The Spinning Donut

I’ve read many bloggers around the web who recommend buying a domain name and setting up your blog with a web hosting service. That is considered the de-facto standard or professional way to setup a blog.

However, while I agree with that thinking for the most part, I found myself in a casual conversation recently with someone who wanted to start blogging. He asked me what I recommend he do to get started blogging. He wanted to start blogging for more than just family and friends. Sure, easy question (not really).

I told them I had been blogging for around six months and that I’m also helping my wife with her blog. I knew the person I was talking to and he’s not too technical of a person. He has a young family - wife and two kids under 10 years old. I know their kids are involved in after school activities that keep the whole family busy as well as all the regular stuff young families do together - home at night in front of the television, helping with homework, going here and there, etc.

My first thoughts were, tell this guy he doesn’t have the time. Which, if you’ve been blogging regularly for 1-3 months, you know the time commitment.

I decided to give him the keep it short and get to the point way of blogging. I also knew he had a Gmail account so I told him to browse over to www.blogger.com which is now owned by Google and since he had a Gmail account use his Gmail login to get started.

I briefly talked to him about some of the stuff you learn about blogging as you start a new blog, like:

• It’s harder than heck. DANG!!
• What do you want to write about?
• Who’s your audience? Who do you see coming back to your blog day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after-year.
• Do you think you can write decent blog articles regularly enough so that when you get some readers they’ll come back to your blog?
• Do you want to make money with your blog?
• Is your family going to understand that even though you work a “normal” job 8 hours a day that you want to write your blog during your own time?
• Do you have “your own time?”
• Can you have “your own time” without interruptions?
• Will you make any of your family members mad? “You used to have time for us.”
• What will you do if you become addicted to it?
• Will you know if you’re addicted to it?
• Will your “normal” job be affected by your blogging in such a way that the quality of your work that you do for your “normal” job suffers?
• Watch out if you find yourself blogging on a night that you and your spouse used to call “Date Night”. If so, then most likely you’re addicted to blogging and your spouse will soon start acting differently towards you. Like in a bad way.

I told him if he was really serious about blogging, to go home and fire up his favorite word processing program like Microsoft Word or WordPad and write 3 articles that are at least 500 words long and email them to me within a week.

This exercise would force him to find time to write, write about something that holds his and my interest for more than 500 words (which isn’t too long).

Well, we’ll see what happens. Which brings up a question - How many blogs out there were started and then stopped within a year? We know there are tons of blogs in the blogospere, but I’m wondering how many are just sitting there that were worked on for less than a year and it’s been at least a year since the last post. Hmmmm…

I also emailed him this link to receive a free and very valuable pdf from professional blogger Yaro Starak - The Blog Profits Blueprint.

[techtags: Blogging, Yaro Starak]

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Need to support your mother-in-law’s computer, your father’s computer, your girlfriend’s/boyfriend’s parents computer?

The best way to support the less-experienced computer users in our lives is by NOT supporting them at all.

What!!?

When you support your family and friends computer it could turn into a lifetime of free support by you, and lots of frustrating hours for everyone. Also, the moment you finish fixing their computer, you are setting yourself up to get blamed for anything that goes wrong with their computer forever. Now we’re having fun.

To make your support job easier, I recommend LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a web-based remote desktop system for PCs and Macs, and it’s free. At least one version of it is. I have found that I can support the folks in my life with the free version just fine.

Here’s their Product/Feature Comparison chart. Pay particular attention to the LogMeIn Free column.

At each computer you’ll have to install a small piece of software from the LogMeIn website. After that, you’ll be set to remote to each computer you need to support. You can have the software load when the computer reboots so the computer will be ready and waiting for your connection.

 

[techtags: Free Software, Remote Access, Remote Desktop]

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It’s been said, “Not owning a computer is the most secure computer.” While that’s true, we need to take steps to keep our computer secure.

As a general rule, I like to shut my computer off when I’m away from it for long periods of time. That includes going out for the day or night, as well as going to sleep. Sometimes it’s hard to remember to shut it off. So in this article I’ll show you a way to shut your Windows XP computer off automatically.

Windows XP comes with a program called shutdown.exe and is located in your system32 folder which typically resides under C:\Windows or the main folder where Windows XP was installed.

So let’s set this up quickly:

1. Go to “Start->Control Panel” and click on “Scheduled Tasks” if you’re in “Classic View”. If you’re not in “Classic View” you are probably in “Category View”. In “Category View” you’ll click on “Performance and Maintenance”. Then click on “Scheduled Tasks”. You’ll see the following screen. Double-click the “Add Scheduled Task” icon.

2. Click “Next” on the “Schedule Task Wizard” screen (below).

3. Click the “Browse” button on the next screen that lists the different applications you can select from (below).

4. Browse to C:\Windows\system32 and select the program shutdown.exe (below).

5. After selecting shutdown.exe, select “Daily” for “Perform this task:” (below).

6. I sleep during the night. That’s why I shut my PC down automagically at 3:00am (below). But, I run some jobs automatically at 1:00am - virus scan and spyware scan, which will be part of a future article. Feel free to adjust this time to fit your schedule.

7. You’ll be asked to provide a user name and password that will be used to run this task (below). Warning: If you don’t know your password, that ok. You can add or change it later. If you don’t provide the correct password, you’ll get an error screen after this step. However, you’ll still be able to finish this process.

8. At this point you’ve successfully added a new schedule task to run at 3:00am. However, let’s click on the “Open advanced properties fro this task when I click Finish” checkbox and click “Finish” so we can add some command line parameters to shutdown.exe (below).

9. You’ll be presented with the following screen.

10. Add the following command line parameters as seen below and here - C:\Windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 60 -c “Daily Shutdown” -f. The -s stands for “Shutdown the computer”. The -t 60 stands for “Set timeout for shudown to xx seconds. Feel free to adjust that. You never know when you’re going to be working at 3:00am, so it’s nice to have 60 seconds to prepare for the shutdown. The -c stands “Shutdown comment” which shows up on the screen when the PC is shutting down. And finally the -f stands for “Forces running applications to close without warning”.

11. There’s nothing to change on “Schedule” tab. However, feel free to adjust anything that pertains to your work environment or routine.

12. I also leave the “Settings” tab alone. Again, change what you need to or experiment what suits your work style.

13. This is the final screen (below) that pops up when the task runs. You will have 60 seconds to close applications if you need to.

That’s it!! Now you can rest assured your PC is shut down and half way secure while you’re away from your PC.

Filed Under Microsoft Windows | 6 Comments »

Cyan & Collis Ta’eed of the wildly popular Freelance Switch website that provides outstanding advice, jobs and resources for freelance techies, creative web folks, and I would imagine any freelancer, have released an eBook called How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer. The eBook contains 212 pages of expert freelancing advice.

 

I just started working my way through the eBook and here’s the table of contents:

1. Getting Started
2. Your Brand
3. The Working Day
4. Getting your First Projects
5. Project Scope and Timing
6. Pricing Yourself
7. Doing the Project
8. Clients
9. Getting Paid
10. Marketing Yourself
11. Expansion

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In this video we’ll take a brief tour of Microsoft Access 2007. Access 2007 is a database management system or DBMS for short. You can think of a database management system as your phone book - listing people, addresses, and companies all sorted alphabetically.

Access can be used to create databases that track your home inventory to providing data entry screens and reports that access large quantities of company data.

The common objects that make up Access 2007 include:

• Tables
• Forms
• Queries
• Reports

Tables - Tables allow you to store data. A database could have one or more tables. A table could store names of people.

Queries - Queries allow you to extract data from your tables.

Forms - Forms allow you to enter, view and edit your data.

Reports - Reports allow you to present your data in the tables or queries in a readable and printable style. Access reports work well with other Office applications such as Word and Excel.

Like other Office applications, Access 2007 also provides wizards to help you get started creating a database quickly. For now, we’ll open the existing Nutrition database to view the various objects that you work with in Access 2007.

As you can see, the navigation pane allows us to work with Tables, Queries, Forms, and Reports.

Like other Office applications, Access 2007 uses the new Ribbon to navigate its features. The tabs on the Access 2007 Ribbon include:

• Home
• Create
• External Data
• Database Tools

Each tab contains groups of controls that allow us to manipulate our database while we create it and modify it.

The Quick Access toolbar allows us to add our favorite commands for quick access.

Don’t forget the Alt key for keyboard shortcuts. Pressing the Alt key will show “badges” that display the shortcut to a menu or command.

Click here to access the corresponding video to this post.

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In this video we’ll take a brief tour of Microsoft Publisher 2007. Publisher 2007 has been around for a while and has a rich set of design tools. These tools will allow you to build sophisticated publications for print or online.

Some of the new features of Publisher 2007 include:

• The new Content Library where you can reuse various objects
• You can customize templates before using them
• A new task pane called Publisher Tasks
• Convert publications to PDF (very cool)
• Formatting tools that offer effects such as drop shadow, reflections, glow colors, and more.

Publisher

When we first start Publisher 2007 we are presented with a work area that allows us to select different types of popular publications. The left side of the work area includes all the publication types as well as a “My Templates” area and a “Getting Started” area that will return us to the work area that we’re at right now.

So let’s select a publication type of “Business Cards”. Everyone likes to create business cards. After selecting this type of publication, we’re presented with the various templates of business cards to choose from.

You can see we have a “New Designs” area as well as “Classic Designs” and the Microsoft Office Online templates that we can download. If you’re a company that has an established brand look and feel, then starting with one of the blank templates will help get you going.

So let’s select one and click on the “Create” button in the lower right-hand corner. We are now presented with the “Format Publication” task pane.

The Format Publication task pane includes the Business Card Options area, the Font Schemes area, the Color Schemes area and the Page Options area. All these areas help you design your publication which in this case is a business card.

In Publisher 2007 we don’t have the Ribbon that we’ve been talking about in the other videos. We are back to the standard menu structure as well as the familiar toolbar structure.

Click here for the video that corresponds to this post.

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