What is the best external blog editor? Would you believe Microsoft Word for Windows?

There are a lot of great external blog editors in the world, but you may not be aware of the one that I consider the best; Microsoft Word for Windows. Microsoft Word for Windows you say? How is Microsoft Word considered an external blog editor? What most people don’t realize is that anything that you can write in Microsoft Word can be sent to your blog in less than three clicks. That means you can use all the features of Microsoft Word to create stunningly beautiful blog posts that are spelling and grammar checked. It also means that if you already know how to use Microsoft Word you already know how to blog!

Some of my favorite Microsoft Word blogging features…

Anything can do in Word can be easily uploaded to my blog. Let me show you how here:

PS Sorry my Mac using friends; Microsoft does not include this feature in Microsoft Word for Mac…

 

Surface Computing: The iDesk Final Frame

Tech | Apartment Therapy via Surface Computing: The iDesk Final Frame.

One of the greatest things about computing and the internet is the wide variety of “good, fast, and cheap” tools we have for ‘thought leadership‘ marketing. One of the worst things about computing and the internet is that if you are on your own, that means you have to be your own IT [information technology] department. You may or may not be up to that task…

Last year we celebrated the 30 anniversary of the first desktop computer from IBM. The thing that amazes me most about computers? Power? Yes, but the thing that amazes me MOST is that they haven’t really gotten easier to use! Most people don’t realize that the best day they have with their new computer is the first one and that as they install software, load and unload files, etc. their computer becomes slower and slower until the day they decide they need a new one and the process starts all over again…

If this resonates with you, you might want to use a tool I use called Tune Up Utilities 2012 — it keeps my computer running in top form so that every day with my computer is my best day because it’s always running at maximum capacity. You can download a free trial here and learn how to optimize your computer here:

You might also be interested in this post I did a few years back on how to keep your computer running as fast as the day you bought it [Note I recommended Tune Up Utilities then and still do; that is a testament in itself!]. If you the video and the posts seem intimidating, I can do it for you over the internet through “Personal Digital Coaching“. Comment below or use the ‘connect’ form…

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PC users vs. Mac users

The Difference Between Mac and PC Users [Infographic] « DAIN IT!

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Official Ubuntu circle with wordmark. Replace ...
Image via Wikipedia

“The VAR Guy was flipping though his Sunday morning paper when he spotted an article about Ubuntu Linux. He took a few more sips of coffee to perk up and make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. Sure enough, Ubuntu had made the leap into the mainstream media — earning coverage in Newsday, the eight largest newspaper in the nation. Has Ubuntu reached its tipping point with consumers?

Newsday’s Personal Technology column includes a question from a reader who intends to purchase a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop with Ubuntu preloaded. Sweet. The VAR Guy already has a Dell Ubuntu desktop, and also is looking at an Ubuntu laptop.

Newsday’s columnist walks the readers through some potential issues related to Ubuntu (scan down toward the middle of this Newsday page). But overall, letters like this reinforce an undeniable truth: Ubuntu is quietly becoming a mainstream phenomena.” Click here to read more…

Lifehacker has a great roundup explaining the good and the bad of maintaining Windows. Definitely worth reading in its entirety! Click the ‘via’ link…

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…if you’re a windows user:

“Revo Uninstaller is a freeware innovative uninstall utility much faster than Windows Add/Remove applet. With its advanced and fast algorithm, Revo Uninstaller scans before and after you uninstall an application. After the program’s regular uninstaller runs, you can remove additional unnecessary files, folders and registry keys that are usually left over on your computer. Even if you have a broken installation, Revo Uninstaller scans for an application’s data on your hard disk drives and in the Windows registry and shows all found files, folders and registry items so you can delete them.” Revo Uninstaller – Free software downloads and reviews – CNET Download.com: Click the link to go to the source of this quote…

It’s a small thing, but it has done such a good job for me in a critical area that I just wanted to mention it. Thanks again to my good friend Bill for recommending it.

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The beautiful view from my deck in rural northeast Wisconsin is a great reminder of the power I have to publish and promote; from anywhere to the ends of the internet!

I’ve worked hard to develop a simple blogging workflow that can empower even the most basic computer user. I don’t care if you’re Mac, Windows, Linux, or even Smartphone or iPad — my practical, tactical approach to social media can help  you publish and promote your passion whatever it might be. But “Wah!”, you might say, “I don’t want to learn anything new!” Can you send an email? Can you save a bookmark? Then I can teach you how you can leverage social media to help establish your thought leadership position…

We’re now in an unparalleled time in history where everyone has the power to publish — the question is, will you take advantage of it? I post here every day, day after day, the best of the insight God has given me into leveraging these new media tools. If it makes sense to you, use it, great! If not you know the drill — comment, call or contact me and I’ll be happy to net it out for you!

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Image via CrunchBase

I write frequently about my disdain [hatred is too strong a word] for Microsoft and their evil licensing practices and my newfound love for Ubuntu. Over the weekend, the two final barriers to moving ‘full time’ to Ubuntu were removed. I wrote about one last night — VirtualBox allows you to run Windows seamlessly inside Ubuntu for the application or two you just can’t do without. The last remaining app I needed was a text expander like Texter for Windows or Text Expander for Mac that takes blocks of text and reduces them to keystroke combos. Lifehacker puts it this way…

“You write some blocks of text over and over. “My address is …” for example, or addresses you enter frequently into mapping web sites, or a list of email addresses. Text expansion tools instantly write those blocks for you when you write a trigger word, and are smart enough to auto-insert dates, text you’ve just copied, and then move the cursor to where you’ll be. On Windows computers, your Lifehacker editors use Texter, while the Mac writers run TextExpander (your sole Linux stalwart is tinkering with AutoKey at the moment). Save yourself a few words at a time, and soon you’ll have freed yourself from hours of mechanical typing.” Source: Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained – Productivity – Lifehacker

So today I found Autokey and while it’s a different paradigm than As-U-Type which has been my Windows favorite for many years, it shows great promise. Henceforth, I’ll be working on an experiment on my home computer to NEVER boot into my Windows partition. The transition is now as complete as it’s going to get for awhile. So long Windows — hello, Ubuntu!

btw, go to the source on the blockquoted article; the top 10 productivity basics post is priceless!

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Top 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity

“The Internet is loaded with free software, making it hard to know which one’s you really need. This article will act as your guide to the top 20 free applications (Web and Windows) for increased productivity.” Click here to read more…

Don’t forget to check Google Pack and Ninite to grab some of this software!

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Firefox or Chrome; which one should I use?

Image representing Google Chrome as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

This question is NOT a slam dunk! Also, you may be surprised to know that the answer depends on what computer platform you use…

“Which Should I Use on Windows: Firefox or Chrome?

There’s no short answer to this question, really, since neither browser is clearly better, so instead of a straight out “Use X” recommendation, let’s consider the pros and cons of each.

First, in our regular web browser performance tests, Chrome has regularly beaten up the competition or come in a very close second in most categories, while Firefox rarely leads the way. That might seem like a pretty big deal, but most browsers actually perform really well these days, so the fact that Chrome beats Firefox in most of our performance tests doesn’t mean Firefox is extremely slow—it just means that compared to Chrome, it’s not the fastest.” Source: Which Browser Should I Use: Firefox or Chrome? – Web browsers – Lifehacker

“But that brings us to another important point: Bloat. Despite the fact that Firefox generally does pretty well on memory use tests (strangely enough, it regularly wins that test in our browser performance tests), a lot of Firefox users are increasingly frustrated with slow-downs caused by what they see as browser bloat. It’s not at all uncommon to see a Firefox installation eating up more than any running application on your system, and while the memory consumption itself isn’t that big of a deal (Chrome eats a lot of memory, too), the high memory usage is often accompanied by serious browser slowdowns, which is a very big problem, and one that, anecdotally, at least, we hear from tons of Firefox users and very few Chrome users. (Presently company included.)

So what keeps Firefox users coming back despite Chrome outperforming it on Windows by most accounts? One of the biggest issues is extensions. Firefox’s extension ecosystem has long been a selling point of the popular open-source browser, and if there’s anything you wish your browser did differently, chances are there’s a Firefox extension to address it.” Source: Which Browser Should I Use: Firefox or Chrome? – Web browsers – Lifehacker

“Unfortunately, in our experience, Chrome for OS X is still much too young for full-time adoption. Remember, Chrome for Mac launched quite awhile after the Windows version and has been around much less than a year overall. Like Chrome on Windows, it shows a whole lot of promise, but it’s also prone to the occasional non-responsiveness and other bugginess that we aren’t used to and probably shouldn’t be seeing from a prime-time browser.” Source: Which Browser Should I Use: Firefox or Chrome? – Web browsers – Lifehacker

Me? I’m using Chrome more and more every day as Chrome versions of my indispensable Firefox addons become available. What about you?

Tactic #4: Use an external blog editor

Last week I covered tactic #3 in the tactics and tools series: blogging. Assuming that all my clients and readers went out and immediately launched a new blog by now you’re thinking to yourself ‘there’s got to be an easier way’. That easier way is to use a blog editor. Not just any blog editor; use ScribeFire. Jon M. of the Affiliate Business Advisor blog writes this:

“I mentioned previously in an older post how I have used various Blog Editing software, some have been good some have been complete crap and some fall, somewhere in the middle.

I just want to mention one that I have been using now for quite some time. Previously I was using software called Post2blog and I worked closely with the designer to add features in that I thought would make it better.

After Microsoft came out with their free Windows Live Writer software, the owner of post2blog decided to call it a day, and with it a number of features stopped working.

So i [sic] moved over to windows writer. I started to find that has numerous issues and was extremely slow to use. Posting videos was a nightmare though I believe they have fixed that now.

At which time I began looking for another editor to use to post to my multiple blogs.. i came across Free Scribefire which at the time seemed excellent but once again I found a ton of issues like you couldn”t align images which was a pain, they also had a number of other issues.. Yet I could see that it had potential if only the creator would fix some of the issues.

Well I have to say that the creator took the feedback from his users very seriously and I kid you not… within a matter of a month or 2 he had output at least 4 to 5 new updates to Scribefire… taking into account pretty much all of peoples requests.

Yet still there seemed to be a few issues that I ran into so i decided to create a video to show the owner..

And once again the owner took seriously the feedback and within a week had a new update out which included some of my suggestions

I stand behind this as its not only FREE but the support is by far some of the best support I have seen provided for a free based application.” Source: Internet Marketing Blog – Making Money Online » Blog Archive » Scribefire Review

Jon also put together a nice video review which you can view here…

Why use ScribeFire?

  1. You want to easily be able to slurp content from websites you visit.
  2. You want additional features or enhancements like Zemanta.
  3. You edit multiple blogs and want a way to quickly update them all.
  4. You want to actively manage pings and technorati tags.
  5. You want an easy way to generate ad revenue.

Slurp content? What is that you say? Here’s a video — easier to show than tell…

I’m a little bit rushed today — my focus is on gettings things in order before my trip to Germany Friday so I may have missed a thing or two. You can always ask a question in the comments or via the contact page. One final note; I would have liked to write about Windows Live Writer which had shown some promise, but due to the pissing match between Firefox and Microsoft, the Windows Live Writer add-on for Firefox does not work with the current version. If you’re an Internet Explorer user, you may want to evaluate that solution as well…

I had a date with an old ‘flame’ this past week…

PowerBook G4
Image via Wikipedia

Not really — it just felt that way! David Sauter of Envano gave me a Powerbook G4 for a project we’re working on and it was the first time I had used a fast Mac running a current version of OS X. Ever…

I left the Mac back in 2002 — finally got that one job that insisted I move to Windows and left the platform. Prior to that, I had been a Mac user for 15 years — even worked 3 years for Apple — and I was a sold out Mac fanatic. Eventually, I had to leave my first computing love and I didn’t have a chance to look back until this week…

So how did it feel? Meh. That’s it, just meh! I wasn’t overcome by nostalgic feelings of love for my long lost platform and I didn’t get teary-eyed as I touched the keyboard again. Don’t get me wrong — Apple makes a nice notebook and OS X runs well. The big difference? Thanks to Apple’s success there are more hardware/software solutions available than when I worked at Apple during the dark ‘pre-Think Different’ days.

The one thing that make me really happy, though, was to see how well my current strategy of using tools that are cross platform Windows/Mac/Ubuntu is working. I’ve written recently about how for me, the hardware platform is becoming increasingly irrelevant — it’s all about how fast you can get into the ‘cloud’ and get your work done online! For me it’s all about Firefox and other free open source tools that are available for the price of a download. Here are some of the tools that I use and recommend:

You can grab the map and move it around or view it full screen. All of these tools work exceedingly well, run on Windows/Mac/Ubuntu, and are free. Free. And Ubuntu is a free operating system that runs Linux in a way that’s similar to Mac OS X.

The balance of power in the computing space is shifting and I’m glad that I made the move to the cloud and started using Ubuntu and free open source software. Contact me — I’ll be happy to talk with you about the impact this could have on you and your work…

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