Building Websites with Master Pages (Visual Studio)
May 20, 2009
Last week I was tasked with building a site from scratch with a very short deadline. Normally, I’d accomplish this with a WordPress install and a few theme tweaks, but my bosses didn’t want to go that route. I thought I was going to have to do things the old fashioned way (Dreamweaver, lots of typing, lots of coffee) until a friend of mine told me to take a look at Master Pages in Visual Studios.
Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Part 2 – Flag, Rate, and Filter
May 16, 2009
In the previous article of this series we took an in-depth look at importing your photos into Lightroom. Now that your photos are imported, let’s take a few moments to go through them and tag them with a flag, rating or color so we can easily filter through them during the editing process.
It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.
Remote Access for Windows and Mac
April 15, 2009
Lifehacker recently asked their readers to vote for the Five Best Remote Desktop tools. I personally use both Windows and Mac machines and have never had any trouble remotely accessing my Windows machines from either system thanks to Remote Desktop applications freely available for both platforms.
However, remote access for my Mac has been a different story. I recently began using the free version of LogMeIn.com with much success. So seeing LogMeIn.com at the top of Lifehackers “Hive Five” list validates the opinions of the readers.
Keep the VPN Connection Box from Popping Up
March 3, 2009
VPN connections (virtual private networks) are wonderful. I use one to connect to work several times per week. I can do all sorts of handy things: surf the network, grab files, print to my office. But one annoyance has been bugging me for a good while now, and I’ve just been putting up with it. Seemingly at random moments, the VPN connection box would just pop up for no reason.
I finally got tired of clicking the cancel button, and decided to figure out just what was causing this problem. Turns, out that Internet Explorer was the culprit, even though I only use Firefox.
Use Excel to Write Repetitive HTML Code
February 17, 2009
I have to maintain a rather old website that consists of nothing but flat HTML files. Until I get around to finally updating it to dynamic, database driven web site, I’m stuck with editing several dozen complex web pages. Every so often, I have to edit or create a new page that consists of long lists. While lists themselves aren’t complicated, it’s very time consuming to write all the HTML associated with a list of many items. Thankfully, I call upon a little trick that I’ve learned that uses Excel to write 99% of the code for me!
Add Windows Live Hotmail to Your Gmail Account
February 12, 2009
It’s no secret that millions of folks have turned their allegiance to Google’s awesome online email service, Gmail. However, if you’re like me, you’ve probably begrudgingly kept that old Hotmail account around for reasons that cannot be defined by human words.
Until now, we’ve had to login our old Hotmail accounts every month or so to check mail from friends (if we can still call them that!) who refuse to update their contact list, and to keep Hotmail from erasing our account data because of the lack of activity.
Well, Hotmail has finally decided to add POP3 support. This means we can now add and receive our Hotmail emails in our beloved Gmail accounts or any mail client that supports POP3.
Convert Web Page to PDF or Word Document
January 14, 2009
We’ve all found a web page that we wanted to print out for reading away from the computer or just to have a physical copy for easy reference. However, simply clicking on the Printer icon doesn’t always give you the best results. You could easily end up printing a page with unwanted advertisements or images.
Here I will outline a better way to have a copy of this content for easy printing. It just takes a little bit of patience and time, but you end up with your favorite website’s content in a flexible format that can either be printed or transferred to a handheld device for easy reading.
List All Files and Folders with DOS tree
December 22, 2008
I’m constantly amazed by how often I turn to DOS to finish a task. The more Microsoft tries to push us into a graphical world, good ‘ole command line brings us back in. Perhaps this is why so many prefer to run Linux.
Anyway, I recently needed to generate a list of every folder and file that is in a particular directory. Windows XP doesn’t offer a way to do this and I’m not aware that Vista does either. So, to DOS I turned once again to make this list. It only required typing one little command and, when it was done, I had a nice little text file that presented my list in a fully expanded tree. Read more
Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Importing Photos
December 18, 2008
What? You’re not using Adobe Lightroom? Well, you should be. Lightroom is a very powerful image editor and management system, and since it was created by Adobe then it integrates great with Photoshop. It has quickly become a vital program in my photography workflow and one of the easiest programs to recommend to friends who are looking for a better way to manage and edit photos.
The starting point of any workflow is the importing of the files. (Yes, I know the actual starting point is the creation of the photos, but for the sake of staying within the scope of this article, let’s agree that our starting point begins with the import). This is the foundation of your workflow, getting your photos imported to relevant locations on your hard drive and named accordingly.
This article details the steps I take when importing files in Lightroom. There are no definitive right ways to import your files, so I am by no means preaching the gospel here. I’m just offering suggestions on what has helped me over the past few years in organizing my photos for effective use and archiving. Read more
Mozy Remote Backup
December 15, 2008
As you know, everyone needs to backup their computer files. Mozy is the first and only full-featured, remote backup system in the world that’s offered for free. And as of this writing, Mozy also offers unlimited backup for just $4.95 a month (or $54.50 a year). If you have files your care about, or files that you can’t replace, there’s really no excuse to not have everything backed up. Mozy makes it easy!
Mozy offers several backup options to help you pick the best plan. Of course, they are best known for their free service, but if you have more than 2GB of files that you want to keep safe (and it’s really easy to do, now days), you can protect everything you care about for less than $5 per month. So, for the cost of a foot-long sandwich, all of your files and precious family photos can be safe and secure.
