In my next few posts, I am going to take a deeper look at Google Apps (http://bit.ly/Z10S4). If you haven’t heard of Google Apps or if you have and hadn’t bothered to check it out, you may want to consider it when I am done. I am a big proponent of Google Apps and of course, a user. Google Apps is designed to help a small office manage email, calendar, shared documents, intranets, and chat. In theory, you could replace an IT consultant with Google Apps for a small office. In fact Google Apps works exceptionally well for a virtual office. You will save money on IT and software licenses. And you will enjoy improved reliability of applications. You only need to be able to connect to the Internet to get to your stuff. For $50 per user per year, you can make the great leap to Google Apps. Not ready for even a $50 commitment? Use if for FREE with some limitations. I’ll write more in the coming weeks on this topic. If you are interested in any particular application about Google Apps, let me know and I will address it the next few posts. – Joe
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Google Apps Part 1 of x
Joe Caridi
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Skimmer Your Social Networking
Shawn Brown
Skimmer looks like a promising tool for managing all your social media streams.Skimmer℠ is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities. It improves upon your day-to-day interaction with multiple social networks, removing distractions and providing a rich experience that is particularly suited to multimedia content.
For more information The 2.0 Life has a great overview of the tool called Keep Your Social Media Life Organized with Skimmer.
Enjoy!
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Need Online Backup
Joe Caridi
Need an online backup? Backup all your files, pictures and videos in a safe, encrypted, and secure way with Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk utilizes Amazon Web Services to store your data in the cloud. All the user sees is a network drive letter on their local machine. The software helps you to schedule backups of whatever and whenever you want. The service also provides access to all your files from any Internet enabled PC. Pay for only the server space and upload bandwidth that you use. This is a relatively inexpensive and reliable solution without worrying about any hardware failures. By backing up your data in the cloud, you also secure your data from natural disaster or fire.
Fore more information, visit http://bit.ly/T6vL3.
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Choosing a CMS
Shawn Brown
Here’s a great article by Noupe called Ten Simple Rules for Choosing the Perfect CMS + Excellent Options.My pick from this list is WordPress!
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Latitude and Longitude of Google Point
Shawn Brown
This is a great site for finding the latitude and longitude on a map. I think this could come in handy.Enjoy
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Online Color Palette Tools
Shawn Brown
Trying to decide on a color palette for your website or design projects? This list from Web Designer Ledger gives a great selection of online tools for picking colors.Enjoy!
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Check status of web sites with AreMySitesUp.com
Joe Caridi
If you host or manage or are responsible for a web site the number one thing you have to know is … Are my sites up? A service at AreMySitesUp.com handles this issue in a seamless and easy to manage way. So whether you are responsible for 5 sites or 100 sites, you can know within minutes if any of your sites are down and begin working to correct the problem – even before it is ever reported to you.
AreMySitesUp.com provides both FREE and paid service. The free service is great. It allows you to monitor up to 5 sites and receive email or SMS when any of the sites go down. It checks the sites about once an hour at this level. Not bad if you are running less than critical sites. For more important sites or if you monitor a lot of sites, you may want to check out their paid service. For $75 a year, you can monitor up to 100 sites with checks every 15 minutes. All the premium services check the sites’ status with greater frequency, provide RSS feed instant checks and are advertisement free when you visit the web site.
Other features include, iphone/itouch application, twitter integration (really not sure what this looks like or why anyone would care), and reports of time a site was down and when it came back up.
All and all a good service. The free service takes care of most our needs, but the paid service provide a little extra speed and the ability to monitor a lot more sites. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/17FBiu.
Google Image Search for License Free Images
Joe Caridi
Google updated their image search feature today so that you can search for images with Creative Commons or GNU Licenses that you can use for FREE. All these pics are tagged as being usable by anyone. You can even search for images that you may be allowed to modify.
To use this feature, visit http://images.google.com and go to Advanced Image Search. Then select the type of license that you are interested under “Usage Rights.”
LEGAL WARNING: Keep in mind that the person who tagged them might not actually have the rights to the image. So be careful. You may have the rights to the artists creation, but not to the unrestricted use of the building or model. So this search is probably fine if you are looking for a picture of a flower or animal, but if there is a person or a building in the pic, you still may want to use one of the stock photo sites out there.
For more information on this service, visit http://bit.ly/v2WnL.
Wordpress Plugins
Shawn Brown
Here’s a great list of plugins blogged by @EricHamm.
SEO, Anti-Spam, Comments, etc: The Best Wordpress Plugins
Shawn Brown
Good find on twitter. RT: @Photoshop_GU: #Photoshop : Red and brown grunge backgrounds: Red and brown grunge backgrounds, dirty colored paper.. http://tr.im/rhya