Blog Promotion with Zemanta

Image via CrunchBase

My experience with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ had been awful when it comes to getting shares or even hits. I think it’s partly luck as my post gets pushed down by a wave of cute kitten memes, political rants, and timewasting, but very interesting videos. It’s also partly because I don’t feel comfortable spamming people with links to my blog.

I had better luck with a plugin called “Zemanta”. It inserts a sidebar that allows you to quickly find images for your blog as well as articles that are related. When you click on the articles, sometimes, you get clicked-back. Almost all of my comments came from these links.

I had stopped using Zemanta as it is a bit flakey with Windows Live Writer (WLW). WLW is something I use when I want to blog offline. I can’t get to blogger when I’m in the car and there’s no free wi-fi around. When I get home, I usually would connect to the internet, allow Zemanta to load, add all of the extras, then publish it to my blog.

At one point, WLW started to crash before I could type anything, so I finally just turned off the plugin. Sure enough, my legitimate hits went down.

A couple of days ago, I tried Zemanta again on live writer and found that it worked – somewhat. It seems that when WLW cannot connect to the internet, which happens frequently, it crashes.

That said, I manage to get a few more posts up using Zemanta (mostly on my newer blog) and sure enough, my legitimate clicks went up again.

Even if I have to edit my blog later in blogger online to include Zemanta content, I will continue using it.

Related articles

• Using Zemanta with any blogging platform (zemanta.com)
• Post-Release reviews (zemanta.com)
• Offline WordPress Editor for Mac - PixelPumper (hongkiat.com)
• My interview on Zemanta's blog (brandsandfilms.com)
• Zemanta’s Website (added by me)

Amazon Kindle for PC Issues

Kindle App (Photo credit: PiAir (Old Skool))

There are a lot of people who are having problems with the Kindle for PC app, in particularly that the Kindle app for PC will not start. For a while, I did too and was stuck using the cloud server with the browser.  The problem is that I don't always want to load my browser, as I have a few tabs "pinned". So every time I load my browser, it tries to call up those pages - even when I'm offline.

This can be a problem when I’ve already have several other programs open as I use kindle books mostly for reference.  The browser starts to stall as it tries to load plugins that aren’t there with limited resources.

I have had an idea for a website percolating for a little while and I finally seem to have some time to get it started. So I figured I would use some of that time to get the Kindle app up and running again.

Unfortunately, it was harder than I thought. I started a few days ago, and I did my best to be good Christian, and made sure that I didn't break any laws – including Murphy’s.

We do have a Western Digital 1 TB book drive, so I was able to back up all of my files before creating another admin account and deleting the old one. This is as close to a reinstall as you can get. Yeah, I did that much damage.

While all of the other problems were solved in doing this, Kindle still wouldn’t load. In the task manager, it would show up, and then disappear. Sometimes, it would show up, and stall. I couldn’t “stop process” through the task manager or “Kill process” in the Process explorer (sysinternalssuite). The only way I could have stop it was to log off, then log back on.

I did a lot of research online. Some suggestions were reinstall (didn’t work), install an older version (didn’t work), something that has to do with DEP (windows *yelled* at me with error messages, probably when my other problems started), and cleaning the registry with ccleaner (also may have triggered some problems).

Seeing several threads on Kindle and possible firewall conflicts, I had stopped ZoneAlarm and found that was ineffective, but for some reason, I felt like I was headed in the right direction. I tried to uninstall Kindle, only for the uninstaller to also not work.

This was the point where I started to notice other problems. It was enough problems to consider doing a recovery, but thought that I would try something different. After backing up my user files, I created another admin account and deleted my old one.

While this solved the other problems, kindle still wouldn’t start. On a whim, I finally decided to uninstall Avast. Lo and behold, Kindle loaded. Before I could break out the Champaign and celebrate, I reminded myself that I was pregnant and tried to register the app. Kindle would not connect to the internet.

Now what?

I used Kindle has a debug feature in its help menu and for some reason it thought that there was no internet connection – even though I was browsing the internet at the same time to find a solution to find out why I couldn’t register the app.

After a few failed attempts, it was getting late and I was falling asleep in my chair. This morning, while eating breakfast (not recommended, it’s a bad habit), I used TCPview (also sysinternals) to see what IP address pops up. I couldn’t get a “whois” via the context menu (right click on the ip, click on “whois”). TCPview gave an error stating that the server took too long to respond.  So I tried pinging the IP using the command prompt.  It came back with no packets loss.

For those who had no idea what I just said, I pretty much asked if the server was there and it responded with “Yes, of course I’m here and doing just fine, thank you very much”. This led me to believe that the problem was on my end: Windows Firewall.

I didn’t want to go without some sort of firewall as I already had uninstalled my antivirus. So, I tried to get windows firewall to allow Kindle, and kindle still couldn’t find a connection.

I had one last solution and I would have to give up. I restarted ZoneAlarm and shut Windows Firewall down. Then I made sure that in the “Secured Programs” list, the Kindle was listed as Trusted. Then I took a deep breath, and ran Kindle again.

Bingo!  It’s now running just fine. Two days of racking my brains to try to find out what the problem was, only to be solve with a 15 minute fix. Computers… Can’t live with them, can’t smash them into thousands of tiny pieces without being fined for environmental pollution or littering.

For now,  I will be using Clamwin as an antivirus until I figure out how to fix the Avast/kindle problem. Why can all programs just get along?

Related articles

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• How to take Screenshots on the Kindle Paperwhite
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• Amazon Kindle for Windows RT Now Allows You to Buy eBooks
• 70%, 47%, And Why Even Agency Didn't Stop Amazon
• Kindle Quick Tips: How to Organize Your Free E-Books

Free Stuff–Task Coach

Image by john.schultz via FlickrThis has to be the Ultimate to-do list – especially for those of us who like keeping a to do list.  After all, there’s nothing more satisfying then crossing an item off of the list, knowing that it’s done.

Task Coach – Your Friendly Task Manager is a program that allows you to categorize your to do list and use subcategories. Then the tasks themselves can have subtasks. You can also take your email from outlook or Thunderbird and drag it into the Task Coach manager so that if you use email a lot to talk to clients, this is a great way to organize it all.

If you don’t mind it running in the background (not good if you are using a netbook), it also has a reminder feature to remind you when the next task is due.  But on slower computers, it's yet another item running in the background. I own a netbook, so I try to keep my running background programs to the minimum.

There are many more features, you can check it out here: http://taskcoach.org/features.html and you can download it for windows here: http://taskcoach.org/download_for_windows.html. Not running windows?  No problem.  There’s  version for Mac OS X, Linux, Iphone, and Ipod touch.

Related articles

• taskcoach - one of the best approach to manage your tasks (amit-agarwal.co.in)
  
• Your To-Do List: Knowing Where to Start (dumblittleman.com)

Free Stuff: Google

Image via CrunchBaseOkay, before you say "Well, DUH! Everyone knows of Google!  It's like, the best search engine ever!" continue reading first.  I'm about to talk about Google's other features, like Gmail, Calendar, Blogger, and Google Desktop - all which are free.
I've had my account on blogger since before Google owned it, but it has improved a lot since I first signed up.  One main thing, is that at one time, only geeks with a lot of knowledge of at least HTML and some CSS could have unique templates.  Everyone else was stuck with the few basic templates they had.
Now, there are so many templates, you finally can have a blog that is pretty unique.  If you think it's not unique enough, you can very easily upload your own background and change the colors and modify the layout by adding and removing widgets.
Calendar is also a decent feature. I use it to keep my blackberry calendar up do date and I'm planning on using it so that Mike and I don't get conflicting schedules.  I just need to convince my husband of the awesome power of the shared calendar.
There are many other google applications that you can use, but there's one item that ties it all together: Google Desktop. This program, you download and install on your computer.  I use it in place of Windows Gadgets and it lets me see my calendar and the weather in one glance.  I also have a too do list and a little notepad to take quick notes without having to run notepad.
The Google Sync for the blackberry automatically syncs with your calendar, so that whatever you or someone else puts on the online calendar shows up on your blackberry calendar.  Using Google Mobile App, you can check your gmail and the news.
If you already use any Google account (including Youtube), you can use your email and password to tie all of your Google accounts together.  So you can use just one email address and password.  This works even if you don't have a Gmail account.

Free Stuff: Evernote

Image via CrunchBase
Possibly one of the most useful free program you will ever find.  Considering that I've tried many, MANY different programs, that's saying a lot.  You can check it out here at http://www.evernote.com

Now, suppose you see some really interesting page on the web that you are absolutely sure that you are going to use in the future. Of course, we all know that it will just get buried in your bookmarks and you will probably never use it again.  If you do, you end up just searching for it because you can't seem to find it.  Worse, if you do find it, the page is gone.

Enter Evernote Web Clipper.  You sign up for an account (important if you have more than one device/computer) then install the software on your computer and whatever device you own.  Then when you come across the site you want the notes from, you simply highlight the text you want to save, right click on the highlighted text (or click on the icon in the toolbar), and add it to Evernote.  Now it's available to all of your devices and computers.  Add your tags to the note to make it even more easy to search.

One feature that I found the best was the text recognition in photos.  Take a photo with your smartphone and the text in the photo becomes searchable.  I have been using my Blackberry Curve to take photos of posters and text since it's much faster than typing it.

This is a great tool for everyone, including stay-at-home moms who have a lot going on.

Online Bible Study

So, you are trying to come up with a sermon, or maybe you want to do some personal research on specific spiritual topics. You could spend hours, or even days searching and reading the Bible to find the answer you want - or you can use these two great sites:

Biblegateway.com
youversion.com

Both have searchable Bibles in just about every translation available, both have reading plans, and both allow you to use your smartphone to read and search the text.

There are differences.

Biblegateway has a more intuitive search engine and a better list of resources available.
YouVersion has a better mobile app (one that I use on my blackberry) and is also community based.  You can also have a journal entry so that you can keep your notes in the same place, and if you have an insight you want to share, you can contribute it to the community.

I've used Biblegateway when I'm discussing scripture with others in forums and Facebook, but I use YouVersion for my personal devotions.  Both sites are a great tool to help one grow spiritually.

Free Stuff: Browsers

There are many, many different browsers and you can see them in the Wikipedia article here.

Out of all the browsers available, there are two that I use the most: Firefox and Chrome.

Chrome is definitely faster and does really well with Google based services online.  It streams videos well, especially since Google has ironed out the bugs it had with Hulu and Netflix.  Because of Chrome's speedy load time, it's usually the first browser I load to to look something up.

Firefox has more flexibility.  Out of all the plugins that I use in Firefox, only two work in Chrome. For example, Scribefire opens in Firefox at the bottom of window, off the status bar.  In Chrome, it opens in a new tab.  If I'm blogging on a specific webpage, it's easier to just look above the Scribefire box (Firefox) than it is to change tabs (Chrome).  The other plugin is Evernote, but I will get more into the plugins in another post.

Now these are only two of the many, but these two are definitely a good alternatives to Google.  You can look at my Free Software page for the download links as well as links to other freebies.

How to really protect your computer

Do you scan your computer on a daily basis?  If not, then you are asking for trouble.  I'm sure you think you can't afford a virus scanner - but really, you can.  Here are two donation-ware (one is actually open source) so that if you CAN afford it, you can give your support by donating:

Clamwin and Spybot Search & Destroy.

The first (Clamwin) scans for viruses and the second (Spybot) scans for malware, spyware, and adware.  The definitions overlap though but to sum it up, a computer virus can propagate from computer to computer.

Spyware is software that watches your every move (some more than others).  Usually it's for advertising, but sometimes it's to collect personal info to sell.

Adware sometimes acts like spyware for the sole purpose of sending you ads via a software.  Sometimes adware isn't so bad.  The free version of Evernote might be considered adware, since at the bottom corner has an ad display, but it's tastefully placed and is unobtrusive.  So adware is so bad, that you can't do anything for more than five minutes without having a pop-up block your view.  You should try to uninstall the software first before using spybot.

Malware is pretty much any software that messes with your system.  Spyware is malware, and some adware is malware.  Usually it's software that's installed that pretends to be legitimate and it turns out to be a scam.

Recently, I had to deal with such malware.  A supposed virus scanner (one that I hadn't installed) found supposed viruses on my computer.  I couldn't open ANY of my programs including the task manager.  If I had scanned my computer daily, instead of weekly, then I probably would have avoided the problem altogether.  I did eventually get rid of the virus, but it took a while.

Moral of this post:  Download (or buy) a virus and spyware scanner.  The best two I ever used are the ones I just mentioned.  You can download them now:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
http://www.clamwin.com/

Then start using them - daily.

Credit: Photo had been "remixed" with "Ubuntu laptop" from sfllaw and "Evil Face" from bixentro on flickr.com.  Both are licensed under Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org).  I wasn't paid for any of the links in this post.

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