Douglas Communications Group » Tips & tricks

Web-based mapping software is a hit

sharlan — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:22:35 +0000

Last month’s post about Web-based mapping software is already the most-viewed post EVER on our blog. Read more about one user’s delight.

“I got so excited when I clicked on your link today. But alas, I still have no time! So, I passed it along to my new staff accountant who, within an hour, had downloaded a five-year history of our labor relations clients and mapped them, complete with color coding by type! I am so geeked right now, I can hardly wait to celebrate this with the management team tomorrow and I PROMISE to give you credit! I love your newsletter, there is always something I use!” Nan Pearson, Chief Financial Officer, Michigan Association of School Boards.

Here’s the link to the article about mapping. 5/27/10

Easy SEO

sharlan — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:22:01 +0000

Adagio Graphics, one of our design contractors, recent contacted an SEO consulting firm on behalf of their clients. They learned that the consultant’s minimum fee was, I kid you not, $40,000.

Without a doubt, there are companies out there making enough money selling over the Internet to justify that cost. But even the smallest companies can do several simple, effective things to help themselves get found by their prospective customers. Once again, American Express’s business-advice website comes through, with this article on SEO for beginners.

Photos – organizing, sharing, cropping, sizing, enhancing, manipulating

sharlan — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:21:48 +0000

If my earlier posts have encouraged you to sign up for the Kim Komando e-newsletter, then you already saw this link. If not, and if you want to browse a plethora of picture-related applications, click here. We’ll see you when you come up for air next week. 5/27/10

Display addresses on a Web-based map in seconds

sharlan — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:26:54 +0000

Do you want to know if or how geography brings you customers? Do you need to create delivery routes? Would you like to put a custom map on your Web site showing your store locations? There are several free Web-based applications that’ll do the trick. It took me all of two minutes to map a list of addresses from Excel using Batchgeo. Mapalist looked promising. To use The Map Monster, your data needs to be in a Google Docs spreadsheet. This site has instructions for a more detailed process which enables you to put a map on a Web site with customized icons and additional detail about each map point, e.g. hours of operation, or locational information (“Just north of 12 Mile Road”). 4/28/10

Make weapons out of office supplies

sharlan — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:20:30 +0000

Here are instructions to make a crossbow with four pencils and a couple of rubber bands. (Don’t put your eye out.) You can also find out how to build an Altoids Catapult, an Altoids Trebuchet and a Sharpie rocket. 4/28/10

How to adjust your rear view mirror

sharlan — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:01:20 +0000

Here’s the link to the story at Car and Driver. I learned the secret to setting it up from Click and Clack on NPR’s Car Talk. Lean your head against the driver’s side window, and line up the left mirror so you can just see the side of the car. Lean your head right, into the center of the car, and line up the right mirror in the same way. My husband still doesn’t believe this works, so every road trip has its little adjustment rituals, as the new driver takes the wheel, sighs loudly in exasperation and changes the settings back to her/his preferences. 3/31/10

Road trip electronics

sharlan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:35:35 +0000

When Douglas Communications Group and Ken Hebenstreit, Bookseller go on a road trip, we are wired. Here’s a list of our electronic helpers:

Two laptop computers
Smart phone, with 12-volt and 110-volt chargers
35mm camera
Flip video recorder
A 12-volt to 110 converter, to use computers in the car
A converter to plug the smart phone into the car’s cassette player, so we can stream audio and play MP3s through the vehicle sound system, and
The piece de resistance: A Mifi card.

I’ve wanted to try Mifi ever since I learned about it, and boy, is it dandy. Just turned it on and both our computers immediately found the wireless network. It worked in the car, so we could stream Pandora radio even when we didn’t have 3G coverage. It’s faster than the hotel network. 3/6/10

Our WordPress-based website

sharlan — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:46:32 +0000

Our new site is designed with WordPress, whose capacity extends beyond blogging. You’re reading our blog here, but the rest of the site is comprised of static pages. They’re easy to update, and those regular content updates keep the search engines interested.

A blog site’s design is based on a theme. WordPress offers a number of nice theme templates, but I designed the theme myself using an inexpensive application called Artisteer.

Nice guys (& gals) win

sharlan — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:27:28 +0000

When the going gets tough, the tough get nice. Cheerleaders generate better performance than despots, according to research by a University of Amsterdam professor reported in this article in the November, 2009 Harvard Business Review.

Lifehacker, voicemail hell & passwords

sharlan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:31:47 +0000

The Lifehacker site is a constant course of useful information, including this list of 61 great free applications. Sign up for their RSS feed!

Go to this site for information about how to avoid voice mail hell with more than 1,500 major companies. http://gethuman.com/

How to create safe but memorable passwords: Create one nonsense word which combines capital and lower case letters and numbers. Let’s choose z00md0G, where the “o’s” are zeros. Now look at the domain for which you’re creating a password: ebay.com, for example. Decide that you’re going to take the first two letters of that and every passworded domain and add them to the beginning of your nonsense word. So the password for ebay will be ebz00md0G. The password for paypal will be paz00md0G. Unfortunately this doesn’t solve the problem of remembering your user name, but you can more safely write those down if you don’t have to write down the password. Now go sign up for free, safe, online passwork storage at Keepass.info.