File storage for multiple computers – Dropbox.com

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to copy files from one computer to another, even if both computers aren’t powered on right now?  If you are like me, you carry around a USB stick to store the files on and copy the files to the other computer.  Or, you emailed the files and received the files via email on the other computer.  Well, I have found a site that allows you to easily create a directory on your computer that can then be used to synchronize files to another computer.  The site has a reasonable free storage plan (2 GB of storage), is called Dropbox, and is available here.

How Dropbox works

To use Dropbox, you will need to install a desktop application.  This application can run on Windows, Macs and Linux.  You will need to create an account to use the application, the Computer Name is any name that you want to use to identify the computer.

Once you install the application, you will have a new icon on your status bar and a directory will be created on your computer called “My Dropbox”

Any file that you put into your My Dropbox folder will be copied to the Dropbox website to your account’s web space (you will know this has been done because there will be a little green checkbox icon next to the file).

If you have another computer that you have installed the desktop application on, when you turn on that computer, it will automatically synch up the website with that computer’s My Dropbox folder so you have all of the files on your computer that are on the website.

If you make any changes to a file in the My Dropbox directory, it will be automatically saved to the website and subsequently synched to all of your other computers that use Dropbox.

Version control with Dropbox

Dropbox stores versions of the files that you save to the website so that you can easily go back to a previous version.  By default, the site will keep 30 days with of file changes.  You can get to the previous versions by either right clicking on the file on your computer and selecting “View Previous Versions” from the Dropbox menu or going directly to the Dropbox website, selecting the file, and then “More actions/Previous Versions”.

Sharing Files With Others

You can share files at two different levels, either individual files or folders.

Sharing individual files

You can share an individual file with a non-Dropbox user by putting the file in the public folder of your My Dropbox folder.  You can then get a link to the file by highlighting the file on the Dropbox website and selecting the “More actions/Copy public link” menu option.

The shortened link:

Sharing Folders

To share folders you need to send the user an invitation.  This is what the invite screen looks like.

Once the user gets the invite, they need to create a Dropbox account to access the folder (note, they can do it via the Dropbox website if they choose to not download the application).

This is what the invitation email looks like:

Checking what has been done with your folder

You can click on the Events tab on the website to see what has been done with your Dropbox folder.

Pricing plans

If you need more storage space, you can see Dropbox’s pricing plans here.

Conclusion

I love this site.  It has greatly simplified my moving files between computers – now it is easy to do.  Add to this the revision history and the ability to share files and this has been a wonderful find.

Creating Email Lists and Campaigns – MailChimp.com

If you work with any kind of a club or organization, at some point you will probably need to send out emails.  For a lot of people, creating them on the fly is fine.  But if you want to take things to the next level, for example, to let people add themselves to your list and to track who opens the list, then you need an Email marketing tool.  There is one that starts free (for small lists) , it is called MailChimp, and is available here.

Is it free?

MailChimp has various pricing plans.  The free plan has the following features:

• Up to 500 subscribers
• A limit of 3,000 emails a month.

If your list gets more sophisticated than that, they have paid plans that increase your capabilities.  For initial lists, I think these limits are not an issue.

Basically, the paid plans all allow unlimited emailing and a gradually increasing number of subscribers.  They also have a Pay-as-You-Go plan where you pay for each email (this is designed for people who email less frequently than once a month).  A description of the different pay plans is available here.

Starting up

When you click on the dashboard tab at the top of the page, it guides you through the steps that you will need to take:

How to create a mailing list?

When you create a mailing list, this is the webpage that you get (split over the next two images).

This is the main list page:

After the list is created, you can click on “list data” to bring up a page that lets you modify the list’s form fields.

You have the option to import a list but be careful, you could run afoul of SPAM laws (the site has a help page that will tell you when it is ok and when it is not).  You can also manually add people to your list from the website.  Primarily though, people will be opting into this list.

How do I give people the ability to sign up for a mailing list?

On your list settings, click the “forms” link.

That will send you to a form editor where you can create various forms (via the drop down list on the left), including:

• Signup Form
• Signup Thank You Page (i.e. to confirm that they did sign up).
• Confirmation “Thank You” Page
• Unsubscribe Form

You can either get a link to the form on MailChimp’s site, or embed the HTML code from MailChimp on to your website.   The instructions on how to do both are here (link) and here (embed).

What kind of opt-in are the lists?

All of MailChimp’s forms are double opt-in (which means the user requests being added to the list, the site asks them to confirm, and then the action is taken).  This is done to reduce the spam complaints that you may otherwise receive.

Creating A Campaign

When you create a new campaign, you have the choice of what kind of campaign you want to create, for now, we will create a “regular ol’ campaign”

When you first create a campaign, you have the option of either sending it to the entire list or just a subset.

If you want to send to just a subset, then you can define the rules to use to choose the people to send to:

Then you define the campaign:

Now you create the actual email.  MailChimp has a bunch of templates that you can use, here are some (there are a lot, I didn’t want to put all of the screenshots it would take to show them here).  I think these are a very impressive set of templates.

Once you pick a template, you can edit the text inside, it is a standard text editor.  If you don’t like their templates, you have the option to create your own:

You will also have the ability to set the email up for people that can’t read the HTML version.  The “copy text from HTML email” button is a very nice feature.

The last step is MailChimp letting you know if everything is OK.

Then you schedule the campaign, or send a test, and you are good to go!

You will get an email telling you that the campaign has launched.

Reports

If you click on the reports tab, these are the reports that you can get:

This is the summary report that you will get in overview mode:

Conclusion

MailChimp has a lot of features, I have gone over some of the basics but there is a lot more here, I would encourage you to try it with the default setup first and then get more sophisticated.  The site has a good help system to guide you through things.

Helping Friends via Screencasts – ShowMeWhatsWrong.com

For those of us that are somewhat knowledgeable about computers, we tend to be on call all the time when people have problems or questions with their computers.  I’ve discussed a great remote access tool before, CrossLoop, in a previous post.  Today, I want to talk about a website that takes a different approach, making it easy for people to show you what they are doing without you needing to directly access their machine.  The site is called ShowMeWhatsWrong, is free, and can be accessed here.

Making screen recordings

The principle behind the site is to allow a user to easily generate a screen recording (up to 5 minutes) and send it to you.

The first thing you need to do as the support person is to go to the ShowMeWhatsWrong website and fill in the opening page.

This will generate a URL link that you will then give to the person you are trying to help.

This is what the email you will receive looks like:

When the user clicks on the URL, they will get the following webpage.

When they click on the Start Recording button a big 3-2-1 countdown will appear and then everything that they do on the screen will be recorded.  Note the stop icon on the bottom right of the screen is a button that the user can press to stop the screen recording, it also has a running clock of how much recording time you have left.

After you hit the stop button, the following steps are performed on the web page.

The email that the support person gets (i.e. the person that started this process at the beginning) is:

If you click on the link, you will be brought to this page.  You can either click on the player to see the screencast

or right click on the download button to save it as an mp4 file.

That’s it!

Do you want to be Internet cool? Check out these lists

Do you feel like you are missing the latest viral videos or Internet memes?  Do you look blankly when someone makes a pop reference to something on the Internet?  Greg Rutter is here to help you.  He has compiled two lists of all the websites, videos, etc. that you should familiarize yourself with (it is your choice whether you do it or not).

The two sites are:

Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something

and:

Greg Rutter’s Second Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something

Greg is a writer, his personal website is here.

Creating Packing Lists – 2 different ways

Some people, like me, live by lists.  One fear I always have when getting ready for a trip is that I have forgotten something.  I have found two different websites that take different approaches to this issue, The Universal Packing List and  Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush.

The Universal Packing List

The Universal Packing List website takes the approach of giving you limited options and a simple list.  When you go to the home page, you get the following page that you need to fill out.

After filling out the page, the website will generate your packing list, which is on the following screen snapshots:

If you click on the descriptions option on the main page, you will get descriptions added to the items, as shown here:

Conclusions

This site gives you a quick and dirty list.  You can not modify it and you can not create multiple lists.  For basic information, it is a decent option.

Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush

To use this site, you will need to create a free account.  One thing to be aware of is that this site is based in England and is slanted towards that culture.

Once you create an account and log in, you can create a list, starting with this page:

This is the second page:

Clicking on one of the sections on the bottom will cause it to expand.  You check the items that you want to include.  The notes gives you a little extra information that the website has stored about the task.

After finishing the planning list, you go to the packing list, checking the items that you want to include:

If there are items that you want to include that aren’t in the site’s packing list, you can add them in the Extra Items section:

Printing the list/Marking things done

Once you have finished the list, you can print it from the home page.  It will only show the items that you have selected:

If you click on the link in the top paragraph that asks if you want to see the handy notes, your list will have the website’s notes attached like this:

As you complete items, you check them off of this list so that the site knows that they are completed.

Reminder Emails

What is really cool is that the site will send you emails as the deadlines come up (i.e. two weeks before, the day before, etc.)  The email will show all of the items that haven’t been checked.  Here is an example of the email:

Conclusions

This site gives you a good head start in creating a packing list and has the flexibility to allow you to modify it.  The only thing I would like it to have is the ability to create multiple lists, right now you can only have one list – if you want to create a different list, you need to delete your current list.

Clear stalled printer jobs from the printer queue

This is one of those special case solutions that is great when you need it.  Have you ever tried to print a job in Windows and it gets stalled in the printer queue?  You try to delete the job and it won’t delete.  You can’t print anything else until this stalled job is deleted and you can’t delete it.  The only thing that seems to work is to reboot the machine.  Well, someone has written a program that will clear these jobs for you.  It is freeware, works on Windows XP, Vista and 7, and is called Stalled Printer Repair and is available here.

Running Stalled Printer Repair

Running the program is easy, nothing gets installed (assuming you download the zip fie and not the installer), you just run the executable.  When you do, you get the following dialog box:

Click the Purge Print Jobs button and you are all done.

Could you do this without the program?

Basically, this program is automating steps that you could do yourself.  If you want to do them, here are the steps (from the Stalled Printer Repair webpage)

1. Make sure all print jobs are complete and that no new print jobs are being submitted.
2. Double-click Services in the Printer Control Panel and stop the “Print Spooler” service.
3. Open the C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32SPOOLPRINTERS in My Computer.
4. Delete all files located in this folder. Files in the Printers are named xxxx.spl, xxxx.shd where xxxx is a hexadecimal number. Files with .shd and .spl extensions are printer files.
5. Double-click Services in the Control Panel and start the “Print Spooler” services.
6. Re-print any print jobs.

Looking for what’s on the web – StumbleUpon.com

Are you a little overwhelmed with the amount of sites on the Internet and not sure what sites you would like to see?  There is a free webservice available that will make suggestions based on what you like and dislike.  It is called StumbleUpon and is available here.

Creating your account

On the website, you will need to create an account and set up some initial interests.

The StumbleUpon browser Add-On

In order to use StumbleUpon, you need to install their add-on, which is available here for Firefox and here for Internet Explorer.  This is what it looks like once you install it:

To get a recommendation from StumbleUpon, all you have to do is click on the Stumble! icon – a new website will appear in the window.

Refining the recommendations – thumbs up and thumbs down

To refine the recommendations,  you can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icon to indicate your interest in the site.  StumbleUpon will use that to refine its recommendations and will add all thumbs up sites to your favorites list.

If you thumbs up a site that StumbleUpon doesn’t have in its database, then the site will ask you for some information about it.

If you click on the thumbs down icon’s arrow, you will have some more advanced options.  This is from the stumbleUpon Help Center:

The thumbs-down button has a few advanced options if you click on the arrow next to it:

• Not-for-me = poor targeting. Use this whenever you receive something that you dislike or that does not match your interests.
• Report Spam = Use this option whenever you receive content that provides no value, no matter who the Stumbler is. If it’s something you personally don’t like, use the option above. If it’s content that no one, but the author of the page could possibly like, it’s spam. You may use this option for unsolicited requests to register, sites that look suspicious or contain scams.
• Duplicate Content = content that has been copied from another page with no added value from the original.  Examples would be news articles taken verbatim from a news site, photos taken from a photo site, re-uploaded videos on YouTube, online games re-hosted on another server, etc. Critique, satire, remixes of content from other pages are acceptable and should not be flagged.
• Block website = you can opt to block an entire domain, which means you will no longer receive any stumbles from that site again. You can unblock
• the domain at any time later if you change your mind.

Sharing with others

You can share sites with others via the toolbar.  You have three options:

• Sharing with your StumbleUpon friends
• Sending the site to someone via an email address
• Through Facebook or Twitter

Additional information on a site

If you click on the Info icon when you are on a website, you will be referred to StumbleUpon’s information page, which will show you things like which StumbleUpon users have liked this site, user reviews, etc.

Incorporating StumbleUpon results in searches

When you installed the add-on you were asked if you wanted to include StumbleUpon results in searches.  (you can also set this via the Tools button on the toolbar and selecting Toolbar Options and then selecting things from the Web Search section)

After activating the web search feature, your search page will have the StumbleUpon icon and yellow stars (the stars give an indication of how many StumbleUpon reviews there are).

Clicking on the stars will bring you to the StumbleUpon review page.

Modifying your favorites

You can always click on the favorites icon and get a list of your current favorites and modify them or delete them.

Updating topics

If you want to modify the topics that StumbleUpon uses, you can click on the Tools button and select Update Topics (or go to the website, sign in, and go to the settings screen).

Creating web pages – KompoZer

If you want to create HTML web pages, you can use a simple text editor like notepad to create HTML documents.  While that works, it can be extremely tedious to do that for any pages that are complex or long.  What would be really useful would be a free web editing program that has a lot of features.  I have found one called KompoZer and you can download it here.

Son of Nvu

KompoZer has its roots in another free editor – Nvu.  When development stopped on that program, KompoZer started with the Nvu editor and enhanced it.

Using KompoZer Views

When you start up KompoZer, this is the view that you will see.

The right pane will contain the web page that you are working on.  You can see it in four views.

• Normal
• HTML Tags
• Source
• Preview

Here is an explanation of the different views from a manual that I found online here:

Preview mode offers almost the same view as in a browser with the addition of rulers and sizing boxes. The main differences are that scripts do not run (so their effects will not be seen), links do not operate and the style for links does not respond to any class set. Tooltips do work however.

Normal view is very similar but here table outlines show and markers for named anchors appear.

HTML Tags view assists those familiar with HTML. There is a yellow marker for the start tag for all elements (end tags are omitted). Clicking on a marker selects and highlights the whole of the element.

This is normal view:

This is HTML view:

Source view will give you essentially a notepad editor.

Making A Page

Adding elements is pretty straight forward.  You choose the element from the toolbar and fill in the dialog box.

This is the dialog box to add an image.

All of the form fields can be accessed by the form field dialog (i.e. buttons, textboxes, etc.).

Inserting a table is very easy, just drag the mouse to get the number of columns and rows that you want.

Site Manager

KompoZer has a site manager that allows you manage all of the files in a website.  The confusing part to me was setting it up.  To do so, go to the site manager pane and click on the two computer monitors icon.

That will bring up the following dialog box:

For a local site, you just need to enter a site name and the publishing server – which in this case is a directory on your computer.

You can create as many sites as you want.

Once you have a site in the site manager, it will bring in all of the files and directory structure like this:

Stylesheets

KompoZer has a basic style sheet editor.  I’m assuming that you know what stylesheets are and how to use them.  If not, that will be a discussion for another day.

You can get to it by clicking on this icon in the toolbar.

The editor options are:

Create a new style by clicking on the palette icon.

Once the rule is created, then the other tabs will be active.

To use an external style sheet, you just need to click on the “internal stylesheet” name and then click the “Export stylesheet and switch to exported version” button.

If you want to link in an external stylesheet, click on the down arrow on the palette icon and select “Linked stylesheet”.

Inserting a Table Of Contents

From the Insert menu, you select Table of Contents.

This is what will appear:

You can also update the table of contents once it is created.

Validating the site

KompoZer has tools to assist you in validating the site under the tools menu.

Markup cleaner

The markup cleaner will attempt to remove redundant code.  When you select the tool, the following dialog box will appear:

Validate HTML

KompoZer links to the W3C validator service to validate the page (Unfortunately, I can not show it to you because of network issues).

The limits of KompoZer

KompoZer is very good at what it does, but there are limits to what it can do.  Specifically, if you are going to build a website with the following features/capabilities, you will most likely need an additional tool, or will need to purchase a more heavyweight editor.

• An server side scripting (for example changing what is on a web page based on what the user enters)
• Any website that is going to read or write to a database
• Client side scripts (i.e. JavaScript) will not work directly in the tool.  You need to select the Browse mode to bring up an external browser to see how JavaScript will work.

Conclusions

If you are looking for a basic webpage editor, you can do a lot worse than using KompoZer.  I found it takes a little to get used to but that’s true with all tools.

Turning down your monitor at night – f.lux

Are you one of those people that work at night on their computer and notice that their screen is very bright?  There are theories that this isn’t the healthiest thing for you – that the bright light late at night can mess up your sleep cycles.

Whether you believe this, or just want a less harsh computer screen at night for your eyes, there is a program that you can install on your computer that does this and it is here.

How it works

Here’s an explanation from the website:

Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?

Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?

During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.

f.lux

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

The program will adjust your computer screen based on the type of lighting you have and the time of day.  At night, it will add a tint to the screen to make it less harsh.

Unfortunately, I could not get screen snapshots that can show the differences between settings so you will have to trust me on that.

The settings screen is very easy – you can change the location and define the type of lighting you have in your room.

Once you have your settings, click on the done button and you will get to this screen which will let you see how the screen changes over the day (click on the dialog window and the ball will move through the day).

But I’m working and want the screen to be full brightness

If you need to disable the program, you can disable it for one hour on the settings screen (or just turn it off).  I think this is very limiting, but hopefully this will be modified in the future.

A web-based To Do list – Remember The Milk

Do you have trouble keeping organized?  Do you try to work with To Do lists but they always seem to get lost or unwieldy?  There are many websites that offer a way to create and keep track of To Do lists.  One of the most popular is Remember The Milk, which has a free version, and can be found here.

Overall View

The home page gives you a list of what tasks are due, and a way to print a basic weekly planner.

Creating tasks

Creating tasks is very easy and you have the additional benefit of being able to create different categories of lists (what you see on this screen screenshot is the default lists).

To create the task, you type in the task under the tab (list) you want it to appear in.

If you click on the task after creating it, on the right side of the screen are options that you can use to further refine the task (by clicking on the item)

One of the neat things is the due date, you can type things like “Saturday” and it will put in the date (or “Next Saturday” for two Saturdays from now).

When you have completed a task you go to the task list, select the task, and click on the Complete button to get it off of the list.

Creating Lists

To create a new list you need to select the settings tab on the top right of the page and then the lists tab comes up.

From here you can create new lists, set one of the lists to be the default, and delete lists.

Setting Reminders

From the settings menu, you can select the reminders tab to set how often you wish to get reminders.

You can be reminded by email, SMS, or some IM clients (including AIM, Yahoo, and GoogleTalk)

If you set email reminders, this is what the email will look like:

Adding Tasks via email

To create tasks via email, you need to go the settings option and then the Info tab.  The Inbox Email Address is the address you need to send the email to.  The format of the email is shown below (via Remember The Milk’s help pages).  There is more detailed information at this link.

Subject: Weekly work meeting
To: [Your Remember The Milk email address]

Priority: 1
Due: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee
---
This is a heading for the first note.

This is the first note's content.
---
This is a heading for the second note.

Adding Tasks from a webpage (the Add to RTM! bookmark)

You can add a bookmark to you browser that will allow you to add any date you find on the web into your task list.  To get the bookmark, go here.  Once you have it, highlight any text and click on the bookmark – the following window will appear:

Make the selections you want and the task will be put into Remember The Milk.

Search

Remember The Milk has a basic search function at the top of page where you can put in words that you want to find in your task name.  There is also a more sophisticated search that you can select by clicking on the “Show Search Options” link.

That will bring up the following dialog box:

If you want more information about the different advanced search options, you can get it here.

Smart Lists

Smart lists are really lists based on a search criterion.  To create a smart list, first run a search.  Once the search is completed, on the right side of the window, click on the save tab and give the search a name.

Once you save it, a tab will be created with this smart list name.

The Pro version

If you wish to get extra features, you can subscribe to the pro version.  These are the extra features that you will receive (from their website):

• Priority support via email
• New! RTM for Android
• RTM for iPhone and iPod touch
• MilkSync for BlackBerry
• MilkSync for Windows Mobile
• Pro Tester Program
• A warm fuzzy feeling for supporting RTM