The Spinning Donut

Click on image for larger view (1024 x 768)

Above is the outcome of going through a WordPress tutorial at the WPDesigner blog by Small Potato.

Here are the final files that were created and are standard to a WordPress theme. These files provide a standard basis for all WordPress themes. You don’t have to organize your files this way, but it is a standard that makes it easy to follow when creating and studying the code that goes into a WordPress theme.

First a quick list of files and then a bit of a break down on each.

1. style.css - A Cascading Style Sheet controls the way your blog looks consistently through out the various sections of a blog. For example, if you want all the names of each section in the right sidebar to look the same, you would do that in the style.css file. Cascading Style Sheets have been around for a while now and they help you control many aspects of a website or blog in one area - the style.css file. You can read all about cascading style sheets here and go through a tutorial here. Check out Smashing Magazine’s CSS section here for tons of articles, ideas and design.
2. index.php - contains all the posts in your blog including the title of your post and a section called the postmetadata, which is below the main post.
3. header.php - is just what it says, the title of your blog and the description and any customizations can go in the header.php file.
4. sidebar.php - contains the standard search box, archives list, categories of post, calendar, etc.
5. footer.php - contains any information you add to the footer - copyright notice, blog author, etc.
6. single.php - displays a single blog post.
7. comments.php - the comments template where the comments are listed and readers enter comments.
8. page.php - in blogs you can have pages that are typically static information like an About page.
9. archives.php - this allow you to provide a way for your blog readers to look at archives of your blog.
   
10. searchform.php - a search form is the box and search button that provides blog readers to search through your blog.
11. search.php - displays the blog post results of a search, from the searchform.
    
12. functions.php - like its name, this file can contain functions to perform what you need to, like display widgets in a widgetized blog or special print instructions.

Here are some notes and pointers learned from the tutorial:

1. What is the difference between id and class? For every invisible box or DIV, use id to name it. Id is unique and class isn’t. For example, you only have one id=”header” and there’s only one id=”container”, but there are multiple class=”entry”.
2. Can header and container be classes instead of ids? Sure. Keep this in mind - you cannot repeat any id. For example, you can’t have two id=”header” on the same page. When you want to reuse something over and over again like the post entries, use class.
3. The names for classes and IDs can be anything you want them to be. You can name them after… your favorite foods, but post and entry are short, simple, and easier to remember. And standard.
4. Why add another DIV to wrap the post title and post entry? You added the div class=”entry” to separate the post title from the post entry. The div class=”post” is for separating one post from another.
5. Each post now has a number or post ID attached to it. the_ID() simply calls for the id of each post, that’s it. Why use it? It’s for customizing the look of posts, individually. When you use the style.css file to tell your theme how the posts will look like, every post will look the same. With a unique ID attached to each post, you can target a single post and make it look different from the rest of the posts. Without the IDs, you have no way of differentiating the posts within the style.css file.
6. How can you assign both class and id to the same DIV (invisible box)? DIV is a tag, class is an attribute. id is an attribute. Each tag can have multiple attributes just like each DIV can have both class and id. Note: id is an xhtml attribute. the_ID() is a PHP function. They’re different.
7. Adding descriptions to your links is also useful when other sites have to scan your blog. Technorati for example, each time you publish, WordPress notifies Technorati and other sites that your blog has been updated. Technorati then comes to your blog, scans it, and indexes a summary of your post, which includes the link title description.
8. Validate your code with XHTML Validator and CSS Validator. This is tough because most of the top blogs don’t validate to perfect XHTML. I’ve seen static websites validate better than blogs. Please prove me wrong.
9. Test your CSS in multiple browsers - Safari, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer.
10. In CSS, specifically in style.css, the pound sign (#) is how you address a DIV with an id. The period is how you address a DIV with a class. For a class example, if your codes were <div class=”wrapper”> then use .wrapper instead of #wrapper to address the wrapper DIV.
11. Screen resolution 1024 x 768 has become more popular than 800 x 600 according to the statistics at W3Schools and my own traffic statistics. Now I also know, “Statistics are like bikinis, they reveal a lot but hide the vital spots.”
12. margin: 0 auto 0 auto; means (in exact order) 0 top margin, auto right margin, 0 bottom margin, and left auto margin. For now, just remember that setting right and left margins to auto is centering.
13. What’s the difference between the Header and Footer stylings? The answer is the presence of clear: both; in footer{}. It’s there to make sure the Footer doesn’t attach itself to anything above it, like the Sidebar or Container.
14. This is just in case you’re getting a 20px margin instead of a 10px margin. 20px margin would break your layout and push the sidebar to the bottom of the page because a 20px margin makes the sum of the Container and Sidebar widths equal 760px instead of 750px. This extra step is Internet Explorer’s fault because the bug of doubling the set margin doesn’t exist in Firefox. To fix this bug, add display: inline; to the Sidebar.
15. When all your values are the same you can use one number like margin: 0; instead of margin: 0 0 0 0;.
16. Style Inheritance - a certain style that inherits from another style attribute or class.

That’s it for this part of my first WordPress theme. Now that I’m through the tutorial I’m ready to start customizing the theme I’m working. If you’re interested in learning how to create a WordPress theme or just want to know what goes into a theme, check out the tutorial at Small Potato’s WPDesigner blog.

More to come…

Filed Under WordPress | 3 Comments »

My First WordPress Theme

Here’s what I’ve done with my first WordPress theme I’m creating. Why am I creating a WordPress theme when there are a billion of them out there for free and much better than what I can create, as well as all the available premium themes that are outstanding? Well, good question.

My wife is being particular in what she wants on her new WordPress blog. Which is ok, because I want to learn what goes into creating a WordPress theme. Either the theme I create will last for a while or it will get transformed into something else, or will totally go away at some point, and that’s ok. Then we’ll opt for a freebie theme that I can adjust to our liking or a premium theme.

My wife’s an artist and she wants everything together on one site - the blog, the art gallery, about page, and any other pages she thinks of that make sense. She only wants to maintain one site. I’m all for it because I’m the one who’ll maintain it. So after scouring the web and looking at billions of themes I’ve decided to dive in and “Just Do It!!”

Which also means there’s tons of WordPress stuff out there to read about. Thanks everyone who blogs exclusively about WordPress. Thanks for all the information and all the time I have to spend reading. It’s all good though, I’m enjoying it.

I have a technical background in a lot of different programming languages from years past so I feel comfortable digging in and doing this.

My guide for this endeavor is Small Potato’s tutorial series over at WPDesigner. This is a great tutorial series on creating a WordPress theme. I figured it’s a good basis for establishing some standards for creating my first WordPress theme.

As I work through the tutorial I’ll change things the way I want for my situation as well as later on maybe tweaking some of the code based on other WordPress theme creation advice and articles I read and discover.

After working through lesson 5 of 16 lessons, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Theme Title: Scofield

Files created and populated:

• index.php
• style.css

If you don’t understand any of the files I’m talking about and you wish to learn more about creating WordPress themes, and what goes into them, head on over to Small Potato’s blog WPDesigner. You certainly don’t have to do the tutorial but you can skim through it to get a feel for what’s involved.

The output so far is the image at the top of this article. WOW!! Now that’s a minimalist theme.

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photo credit: AMagill

For the new bloggers out there I’ve compiled a list of links for you to read about how bloggers make money with their blogs.

In rummaging through the blogoshere looking for articles on making money with your blog, you run into the word “Monetize” or “Monetization” a lot. Monetize simply means doing something with your blog to make money with it or from it, and there are many ways.

Recently, Daniel over at DailyBlogTips wrote about 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website. In turn, Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey dissected Daniel’s article in a kind of a cut-to-the-chase, what works best when monetizing your blog. I love these kinds of blog posts because you get a huge list from a pro blogger of how folks are making money with their blogs and then another experienced pro blogger validates and paves a path for newbies to focus on when and how to consider monetization techniques. Some of the monetization methods Yaro talks about that work better are:

• Banner Advertising - You can sell space on your blog for banners using your own pricing structure - monthly, annually, etc.
• Text Link Ads - Although Google implemented guidelines rgarding TLAs, some folks still use them and are making money.
• Affiliate Marketing - Sell something for someone else on your blog and you get a percentage of the sale.
• Premium Content and Membership/Mentoring Sites - A good example of this is the course Teaching Sells by Brian Clark at Copy Blogger. You pay a monthly or quarterly, etc. fee for premium stuff - information, services, technology, etc.
• Selling your own website or blog

Other ways to make money from your blog is by offering your knowledge and skills as services. Chris Garrett at ChrisG.com has a nice page explaining what services he offers. Michael Martine of Remarkablogger does this as described on his blog consulting page.

Show Me The Money

I think it’s great when bloggers share how they’re making money with their blogs and how much. Here’s a list of bloggers who do that:

• John Chow’s January 2008 Income - John has a ton of great marketing information at his blog.
• Caroline Middlebrook’s Stats & Analysis for January 2008 - Caroline is the up and coming blogger we all love to watch and read because she’s new, honest and authentic, and the poularity of her blog has grown fast. Her excellent guides she’s written have helped her tremendously - The Big Juicy Twitter Guide and How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress.
• Ben Cook at BloggingExperiment also has his blogging income report published on his blog - January’s Blog Income Report.
• Yaro Starak talks about his income for 2007 in these 3 articles:
  • How I Made Six Figures In One Day - 2007 Year In Review Part 1
  • What Do You Do When Everything Happens At Once? - 2007 Year In Review Part 2
  • You Can Make $20,000 A Month Online - 2007 Year In Review Part 3
  • How I Make Money On Part 4
• Darren Rowse of Problogger has a couple nice articles, well more than a couple, but here are two about how he makes money at his blog:
  • Becoming a ProBlogger - A story in Many Parts
  • How I Make Money Blogging

Build Traffic (Easier said than done)

One key to making money with your blog is through the traffic that makes its way to your blog. Without traffic, it might be difficult to make money with your blog. Here are a couple key articles that stand the test of time on how to build traffic to your blog.

Steve Pavlina’s How To Build A High Traffic Website (or Blog)

Yaro Starak’s 10 Blog Traffic Tips

Filed Under Making Money Online | 6 Comments »

photo credit: Davide Rizzo

Sometimes we overlook the simple pleasures of life and the simple features that are provided to us when we use our computers. There’s nothing more gratifying than watching someone use their computer and let out a burst of joy when they find or use something that makes their computing experience easier.

Take for instance the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Recently I was helping a medical researcher with his computer and he mentioned, “Man that Google search feature is incredible.” I asked him what he was talking about specifically and he went on to talk about how great it was to highlight a word while browsing, right-click and immediately do a Google search on that word. This feature is provided by the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. This feature is built-in to Firefox 2.0.

Listed below are some features of the Google Toolbar.

• Google Safe Browsing (Google Toolbar for Firefox) is a nice feature that used to be a separate add-on but is now built into Firefox 2.0+. Google Safe Browsing watches the sites you visit for phishing and spoofing attacks - web pages that might try and get your personal information like financial information from you by trickery.
• Add custom buttons or select from popular buttons available at the Google Button Gallery. This allows you to put buttons on your Google Toolbar for some of your most frequently visited and favorite sites.
• Another great feature and life saver if you’re a blogger or anyone filling out information on a web page is the Spell Check feature. The Spell Check feature provides an “AutoFix” feature. Let’s say you’ve finished a Google Document, you click on the Google Toolbar “Check” button to check your spelling in the document. You see a few words that are highlighted because of misspellings, you click the “AutoFix” menu choice on the “Check” button and now you’re misspelled words are automagically fixed. You can also click on each misspelled word and you are presented with a pop-up menu of word choices to replace the misspelled word.
• As mentioned above, the ability to highlight a word, right click on that word and search Google is very handy for a lot of folks. When you arrive at pages that contain the word you’re searching on you can use the Google Toolbar’s highlighter and all the occurrences of a word or phrase that you searched on will be highlighted. Pretty cool. See example below.
• There’s a pop-up blocker (Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer) on the toolbar as well. If a page is or isn’t working for you, just click on the pop-up blocker and that should allow the page to work the way you want it to.
• By the way, Firefox has a nice feature that recognizes a web page with an RSS feed and presents an RSS icon to the right of the address for that web page. If you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check this explanation out here.

I highlighted the word “Chronological” on a previous web page, right-clicked and selected Google Search which show me the following page. I turned on the yellow highlighter in the Google Toolbar and all the “Chronological” words on the page become highlighted making it extremely easy to see that word throughout the page.

You can download the Google Toolbar here. There are many more features and here is the link for all the information you need to know about the Google Toolbar for Firefox and here is the link for the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

If you’re an Internet Explorer user, you can download and install Toolbar 5 (BETA) for Internet Explorer here. There is a short video explaining some of the new features of Google Toolbar 5 (BETA) for Internet Explorer.

Have Fun!!

Filed Under Free Software, Productivity | Be The First To Comment »

photo credit: karindalzielkarindalziel

I’m helping convert a Blogger blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog. This is not for the faint of heart or the beginning blogger or other non-technical types.

When I encounter non-technical or semi-technical folks who have been told to use a self-hosted WordPress blog I always think, “There’s got to be a better way.” Of course, a lot of times these folks haven’t been told to hire someone to help them. Some of them go off thinking that WordPress.com was what they’re suppose to be looking at. Yes, there are differences between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.org.

I’ve listed quite a few sporadic questions in my blog post 101 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Blog that you don’t know about until you start blogging for a while and run up against some walls that can make blogging a challenge.

Now, I’m not down on a self-hosted WordPress blog, but for the average Jane and Joe it’s a big undertaking that leads them to the, “There’s got to be a better way.”

Anyway, in my quest to learn how to create and/or alter a WordPress theme, I found a bunch of excellent tutorials and information in general. I’ve listed them here.

Before goofing around with WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to learn a bit about CSS - Cascading Style Sheets as well as PHP - Hypertext Preprocessor. Both very heavy concepts for newbies, but not if you have the time and motivation to want to learn these attributes of WordPress.

Grab a good editor:

• HTML Kit
• UltraEdit
• TextPad
• Free CSS Editors
• PHP-Editors

Fire up your browser and read these two articles to learn how to run WordPress locally on your computer so you can goof around with WordPress:

• Setting Up WordPress On Your PC Using XAMPP
• Setting Up WordPress On Your PC Using EasyPHP

Check out WampServer here. I’ve been running WampServer lately and it’s been working just fine. However, my goal when working with a local server on my PC is to have the ability to move (copy) the whole local environment between a couple different PCs and a notebook. Depending on where I’m at and what I’m working on. WampServer doesn’t seem to like to be copied from one place to another. However the other two work fine when moving between different computers.

After you get that accomplished read some of the following articles for a great run down of what WordPress is made of.

So You Want To Create WordPress Theme Huh? by Small Potato

Designing A WordPress Theme From Scratch by Lorelle On WordPress

How To Create A WordPress Theme by Jonathon’s Tutorials

Theme Development by WordPress

WordPress Theme Generator

Useful Resources For Creating A WordPress Theme by cre8d design

On another note, here’s a great article from last week on writing blog articles from Leo Babauta’s new Write to Done blog titled 12 Essential Blogwriting Tips For Building A Successful Blog.

This week I also downloaded and installed a new WordPress plugin called PhotoDropper. That’s how I inserted the photo at the top of this blog. After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll see an extra box below your WordPress editor (see below).

PhotoDropper allows you to search for photographs directly from Flickr’s CreativeCommons selections. Read Skellie’s article here on using Flickr’s CreativeCommons photographs.

Filed Under WordPress | 1 Comment »

Photo by Hamed Saber

Check out popurls. popurls allows you to view some of the best stuff on the web in one place. It aggregates (collects) a bunch of information from multiple web social sites and displays them in one location for you to browse through. Here’s what you’ll see:

1. Digg

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

2. del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

3. reddit

reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.

4. flickr

Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world

5. newsvine

Updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.

6. metafilter.com

Metafilter is a weblog (what’s a weblog? | comprehensive history of weblogs) that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.

7. truemors.com

The purpose of Truemors is to democratize and spread information. First, from a “citizen journalist/editor” perspective it enables you to “tell the world”—within the bounds of good taste and the law anyway. Second, from a reader perspective, it puts you “in the know” about the latest news, rumors, and happenings, so that “you know better” without having to spend hours every day searching for information.

8. YouTube

YouTube is a popular free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips.

9. news.google.com

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests.

10. news.yahoo.com

Use Yahoo! News to find breaking news, current events, the latest headlines, news photos, analysis & opinion on top stories, world, business, politics, etc.

11. tailrank.com

Tailrank is a memetracker which finds the hottest posts from millions of blogs so you don’t have to!

12. spike.com

IFILM (spike.com) is a leading online video network, serving user-uploaded and professional content to over ten million viewers monthly. IFILM’s extensive library includes movie clips, music videos, short films, TV clips, video game trailers, action sports and its popular ‘viral videos’ collection. IFILM is one of the leading streaming media networks on the internet.

13. wired.com

A division of Condé Nast, Wired Digital is a group of websites that includes both Wired News and Reddit.

14. slashdot.org

In the beginning there was no Slashdot. Bored and confused geeks would scribble “First Post” in the sand. Grits were strictly for consumption and there wasn’t a place to get nerd oriented news. Then in September of 97 Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda changed all that. With the help of Jeff “Hemos” Bates and others, Slashdot has stumbled forward with the simple mission to provide ‘News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters’.

15. boingboing.net

A Directory of Wonderful Things

16. last.fm

Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler music engine. More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users “scrobble” their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world’s largest social music platform.

17. fark.com

The first thing you should know is that Fark.com isn’t a Weblog. Fark.com, the Web site, is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership.

18. nowpublic.com

NowPublic is a participatory news network which mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world. In twelve short months, the company has become one of the fastest growing news organizations with thousands of reporters in over 140 countries. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff.

19. stumbleupon.com

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 4,493,158 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

20. metacafe.com

Metacafe is one of the world’s largest video sites, attracting more than 25 million unique viewers each month (comScore Media Metrix). We specialize in short-form original content - from new, emerging talents and established Hollywood heavyweights alike. We’re committed to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience, and we do so by engaging and empowering our audience every step of the way.

21. mixx.com

Mixx is your link to the web content that really matters. There’s a lot of information out there and, let’s face it, you don’t have all day to find the good stuff (if you do, we’re totally jealous). And who knows better than you what informs you, what makes you think, what makes you laugh? So why should some faceless editor get to decide what’s important?

22. clipmarks.com

We created Clipmarks because we’re fascinated by the moments that snap people out of a day dream. Lets face it, when we read articles in newspapers, magazines, or on the web, we often drift in and out of space. But then there are those moments that smack us in the face and make us take notice. Offline, they’re the moments when you reach for a highlighter or pair of scissors. But online, what do we do when something within a web page jumps out at us? Bookmarking the whole page is not an adequate solution because it doesn’t let us shine the spotlight on the parts that matter the most to us. And copy/paste, forget about it.

23. dzone.com

• DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers
• anyone can submit new links to the incoming queue
• members vote on upcoming links to determine what gets promoted
• everyone can browse, search and comment on links

24. videosift.com

VideoSift is an online community and passionate about Web video. Members submit videos from the best video hosts from around the Net to be voted on by other Sifters with only the best being “sifted” up to the front page. VideoSift was started in February 2006. Since then, we have grown to be the best video aggregator on the Web. PC World magazine agrees.

25. mahalo.com

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links.

26. video.aol.com

AOL Video has millions of free, high quality videos including music videos, news clips, movie trailers, viral videos, and full-length TV shows.

27. twitter.com

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

And that’s not all. More sections at the bottom of popurls page includes:

• quickie - short headlines from many more media sites - it’s Rick Dickulous!!
• voices - todays top talkers people are listening to - seth godin, guy kawasaki and more
• vlogs - video weblogs from more media sites

Below is the popurl main menu.

From left to right on the menu you’ll get:

1. switch between black and white backgrounds
2. switch between normal and larger fonts
3. open links in a new window
4. hide and show story previews
5. show and hide popurlar block - puts the popurlar stuff at the top of the page
6. hide and show media feeds
7. switch to popmania - to show you more stuff there is to read - YIKES!!
8. customize feed arrangement - a very easy way to drag bits of information around on the page for your own liking.
9. switch to river view (not cool)
10. open scrabook - drops down a scrapbook for you to add urls to your scrapbook
11. login with openid
12. search buzz box

In popurls own words:

popurls is the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the internet.

Popurls is a mad cool site and overwhelming in a very nice way.

With a very intuitive user interface you can sit on one page and read title after title on what’s happening on the web and in the world, as well as viewing photo after photo after video after video, etc., etc. The next time you sit down to watch TV, consider popurls. More informative, eye-ball popping and brain filling. Check it out here.

Filed Under Social Media | 2 Comments »

Photo by ninette_luz

Here are six programs to help keep your Windows XP or Windows Vista PC free from spyware, viruses, and intruders. All these programs are free, which is a good thing. However, I encourage you to purchase any of them that you find helpful for your computer in the long term.

Some of the paid for versions of these programs might help you consolidate these tasks. For instance, if you buy a firewall software package, you might get anti-virus and anti-spyware software with that firewall software. If you buy an Anti-Virus software package you might get all the other services with it - firewall, anti-spyware and other services that will keep your computer safe and secure.

This would reduce having to run seperate programs and save you time in keeping your computer safe and secure. But for this article, I’m presenting six software programs that I run to help keep all my Windows XP and Windows Vista computers safe and secure.

Anti-Spyware Software

Here are four Anti-Virus programs I run on my PCs. Some folks might consider this overkill but I will most likely continue to tweak this schedule since I’ve kept all my computers spyware and virus free for a long time now. Here is the list with my schedule.

1. Ad-Aware 2007 - I update and run a full system scan on the last Sunday of every month.
2. Spybot Search & Destroy - I update and run this after Ad-Aware on the last Sunday of every month.
3. SpywareBlaster - I update this after Spybot Search & Destroy on the last Sunday of every month.
4. Windows Defender - This runs a Quick Scan automagically at 2:00am every night. Full scan on the last Sunday of every month.

The fourth program, Windows Defender, I ‘ll mention briefly since I’ve written about the others on this blog but not Windows Defender. Windows Defender is Anti-Spyware software that you can download from Microsoft here.

Windows Defender is a free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software. It features Real-Time Protection, a monitoring system that recommends actions against spyware when it’s detected and minimizes interruptions and helps you stay productive. Now with 2 free support incidents for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Windows Defender is a spyware detection program that allows you to set a schedule to scan your PC for spyware or manually start a scan yourself. There are two types of scans it will do - Quick Scan or Full Scan. I run a Quick Scan every night, automatically at 2:00am.

I run a full scan the last Sunday of every month after all the other programs mentioned above run. Windows Defender gets its spyware updates from Microsoft and automatically updates itself.

Anti-Virus Software

For the fifth software program, I run AVG Anti-Virus Software on my computers. You can read more about AVG at my blog post Protecting Your PC With AVG Anti-Virus Software. You can download AVG here.

So here’s the final daily schedule:

1:00am - AVG virus scan runs

2:00am - Windows Defender runs a Quick Scan

3:00am - My PCs shut down automagically. Read about it here.

Last Sunday of Every Month:

1. Ad-Aware Full Scan
2. Spybot Search & Destroy
3. SpywareBlaster Update
4. Windows Defender Full Scan

Firewall Software

For the sixth and final software program, I run ZoneAlarm, the free version. You can download ZoneAlarm here.

All the above programs can be downloaded from their individual websites, however one website you might not know about that has a bunch of software to help manage your computer is Major Geeks. Major Geeks is a website that’s been around for quite some time and contains a bunch of programs to help manage your PC. All the the above programs can be downloaded at Major Geeks.

Filed Under Free Software, PC Maintenance | 2 Comments »

Photo by PPDIGITAL

This past week I’ve bumped into the following issues experienced by people who use computers to get their jobs done. They are not computer experts. They are computer users, a sideline wanna-be geekette who spends too much time on technology to get things done.

One computer user finds a virus on his PC and dumps the whole computer. “I’ll move from Windows XP to Windows Vista and everything will be ok.” Oh really?

I decided to write about using technology in this post to help those folks that encounter the various technical brick walls of life.

Too Munch Time

“I’ve just spent 12 hours trying to erect a new website with Adobe GoLive. It was very frustrating and after 12 hours my new site looks horrible.” This person is someone who is trying to setup a website to sell products online. Now I don’t know about you, but 12 hours to setup an online businees using Adobe GoLive for a technical wanna-be is NOT the best use of time. I know this person and she likes to be self-sufficient. She tries to do a lot of her own technical work, but she would be better off setting her site up somewhere else. She is neither a web designer or a graphics designer.

Here is the main description of Adobe GoLive from their website.

Adobe® GoLive® 9 software allows both web professionals and graphic designers to visually create sophisticated, CSS-based content. Design graphics in other Adobe applications and bring them to the web with ease, using familiar tools and concepts. Then, publish your site to the web with easy-to-use site management tools similar to those found in Adobe Bridge.

I know Adobe GoLive does a great job and allows you to do a bunch of cool stuff, but I don’t see the word “for beginners” in the description. Adobe GoLive is not for the the casual technical person who wants to setup a website that displays products for sale and everything that involves setting up a website that allows you to run a business online.

Site Build It!

I would recommend someone in this situation to check out Site Build It!. Site Build It! does a lot of technical work for you when you setup your website. It costs $299.00 the first year (think of it as $25.00 per month) and provides everything you need to get an online business website up and running. It also allows you to dig a bit deeper and do some of your own technical work on your SBI website if you so desire.

SBI helps you tweak your online business website to help you concentrate on the product and services you want to sell and not 12 hours of technical wizardry that’s already done for you in a lot less time. Visit this link to see some final examples of sites built with SBI. They also have a page that helps you determine if SBI is right for you. Visit this link to find out more.

For an in-depth review of Site Build It!, read Steve Pavlina’s review here.

The Doctor

I was visiting with a doctor recently who stopped using his Windows XP machine because he thought a virus or viruses made it unusable. So he moved from Windows XP to a brand new Windows Vista machine. “Machine” - Technical geek speak for PC or computer. After unsuccessfully trying to install a medical image viewer on his new Windows Vista PC that previously worked on his Windows XP, he didn’t know what to do.

IrfanView

The image viewer he was using allowed the doctor to view an older image file format that ended in .dcx format. DCX files are multipage PCX bitmap image files. After looking at a few popular and free image viewers, we found the stalwart IrfanView to do the trick. Althought it’s a bit complicated for a lot of non-technical type folks, once you set up a routine to perform a specific task, Irfanview works nicely for your imaging viewing chores.

IrfanView has been around for a long time and works with this older file format that ends in .dcx as well as any of the new image files in use today. You can download IrfanView here.

By the way, another very nice and free image viewer is FastStone Image Viewer. It did NOT read the older .dcx image for me. Anyway, here is an overview description of the FastStone Image Viewer.

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touch the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).

You can download it here. It should be part of your image viewing, converting, editing bag.

The Web Content Keeper

A friend of mine who updates web content for his place of work was trying to unzip a zip file that contained a bunch of files, over 500 files. This person doesn’t know too much about computers as well. Just uses them to get the job done.

He was using the Windows XP built in unzipper. This works great for most zip files but in his particluar case performed extremely slow to where it was unacceptable to use. I told him to download and install the freely available 7-Zip. That should solve your problem assuming everything is running ok on your PC. In other words I wanted to make sure he wasn’t suffering from bad memory on his PC or spyware, viruses, etc.

7-Zip is an open-source software project. Open-source means that 7-Zip is being developed for free by volunteers. This allows it to be free. Very cool.

Filed Under Free Software, Productivity | 7 Comments »