Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Entreprenuer/Small Biz
DEAL ALERT: Free Custom URL Registration + Email Account
May 26th
You know you should get a custom website address and email account.
Stop letting Gmail and Yahoo!Mail take over your identity.
It’s time you buy your own URL and then start using that for your email correspondence . . . For $0.00!
The world’s largest webhost, 1and1 Internet is giving away free URL registrations (worth about $8-10) for the first year. And included in their URL service is free 2GB email accounts.
Even if you “buy” a new domain for $0.00 and then transfer after the waiting period to your own webhost, this is a great promotion to take them up on: 
http://bit.ly/freeurlregistration
How To Transfer Big Files To Co-workers, Friends, Family Via Email
May 15th
These days, sending big files to other people via email (or even yourself!) is becoming more and more common.
Any video file, or those huge 12-15 megapixel photos of the kids’ soccer game, etc sometimes exceed the email attachment limits of your email provider.
Most of the popular web-mail email services like Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, and AOL all have file size limits of 25 MB or so for attachments. This means that you may have to send multiple emails, each with the various files you want to send, or you may even be prevented from sending the file at all if it is a large file. Video files typically encounter problems when trying to send through email.
So what can you do besides invoking snail mail? or waiting to hand over a CD or DVD the next time you see the other person?
There are free services online that let you upload files, and then simply send a download link that are live for a limited period of time – many times just a week or less, giving the recipient enough time to retrieve the file before the file become unavailable. Although there are services which let you transfer files via peer-to-peer, so that you don’t have to upload and leave your file in the hands of someone else, most people will want to use web-based services which temporarily hold onto your file until the recipient grabs it at their own convenience.
One of the services I’ve recently been using has an upper limit of 1 GB of file size, deletes the file after 5 days, allows up to 20 downloads of the file and is free. . . Read the rest of this entry »
How To Schedule Meetings Without Pulling Your Hair
Apr 1st
“Let’s do lunch sometime…”
“Do you want to grab some coffee soon?”
“When can we get together?”
This happens all the time. And of course, it never happens…for the majority of people you hear this from.
Here’s a neat little web app that’s good at what it does. It is simple and straight-forward. Introducing. . . Doodle.
A cute little, easy-to-remember name too!
Basically, you go to www.Doodle.com and set-up a mini “poll” where you can enter the topic, location, and then as many options as you want – with a label for the day & time. It auto-generates a neat little web-form that your friend or associate can respond to with their best options available.
What I love about Doodle.com is:
- It allows you to ask the receiver about a *more than one* potential meeting times
- It allows the receiver to input *preferences* for each time proposed that’s very easy to do. No more strings of back-up options explained in long, lengthy, sometimes confusing emails (I can do Tuesday from 1-2p and then again from 3-3:30p but if that’s doesn’t work, Wed and Thurs from 10:30-11:30, and Wed only at 4pm-5pm. . .yada yada yada)
- It’s easy and free.
You can probably see how practical this is for setting up your next meeting, group/committee session time, etc. No more hair-pulling stress going back and forth and back and forth between the team members. Hope you can find some good use for Doodle.
Try it, you’ll like it!
Here’s some more reasons why you’ll like it!
- There’s an iPhone app
- You can use doodle from within Facebook, iGoogle, and other places
- Words with Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, iCal, Lotus Notes, Y!Calendar and more.
QUESTION: What group or meeting do you think this service could help out with in the next month?
Twitter 201: What Can You Do With Twitter?
Feb 10th
Once you get past the initial learning curve required to really understand that Twitter is not just knowing what everyone eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you start to ask, what else can I do with Twitter?
There’s actually a TON of stuff for which Twitter is useful. That’s why there’s a social media revolution afterall. But the Twitterverse isn’t so easy for newbies to get on what seems like a speeding bullet train at times.
The best place to start for most is to understand that you can control what you get out of Twitter. It is not just a continuous moving feed of random tweets from all that you follow. Once you find Twitter Search, your imagination starts to open up for what you can do with Twitter.
Here’s a quick video that explains just a few practical things you can do with Twitter beyond monitoring your network’s latest moves and ponderings:
Outsource Your Work With Freelancers
Dec 7th
Not enough time in the day? Too much to do, too little time?
It’s time to look at outsource some of your workload. Hiring freelance coders, designers, proof readers, presentation specialists or even plain old virtual assistants can help save the day.
Nowadays, there are online marketplaces where you can go to find the help you need. You are able to submit a job description for small jobs (I’ve done jobs as small as $15) to full blown long-term contractor jobs. You can look to outsourcing as a virtual workforce or like a place to get digital handymen to fix the small things that you just don’t have the time nor people to do it in house.
Three in particular worth a look are among the biggies:
oDesk
oDesk‘s angle is interesting – this service tries to ensure that every minute billed to your project is actual work. So you’re not getting billed for when they go to the bathroom, go outside to check their mail, fix a snack in the kitchen, etc. In fact, they offer per minute pricing via a proprietary remote desktop contractor interface that monitors keystrokes, provides periodic screenshots so you can actually see what your contractor is doing if you so wish to.
Rentacoder
I’ve been using rentacoder.com for smaller jobs. They have a lot of coders around the world that offer decent pricing. Like all of these marketplaces, you have to decide for yourself if you’re willing to open up your bidding to contractors where English is NOT their primary language, etc. Their communication interface keeps track of all discussion you have back and forth so that if there is a need to dispute in the end, a record of everything agreed to is available. They escrow your money for the job and won’t release it until the entire project is done and you approve the release.
eLance
This marketplace got bought out by eBay several years ago, and got a lot of attention – quickly making it one of the “big guys” in the outsourcing marketplace marketplace. The key to any job listing is that you have a lot of coders that are available so that you can get quality help – and also increase competition. Elance fits this picture. Although sometimes because of its prominence, sometimes the overall pricing might come out a little high (vs. if you listed the same project elsewhere). Worth testing to see if you like their platform for some jobs.
There are a bunch of other coder marketplaces too like scriptlance.com, guru.com, etc. All worth checking out. The key point is that you should identify a small job in front of you and test the waters to see if outsourcing is for you.
How To Boost Your Ebay Sales With A Single Click
Nov 2nd
With so many listings, it is vital to capture your audience at first glance when you are selling your merchandise on eBay.
Customers often become inundated with the overwhelming number of like items available for sale on eBay. Your job is to catch their eyes and pull them in. The best way to do this is, take better photos.
If you just take a little extra time to setup a simple photographer’s set, it will be worth it. The best part is that you don’t need fancy equipment or dedicate space in the house. You can achieve this by using everyday items found around the house, you will be able to sit back and watch as your eBay views and sales skyrocket.
The best part about this competitive edge is that you can create your own professional looking photo set with items that probably are already in your home. Here’s a look at how to boost the look of your eBay listings with ease . . .
• table/stool
• white sheet/table cloth
• 2 chairs
• rope – about 10ft
• light (softbox if possible)
• white pillow case
First, place your table near some large windows with one chair on each side of the table. Between the chairs tie your rope — this is used to create a white backdrop by draping the table cloth over the cord.
Use a very light table cloth that will diffuse the light from the window, but be careful not to use to thin or thick of a sheet. This could result in a gray background, or over exposure from the sun.
Then place a light/softbox in front of the table. If you do not have a softbox use the pillow case to cover the light. This will help create a soft lighting effect. Lower and adjusted lighting as needed. While shooting be sure to keep make sure only the white from the sheet is in the photo. Also keep an eye out for random shadows.
When shooting your eBay product photo, be sure to get as much light as possible on the item you’re selling on eBay. This will allow users to view small details better.
That’s it! This is a really quick and simple way to create a better product shoots with every day household materials. Once you start to post some better photos of your items, they’ll stand out in the eBay gallery and search listings.
Hope this mini tutorial teaches you about one CLICK (of the shutter!) that you’ll want to master which leads to more sales and higher winning bids!
Matt Johnson – Social media guru, with a love for connecting with people around the world. His passion for food and photography are evident in his two personal blogs BibleDogMan.com and NoGrilledOnion.comHow To Bulk Submit To Social Bookmarking Sites
Oct 26th
Social media is all the rage these days.
Anyone with a website knows they should be submitting their website pages to the various social bookmarking sites to gain better visibility on the web.
But we’re also talking about a time consuming task to do the repetitive submissions to the top social bookmarking sites like: Digg.com, Propeller, Delicious, Reddit.com, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Mixx, Twitter, Furl.net, etc.
There are completely automated tools that submit in bulk, but sometimes they can be seen as spam. The next best thing to manual hand submissions one at a time is to use a semi-automated tool. . .
SocialPoster.com allows you to set-up the basics first and then go through various filtered lists of social bookmarking sites and quick-click-thru to the posting page with the main data pre-populated for you.
Here’s a video walk-through tutorial of the process of using socialposter.com:
It won’t completely eliminate the time-consuming task of manually submitting to dozens of social bookmark sites, but it certainly will shave off a decent portion of time spent on the task. Moreover, it will help you to consistently submit to the top sites using socialposter.com’s list of sites.
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!