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
Updates from August, 2009
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Google Apps Part 1 of x
Joe Caridi
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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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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.
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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
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Shawn Brown
Looking for a nice slideshow script. I’m using this on one of my sites and it works great. Very easy to setup.
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex14/fadeinslideshow.htm
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Shawn Brown
Get inspired with CSS Nature.
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Digital Photography Made Easy With Snapfire
Shawn Brown
Corel has launched a new software product called Snapfire. Snapfire is great software for the digital photography enthusiast. Snapfire is simple to use and gives you the ability to share your digital photos with friends and family. With this cool software you can easily organize digital photos, create slide shows, and send digital photos by email. Snapfire makes organizing your digital photos a snap. This software will let you view pictures as a full screen slide show as soon as they are downloaded from your digital camera. You are also given the tools to help you locate those photos by rating photos, adding captions, and adding tags so you can always find them. When you want to locate your digital photos later, just type the file name or keyword into a search box and Snapfire will find the photo you are looking for.
It’s a snap to enhance your photos with just a few clicks. Snapfire will crop photos to a 4×6. The Photo Doctor in Snapfire will let you know when a photo can be improved by clicking Quick Fix. Adjust the color, brightness, and contrast and also turn your digital pictures into Black & White or Sepia photographs.
In addition, Snapfire comes with templates to make scrapbook pages, cards, collages, and calendars. So are you ready to get your creative juices flowing. Download the free version of Snapfire by visiting their website at http://www.snapfire.com/.
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Good CSS Page Layout Resource
Shawn Brown
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Picasa - Free Photo Software From Google
Shawn Brown
Looking for free software to assist in managing your Digital Photos. Check out Google’s Picasa. Here’s what google says about it.
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.
Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, instantly share via Hello™, and even post pictures on your own blog. (http://picasa.google.com/)
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Open Source Desktop Publishing
Shawn Brown
For those of you interested in Desktop Publishing check out Scribus. Scribus is Open Source Desktop Publishing for Linux, Mac OS® X and Windows®. I’ve used it a bit and have been happy with the results (I’ve only used it on my home printer).
