Category: Tools

Yahoo’s stupidity continues with news that they are closing down Delicious. While not making many headline lately Delicious was a fantastic service that allowed people to bookmark websites so you could access them anywhere. I used to use Delicious regularly to save sites that I would find so I could access the bookmarks from anywhere. The mere fact the Yahoo is closing down a service that was used by millions regularly giving them a database of website bookmarks with tags is astounding to me. How could they not find a way to make money with this service shows how poorly Yahoo had and is being run.

Of course if you use Delicious you are now going to have to export all of your bookmarks to use on another service. Search Engine Land already has a roundup of 10 alternatives that you can switch over too and a good place to start if you want to maintain your bookmarks in the cloud. One service that is not mentioned is Xmarks. While Xmarks is not the same as Delicious, it does provide you with the ability to sync your bookmarks across web browsers, and access your bookmarks over the web from any web browser. Xmarks also had a close call with closing down recently but have been acquired by LastPass so they will be around for a little while longer. At least if Xmarks does close down you will not have to worry about exporting your bookmarks since they will already be one your computer.

I wonder how long until Yahoo closes down Flickr? Course maybe someone could help out my buddy Rhett raise some money to buy it from Yahoo and make it work.

There are some applications that I use all the time and has made my life easier. Dropbox is one of those applications that I mostly use to sync files between my main desktop and my laptop so I always have the latest version of the files I am working on. It is also great to sync my latest favorite album so I can listen to it on the laptop as well. I was looking forward to the Android application coming out so I could use Dropbox to always have the most important files I need available on my phone. After installing the app from the Android market here is what I like and don’t like so far.

The Good

• Allows me to easily upload files from my Motorola Milestone to Dropbox.
• Can stream music to my phone, which is handy on a wifi connection.

Things I wish it could do

• Sync – I am amazed the I cannot sync at least some specific folders to my phone. This is one of the things Dropbox does best and it is missing in the Android app.
• Download a whole folder – I can download individual files, but it is not possible to download a whole folder at a time.

Dropbox on my laptop and desktop are great, but I have to admit I am a little disappointed in the Dropbox Android app. It seems like they just missed ignore what makes Dropbox great. Sure streaming music to your phone is cool, but I want to be able to wirelessly sync data, music and video to my Android phone so I have it when I am not connected.

I was reminded recently that I am human. I made a mistake and when I make a mistake it tends to be a big one. Now I am pretty paranoid about backing up data so when I discovered what I did I knew I would be able to restore pretty much everything from the backup I had, but there was a few pages of new content that I did not have a backup for.

As I started fixing my error I kept wondering how I was going to restore that new information that the client had placed on their website between the last backup and my screw up. Then it dawned on me, I had read the pages that the client added to the site on both Firefox on my desktop and Firefox on my laptop. A quick about:cache?device=disk and sure enough they information was cached. The only problem is that Firefox does not give you a very user friendly view of the cached files. I needed an easy way to save the information so I could add it back into the website.

This is where I discovered the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It allows you to sort the items in the Firefox cache by key, size, type and date. Using the Firefox CacheViewer I was quickly able to find the couple items I needed, save them as HTML files and copy the information out that I was missing.

If you every need to go looking though your Firefox cache for some information that you might have lost, or just want to browse the cache and see what Firefox has saved take a look at the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It sure helped me when I made my mistake.

Your IP Address Is:

 
It seems like I need this information at least once a day lately from one client or another so I thought I would make it easy for me to find.

If you need to find your IP address often you might want to signup for a service like DynDNS that will assign a domain name to your DHCP IP Address. I use it for my office IP Address and it makes it easy to connect to my office network.

There are a number of tools that I use regularly and tend to take for granted, one of those tools is Dropbox. I have a desktop computer that I do the majority of my work on, but there are times when I meet with clients and I take my laptop. While I take transfer the files that I need from my desktop to my laptop there are occasions when I do forget a file or I create some new documents and I want to make sure that they are stored back on my desktop just in case something happens to my laptop.

I used to carry a USB flash drive around but there have been occasions when I forget to take it with me. There is nothing worse than being at a clients and realizing I forgot an important file or folder on my desktop that I wanted to show them. This is where I will usually use a VNC remote desktop to connect to my desktop computer copy the folders and files I need into my Dropbox and in a couple of seconds (or minutes depending on how large the files are) and the files are there for me to use on my Dropbox on my laptop and accessible through the web interface.

Dropbox has also come in very useful when I have created new documents on my laptop and want to make sure I have a copy of them when I am back at home just in case something happens to my laptop before I get home. I have Mozy installed on my desktop at home and it automatically backs up my files there, my laptop does not have Mozy so I backup the files using Dropbox to my desktop which will automatically backup the files. Dropbox makes it very easy for me to make sure those files are safe and where I need them. That way I don’t have to worry about losing my USB flash drive.

There are lots of other things you can do with Dropbox. I am sure I have only touched the surface of what can be done but it works well for what I need it to do. Dropbox gives you 2gb for free so you can use it without it costing a cent and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you need more space you can purchase a larger account. The next account size up from free is $9.99/month or $99.00/year for 50gb. They also have a referral program that will get you more space for every person that you refer. If you need to sync files between two or more computers or want to have instant web access then take a look at Dropbox it might be just what you are looking for, I know it has helped me numerous times since I installed it.

Sharing information is what the Internet is about. The problem is that not all information is easily made into HTML pages so it can be easily shared. The creation of easy to use content management systems has made it easier for anyone to become a web publisher, but there are still times when it is not easy to put the information you want to share with the world online. Often the problem is because the format the information is in is not easily converted to HTML. Fortunately there are now easier ways to share documents that do not require you to export documents to HTML. Here are some of the easiest ways I have found to share documents on the web.

Google Docs

Google Docs allows people to upload many different formats of documents which you can then share. Speadsheets and Presentations can be embedded into web pages, and word processing documents can be saved as web pages. For example here is a quick document I made just to share with all of you.

Scribd

Scribd is my favourite way to embed PDF and Word documents online. They support a wide range of document types including:

Microsoft Office: Microsoft Word Files doc, docx Microsoft Powerpoint Files ppt, pptx, pps Microsoft Excel Files xls, xlsx

PDF: PDF pdf, ps

Open Office: Open Office Documents odt, odp, sxw, sxi, etc.

Text: Text Documents txt, rtf

Once the documents are uploaded you can copy and paste the embed code and add the document as a flash reader to your website or blog. Makes it great for people to read that PDF instead of downloading it.

Docstoc

Docstoc is similar to Scribd in many ways. You can upload documents and embed them in your website. Docstoc recently just came out of beta and has also started an AdSense revenue sharing program. This gives people the opportunity to share in the money that is made from their documents that they upload to Docstoc. Check out the video below if you would like to know more.

edocr

I just recently came across edocr, and have not much of a chance to try it yet. It looks similar to Scribd as well, but the site appears to cater more to business than to individuals. If anyone has more experience with them leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

SlideShare

SlideShare is my favourite way to embed presentations in a website. Simply upload the presentation and you can then easily copy and paste the embed code to add the presentation to your website to let people click through the slides.

SlideBoom

Similar to SlideShare but with more of a focus on business presentations and sharing with other business colleagues.

Empressr

Is not just a presentation sharing website. They allow you to create your own presentaions online and then embed them into your website using a flash embed.

---

Those are some of the web services I have found and use to easily embed documents into websites and blogs. As I mentioned I have my favourites, what are yours?

I tweeted recently that I was doing my invoicing and that I needed to find another way of doing it. Two suggestions I got from people were FreshBooks and Cashboard. I checked out both and signed up for the free trials.

Feature wise both FreshBooks and Cashboard offer similar things. Invoicing, recurring invoicing, time tracking, estimates and reports. A couple features that FreshBooks offers is the ability to enter expenses and snail mail an invoice to clients that do not have email. Cashboard has expense tracking on their being developed feature list so I image that will be added soon.

Recurring invoicing is one of the tasks I tend to get behind on and it was the main reason for me to look at finding a new method to do my invoicing. Both FreshBooks and Cashboard offer a recurring invoicing system and from what I can see they both work fairly similar. Invoices are created automatically and clients can then login and either download and print the invoice and depending on your payment options pay you online. This feature alone will save me several hours a month and my clients will no longer have to wait for me to get the invoice out to them. It also gives me a great overview of how much regular money I have coming in every month.

The tracking project time is another nice feature and again I could not see a great deal of difference between FreshBooks and Cashboard. Both offer time tracking based on projects and tasks. Cashboard does allow you to create an invoice from your tracked time, I was not certain if Freshbooks is able to do that. I still track much of my time using a spreadsheet on Google Docs because I often have GMail and Google Docs open while I work.

Invoicing in both systems is similar, but I did notice that Cashboard allows you to attach a PDF to the email when you are sending an invoice by email. This is a nice feature that means the client does not have to go and download the invoice from the Internet. It would be nice if the recurring invoices allowed that as well on Cashboard. FreshBooks does not appear to attach a PDF file to the email when invoices are emailed out. FreshBooks does however allow you to send a snail mail invoice so that could be a real plus for those people that have clients that do not have email (is that possible anymore?).

I have to say I am impressed by the features of both FreshBooks and Cashboard. At this point I am leaning towards signing up for Cashboard mainly because of Cashboard being slightly less expensive for the features I need. Hopefully soon I will be on my way to invoicing heaven.

What do you use to do your invoicing and why?