Computer and Web Articles

1. www.xtranormal.com – Warning: Do not visit this link unless you have a bit of extra time on your hands. The site’s premise is as follows: “If you can type, you can make movies.” And it’s true. You can make a movie in minutes with the sets, sounds, and actors of your choice. You’ve got drag and drop animations along with automatic lip-sync; this means you type, your 3D actor speaks. Anyone out there a bike racer? Or have a significant other who is a bike racer? Then you MUST MUST MUST watch this xtranormal video: http://tinyurl.com/yloevej.
2. http://tinyurl.com/ykdfedw - I know I’ve provided a link to food-related USB Flash Drives in the past–HOWEVER–I came across these delicious cake USB Flash Drives and I thought…. Oooooh cake. It’s always time for cake, right? Cake Royale … French Mille-Feuille, Strawberry Torte, Black Forest…
3. http://tinyurl.com/5gw663 - If you’re going to complain, at least do so in a manner that gives you a chance to benefit from your efforts. The purpose of drafting purposeful complaint letters, in a nutshell, is to artfully say “it will cost more to ignore me than to take care of my problems.”
4. http://tinyurl.com/2k7rhz - Ahem. I give you: “Twenty-Eight Ways to Make Money with Your Website”
5. http://tinyurl.com/ygdfmho - “Help! My computer is full of spyware and I don’t know what to do?!” Well, I can’t help you. We here at timeforcake don’t fix computers. That being said, I did find this fantastic blog post, and I suggest you either read it right this second (if your computer is currently full of spyware) or bookmark it (in case your computer becomes full of spyware in the future).

The fact that your business website’s copy is good doesn’t guarantee that it will be read. Your copy may be useful, effective, and persuasive when read from start to finish, but it may not be living up to its potential if it doesn’t respect a basic web truth:

For the most part, when reviewing information on the web, people do not read. They skim.

As much as you may love those long, detail-rich paragraphs expounding the wonders of your many qualifications and accomplishments, most people have neither the time nor patience to read through them.

To turn your good text into great text that allows people to first skim through your content, simply chunk it up. Break large paragraphs into smaller, bite-sized portions of content. Use headlines above areas of text to let your visitors know what that text focuses on. Take those long lists of accreditations, clients, or products and arrange them in easy-to-skim-through bulleted lists.

MYour site’s visitors can’t be educated or influenced by all that text you wrote if they never read it. So consider setting aside a small bit of time to review your site’s copy and, if it’s a bit on the wordy side, chunk it up to increase the likelihood of it being read by your site’s visitors.

1. http://tinyurl.com/yz9fk9s - Allow this YouTube video to introduce you to the future of computer mice.
2. www.LetterMeLater.com – Send out emails to anyone you wish – “with the ability to have them sent at any future date and time you choose.” Features include a LetterMeLater widget, the ability to send recurring emails, the ability to send scheduled text messages to cell phones, and a function for importing your contacts and creating grouped mailing lists.
3. http://tinyurl.com/ygdjo6t - Oh how I wish more Twitter users would read this blog post, written by Denver copywriter Erika Napoletano, entitled “How to be annoying on Twitter in 3 easy steps.”
4. http://tinyurl.com/6mmnu3 - Are you mucking up your website’s analytics without knowing it? If you Google Analytics users haven’t filtered out yourself and your coworkers, you very well might be skewing your site’s statistics. Would you really feel so proud about your 400 website visits last week if 250 of those visits were actually you and your office pals – because you all have your site set as your homepage? Visit this link to learn how you can easily filter yourself and others out of your Google Analytics tracking.
5. http://tinyurl.com/yed9xbs - Hang your clothes, save the world? Sounds a bit easier than having to save the cheerleader.

Sound the trumpets! Clang the bells! Let it be known to all Summit County residents that we have a local telephone company right here in Breckenridge!

Summit Telecom offers three great plans for you to choose from, they donate $1 from each monthly bill to the National Forest Foundation to help replant Summit County forests, and best of all, all their plans include free long distance! I don’t think it gets much better than that. In fact, most companies and businesses that switch to Summit Telecom find they save close to 40% on their phone bills.

In 2002 my company began using Qwest for its phone service. Our monthly phone bills typically fell within the $50 to $60 range—and this did not include long distance service. We’ve since switched to Summit Telecom and, not only do we feel great about supporting a local business, our monthly phone service now costs $39.95 per month—and that includes national long distance service!

Sign up or learn more today. Call Summit Telecom at (970) 776-5882 or visit their website: www.DialSummit.com.

Keyboard shortcuts allow you to do your computer work quickly and more efficiently.

Think about all the poor people who don’t realize they can copy text with Ctrl + C and paste that text with Ctrl + V. Every time they want to copy and paste they select text with their cursor, move their cursors up to the Edit menu option at the top of their screen, click on that Edit menu option, move their cursors down, and select Copy. They then repeat an almost identical process to paste their text. Slow, inefficient, and tedious work.

But of course you already know about Copy and Paste, yes? Let’s look at some other useful keyboard shortcuts you can put to work for you.

• Ctrl + A: Selects everything! In Word this will select every single letter, word, image, etc. that’s sitting in your document. If you’re in a Windows folder, this will select every single file within the folder.
• Ctrl + B: This will bold text in many programs (Word, Excel, etc.).
• Ctrl + D: This allows you to quickly mark a web page as a Favorite when you’re using Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer.
• Ctrl + I: This will italicize text in many programs (Word, Excel, etc.).
• Ctrl + Q: This quits most programs. All done with your Excel spreadsheet? Finished up your Photoshop comp? This will close the program down for you, pronto. (If you’ve not saved your work yet, you’ll be prompted to do so before the program closes–don’t worry.)
• Ctrl + U: This will underline text in many programs (Word, Excel, etc.).
• Ctrl + Z: Undo!! Undo!! Make an error? Typo? Enter the wrong information? This will save you. I use it many, many times a day. (Sadly though, it can’t help you take back emails you shouldn’t have sent.)
• Ctrl + Esc: In PCs, this will pop open your Start menu (no need to click the Start button at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen).

1. http://tinyurl.com/28ecn8 - [For Mac users only] No more painfully slow load times or massive onslaughts of advertisements from weather sites like Accuweather and Weather.com. You have an alternative, and it’s called Seasonality. Developed by Gaucho software, Seasonality is a little software program created specifically for “visual, information hungry weather buffs” that includes features such as graphs, satellite images, and astronomical data. Take it for a 30 day test drive for free. If you like what you see and choose to purchase Seasonality, it will set you back a total of $24.95.
2. http://tinyurl.com/6l5or7 - Fifteen super easy, super quick, neat things you can do with Excel. What can one possibly do in Excel that’s neat? How about adding smooth, rounded borders to your charts? Filling those tabs at the bottom of your spreadsheet with color? Fetching live stock quotes or company research with a single click? Eh?
3. www.backtype.com – Find out what people are saying about you, your company, or topics that interest you. In real-time. This conversation search engine indexes and connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks, and other social media.
4. http://tinyurl.com/yu77p6 - Attention all Outlook-using business owners and employees! Learn how to set up better (and multiple) out-of-office responders. Please? I’m asking you nicely. Please learn how to do this. It is truly annoying when you leave for vacation and I send you an email and receive no response. I think you’re ignoring me and I try to follow up with you despite the fact that you’re actually going to be sitting on a beach in Hawaii drinking Coronas for another week and a half. I had no idea; you never told me. Setting up a simple autoresponder would have saved me (and all the other people who emailed you) quite a few headaches.
5. http://tinyurl.com/28j9e8 - Still wondering how I make these ‘tiny URLs’ for most of the links in the Grab Bag section? Wish you could shrink long website addresses down so they were shorter and easier to share with others? Here are three tools that put the power of URL-shrinking into your hands! (A note for those thinking “Yeah, I already know how to use TinyUrl – so thanks but no thanks”: read this post to learn about two alternatives to TinyUrl that offer an additional, useful benefit…)

Few business owners would say they want to frustrate their websites’ visitors. Yet many unknowingly do just that by failing to ensure that the links on their sites are consistent and easy to spot.

If the links in your homepage text are underlined and blue, make sure the links in the text throughout the rest of your website are underlined and blue. If you have green buttons in the footer of your website and you’re about to add more footer links, make sure they’re green as well.

Sounds simple. Rudimentary. This tip is so basic that you almost feel insulted I would take the time to suggest it. Fair enough.

Consider, though, the fact that over the past week I counted no less than eight Summit County businesses’ websites in which I encountered confusing, inconsistent link-display problems. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I click on items that appeared to be links but were not. It was annoying.

So if you get a chance, you just might want to take a quick look at your business’ website. Not that your website would have link-display consistency issues but … well, you know. It doesn’t hurt to look.

1. www.page-flip.com – Many people love the idea of adding flashy flip books to their websites. Many people love the “page-turn” effect they’ve seen in PDF files. If you’re one of these people, I believe you’d be interested in this website. FlippingBook PDF Publisher is an “easy-to-use professional desktop editor” that will help you replicate these fancy-schmancy page-turning effects.
2. www.pleasedress.me – A “t-shirt search engine” that lets you locate cool shirts on the web.
3. www.pingg.com – Free, stylish online invitations and announcements which, as they say, are “worthy of print.” I actually agree with them; the designs of their invites, eCards, greetings, announcements, etc. are professional and well-done. This is exactly why, within 10 seconds of arriving at the Pingg.com website I wondered, “Okay, so what’s the catch? There’s no way a company can offer a service like this with such beautiful designs for free. They need to make money somehow. So how do they do it?” After a bit more poking around, I discovered that the free cards they send contain advertisements (surprise!!), but if you pay $5, your card/announcement/invite will be ad-free. Suddenly it all made sense. (Oh, and PS: pingg.com delivers to mailboxes as well as inboxes: you click (and pay), they stamp and send.)
4. http://tinyurl.com/mn3gyx - Any do-it-yourself Google Adsense users out there? I think you’d be quite interested in this superpost on understanding Adsense, all its rules, optimization, and ad placement.
5. http://tinyurl.com/yfot7yn - Do icons on your computer’s desktop indicate that programs are actually running—and if so, will these programs slow down your system? Find out here.

Question:
When you use Gmail, what do you use for your antivirus software?

Answer:
Actually, I don’t use Gmail—but I’d still be delighted to answer this question for you…

Gmail scans each email and attachment for you when it first arrives in your inbox; it also performs another scan on each email you open, and yet another scan on each attachment you send out.

While this anti-virus prevention through constant scanning is wonderful and convenient, it doesn’t exempt you from keeping an anti-virus program on your computer. Learn why (and learn more about Gmail’s anti-virus scanning) at http://tinyurl.com/yzg32bh.