Computer and Web Articles

Are you a regular poster on forums? Do you leave comments on the blogs that you read? Organize and keep track of all your online conversations with the fabulous set of tools offered by CoComment.

In sum, CoComment displays all the conversations you’re tracking in one convenient, organized location; it works just like an e-mail inbox. When you’re tracking your conversations, CoComment alerts you when someone’s added a comment.

CoComment offers three main services. The first automatically collects comments and efficiently shares conversations.

The second allows you to efficiently browse conversations and discover new sites and people. The third lets you create a group to share conversations with others.

Learn more here: www.cocomment.com.

The people behind SmugMug are 100 percent dedicated to nothing other than your personal, priceless photos; they built SmugMug to act as a place where people like you and me can easily and securely store all our digital photos.

SmugMug’s standard account costs $39.95 a year and offers unlimited storage for all your digital photography, meaning you never have to worry about running out of room. Your photos are backed up four times across three states, so you also don’t need to worry about accidentally losing or deleting your photos. You receive “white glove support” with real people responding to your e-mail questions. And with their homepage stating “Your photos look better here,” it’s no surprise that SmugMug offers its members plenty of gorgeous, ad-free photo gallery themes in which they can display their shots.

SmugMug standard accounts also come packed with easy photo organization tools, photo-e-mail tools, crop tools that let you chop out the bad parts, comment notifications, friends and family networking tools, and the capability to personalize with professionally designed themes.

Learn more at www.SmugMug.com.

• http://tinyurl.com/6z2y4h — Like shopping for unique handmade jewelry? Have a look at the work of Stones and Starling and see if anything here tickles your fancy.
• www.toggl.com — A unique program designed specifically for fast and effective time management. Features include live tracking, different workspaces for different employees/teams, permissions, client and project settings, exports, reports, and a desktop widget. Toggl is free and takes less than a minute to sign up and test it out.
• www.ipod mechanic.com /deathclock — An amusing site that provides visitors with estimates on how much longer their iPods will last.
• www.rhymezone.com — Visit rhymezone.com and type in a word to find its rhymes and synonyms. You can even organize your search results by syllables or letters. Cool. Especially if you’re a poet or writer of song lyrics.
• www.carbonneutral.com — A site dedicated to neutralizing and reducing the carbon emissions from individuals and businesses alike. Shop for carbon-neutral products, dedicate a tree, learn more about carbon neutral homes, or take a look at the site’s carbon neutral calculators.

Question: I often use AOL Instant Messenger to chat with contractors and clients living in other parts of the world. However, because many of these conversations contain sensitive information, I’m concerned about the security of my chats. Is there a way to encrypt Instant Messenger conversations? Even better, is there a free way to do this?

Answer: Yep, there sure is. Visit this link: http://tinyurl.com/3mskdq; it’ll take you to a page on the Download.com where you can download a program called Trillian (for free, of course). Trillian is a full-featured, stand-alone chat program that will let you connect to AOL Instant Messenger and then encrypt your chat conversations so that they can’t be read by others.

As a side note, in addition to AOL Instant Messenger, Trillian supports ICQ, MSN, IRC and Yahoo Messenger.

No more sifting through music magazines and searching for articles on the bands you’re interested in. Introducing Idio — the free, daily, online music magazine completely customized and built from the ground up based on your favorite music artists.

Stay in the know about the artists and music genres that you care about while discovering new music that appeals to your individual tastes. Your personalized “IdioMag” will let you read articles, play music tracks, watch videos, check for concerts, buy mp3s or tickets, and share it all with friends and family (if you’d like to do so, that is).

Head over to www.idiomag.com to learn more and sign up — it’s completely free.

Instead of scrolling with the sidebar or your mouse wheel while reading long sections of text on the web, just hit your space bar. Your screen will immediately scroll about one screen-height down.

So then how do you scroll back up, you ask? Just make sure the Shift key is held down when you tap your spacebar and your screen will move up instead of down.

Simple, easy, fast.

• www.worldhum.com — A site dedicated to “exploring travel in all its facets: how it changes us, how it changes the way we see the world, and finally, how travel itself is changing the world.”
• www.skyscanner.net — An alternative to Expedia that allows you to search for cheap flights.
• www.pando.com — Send files up to 1GB (that’s big!) via any e-mail or IM for free.
• www.recuva.com — A free utility for PCs that restores accidentally deleted files from your computer. According to the site, Recuva will not only bring back files emptied from your computer’s Recycle Bin, it will recover files deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses. Quite a valuable free service, in my opinion.
• www.callercomplaints.com — Stop feeling so helpless and frustrated when the telemarketers call. Visit callercomplaints.com and search the site to learn more about a telemarketer that’s been calling you or submit your own complaint to help stop the annoying calls.

Certain work projects have had me spending a good deal of time researching the effectiveness of online stores and the latest in eCommerce trends. While there’s an endless number of opinions out there, I continually ran into the following pointers for owners of online stores.

Did you take each of these issues into account when building your online store? Or, if you’re in the process of building an online store, make sure to take these guidelines into account.

1. Always remember: The more clicks visitors have to make, the less likely they are to make a purchase in your online store.
2. Ask yourself: Does the design of my online store reflect my company’s brand? (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked the “online store” links on websites only to find myself staring at what appeared to be a totally different design. Very confusing.)
3. Make sure your check-out process is as simple as possible.
4. Ensure that it’s easy and obvious for visitors to review your warranty and returns information before they make a purchase.
5. Do everything you can to make sure your visitors never feel surprised during their shopping experience. For example, don’t wait until the final order confirmation screen to display applicable taxes — be upfront and clear about them before your visitors check out.

It’s not necessary to visit www.FedEx.com or www.ups.com to track your packages. In fact, it’s almost scary how easy it is to track FedEx and UPS packages with Google.
Allow me to demonstrate Let’s say I had a UPS tracking number of “1Z9999W99999999.” To track that package, I’d simply visit www.google.com and plop that tracking number into the search box and hit the search button. Done. Really. Try it!