Fuser puts your email in one place

How many email accounts do you check? Be honest now! I have 6 – 8 feeding into Thunderbird, a yahoo account that is rarely checked & my work email on Outlook.

As I prepare to travel for a week & half, I needed to have a way to read them away from my personal laptop. I could have forwarded them all into gmail but to be honest I can’t stand the threaded reading. I really like reading them in Thunderbird & my accounts are set up by purpose.

Fuser.com offers a solution to me when I travel. It’s the equivalent of online web access to several accounts. I wouldn’t use it everyday, but for these trips it will work great!

It’s easy to set up & is user friendly:

• It easily recognizes gmail accounts
• It reads messages & Wallposts from Facebook & Myspace

How it works:

• You can read all the accounts & all the messages are mixed. (scary really!)
• Click on All Accounts Off & click on the account that you want to view (much more manageable!) – I have 5 accounts there

Some downsides:

• One irritation is that it doesn’t give me the option to remember my login info.
• Fuser recognized my Outlook account but won’t update it after the initial time. (but I will have my work laptop with me, so it’s ok).

It supports many types of email:

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Cleaning up your Facebook Profile

Is it a mess? Are there applications everywhere? Is your right column really long requiring the visitor to scroll? Have you succumbed to Facebook addiction & you’re ready to take control again? (well at least of the appearance! we won’t go into time management here ).

Here are some tips for getting your profile under control.

• Delete app’s that don’t have any value for you (even if your best friend sent them).
• Most of the things in your profile can be collapsed or minimized by clicking on the arrow.

• Move items around to bring the most important ones to the top for priority in viewing
• Move items to left column to equalize the space.

There are 2 ways to move panes:

1. Click on anything & drag it to a new position. Items can be moved into the left column this way which shortens the length of the page considerably. (The mini feed is static).

2. To right of Applications click on ‘edit’
Rearrange app’s using arrow icons on left.

Tip I just figured out tonite:
To reduce items in the mini feed -
Under Privacy tab – News Feed and Mini-Feed Privacy
(I unselected many there which should clean up that area). It also allows you to leave a group in stealth mode!

Have you found ways to simplify your profile? Do share, please!

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Windows Liver Writer Updated for Blogger

The power of blogging is so amazing to me. Heidi & I are enjoying our blog’s ability to teach & share information. The feedback from our readers is fabulous & motivates us to provide more! So I’m really excited to share some news that I received today. The significance is that as blog readers you can make a difference!

Remember when I blogged about Windows Live Writer & everyone agreed it was THE BEST blogging tool?!! Well, some people asked me for help with troubleshooting & some of you provided your comments. I posted a culmination of that information, which was noticed by Sean O’Driscoll, GM of Marketing from Microsoft. He forwarded it to the development team.

Today I received a personal note at Facebook from Joe Cheng, a Microsoft software developer on the Live Writer team saying:

Hi Connie, I wanted to let you know that Beta 3 of Windows Live Writer was released yesterday. Two things I want to make sure you’re aware of. 1) Images can now be automatically uploaded with Blogger blogs, via Google’s Picasa service. I know a lot of scrapbookers are on Blogger and have been waiting for this. 2) Beta 2 and earlier made screenshots pretty blurry; I noticed you have a lot of screenshots on your blog lately.
As always, let me know if you have any questions/comments! Thanks!

Isn’t it nice that Microsoft is worried about scrapbookers and takes the time to send a personal note to us?!! especially scrapbookers using Blogger?!!! like my techie friend Hummie! And I can’t wait to see the improvement on the screenshots. Heidi & I enjoy throwing up tutorials here quickly in Live Writer. It’s a great tool. I also compose our newsletters in Live Writer and copy/paste into the software because Word kind of mungles it. So a big thanks to Joe & your team!

What are you waiting for? go get the 3rd beta of Window Live Writer! Here are the new features:

So dear readers, give it a whirl & let us know how it goes! Microsoft is paying attention & looking forward to your feedback. That’s pretty exciting, don’t you agree?

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Daily reading using tabbed browsing in Firefox

Heidi had blogged about this long ago. And it took me awhile to figure it out & start using tabbed browsing, but now I love it! My bookmarks are organized into work groups allowing me to get to things quickly in a couple of different ways. First I’ll show you what I’m talking about, then how to set it up.

See the little folders just under the address bar? I use these all the time. Here are my categories:

• DSI Related – items related to this site including the newsletter software
• Other sites – favorite digiscrapping websites that I want to access periodically
• ACD Related – how do you think I answer those technical questions?
• All Regulars – every morning I open this folder & go to the bottom & use ‘Open all Tabs’; and Firebox magically opens every one in that order. Then I start reading at our forum & go across. I use this one about 3 times a day!
• Stats – you guessed it – Feedburner is there & I visit that once a day. Google Analytics is also there.

When I click on ‘Open in all Tabs’ this is what it looks like. See all my tabs?

Each one matches with the bookmarks listed above & in that order. Cool, huh?

If you’d like to set this up, then you will need Firefox, of course! Everyone should be using it!

In the Custom Links bar, right click & choose new folder. Provide a Name for your folder. Your new folder will show up in your Links bar. To add bookmarks to it, go to each site & click on the favicon (the icon on the left) & drag it onto the folder. They will go in there.

Some tips about managing the bookmarks in a folder:

• Left click on a folder & you can click & drag the bookmarks in the folder to whatever positions you want them in.
• Right click on the folder & you have a host of other options!

After you have a few folders & want to put them in a different order, I just learned how to do so.

• Under bookmarks
• choose Organize Bookmarks
• click & drag the folders into the order you want

So think about what types of ‘groups of bookmarks’ that you use daily & would like to have easy access to? Then try setting up a folder. If you put a bookmark in a folder & change your mind, simply click on it & drag it onto another folder. Don’t you just love Firefox?

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Tags, Categories, Trackbacks and your blog

This past week a reader asked: I have just started blogging and I was wondering if you might be able to address the topics of tagging and trackbacks. I don’t think I understand them or know how to go about using them!

The question doesn’t ask about categories, but for me tags & categories are related. They are important to your readers in two very different ways.

Categories are used internally on your blog. When I write a blog post I assign it to a category or two. For example this, will go under Blog Marketing. The categories that you choose help your readers find all the information that you’ve written about a certain topic quickly. After 5 months I went back thru & redid all of our categories because our topics shifted to what people were interested in. Then we added two newsletters with distinctively different focuses.

Tip on categories – Did you know that you can click on any of the terms in our category cloud on the right? Try it! When you set up your blog, you can offer your readers a list or a cloud. In the cloud the topics with more items are represented by the larger type.

Tags are used ‘externally’ when people search. When you assign tags, they are used by Google & other search engines to find your blog. (They become a part of the metadata. Metadata is simply information including the title & tags which are descriptive. You can read more about tags on Wikipedia). So it’s helpful to assign tags that are relevant so that a person searching can find your post. For example, if you had a layout in your blog post using a designer’s kit, it would be helpful to put that designer’s name as a tag.

Trackbacks are a part of a bigger idea all related to linking to your blog post. (I was reading about trackbacks on wikipedia & just learned the difference between terms that I had been interchanging.). The general term is Linkbacks & it’s simply notification that your blog has been linked on somewhere else. And there can be two types of Linkbacks – trackbacks & pingbacks:

• Trackbacks are from another blog – someone has linked to your blog post on their blog (your blogging software ‘notices’ that & generates a ‘trackback’ as a comment). As a good blogger you want to know what people are saying about you, so you follow the trackback by clicking on it in the comment section or from the email & go see what people are saying about your blog. Then, you can leave a comment on their blog. The whole purpose is to further the conversation & build community amongst bloggers who are talking about similar topics by linking them together. It’s a great way to find new blogs to read!
• Here’s an example of a trackback from my post on Live Writer. The first one is a comment & the 2nd is a trackback from James Key Lim’s blog. You can see his post here. Now he will get a trackback from me because I’m linking to his blog. (James also has a cool site called Tellfriends.com) You can set up your blog to notify you of trackbacks by email, just like you get comment notifications.

Here is where we enabled trackbacks & pingbacks in Wordpress (you can see the tabs):

• Pingbacks are linking to previous blog articles that you’ve written. This is extremely helpful to bring older material to the reader’s attention. Maybe they’ve recently started reading your blog & aren’t aware of a related article that you previously posted? So, when I publish that post, I get an email notification of the pingback. And that is also noted in the comment section of the older post.
• This is easy to tell that it’s a pingback because it’s linked from our blog rather than another blog. I wrote a post on Choosing a DSLR camera & linked back to my article on ACDSee’s Pro 2 software. You can see the pingback there.

So, in review, categories are for the reader’s use on the blog, tags help the reader find your blog. Tracksbacks are created when someone links to your blog & pingbacks are generated when you link to previous posts in your blog. These may or may not show up depending on if you’ve turned on the notification. (And I’ve created a # of pingbacks here which will generate some email back to me )

The first question will be ‘Does Blogger support trackbacks?” because I’m getting to know you guys! So I checked into that (just for you!). And it doesn’t, but I found a workaround but it requires the use of Firefox (which you REALLY should be using anyway!). If someone gets it to work, please let us know! Maybe Hummie will experiment with this? (She’s my techie friend that made the really cool Digiscrapping Blogroll on the right – it’s just so spiffy! thank you dear!! Get one for your blog too! – ah! I created another trackback!!

And I really do enjoy researching these types of things, so keep asking questions!

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Organizing Action & Organizing Actions!

I love plays on words & that suited me.  Today I’m going to link you to ideas for organizing Actions and I’m going to tell you about my own organizing efforts.  Hopefully it will help me to be more efficient so I have more time to blog!   

What are Actions?   Actions are used in Adobe Photoshop & Photoshop Elements.  They are a set of steps that are ‘recorded’ or saved & can be used over again & again.  The advantage is that it’s a one click effect that initiates any number of steps to achieve the same goal each time.  For Paint Shop Pro, the equivalent is Scripts.  ACDSee Photo Editor has built in photo adjustments that allow you options for adjusting your photos by selecting from options

Because I don’t use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, I’m going to link you to my friend Hummie’s blog.  She outlines her ideas for organizing her Actions.  She also links to her tutorial for converting Photoshop Actions so that they can be used in Photoshop Elements.  So if you’re like Hummie & need to get your Actions in order, then try her suggestions:

Hummie’s World: Organizing Actions in PSE 

This week when I was looking for something else, another suggestion for organizing Actions were different, so I’ll link you to Katherine’s way too. 

And since I don’t have Adobe Actions, I was working on my own organizing.  I’ve had my laptop for 8 months & last night spent time organizing all my doc’s & files.  What a good feeling!  So today I rewarded myself by installing 8 plugins for Window Live Writer.  I will play with them & let you know which are worthwhile.  And I have a list of ideas to blog about.  My next thing is to try to get my blog reader feeds pared down to what I actually read!  It must be a laptop housecleaning weekend! (It’s certainly not happening in my house! )

Since I’m rambling I’ll wrap it up with sharing the crazy thing I did on Thursday night – I bought two domain names.  Now I used to splurge on paper slabs… did I need them, no?  but I bought them anyway.  So now I’ve moved on to buying domain names … I think I’m a geek now officially!  (maybe you had noticed this already?!).  So if any of you wanted  conniebensen.com sorry! it’s taken… and I bought another, but I’ll blog on that one later.  What to do with them?  Well, I’ll have to rely on my sister for that. 

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Shoebox for organizing on a Mac

The great thing about the web is that you meet wonderful people & they are willing to share their knowledge!  I love learning from others.  Katie & I bumped into each other long ago because we’re both librarians.  When I saw her excitement about having found this software, I asked if she would write a blog post for our Mac friends.  So, thank you Katie for sharing!

This was written by Katie, aka stampnbug

I am a Mac user through and through, but have been so envious of PC users because of their ability to use ACDSee to organize their digital scrapping supplies. I tried organizing in iPhoto, using Adobe Bridge, keywording and then using Spotlight (a Mac feature)?none of these options really fitted my needs.

Recently, My Digital Muse wrote about Shoebox in their latest newsletter. I decided to give it a try. Shoebox is a browser, which allows you to tag (categorize/assign keywords) your supplies. I found it very intuitive and easy to use. I am a still in the process of tagging my supplies, so by no means am I an expert at using this program, but I wanted to share what I have learned so if there are other Mac digital scrappers who might want to try this software.

There are two important things to consider before you begin tagging:

• you need to think for a moment how you would like to organize your supplies so that you can set up your categories. I found the organizing styles page at DigiScrapInfo to be very helpful
• you do not want to move files around once you begin tagging (or paths will be broken) so make sure you files are arranged in a way that you like

You are now ready to begin tagging?quite the undertaking I am finding!

A few tips in regards to tagging:

• you can assign as many tags to each file that you want ? the tags are what will help you search for things, so I feel the more detailed the better.
• you can assign tags to more than one item at a time ? click on an item, push the shift key, and then click on another item in the row ? it will select all the items between the two you selected. OR you can click and then hold down the command key (open apple) and select items one at a time. These two options are helpful to assign tags to multiple items (i.e. ?paper? or ?brads? in a kit)

An example of tagging is listed above. This particular piece of paper is solid yellow. Above the tags is the actual file name.

Another very helpful tip:

• you can customize your toolbar. The first thing I did was add Photoshop to my toolbar so that I can very easily click on an item, then click the Photoshop button?and it will immediately open it in Photoshop.
• There are two steps to be able to add Photoshop (or any other photo editing program) to your toolbar:

1. You need to set Photoshop as your default photo editing application. To do this, go to Shoebox preferences, click the photos tab, and then where it says edit photos in choose Photoshop. Close the preference window.
2. Click the View menu, choose customize toolbar, then all you need to do is drag the Photoshop icon up to your toolbar (see my screenshot below)

There are two versions available. Shoebox Express is $29.99, which allows you to create up to two catalogs, add 10,000 photos to each catalog, and view 1,000 photos at a time. Shoebox Pro is $79.99 and allows an unlimited number of catalogs and an unlimited number of photos. Visit the Shoebox website at: http://www.kavasoft.com/Shoebox/ to learn more about the software or to download a trial version.

Kathy has a Mac blog  Digi Scrap Mac and she has info on organizing PS Actions

We also blogged about another software for Mac’s:  Graphic Converter

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Details about Windows Live Writer

After two weeks of using Live Writer I still think it’s one of the best tools ever (ok, right behind ACDSee products!). This has made blogging so easy. And your feedback was phenomenal! Up to that time I had been religiously keeping up to replying to comments … but that post max’ed our reader stats & I was deluged with great comments & requests for troubleshooting it. So I wanted to do a follow up for everyone’s benefit. First of all thank you to our readers! I so appreciate your requests for new app’s & I love searching them out & trying them. And of course we appreciate the comments!

Windows Live Writer is a beta & they have a support forum.

Some issues that came to light are:

• images aren’t supported on blogspot – blogger has an API restriction (meaning that they’re not allowing outside sources to upload images)
• images can’t be uploaded to secure ftp’s
• posting at future time isn’t working for someone, but I haven’t tested that

Overall people love the flexibility it offers & the broad range of text & image options. (I forget to use color). I’ve also been using it to compose our newsletters & then I copy & paste them into the newsletter software. It saves my draft so easily & I don’t need to browse to a file, open it, etc. Am I lazy or what?!

I want to share some of it’s features that I’m using:

• Categories can be assigned from within Live Writer
  • It learns them from your blog!
• Live Writer can be set to prompt you for Categories
  • under Tools | Options | Preferences

• Live Writer will Ping Servers for you. This means that it’s letting various sites know that you have a new or updated post.
  • Wikipedia has a list (& explanation) & I copied & pasted them in, then deleted the asterisks (not worrying about the formatting – that was fixed when I clicked on Apply)
  • under Tools | Options | Ping Servers

Have you tried any of the plug-in’s? Please share which ones you’re finding helpful. I want to get the ’snipping’ one. Do you have any other comments or issues about Live Writer?

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Screenshots of Windows Live Writer

I’m so excited about this that I wanted to show you some screenshots! None of these are hosted by the way. They’re embedded. I’m using SnagIt. Can someone try it out & see if it will embed screenshots by other ways? And I just added a photo (because I wanted to try it) – MAN! this is the easiest way to add images to a blog post!

You can manage multiple blogs!

And put text wrapping on the left or right of the image.

There is a pane on the right that offers all the options (much like ACDSee Photo Manager). And it changes depending on what you’re doing. Pasting in an image gives other options. This is the main one.

These are the image properties to choose from:

Text wrapping

• Inline (the only option I had in Wordpress)
• Left (great to be able to text & not just have wasted space!)
• Right (good for certain situations like now maybe?)

Under borders – there’s an option for photo paper. I put it on the photo below. Kind of cool, eh? (I was playing with the macro on my camera – it’s a hydrangea if you’re wondering.)

This is the Open screen. It allows access to all drafts and online blog posts for editing. Slick, eh?

The FUNKIEST thing is that you can preview the post in Live Writer without publishing it. And it looks like the real thing! but it’s not published yet. Check it out! See the little blue shapes in the corners? That must indicate that it’s not live yet.

So give it a try, I think you’ll MORE than really like it!

Edited – So I just adjusted a couple of the images because our blog is fluid & I see that each image has a URL with a Wordpress address… hmmm, I always like know why! I wonder how they’re doing this? Maybe they’re hosting the image on Wordpress somehow? Does anyone know? Heidi – do you have any ideas?

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Wordpress: Setting up Akismet

Have spam on wordpress comments?

Akismet is a good way to keep the spam out. With recent wordpress installations, the Akismet plug-in is already there, it just needs to be activitated and given a key. So if you already have the plug-in, skip the downloading step.

1. Download the plug-in: Akismet Download
2. Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.
3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
4. Get your API key
   1. Go to Wordpress.com
   2. If you use wordpress.com as your host, then you already are done with this step. If you host your own wordpress blog, register at wordpress.com and select “Just a username, please.”
   3. You will need to activitate your account and sign in to that account.
   4. Go to My Account | Global Dashboard, click on Profile tab and look for a key:
   5. 
5. On your own blog, Go Plugins | Akismet Configuration. Enter your key from the step above.
6. It should now be configured and running.
7. If you want to see what is being caught: Go to Manager | Akismet Spam and you can view the comments that are caught as Spam. You can mark any that accidently get put there. If there was mistake Akisment should “learn” from its mistakes.

Since we installed it, it has caught 1500 spam comments. That’s a lot of deleting manually if we didn’t have it.

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