Computer Chit Chat

Fuelmyblog and Tsheets contest

Fuelmyblog and Tsheets.com want to know what people do in the first five minutes of their working day. One lucky person who answers this question on their blog will win an 80Gb iPod Classic or an 8Gb Nano.

You probably know Fuelmyblog as one of the most popular online blogger communities. TSheets is an affordable monthly service that offers a web-based timesheet system created to track hourly time from any computer or mobile device. The Tsheets website is well laid out and easy to understand. To use their language, it’s Triffic.

So, they want to know what I do in the first five minutes of my working day. I get up on a work day at 4am. I usually begin work at my day job at 6am. When I get to work the first thing I do is clock in. Then I go into the office and turn on my computer. Then I put the radio up on top of bookshelf on top of my desk (the only place I get reception) and turn it on. I open Outlook first and then the different apps and folders that I use all day. Then I go into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee. Then I go back to my desk and check my voicemail and email. By then almost ten minutes has gone by and I need that coffee. So, there you have it. That’s what I do in the first five minutes of my working day.

What do you do in the beginning of your work day?

Happy Mother’s Day

So many menus

I received an email asking me for a little help understanding the menus within applications. Let me see what I can do to help.

Sometimes people get a little confused within an application because there are so many things going on. If you’re not familiar it could be a little intimidating. I remember when I first started using a computer I broke into a sweat anytime I opened most applications. It all looked so confusing because I hadn’t seen it before, and because I didn’t understand what it was that I was looking at. I recently received a question asking me about the different menus within an application. I’m going to do my best to explain what it is you’re seeing in there.

When you open an application, across the top of the screen you see the menu bar. All of the application’s menus are located within the menu bar. When you click or hover over one of the menus there, you will find a list of options or commands that can be chosen. Next to many of them you will see their corresponding keyboard shortcut. If you learn the keyboard shortcuts for the tasks you do the most you will find you aren’t in the menus nearly as much. Within the menus there is another menu called Toolbars. When you check an item a toolbar containing the commands from that menu will appear at the top of your screen. Toolbars can be customized to contain just the buttons you want by clicking the little arrow on the side of the toolbar. I love to have the formatting toolbar visible whenever possible.

That’s just a small dent in the big pile of information pertaining to menus. If you’re looking for something specific let me know and I’ll do my best to help.

OIO Publisher on sale for $20

If you have a blog and you sell ads of any type, you should check out OIO Publisher if you haven’t already. I wrote a review of this Wordpress plugin about a month ago. I recommend it highly, it’s an invaluable tool for managing ad sales directly right from within your Wordpress dashboard.

Recently the OIO Publisher plugin was upgraded to version 1.6.0 and added some great new features including the addition of an ad queue so people can buy ads in advance, an upgrade alert system, the ability to use html, integration with the ViralBlogAds network, and the capability to place ads on any website by using a javascript code.

This plugin is regularly $37 but for a limited time, I’ve been given two coupon codes to lower your price of the OIO Publisher plugin.

This coupon is HOT! Use code QWERTY-17 to get $17 off of the OIO Publisher regular price of $37, bringing the price down to $20. This coupon expires in the next two days (@ 05/05/08) so take advantage now. At $20 this plugin could pay for itself within one or two sales, so if you’ve even thought about buying it now’s the perfect time to do so.

If you can’t buy within the next day or so you can still save some money off of the regular price. Use code QWERTY-5 to get $5 off of the OIO Publisher regular price of $37, bringing the price down to $32. This coupon expireson 05/20/08.

If you’re serious about selling your own ads this plugin is a must have, so hurry and take advantage of the coupon codes before they expire.

How to find out how many words are in your post

Have you ever wanted or needed to know how many words you’re written in a post on your blog? It’s easy to check at any time if you use the Wordpress plugin Leprakhaun’s Word Count. To use it, just unzip and upload it into your plugins directory. Then activate the plugin in your Wordpress dashboard. After that, whenever you write a post you’ll see a box that has a button that says calculate words a little bit below your post. Click it and it tells you how many words you’ve written. There’s a screenshot below of what the Word Count button and box look like within a new post. I really like it and recommend it highly. It’s a really helpful little plugin worth checking out. If you try it, let me know how you like it.

Computer Chit Chat Bloggy Giveaways winner

Rather than take a screenshot of everyone’s names and email addresses, I pasted everyone into a spreadsheet and assigned everyone a number. Then I went to random.org and randomized the list of numbers. Then I took the winning number, in this case #8, and checked the spreadsheet to see who it was. I’ve added a screenshot of the randomized page showing the winning number.

The winner, #8, is Renee, from strokesofmagic.blogspot.com. Renee is receiving one year of Hosting! It is shared hosting with Surpass Hosting (whom I LOVE), and it’s called the Power Plan. Renee’s comment was “The features that caught my eye, were shopping cart and image gallery. Thanks for the chance to win hosting!”. Stop by Renee’s blog and congratulate her on winning. Renee, please email me within 72 hours to confirm you wish to accept the prize.

Thanks to all for participating! Please subscribe to my rss feed. You’ll not only get to read anything I’m chit chatting about but you’ll learn about future contests that way as well.

Shortcuts

I received an email asking me what was meant by shortcuts. There are two kinds of shortcuts.

The shortcut menu is a menu of commands that appears if you right click on something. I almost always right click to copy something.

A keyboard shortcut is a combination of two or more keys used together to carry out a command. An example is my favorite, control-V, which is paste. If you want to know what the keyboard shortcut for something is, take a stroll through your menus and next to many of the commands you will see the combination of keys included in the shortcut for that particular command.

If you use shortcuts, what’s your favorite? If you don’t, what shortcut might be the most helpful for you?

Bloggy Giveaways - One Year of Hosting

Computer Chit Chat is joining in the Bloggy Giveaways Quarterly Giveaway Carnival for the first time! I’m giving away one year of Hosting! It is shared hosting with Surpass Hosting (whom I LOVE), and it’s called the Power Plan. Want to win it? It’s easy to enter. To enter just leave a comment containing your name (at least first name), and any one feature of the Power Plan. Feel free to share if you’re participating in the carnival as well if you like. Please take a look around while you’re here and if you like what you see please feel free to bookmark my blog or subscribe to my rss feed. Hurry and enter now - comments close Friday 04/25/08 at 11:59 pm est. The winner will be selected using random.org and will be announced on Saturday 04/26/08. Good luck!

THIS GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED.

How to keep up with your Wordpress plugins

Have you ever gone into the plugins section of your Wordpress dashboard only to see that several of your Wordpress plugins have been updated? They don’t appear in the dashboard tab to see when you first log in, which I think would be really helpful. So, in order to keep up with my plugins I schedule one day a month on my calendar to do list to log into each blog and go into the plugins tab. I know it might not sound like a big deal to some but some plugins are updated rather frequently.

So. Anything I’m not using regularly I deactivate. If I see the words “there is a new version of whatver plugin available” I go to that page and take a quick look at the notes on it and upload the new version to my plugins directory and activate it. It’s just an easy way for me to remember to be sure I am running the latest stable version of the plugins I use.

How to clean up your blog archives

A couple of weeks ago I came across a plugin that organizes your archives on a page of their own. This easy to use plugin is called SRG Clean Archives and can be downloaded for free. The plugin will lists the years, months and days that you’ve posted in. The listings include the post permalink and the date the post was published. They can be configured to include post and comment count. The months can be set up to collapse and expand, which is nice because it saves room.

To install it just download it from the author. Unzip the package and upload it to your plugins directory of your blog. Next, activate and configure the plugin. Then all that’s left is to create an Archives page and install the piece of code to make the plugin work. What you see above is a screenshot of the admin panel with the Wordpress dashboard. If you want to see the plugin in action, visit A Contest Blog and click on the Archives page. I’m really pleased with it. If you try it let me know what you think.