In this article we wish to supply you with 8 ways to simplify your home network. These solutions are readily available and easily implemented on any home network. The basic goal is to reduce and remove the total number of wires and gadgets used on a desk or in your home office to make it a more productive environment.
Since the goal is to help remove cables and clutter, the first and most obvious step is to use a Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (KVM). These come in a wide range of colors, layouts and styles to fit just about everyone’s needs.
Most homes now have more than one computer and a need often arises to share files between them. The fastest and most efficient way to both backup data that is accessible to all users on the network and share content is with a network hard drive. The My Book World Edition by Western Digital is a great choice, easy to configure and is very flexible to fit just about all needs. A full tutorial on how to back-up files can be found here.
If your desk has more than one computer on it, it’s pretty silly to use separate keyboards, monitors and mice, especially when the IOGEAR KVMP will reduce the number of peripherals on your desk. This an advanced KVM that also allows sharing of HDMI and USB devices, so it’s much more expandable, while removing duplicate input devices from one’s desk.
Most computers come with enough USB ports to fill the need of anyone, but sometimes certain USB powered devices are just a bit too far away to neatly and cleanly run a cable. Not only does this look bad, it also opens up the possibilities to snag it, trip on it or have it pinched along the path. A wireless USB hub from IOGEAR is a simple solution to eliminate the wires and get four open ports anywhere you may need them, up to 30 feet away from the computer.
Cords are simply a part of computers and accessories; sadly we can’t eliminate all of them. Power cords are the most common ones, but using a cord organizer from 3M will allow you to secure them under your desk, run them down a leg and neatly to the power outlet on your wall. Not only does hiding the cables have a cleaner look, it greatly reduces the chances of accidentally kicking one loose while working.
Part of the clutter in most home offices and desks is a stack of paperwork and bills that tend to build up. Reduce and eliminate this stack with a Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. This compact document scanner duplex scans and outputs directly into PDFs, allowing you to transform your former paper cluttered home office into a paperless, searchable workflow fast and efficiently. Combine this with the network hard drive for backing data up and you can fast and easily keep two copies of important data, easily found using the search function on your computer (Windows or Mac).
From the time I was a kid until about 10 years ago, I remember my Mom always having a calculator, sticky notes and other assorted office supplied cluttering up her desk. There are electronic ways to simplify your desk and home network that can replace many of these items. In both Windows Vista and Mac osX, sticky notes and calculators come standard in either the Side Bar on Windows and the Dashboard on Macs, use them! They are put there to replace clutter on the desktop. I’ve found it far more useful to use the calculator on my computer than open up my desk drawer and fish for one, or have yet another power cable on my desktop. Additionally, Google has done such a great job with their Documents that I keep notes for myself online, easily accessible from any computer that has an Internet connection for me.
Most home networks never start out being cluttered and messy; they are a result of poor planning or constant add-ons to expand needs. This has always been the nature of computers, home offices too. Taking a step back, evaluating your current situation and making some smart investments will not only clean up the cluttered mess you stare at daily, it will also help you be more productive.
Finally, a reward for having a messy, out of control computer desk or Home Theater setup in your home. IOGEAR is running a fantastic give away that will help you get your rat’s nest of a cable pile-up under control with their award winning prizes.
We’ve all been there, doing an un-boxing of shiny new tech gadgets, so excited to get them plugged in and hooked up that the cables just get thrown everywhere, only to add more stuff to the pile as the weeks go on, never making time to organize and put into order the slew of cables connecting everything.
The unsightly ball of cables under your computer desk or draping between your TV and components not only looks bad; it makes tracking down problems or doing upgrades very difficult. IOGEAR has a great line of products to help reduce and eliminate these cluttered cables and are giving them away to your un-organized, messy self!
The contest is easy. Take a photo of your current setup and describe how these IOGEAR products would help improve your quality of life.
First place is the Wireless USB to VGA Kit (valued at $209.95) that allows you to connect your laptop to your monitor (or TV) with no cables. Hello streaming Internet media made easy!
Second place is a USB Laptop KVM Switch (valued at $99.95) that will allow you to connect your laptop or netbook with your desktop computer and transfer files seamlessly. Great for netbook users who want to use a larger screen or need to move files off their smaller hard drives.
Third place is IOGEAR’s Wireless Desktop Keyboard and Mouse (valued at $59.95) – a no brainer for eliminating cables from any desktop. The sleek keyboard features hotkeys for launching specific applications and the mouse comes with a charging cradle.
Get the full details and submit your photos on the IOGEAR blog here. Hurry, the deadline is April 30, 2009.
I adore WordPress, so much so that I use it to design websites that don’t even require a blog, just solely based on the CMS, ease of installation and abundant supply of options and plugins available for it. With all that being said, now and again I run into an issue with some stupid coding somewhere along the lines that won’t let me do exactly what I want. Today I ran into a problem implementing a plugin that would allow me to place a Google Maps map onto a client’s website. Google is nice enough to give the code out to hard code their maps into any site, but it requires the iframe tag which does not play nicely in WordPress.
After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag. This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin. According to their site, EmbedIt is a,
simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.
embed Youtube videos into wordpress
embed ustream into wordpress
embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
embed whatever html code into wordpress
embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article
The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme. EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.
My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on. I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it. I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.
Less than a week after iGoogle had a facelift for the worse, die-hard users have started to revolt. Like myself, many other users have complained about the shift of tabs from the top to the left, the lack of support for what were fully functioning apps and the total lack in ability to go back to the old version. A quick twitter search for iGoogle and hate shows that this is still a very hot topic and most are not a fan of the changes.
Going one step further, there has been an online petition started asking Google to roll back changes, or at the very least, an option to roll back changes. Seems that when software or application vendors make changes without full market research, users will stand on their soap boxes and let everyone know how much they dislike them.
My start page of choice is iGoogle, which was reviewed here earlier in the year. I’ve been using iGoogle since it was released and didn’t even have a real name, and loved it. My love changed about 10 minutes ago when Google did an update to the page, changing the pleasing top navigation for tabbed pages to left sidebar navigation with a + / – button to see the site feeds in text format, but not recent articles. Take a look:
That’s how my iGoogle page looks currently. Sadly, the tabbed names are now cut-off, the last one should read Photography / Art, it doesn’t. Furthermore, this new sidebar eats up 128 pixels of space. Reading article titles when the + is expanded is a joke and it’s now wasted space. I’m angry, real angry. This sucks. Google, give me my horizontal tab navigation back!
The only attractive thing to the new update is the rounded edges, which is so 2006 already.
Update: It seems the real purpose for this update is to integrate Google Reader with iGoogle and, possibly, become your bookmarks portion instead of storing them in your browser. Seems if you click the blog name from the left side, the content from the RSS feed loads, as seen here:
Here’s the other really crappy part, Google has added in content to my tabs that I didn’t have there before! I never had moviesor The New York Times in my iGoogle, now I have to go through and edit their crap out, Google, I hope you are listening because I’m loosing my trust.
From a user perspective, it’s not terrible I suppose, but I still would much rather read an article on the original website than a stand alone reader which is why I never used Google Reader. From a blogger’s perspective, this is horrible. If you choose to publish your whole RSS feed, you have now have potentially lost unique visitors to your site, they can read it all right here in iGoogle. Additionally, .htaccess pages used to help prevent people from hotlinking graphics means that your article that has photos in it won’t display properly, as is the case now with my blog.
As a blogger, I need to seriously consider if I want to continue to publish full articles via my RSS feed or just snippets and have the reader come to my site to read it all. What’s more fair? What serves the reader the best? As a reader, what’s better for you?
Yesterday friend and fellow blogger Daniel Scocco posted the 16th part in a series about generating website traffic, Promoting your content on social networking sites. Outside of Twitter, Daniel admits he doesn’t do much in the form of utilizing social networking or media sites to drive traffic to his site, but I have. Leaving a comment in the article about my experience with MySpace specifically spawned a conversation of sorts in the comments of the article.
There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens. The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins. Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.
A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress. It is almost totally what I was looking for. As described on their site,
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.
Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.
Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.
Perfect! The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file. Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server. Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it. I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are. Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress. The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.
Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password. Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog. Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.
Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content. I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.
The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site. While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source. For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.
Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information. The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.
Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing. This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.
While going through the RSS feeds this morning, I saw a great write-up on CNET about the interface redesign on Twitter. Great in that, it’s well written and covers all the positive points, but it seems that Twitter has pushed more emphasis on making their web app look pretty as opposed to actually stable.
Here’s a summery of what is new and changed:
Smaller tabs that were on top of the timeline to the right sidebar, where they can occupy more space, making them larger clicking targets. They also moved the following/followers/updates stats to the top of the page and made them larger, so now I can really see how deflated my follower numbers are.
The most important change, in terms of functionality is the addition of AJAX to the “Home” and “@Replies” pages. Their new implementation allows you to refresh the items in your timeline without having to reload the whole page.
New design customizer with this release, which allows you to change the colors on your Twitter profile with the help of a color wheel.
Great, new ways to make it look pretty, but still barely works properly. I’ve been using Twitter on and off for a year now (follow me at twitter.com/mikepanic) and while I did manage to crack 12,000 text messages by subscribing to some major news outlets and having them sent SMS to my cell phone, most of what I’ve found is that it’s just noise, even from people I know in real life. For more than 3 months now I haven’t had tweets coming into my cell, I’m very happy about this and do not miss it one bit. I also rarely go to the official Twitter site, rather I use Twitterific on my Mac to read and update tweets.
What is most frustrating, outside of the noise and constant “read my new blog post” tweets that I myself am guilty of sending is the lack of stability. The service seems to be going down, still, several times a month. How can I stand behind and love an app just because it’s pretty looking when it isn’t stable?
The new web browser that everyone is talking about and not using, Chrome, just got an update to it. This update is kind of unusual though in the fact that you now have a choice of how beta and unstable you want it to be. If you are into trying out new things, reporting bugs and getting fresh updates daily or every few days, this is for you. If you use Chrome on a regular basis though, the update is kind of mandatory as it
fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft’s Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections
Cnet News has all the information on how to do the update, to me the killer is you can’t even update from the software itself, you need to go to another website. Then you have to choose which updates you want to receive, Beta or Dev, and then watch as it updates. I have no problem with software being released and not being finished, it happens all the time, but with Google’s track record of keeping apps in beta for years and years, why put so many users through the growing pains of both Dev and Beta versions? Me thinks Chrome should have been a private invite only release like Gmail was originally to get most of the issues flushed out in the first place.
Chrome is nice, it has a lot of cool features and has everyone who uses the internet interested, but as reported earlier, no one is really using it and no one on a Mac can even start to use it. It pains me when major companies rely on the free labor of their own users to finish building and fixing software that shouldn’t be released yet, much less make them jump through hoops to get the update.
One of the popular web celebrities who blog about blogging and making money from blogging is John Chow. His personal site was launched for no other real reason other than to see how much money he could make from blogging about, well blogging and making money. He’s a very successful tech blogger and media network owner, so he knows the ins and outs, but a year or two ago, blogging about blogging really started to take off, so why not jump on board, share some tips and tricks and profit. He’s done well, real well, nearly $30,000 a month well and has a cult like following.
I was a daily reader of his site up until he switched to version 2.0 maybe a year ago. At that point, it was clear that the focus was on ad placement and started to make reading the content that much harder. John’s primary readers are bloggers and creative writers who are looking for ways to turn a profit on their own sites, they want information, not blatant advertising. The overall layout was clean though with good graphics, but I stopped reading daily.
Today, Version 3 launched and John has moved the index of the site to be similar to one of the other super popular bloggers, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net with respects to being more of a magazine style with snippets of current articles, more ads and some static information. Inside the site is supposed need less scrolling to read the articles and be cleaned up even more; I can agree to disagree with that. He did finally do away with having exotic cars in his header, but that only appears to be because others ripped the idea and so he could fit more advertiser space in. On my 1280×1034 screen I count 13 ads plus the top half of two more ads and one more ad promoting his e-book. It’s a bit much. The footer takes on the trends of other larger Web 2.0 sites with what must be close to 500 pixels high worth of information, sadly there is no button to take you back to the top of the page
With more than 30,000 RSS subscribers, 2,000 more following on Twitter people listen to what he says, but I think more is being emphasized on how it looks instead of better content. John is still posting up photos of food and other random things and shares his insight on how to run a blog for money, but getting to the content for me isn’t worth the trouble anymore.
Last week I gave a first 5-minute impression of Google Chrome, the new browser that is supposed to be faster and better than anything else out there. A week later and what seems to be a hundred thousand reviews in the blogsphere later, everyone seems to like it, and no one seems to be using it. Less than 1% of Crenk readers are using it, more people are using Opera belive it or not.
What’s so great about it? Well it’s new and shiny, has a minimalist look and feel to it and consumes about 75% less memory than Firefox does, at least for me on my Windows XP box. Google really seems to have done their homework with regards to chewing up your CPU cycles and there appears to never be a memory leak. Additionally, you just need to type something in what used to be known as the address bar, as it now functions as a search bar and many other things. It’s also fast, but how fast? My seat dyno says slightly faster than Firefox, but to a normal user, it might only feel faster because it’s new.
What’s not so great about it? Well first and foremost, Windows only. As a Mac user, I once again feel like someone put me out in the cold. Lack of any add-ons that I’ve come to love with Firefox is also missing, but if you were coming from Internet Explorer you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about anyway. Dedicated search box is something I miss. Why you ask, since Google answers all questions on it’s own? Because it simply doesn’t. I’ve been using a Firefox add-on called OpenSearchFox for more than a year now; it allows you to add a drop down in Firefox to search any site that has search enabled on it. That means, rather than going to say Netflix and then searching, I can select Netflix from my drop down menu in the search bar and type in my query there. My other gripe is the lack of a status bar. I understand how important screen real estate is, but I like it, I’ve been using the status bar for more than 10 years in browsers, I’m used to it. Lastly, Chrome doesn’t work with all websites yet. One site that I order digital photos from requires a Java plugin, to upload the photos. I have the plugin installed in Windows but the browser doesn’t pick it up. I’m sure small kinks like this will iron themselves out but it’s still an inconvenience.
One of the most interesting Easter eggs is kind of a joke in Chrome. In the address bar type about:internets – then sit back and chuckle, at least someone around the Google camp has a sense of humor. Chrome is interesting, but it’s not a killer app for me yet, nor do I plan on switching. For now, I will use it to beta test website design and other various things on the Internet but Firefox will continue to be my primary browser.
Yesterday Google’s new browser, Chrome was announced so today I downloaded and installed it onto my work Windows XP box to see what all the fuss is about and check for cross compatibility on sites we work on. I spent about 5 minutes poking around, if I can’t figure out how to use a browser in 5 minutes, it’s too complicated for anyone but the most 733t 1337.
Download was very small; it then opens an applet and downloads the rest of the software. Installation requires Firefox to be shut down so Chrome can import all your bookmarks, favorites, history and passwords; this goes quickly and rather painlessly. Next you get a TOS about reporting options for crashes, I denied their request and the install was complete.
Upon launching Chrome for the first time an unusual question is asked, “Do you wish to keep Google as your default search engine?” It’s unusual in that, it’s a Google product and the first thing about this new killer app is to strip out Search, the one thing Google does very, very well. I selected to keep it.
All my bookmarks and history imported, what didn’t was my homepage. I’m a long time iGoogle user and rely on the RSS feeds to get me caught up quickly at a glance to what is going on with the sites I follow. Not there. Instead six white boxes stare at me. A little note tells you that these are your most visited sites. Nice idea, but not for me. I easily look at 50+ sites in six different tabs of iGoogle. There is no apparent way to set a traditional “homepage” only what Google wants you to see.
The other thing lacking is an option to show the status bar. I rely on the status bar while at work and home to see where any link will take my, by hovering over it. There are also several add-ons for Firefox that sit in my status bar that I’ve come to love, from what I can tell in Chrome, there is no status bar option.
On the plus side, it is fast. How fast? I don’t have scientific numbers or pretty pie charts, but it really feels fast. One site that I know uses a fairly common Java plugin to run an app wouldn’t work and there was no option to install it but everything else on the dozen or so sites I quickly browsed seem to work.
Is Chrome the next killer app? Hard to say now, Firefox has such a loyal, loving fan base to it, but I think this could compliment it very well.
A friend with a local business came to me with a somewhat unique request. He wanted to setup a blog that only his employees and certain other people had access to for sharing information, ideas and other business concepts. I suggested Google Apps for this, but he said not everyone that would be using this would be as tech savvy to fully grasp how that works and he needed more than just a text editor and a spreadsheet.
I set off to search for a plugin that would allow me to accomplish the goal of restricting access to the entire blog, forcing a registration. After a few minutes I ended up on Viper007Bond’s site. I’ve used his plugins before, so I knew they’d be top quality. He wrote a custom plugin called Registered Users Only which, will redirect all users who aren’t logged in to the login form where they are shown a user-friendly message.
Perfect! Upload the .php to the /plugin directory on your server, activate it and tick one box in the Options screen, you are done. As admin to the blog, you create user accounts for those people you wish to give access to. Since it uses the standard WordPress login screen and user database, you can simply add them as a Subscriber and once logged in, can see the entire site.
Total installation time is less than two minutes!
While the idea of putting a blog online is usually done so that someone will read it, this certain situation started to make a lot more sense to me. WordPress offers so much more than just a blog, it’s turning into a CMS, and a tool to allow, in this case, his business to expand and grow internally. The more I thought about it the more I realized that a private blog has many other uses to it.
Parents who want to setup a blog for their children, either from day 1 in their life or as they enter the tween stage probably won’t to protect who sees photos of their kids and what activities they do.
This plugin restricts ALL pages of the site, that is the only option. This fits the goals of my friend and I think many other people. Be aware, this does not protect your RSS feeds. I would suggest deleting all RSS feeds from your WordPress install to fully protect your blog, if that is your goal.
