When new Operating Systems (OS) come out for Windows, you always hear people say to wait at least until the first Service Pack comes out so that the major bugs can be fixed. I am assuming that since this Service Pack 1 is now out, more people will feel more comfortable in utilizing Vista. With a Service Pack the OS is usually considered stable.
I have not had too many problems with Vista and find it much like XP. After the initial finding-my-way-around, it became clear that most everything is in the same place as before, but just a different method to go about finding the things.
The only thing I find annoying about Vista is when it asks for owner's permission and temporarily goes into a greyed out screen. I don't really see the need for this and it does freak you out each time it happens. I'm not sure there is any getting used to that.
Cnet's review of the Service Pack 1 is average, indicating that it has a lot of good stuff in it, but not everything needed.
There is a new site called Moonrise. I can really see the younger generation using this site.
After you create an account, you can choose various photos to display how you feel. You can also share your own photos and identify them with a feeling for others to use.
Create a badge. Copy the html code and place it on your blog or whereever html codes are accepted.
Let people know how you are feeling through graphics. You can even choose graphics other people have shared on Flickr.
Scroll through or search for other feelings posted by other people. Once you find a feeling that represents how you feel at the current moment, click on the "share" button to open up an options box to help you post it at the most popular spots, such as Blogger or Facebook, send it to people, bookmark it, or embed it.
For now, I am not going to post it anywhere. Why? Because I do not believe I will have the time to come back to their page to change my feelings all of the time. It would be awesome if there were a desktop application to go with this site. This is a new site, so I plan on watching it grow to re-evaluate my use of it at a later time.
If you are impatient like me, you want a fast way to e-mail layouts to friends and family for feedback. Hey, that's half the fun of scrapping is seeing how others like what you have done, right?
Some people make smaller sizes of all of their layouts and keep them just for that purpose. However, after you see how fast you can e-mail them with Windows, you won't want to waste your hard drive space on those smaller versions.
I often have wondered if many in the digicommunity understand the importance of link love. I see so many in other communities that take it way overboard, but I also see the digital scrapbooking community passing by great opportunities, especially for designers and those selling whereby page rank would be important.
I hope you enjoy these videos and learn more about how linking to each other effects your page rank.
Of course, I welcome any link love here! Warm fuzzies abound! You will never look at blog linking the same again.
The two of you have never double teamed me before. I looked at my stats and imagine a Stat Fight. I'm in a weird mood. Thanks for the giggles Digi Free and Ikeagoddess! Sending you link love right back!
Okay, so this link love topic has inspired my next video. I am guessing there are a lot of designers and new bloggers that have no idea why link love is so important and how to watch your link love. Am I right?
Marie shared a bit about Technorati on Digi Free , but would you like to learn a bit more?
A few days ago I blogged about my disbelief as to why SO many bloggers use FeedJit? It makes me uncomfortable and I tend to leave a site fast without reading or commenting.
Mark Maunder, Feedjit Founder & CEO, commented and invited me to respond either by a blog post or by private e-mail. Since I felt the information he provided would be of interest to all, I am responding by blog post.
Mark stated:
Right now we give you the ability on the Feedjit widget to request that Feedjit ignores future visits from your browser. We're also considering a feature whereby you can immediately delete your own location from the widget on the blog you arrived on.
That way visitors to websites using Feedjit have full control over their privacy and can choose whether or not to show themselves.
I have not seen on any of the widgets this option to ignore visits from my browser. I just see the city where I live and I scoot on out as fast as possible. So I went to the Feedjit site to look. I found at the bottom of the box an almost hidden area for "options."
I clicked to expand the options and choose to "Ignore my browser." I am informed that this places a cookie on my computer. Therefore, since I often clear my cookies with such software as Adaware, Spybot, and CCleaner which I run regularly, this will be a continual process of setting the options as I visit sites using this widget. That is frustrating.
In addition, the opt out cookie only works on one site at a time. Therefore, you must opt out on each and every site. This stinks.
In addition, it only fixes it for the "next" time I visit that particular blog, but leaves the current visit in the widget. This stinks.
I would be comfortable with the widget if it just listed my state. If the city were removed from the widget, that would satisfy me.
I also think being able to delete my location upon arrival would be a good feature too, although it would be a hassle.
And the unfortunate thing is that it's opt out, not opt in for the blog visitor.
I would like to point out that FeedJit does offer three other great tools on their site that are worth checking into. In addition, the services are free and you cannot beat that price.
SITEMETER AND GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Digital scrappers have become avid bloggers! Many are just getting started and do not know the ins and outs of many of the tools available.
Many do not know about tools such as Sitemeter and Google Analytics.
Here are two videos peeking inside my stats so that you can become aware of possible tools for your blog. I would suggest these tools be utilized rather than something so blatantly visible to many users as FeedJit.
I hope these videos are helpful to you. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments. I will try to help as I can.
Why are SO many bloggers using FeedJit? I absolutely do not like arriving on someone's blog only for it to say where I live and where I clicked from to get to the site.
It is certainly one of the fastest ways to get me to leave your blog. Sure. I'm aware that other applications provide this information in reports, but who needs to have that for public information for all to read right there on a blog sidebar?
If it makes me feel this way, I wonder how it is making others feel.
Spybot has saved the day for me on numerous occassions.
For instance, when I installed the newest version of Nero on my XP machine, the start-up programs totally disabled my machine. I was unable to open any program or folder without waiting for a long period of time (10 to 15 minutes maybe). I was able to endure the waiting period to get Spybot opened and disable Nero from the startup.
Just this past week I discovered a startup file for Windows Media Player which was also reeking havoc on my XP machine. The mouse would jump everywhere. The newest version 11 has the capatibility to share with xbox. However, it was too much on my RAM, so I was able to temporarily disable it through Spybot until I could discover how to turn the setting off from within the player itself.
One time I did find a spamware and/or virus running through the startup in Spybot which was not found by any other scan. I was able to do an internet search to identify it, stop it from starting up, and locate it on my machine to manually delete it.
If you are having problems with RAM on your computer while using Photoshop Elements, it is a good idea to check out the startup items as everything that starts up is taking up RAM. Many of the programs, such as Quicktime and other common programs, have a feature to make the program load faster when in use, but is unnecessary to have running in the background during startup.
Who knows, maybe your computer will start up faster too!
I had to cut off the end of the video so it would be under 10 minutes for YouTube. The ending merely stated the above information.
To see whether or not you have an HP with AMD Processor, right click on "My Computer" and choose properties.
Please remember that the service packs are installed with automatic updates, so your computer may automatically install this without your guidance. A suggestion would be to change your automatic updates so that they download, but not install without your permission.
To change the automatic update settings, click on "start", then "control panel," and then "automatic updates" to bring up the popup box. Choose either to have them not be installed automatically at all (which means you will have to get other updates manually from the website) or the second option to "download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them."
The Snipping Tool in Vista is awesome! It takes screen shots so quickly. I find the images to also be very clear.
It is a priceless tool for any blogger to quickly add an image to a post. Images always make posts seem more attractive.
It is also a great way to get quick shots for teaching and tutorials. I see the ladies in my forum grabbing screen shots all the time to help each other and it always makes me smile when I see them go to that effort to get a shot, upload it to a host, and share it.
Here is a video that shares how the Snipping Tool in Vista works.
Many digital scrapbookers preferred using Hello because it had a capability of sending screenshots. Hello is shutting down and there is big discussions as to what to use now.
Thanks to Maria (Ferg Designs) for figuring out that you CAN do screenshots easily in Yahoo!
When you are in an IM with someone, click on the PHOTOS button to begin photo sharing, then CTRL+Printscreen will take a snapshot of your screen. You will then select the option to share the photos from your CLIPBOARD!!
In addition, ALT+Printscreen will take a snapshot of the active window (without the extra stuff in the background).
On laptops, you may need to hold down the "Fn" button before hitting the print screen button.
In addition, you can put your IM name in your profile in forums.
Here is a video to show you how it works.
Check out the Yahoo IM Beta versions! The new Beta version will share YouTube. I love the Vista version too. Although it is scaled down version during testing, it does some really cool things.
In addition, I understand that with a tweak, Yahoo IM can be set to view conversations in tabs. See this page.
My Yahoo IM is "hummdingertub"....feel free to find me if you have questions or want to play with the IM!
There are several ways to find out who is linking to your blog. I like to know who is linking to me so that I can post a comment and give warm fuzzies back!
How do you find out who is linking to you?
Here are two ways.
First, in Google search engine, simply type in "link:" followed by the site and it will bring up a list of people linking to that site. How easy is that?
In the first image, my blog does not have a "www," so I wanted to share with you this sample to my direct site so that you could see that you can either use the "http" or not to get the results needed.
Another way to find out who is linking to your blog (it does not work for other types of sites) is Technorati. After you get it set up, you can view your "blog reactions" section. I can click on the link and go straight to their blog post to find and share warm fuzzies with them.
At the bottom of every post here on my blog, you can click on the button to save one of my posts to your Technorati favorites.
You can also just do a search at Technorati. A search for my name comes up with 72 recent blog posts.
I am aware of some other ways, but maybe that is another blog post. Do share the ways you know of with us in the comments.
Quite some time ago, I shared how to find great new and recent articles on blogs by topic of interest by using the Google Blog Search.
I realized recently that I have also been getting hits from Blog Catalog and found that they have a great search tool also! You can search their directory from the default, but the drop down menus allow you to search for specific blog posts, and then even to refine it to a search of recent posts or relevant posts.
Any blogger can become a member of Blog Catalog and I do say that I have benefitted from the community since I have become a member. If only I had more time to surf there and participate in the community, I would.
Both Jae and Chris asked me from my last post what "stumble" is. I was referring to Stumble Upon. Stumble Upon is a great way to get traffic to your blog.
It is also a great way to find new sites. It is also a great time waster. After installing the web bar, just try it by clicking on the link on the far left of the bar to stumble. It will take you to site suggestions based on your interests. If you like a site, you "stumble" it by clicking on the "I like it" button on the bar. The more you tell it what you like or do not like, the more it learns what you like to give you better suggestions.
However, as a blog owner, if someone stumbles you, I can testify that it sends a lot of traffic to your blog. Now, you can get away with stumbling yourself a few times, but the program is smart and will pick up on that, so just don't do it.
Therefore, there are people gathering in various spots on the internet, such as BlogCatalog Groups to exchange stumbles. I have a Digital Scrapbooking Group there you are welcome to join.
Whether or not being stumbled helps to bring regular readers or not, I'm not sure. It gives a false sense of readership for sure, but I suppose if being stumbled brings one new reader, that is a good thing.
If you have stats installed on your blog, you can see who is linking to you. If you are stumbled, this shows up in the stats.
In order to see who stumbled you, you have to first go to your blog page which was stumbled. Click on the little icon that looks like a speaker bubble for "reviews on this page" and it will take you to a stumble page which will reveal who stumbled you.
Since I am on a new laptop, I did not have my bar installed yet when I wrote me post yesterday.
Today I can see that both Mpatry and Karooch stumbled my post of January 29th and caused me traffic! Now, out of internet ettiquette, it is only appropriate that I find one of their posts of interest and stumble them right back.
As I wrote on my post of August 2nd, you can get convenient links at the bottom of each post on your blog by installing Feedflaire through Feedburner. Therefore, anyone can stumble me easily by looking at the bottom of each of my posts.
There is so much more about Stumble Upon than I can blog about. It is a community in which you may add others as your friend, go straight to your friends stumble suggestions to find things of interest to them, join groups of interest, and so much more. I just do not have time to participate much, but I do recommend the site. If you haven't checked it out, you need to go and waste some time there!
I have had quite a few communications about my last post on the new Blogger Widgets. I understand that not everyone can see the widgets as I am seeing them.
I will say that I am not signing into Draft Blogger, so I do not know why I can see them and you cannot.
If you need to sign in to Draft Blogger, sign in to your account here. There is no reason to be afraid to do so. It is a testing site for the new features, so just signing in will not harm anything and you can see the new features. Of course, testing is at your own risk, but most often it is also harmless. If it doesn't work, just uninstall it.
There is a blog which you can follow to know the new features called Blogger in Draft.
Wow, I've been so busy I think I've been hiding under the cover of winter! I just realized that Blogger has added a bunch of new cool tools!
Under Blog List, you can create a list which sorts by the most recently updated. I'm not anxious to start yet another list, but I am curious as to how this works and may play with it.
Have you tried the Add a Gadget? Wow! All the choices you can now quickly add to your blog! Sidebars are going to be filled rampant now! Oh, the temptations to add something fun to the sidebar causing the download per blog page to take forever is so tempting. Really, I can even count my calories from my own blog page now!
There are other new things too---get on in there now---just hit the "layout" tab from your dashboard and click away! How fun!
I have not had time to look to find fun stuff on the internet to share in a while.
While watching today's ice storm come down in the wee hours of the morning (it's 5:44 a.m. now and I've been up a while now), I found this site called Keybr.com.
I know I can type fast, but I'm always curious how fast I can really type. Within a few minutes, I advanced to level three (it took me a while to realize that when it flashed "new typing record" it was actually advancing me to the next level) with a speed of 135 words per minute with zero mistakes.
Wow, is that accurate?
What speed to you type at on this gizmo?
In the last gizmo, I typed 121.42 words per minute. So maybe I can really type this fast.
I have read that quite a few people are using the free program called ZipGenius. However, I had a terrible experience with it on Friday night and would like to share to save others the hassle.
I understand that it may work fine in XP (although I won't be testing it), but I had serious issues with it in Vista.
What a night I’ve had and a lot of wasted time to boot!
I installed the program earlier in the week and observed that when I right clicked on a zip file, where previously I could see the Windows link for "extract all" it was replaced with ZipGenius links. Immediately, I was not comfortable with the program invading my Windows settings and changing them.
I uninstalled the program as I couldn’t quickly figure out how to use it. It also uninstalled the default Windows extraction ability.
So I tried a restore point---at which time my brand new laptop got the blue screen of death and would not start up again!
I called Sony and was able to get it back up and then the claim was escalated to this guy who accessed it by remote trying to figure out how to get the zip to work again and I was on the phone all night until almost midnight.
Finally, we discovered that if we created a new ID, it worked okay.
So now I need to spend time moving over everything to my new ID and setting everything up (like my e-mail and other settings….WHAT a pain….it will probably take me a couple hours to set up the new ID….after all this time now.
And they warned me that it seemed that the program corrupted some of my files and to back up daily as I could get the blue screen of death again….at which point I’ll have to just do a total system restore.
Please learn from my experience.
**** I continue to use UnZipThemAll. It is a stand alone program that works on its own and is free. I love that if I have all of my zips in the same folder, both .zip and .rar, that I can direct the program to that folder and it will highlight all of the files for me. All I have to do is click to start and it will unzip all of the multiple zips files at once. Thereafter, the folder will have two files for each (the original zip and the unzipped). It's just a few clicks to sort and highlight all of the zip files together to delete them. So quick and I'm on my way to sorting my files.
Yes! I am so excited to finally get my network working! Half or partially working was not acceptable.
Here are some highlights and notes that I hope might help others. If I have a computer crash (hopefully not), they might even help me!
1. Get the IP's of both computers and enter them into your firewall software (Norton, Kaspersky, Trend) so that the firewall accepts the other computer. To find the IP of each computer, click Start, then in the Run box type CMD. In the command prompt box, type ipconfig. You can also try pinging the other computer from the command prompt to see if they are able to access each other by typing "ping" and the IP number of the other computer.
3. Make both computers to have the same workgroup. In XP, the default workgroup name is MSHOME. In Vista it is WORKGROUP. Make them both the same. Go to Start/My Computer/Properties. Under the "Computer Name" tab, click change.
4. Share the folders on the XP by right click on the folder you want to share and choosing "Sharing and Security." Check both boxes under "network sharing and security," the second allowing the network to change the files.
5. Share the folders on the Vista, which I found a bit more challenging. I found this article to be very helpful. A few notes of my own to add would be: A. Make "everyone" a co-owner. B. Give "everyone" at least the ability to "change" and "read" the folder contents. C. Under "caching" insure that all files are available offline. D. In the "Network and Sharing Center" under click "customize" and choose "private." A Must-Do!
6. In XP, the permissions (as in "B" above) are not visible in normal mode. If you are unable to to move filed from the Vista to the XP and receive a "Destination Folder Access Denied" error message, restart the XP in safe mode (by clicking on the F8 key while the computer is starting up). Right click on the folder you are sharing and choose properties. You will now be able to see a permissions tab. I found a user group for "network services" which was not given permission to modify. It may take 10 to 15 minutes for the permissions to set after hitting apply.
It seems that we are always given helpful way to remember to do other things. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't.
For instance, do you remember the gimmacks for when you are supposed to change the batteries in your smoke detectors? I tend to forget them.
Do you remember? When you change your clocks, change your smoke detector batteries. I cannot remember that for the life of me and the local news station always has to remind me.
Hmm...I'd better go check that today.
I have another little helpful gimmack for you today. One I bet you've not heard of. Why? Cause I just made it up.
When you change your antivirus/firewall, change your free software programs with new updated ones.
My subscribtion to Norton was running out and I decided (finally) to try something new and did purchase Kaspersky.
However, my laptop crashing caused me to install new programs on it and I realized that Spybot, Adaware, and CCleaner are old free versions on my desktop. Yes, these free versions update often too!
So, head on over to Download.com and search for them and grab the newest versions of Spybot, Adaware, and CCleaner if you have not done so recently! And when your antivirus/firewall software subscriptions run out next, check for new versions of free programs at the same time! A great way to remember to do that!
Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-being, let me do it now; let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.- Drummond
E-mail Me at hummdingertub at yahoo.com.
I appreciate even small donations for my tutorial writing and freebies.
