Just a quick note to share that my good friend and new business partner David Kuhta and I are going to give a presentation on WordPress at the Incuba8 Business Startup Conference which is going on from January 22-23.
If you are in the area let us know!
So today I have something special to give away to readers of my blog.
Rollip allows you to easily add cool image effects to your pictures. I messed around with it for awhile and here are some examples of what it can do:
So these are some fun pictures of me goofing around with a light bulb, good idea? Narcissistic?…nah.
There are 40 some effects that you can put on a photo, from Sepia, BW, Bold, Vintage, Stylized lens, etc. The vintage/Polaroid type effects are the coolest and make very sentimental-feeling photos.
I think this is a really fun tool and lets you quickly add very professional looking effects to even mediocre photos. It was almost too fun. I actually used the “classic” one for my Facebook profile pic.
Improvements that might make a cool product even cooler:
Click here to claim your pro account. There are only 15 Pro accounts so first come, first served. Good for processing 30 high quality photos.
Let me know what you think of the service!
AlphaLab is a startup incubator in Pittsburgh. I got to go see their "demo day" last year.
It was really fun to see all the innovative companies. One of the most awesome presenters and coolest products was "the Resumator"
The brains behind the startup, Don Charleton, has written a very insightful post about his experience with the startup.
Quick preview of his 7 Lessons Learned:Just looked through his blog and there are a couple other interesting posts:
Taking a cue from Lifehacker's list I have pulled together a quick list of applications that I use often for which I am thankful.
Yeah, I know being thankful for a program is cheesy but these programs make my life easier and give me more time in the day.
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Firefox – powerful internet browsing.
Firefox Addons:
- Firebug – change HTML and CSS with live preview.
- Colorzilla – sample colors on a page and get hex colors.
- Fireshot – take screenshots of web pages.
- SEOtoolbar – great SEO tools, track ranking, PageRank, links...
- Delicious – social bookmarking and tagging of sites you find.
- Window Resizer – see how a site looks in different browser sizes.
- StumbleUpon – discover new sites in topics you like.
- FoxyTunes – control music player from the browser.
Google Chrome – fast becoming my favorite browser.
Google Reader – best feed reader for all my RSS feeds.
AdBlock Plus – ads were yesterday.
Gmail – best way to handle the loads of email I wade through.
Skype – great way to communicate.
Trillian Astra - Keeps all my chat accounts in one client.
Google Calendar – keeps my schedule straight.
Microsoft Office (2010 beta) – only one on this list that isn’t free. Specifically I am a fan of OneNote, Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Window’s Live Writer – great tool for blogging. Easily add pictures and preview.
Notepad++ – Notepad on steroids. Syntax highlighting, tabs…
FileZilla – powerfully lightweight FTP program.
Texter – text replacement on the fly. Saves much time.
Ditto – clipboard history that allows you to re-paste past items.
TeraCopy – move large files and queue up files to be moved.
7-Zip – un-zip, zip, compress, and archive files.
Font Xplorer – preview fonts on your computer even if they aren’t installed.
Launchy - lightning fast way to launch programs.
Dropbox – keep important files constantly backed up and accessible online.
Ultramon – control multiple monitors. Extend taskbar, easy window moving.
CCleaner – clean up temporary files.
Defraggler – defragmentation to keep your hard drive efficient.
SpyBot Search & Destroy – annihilate spyware on your computer.
VLC – zippy little program to watch videos.
Winamp – keeps the tunes organized and accessible.
Audacity – splice and dice audio files.
ImgBurn – burn CDs and DVDs.
µTorrent – download torrent files.
I’m a passionate advocate of autodidactic learning, in other words, educating yourself.
Here is a quick tip that I use to keep learning about a niche I am passionate about. In my case it is WordPress.
In your case it can be anything you are crazy passionate about. My advice to young entrepreneurs is find something you are passionate about and become an expert within the subject.
I’ve heard you can generally read 5 good books on a subject and be an expert.
I think there must be an online equivalency. Perhaps it is following 5 of the industry/niche’s top blogs for a year. Any thoughts?
Ok, ok… so here’s the tip. Subscribe to an RSS feed for a Delicious.com tag.
In my case I am subscribed to the popular bookmarks for WordPress. You can just 
use this URL to go to the popular listing for any tag on Delicious.
Use: http://delicious.com/popular/wordpress – just replace “wordpress” with whatever it is you want to learn more about or keep up with.
Next, just subscribe by clicking the RSS icon and get new items as they come in by using a feed reader like Google Reader. 
If you aren’t already, start using delicious to bookmark and tag things you come across. Then connect to me on Delicious and start sharing some good stuff with me!
Easy right? Tell me, how do you continue learning?
Got a sizable amount of awesome links to dump on you today. Crazy, mad, ridiculously busy, that has been my last few weeks. There. That’s my excuse for infrequent posts. :) Onward…
Seth's Blog: Things to ask before you redo your website – Great philosophical questions to answer for really anything you build on the web.
8 Ways to Target Keywords for Ranking and Usability | 10e20 – Very good summary of some important SEO concepts.
CSS Sprites - Online CSS Sprite Builder / Generator – An easy generator to create CSS sprites to speed up your site. Google uses them like so…
Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets « Smashing Magazine – Grab some free high quality icons. I’m addicted to collecting these. Need any icons, just ask…
300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert | Webdesigner Depot – Good grief! This is an overwhelming, yet VERY helpful post.
How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress « Smashing Magazine – Talk about providing value! Smashing Mag never disappoints. I have been needing this info!
The Digital Business Card Wordpress Theme – Human3rror – I Break Stuff.
WordPress › Socialize « WordPress Plugins – Choose which social media icons to include on each post. Great idea.
WordPress › After the Deadline « WordPress Plugins – High quality spell / grammar checking tool for WordPress. Recently bought by Automattic, owner of WordPress.
WordPress › RSS Cloud « WordPress Plugins – New tech to make delivery of your RSS feeds quicker. Similar idea to PubSubHubbub. (Whose name always cracks me up)
ShopperPress - Wordpress Shopping Cart Plugin – Another WordPress e-commerce plugin that looks promising. I wonder how it compares to WP-e-commerce or Shopp, among others.
45 Brilliant Examples of Photo Manipulation Art | Noupe – fun post!
(Heads up: I’m hard at work on a huge post on WordPress plugins I’ve used)
I have been doing some SEO analysis and critiques for some new clients lately. It is surprising how some mistakes can be so common with websites. Here are 8 things you should be doing to be on top of SEO.
1. Implement Google Analytics - involves putting a few lines of Javascript in a part of the site appearing on every page (footer is recommended) This will really help with 
understanding where visitors come from geographically and how they got to your site. It can also integrate with AdWords.
3. Prevent Domain Canonicalization issues – redirect http://sitename.com , http://www.sitename.com/index.php , http://sitename.com/index.php (may be .html , .asp etc.) all to http://www.sitename.com/ or http://sitename.com
Google could see each of these as separate sites and could lead to duplicate content issues and PageRank being diluted across multiple versions. You can also specify which version www or non-www for Google to use in Google Webmaster Tools.
7. Use Google AdWords – Identify long-tail keywords and run a global campaign and a local campaign. (if applicable)
This has the most obvious calculation of ROI. You can see how many impressions your ad(s) got and the click-thru-rate and then have a goal set up (like requesting information) - when you see how many people clicked thru or completed a goal you can get a cost of acquisition.
Bonus:
Use Website Grader Tool to get a quick SEO snapshot. Take with a grain of salt.
(this was modified and depersonalized from an SEO critique I performed for a client)
These links are coming to you at the end of my first week of classes. Thus starts my senior year at Grove City College. Eeek!
Still have been reading some great things online and found these awesome links to share.
Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors – further proof that business need to be blogging. SEO value alone is worth the effort.
Five Minute Upgrade – Writing Blog Post Titles That Grab Attention
13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area
OfficeTab - Adds Tabs to Microsoft Office – make Word, Excel, PowerPoint better.
Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sites
(New) 27 Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes
Send a letter online :: Snailmailr.com – Cool way to send a “real” letter to someone.
30+ Fantastic HDR Photos by Grey Jones – if you don’t know what an HDR photo is, you must check this out. Gorgeous!
