Designers Need To Reject Gray On Black

Lately, I’ve seen quite a lot of sites (usually blogs) put gray text on a black background. Tonight, I noticed it from StumbleUpon (a site I love, btw), and was just dismayed. (Yes, the screenshot above is from something SU wants me to know). Stop it, people! Just stop it. I don’t care how uber-cool it might be, it just plain sucks for readability. Show off your dark side in some other... read more

Portable Apps Will Not Be My Future

I had hoped that I could become less hard drive dependent by running off of Portable Apps, but my hopes were dashed today. This might be useful for some people, but the fact that the apps load and run EXTREMELY slowly makes it a deal-killer for me. If you do decide to try it out, make sure you have several hours free to install the apps. Some are quick, but some take a really long time to install. Oh... read more

Keep Home Office Business Costs Down

Having a successful home based business doesn’t rely only upon how much income you bring in. Some of the success lies in how well you cut expenses. Here are a few tips to keep those expenses down to a minimum. Use Free or Open Source Software as often as possible. I’m moving more and more towards eliminating any software that I have to pay for, and the open source movement is making that... read more

Business, Productivity, and Freedom

As I’ve mentioned, I plan to be very prepared for any future hard drive crashes. Between offline data backup and portable apps, I should be well on my way to having a hard drive free existence. I haven’t yet received my USB flash drives that I ordered, so I don’t yet know for sure if the portable apps idea will really hold water or not, but for the moment, I’m assuming it will be... read more

Are You an Idea Person?

How often do you say “I have an idea”? Does anyone make a face or groan when you say that? How often do you hear in response, “Now what”? If you are an idea person like I am, you’ll have that scenario play out many times over your lifetime. Some people just have a brain that grows ideas like a unkempt yard grows weeds. We don’t really have control over when or... read more

Portable Apps – Can This Be My Future?

Yesterday, when discussing how I plan to survive my next computer crash, I mentioned that I was going to start storing music and photos on thumbdrives (USB Flash drives). Since that time, I’ve come to the conclusion that I *may* be able to run most of what I do from a USB flash drive. I’ve ordered a 2 GB flash drive and when it comes in, I intend to install a bunch of portable apps onto it. ... read more

The ABCs and 123s of Social Networking Sites

Social Networking – What is It? I get asked this fairly often, so I thought I’d give a brief explanation. Social Networking sites are all different in some respects, but they all have some things in common. Common Social Network Characteristics As the name implies, they are “social”, and revolve around a community of users who are all actively participating in some way (rather... read more

My favorite WordPress Widgets and Plugins

After using WordPress for a while now on different sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that WordPress simply rocks. I’m not sure I would ever use anything else for a new site, even a non-blog site. In any case, over time, I’ve used the following WordPress plugins and widgets on some or all of my WordPress sites. Of course, there’s the old standards like Akismet, that no one should... read more

Linux in da house

Well, not yet, but almost. It’s time for this little household to try Linux on one of our desktop machines. I’ve been wanting to play with a nice desktop flavor of Linux for a while, but we finally have a spare machine to use. I want it to be as user-friendly as possible, so I’m going with Freespire. Rather than downloading the 680MB ISO install file (which is free), I decided... read more

Use throwaway email addresses to avoid spam

My main email address received hundreds of spam emails per day. I hate it, but I’m never going to get rid of that address, so that’s just something I have to live with. However, I can start avoiding new spam by using throwaway email addresses and you can too. I tried a few throwaway email services recently, and decided that Tempinbox.com was my favorite. Here’s why. I don’t... read more