us has already provided extensive information in getting set up with your browser (however, I’ll show you a quick visual of the sign up process on the video) so we will move on to the different things you can do with it once you’re ready to go:
Del.icio.us Registration (this will get you set up with an account, browser buttons, and import your bookmarks -if you want-)
Del.icio.us’ Help Page (great information source)
Also, watch the video to see how I prefer to situate Del.icio.us in Firefox (I prefer to use Firefox’s Quickbar and hide Del.icio.us).
What Now?
So, let’s talk about some of the practical uses for Del.icio.us. I will be using the Firefox version for this article, but the IE version is similar.
Tagging a new site:
From now on, when you want to bookmark a site, you will use the tag button.
- URL: Shows the current address.
- Name: The clickable name that will show up in Del.icio.us and in your bookmarks.
- Notes: Good for communicating the nature of this page to others or simply to remind yourself why you liked it.
- Tags: Important! Separated with commas, you can use these keywords to help yourself and others locate this bookmark later.
- Do Not Share: If you check this box, you are the only Del.icio.us user that can access/search this bookmark. Good for private links.
To sort and browse through the bookmarks you have tagged, just click the . More on using this tool can be found here.
Using Del.icio.us to Find New Sites
This is, perhaps the most important function of Del.icio.us, in my opinion. It pulls everyone’s non-private tags, notes, and links together to create a user-based search engine. It won’t replace Google for most types of research but it is perfectly suited for discovering popular sites.
Method 1:
Go to Del.icio.us and type something into the search bar at the top (or just use the quick search in firefox).
I typed in “learn italian” and these were my results:
The “Best” Match is the bookmark that has the best combination of relevance, recency, and number of saves (others who have bookmarked this site).
Further down the list, however, I see a page that has 1,790 saves. While it may not be the “Best” match, it’s probably worth checking out because so many people considered it worth bookmarking.
In this case, it seems that the numbers were right. The BBC site is very cool. The LearnItalianPod “Best” Match was also cool, though.
It’s usually worth checking at least both the “Best” Match and the result with the most saves.
Method 2:
If you simply go to Del.icio.us, on the front page you can see the hottest pages. These pages are recent and have been rapidly accumulating saves, so it’s a good “buzz” board.
To the right of the “hotlist” you can see some of the tags that are experiencing unusual activity:
On both the “hotlist” and the “tags to watch” areas, simply click one of the tags to get instant results for just that topic. Here’s what I got after clicking “gtd” (“get things done”):
This is a great way to discover new and useful sites or pages on the net.
Sharing Your Links With Others:
Although all your non-private links are shared with everyone already, I’m assuming you might like to specifically share some links with friends or family. Here are the two most common ways to share your links.
Go to Del.icio.us and click “your bookmarks” to see all of your bookmarks. You can link someone there simply by copying the address at the top of your browser. For instance, mine is http://del.icio.us/justaleaf. Anyone can view this page and see my non-private bookmarks.
If you’d rather link someone to a specific set of links, just click the tag that contains those links (ie: “design”) and copy the new address instead. http://del.icio.us/JustaLeaf/design <— the tag is appended to the address.
Whether you are on a account page or looking at a specific tag in that account, you can also add it to your RSS reader (or your friends could) which will alert you whenever new links are added to this list.
Beyond This
Del.icio.us is a very powerful service and there are many, many, ways to utilize it. You can have your links dynamically display on your blog or website, streamline del.icio.us (adventurous only!), view cloud views of your bookmarks, and more. You can also make the interface easier on the eyes, as in the screenshots above, by using this greasemonkey script.
Stay tuned for my next article and video episode. For more tips and tricks, sign up for the Official Tech-Bites.com Newsletter! You will be the first to know whenever I release new articles and videos and receive special subscriber only articles and product reviews.
Jul
6
Flickr: Sharing Your Photos Free & Easy Online
Filed Under episode, how-to, photos, screencast, sharing, social, tutorial | 6 Comments
Episode 8 -
So, you just got (or have been using) a digital camera for your family. Once you figured out how to put those pictures on your computer instead of having to develop all that film, you realized the possibilities were endless.
Now you have 1,000 pictures on your hard drive and you don’t know what to do with them 
.
Most all of the people I know struggle with this. It would cost a fortune to print those pictures; it would take ages to try and mail them, and you don’t know how to resize them for email (we’ve all received those emails where all you can see in the picture is someone’s right eyeball because the picture is so darn huge!).
And to top it all off, you don’t know how to “download them to the internet” (as I hear it so commonly said).
Enter Flickr.
Thanks to Flickr, it can be MUCH easier to share your photos than you think. With the ability to upload on a whim without worries about size, avoid flooding people’s inbox, the ability to run slideshows, and link directly to your photos, Flickr has truly made this seemingly daunting task of uploading your photos to the web a joy and not a chore.
Another reason to consider Flickr over it’s competitors is that it is owned by Yahoo!. This means there is very little chance of Flickr going down overnight as a result of bad business and losing all your photos. For those who want to use online photo sites as a kind of secondary back up, this is very important.
So let’s get this buggy movin’!
Getting Set up:
You are going to need a Flickr account before you can upload anything.
- Just go to flickr.com and click “Create Your Account”
- Sign up with your info (if you already have a Yahoo! account, this will be especially brief)
- Once you are confirmed, just sign in to get started
Getting Photos Online:
Ok, you’ve got your flickr account, a million photos to upload, and a healthy amount of determination. Here are some things you should know at the get go:
- With the free account, you can only update up to 100mb of photos each month (30-70 photos, depending on the size photos your camera takes)
- With the paid account (only $25 a year) you can upload as much as you want
- Use a photo uploader to add photos to your account to keep things as easy as possible
- You CAN make photos private so that only you, or designated others, can view them
For the Brave: Flock, a browser for all platforms and very similar to Firefox (even runs most Firefox add-ons), integrates extremely well with Flickr. If you are adventurous, try it out. It’s really great!
The most basic way to upload a photo is to click “Upload photos” on your flickr page after signing in.
You can add photos simply by clicking “browse” next to one of the 6 fields provided.
You can also see your monthly allowance, set the level of privacy you want on the photos you are uploading, and you can quickly add a tag to them (ex: “Disneyland Trip”) to help others (including yourself) find them later by using keywords.
Also on this screen is “Uploading Tools“. I highly recommend clicking this and downloading an uploader for your computer to ease uploading multiple photos. For this article I will be using the jUploadr since it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux (but feel free to try the “official” uploader for your Operating System).
After downloading the appropriate version (in my case, Windows), I unzip it to a folder on my computer and click jUploadr.exe to start it up. (if this sounds too complicated to you, just download the official Flickr Uploadr) Mac users just drop jUploadr into your applications folder, as usual. For the official how-to for all versions, click here.
Once jUploadr is up, just do the following to connect it to your Flickr account (make sure you are already signed in to Flickr):
- Click Edit > Preferences
- Click Authorize jUploadr
- Click “Authorize” on the pop-up you will see
- Flickr will display a page in your browser confirming that jUploadr is “Authorized” (or it may ask you to confirm).
- Finally, go back to jUploadr and click “Complete Authorization”
- If every thing went ok, you should see this message:
It’s all downhill from here .
Uploading Photos Using jUploadr
This is the pay-off. From now on, uploading your photos is as simple as dragging-and-dropping your files into jUploadr! Here’s an example:
Here are my photos from my recent trip to Italy that I didn’t go on.
I drag a box around them and drag them all into jUploader.
Just double-click any of these photos to modify their upload settings (if you want)
When I’m ready, I just click upload!
When all the pictures are checked off, that means that you are done with the upload. Just go to your flickr page to take a look at them! They’re online… Now what?
There is so much you can do with these photos from this point forward, but we are just going to focus on the most common task.
Sharing with friends and family online
To link people to a specific photo, just click the photo in your flickr account and click the “all sizes button“.
Then you can use the link provided to link others via email, chat, etc.
If you wanted to share the whole batch of photos that you just uploaded, probably the quickest way is using tags. Sets are great too, but they are limited to 3 for free accounts, so we will use the tags example for this article.
The quickest way to get this done (rather than tagging your photos one-by-one) would either be to tag them while in jUploader or to do the following:
Click the little arrow next to Organize and click “Most recently uploaded photos”
This automatically allows you to edit your last uploaded batch as a group
Next click “Add Tags” and enter in something relevant (use quotes if it is more than one word)
Now if you visit one of your pictures, you will see a tag on the right side of it
By clicking that, you will be taken to a view that shows only pictures with that tag… kind of like a folder.
Just copy the address in your address bar (at the top of your browser) and now you can link people just to these pictures! They can even come view it as a slideshow.
Beyond This
Most users of the paid account say that it is worth every penny. Unlimited uploads, sets, and more means that you can really use Flickr to it’s maximum. At $25 a year (at the time of this article), if you take a lot of pictures, this is a no-brainer.
For those of us who couldn’t max out the monthly upload limit if we wanted to, Flickr still stands as one of the net’s best free services. But there are other ways you can spend your money at Flickr.com; from having prints made, to making custom coffee mugs, to professional picture books.
I’ll leave you with a couple links to some extras:
Camera Finder : Which are the best cameras for digital photographers? Graphs and more found here.
Do More with your Photos! : Lots of cool ways to print and use your photos.
Flickr Programs : Some free, some paid. Many cool. This is where I found jUploadr.
All this and we didn’t even get into the social capabilities of Flickr for networking with friends, family, or photographers with similar interests. And Greasemonkies (see my Greasemonkey video/article if you are not familiar with what it is) and don’t forget to see what you can do with Flickr at Userscripts.org. It’s all there and more if you want to pursue it!
Have fun with your photos.
Stay tuned for my next article and video episode. For more tips and tricks, sign up for the Official Tech-Bites.com Newsletter! You will be the first to know whenever I release new articles and videos and receive special subscriber only articles and product reviews.
