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I was at MinneBar this weekend and was in a session where the speaker was talking about how he built a website while on the bus and in his off hours. It was good insight about what it takes to succeed but then towards the end of the session it was pretty eye opening to hear the questions from the crowd. It seemed that this type of work was foreign to them, how’d you find the time? How’d you find the helpers?

I wanted to share my thoughts and let you know that I’m currently outsourcing as much as possible using tools like oDesk.com and scriptLance.com. There are many other sites out there to outsource work to like guru.com, elance.com, rentacoder.com, freelancer.com etc. but the ones I like best are oDesk.com and scriptlance.com.

SCRIPTLANCE.COM

What I like about scriptlance.com is that I’ve only had 1 bad experience and I’ve been using the site for over 3 years. It’s a simple enough interface and could be slicker but it really is a nuts and bolts type of site. The key in working with sites like these are that you get to be extremely clear about what you need and if you’re not your project will get compromised.

Here’s an example, one project I was working on asked the programmer to research 50 items for me. He came back with 100 items and wanted to get paid double the money or asked for a bonus. It was a frustrating spot to be in but at scriptlance.com you put the money into an escrow account and you agree on a price before the project begins so I told this person that I was sorry but I will only pay for what we agreed upon.

ODESK.COM

All these sites are pretty much the same and oDesk.com is not that much different but this site does have one cool feature and that’s the availability to see what your programmer is working on because it takes a picture of them working every few minutes. Very cool to make sure that you’re getting what you paid for.

I found a fun site to get stuff done cheap and with lots of humor, the site is called “Fiverr” and people will do pretty much anything they can do for $5.

I used the site to get a logo made for me and was fairly happy with my logo. The guy was doing it for $5 so there were no tweaking going on and I couldn’t complain too much.

The payment was easy too, upload the amount you think you’re going to spend and hit them up via PayPal.

I wouldn’t get too serious about this site as it seems more for fun like these posts below:

• I will jog a mile today and have my wife thank you
• I will die my hair purple
• I will let my buddy slap me with a fish for one minute and send you the video

You probably don’t know this but there are 340+ Social Media type Networks out there and you probably only know of two (twitter & facebook).

If you’re ahead of the game you got onto twitter & facebook and got your nickname or something funny but did you bother to check your real name?

What if there’s another person out there who has the same name as you? or your same last name? What if that person turned out to be an axe murderer? became someone famous? or what if they were a U.S. Army reservist who was convicted of prisoner abuse in connection with the 2003–2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal?

My last name is “Graner” and my Uncle’s name is “Charles Graner” but that’s not him in the link above. I haven’t had too many questions about my last name but my Uncle has, how embarrassing for him to always have that lingering over him.

Now imagine if this guy got your twitter or facebook name and started to run a muck on your good name? UGH!

You probably think that this won’t happen to you and you’d be right, it is far-fetched but it does happen and you should get out in front of it if you can.

I’m currently looking at KnowEm.Com and Claim.IO, they both seem very slick as I can check my names on all their social networks and they will (for a fee) sign my name up for all of them.

I haven’t chosen yet so if you have one of these services let me know what you think ?

As much as I love Google Chrome, it’s not cutting it when writing posts in WordPress. What I notice happens to me is that it will spin when I click on “Save Draft” or “Preview”.

It’s not all the time but the pattern is that I’ll do a couple of previews and then nothing. It just stops doing a preview, clicking on the “Preview” button over and over and nothing happens.

The only way to get preview working again is to click on the “HTML” tab, highlight all the copy, then click on the “Visual” tab and then click on “Preview” again and it works for a while longer until I have to do it again.

The other thing that killed me was that on one of my “Preview” clicks, it started that dreadful spinning again next to the “Publish” button and sure enough, the darn post was published. UGH!

I get it, this is beta software right now, Google Chrome is a brand new baby and it’s bound to have some bugs so take my advice and keep using Firefox or as much as I hate to say it … IE

 

Backup your wordpress blog with this tool from Austin Matzko!

You’re feeling pretty confident about your web host and your website, it hasn’t had any issues in quite some time so I don’t need to back up right now.

Bad move Joe or Jane!

Backup right this second if you haven’t done it this month because that “too confident” feeling you’re having right now means that something bad is about to happen to your beloved family photos or your blog.

I am speaking from experience when I say that it can cost somewhere around $1253.87 to get your data back from OnTrack and you will feel extremely sick writing out that check.

You know those checks that you write out because of your own stupidity? Those checks hurt the worst because it could’ve been prevented and that’s what makes you shake your head so much.

Backing up everything you have is the key to success not only at work and personally but with your wife. I told my story to a co-worker and then he shocked me with his story!

He said that he lost six years worth of photos of their kids and even OnTrack couldn’t get them off. It still cost him money to find out if they could be recovered and when you write out that “not small” check only to find out that you’re going to get back nothing in return, that also sucks.

SOOOOOOOO

Where are your files right now?

Where are your pictures?

Where are your videos?

If they are on anything that could crash or break down and you only have one copy of, you should be very worried and afraid. For WordPress blogs, backup using the plug-in above. For files, my recommendation is to backup all of your sensitive data with DropBox.

 

 

After talking with a few of my friends recently, the topic of how I handle my passwords has come up and I thought it would be a good post to write about. I have almost 1000 sites that I have login & passwords for and I use roboform to keep track of all of them. I’ve been using this tool for several years and highly recommend it. Here’s a couple of highlights: RoboForm was named PC Magazine Editor’s Choice, and CNET Download.com’s Software of the Year. RoboForm allows you to:

• Manage your passwords and Log In automatically.
• Fill long registration and checkout forms with one click.
• Encrypt your passwords to achieve complete security.
• Generate random passwords to maximize password strength.
• Back up and Synchronize Passwords between computers.
• Fight Phishing and Defeat Keyloggers.

http://twitterfeed.com I just started using this service a few days ago and am pretty happy with it so far. Do you hate to post to your wordpress blog and then write up something for Twitter linking to the blog and then going onto facebook to again post something that feed back to what you just wrote on your blog? Then you’ll love TwitterFeed because you set it and forget it as it feeds your blog out to both services for you. There are several options to choose from so currently I have it checking my blog every couple hours and I ask it to track the links for me on the dashboard. Very useful tool so far but I don’t see much in the way of other services but I’m sure they’ll com. I’m a big fan of anything that helps automate my message so this service is currently in my bag of tricks.

I still remember the day I watched this video and it made me laugh because I couldn’t believe it took over two minutes to explain the how but for the naysayers out there it had to be done, wow. It’s kinda like explaining how a spoon works. Funny thing though, today I was talking with a fellow co-worker who is extremely technical and savvy about the internet or so I thought but they poo-pooed twitter and talked about it like it was a fad … kinda like the telephone was (doh). Anyways, I hope this helps all yous out there who still don’t get it … enjoy the video! A quick and plain English intro the micro-blogging service Twitter. Follow us: twitter.com This video comes in an unbranded “presentation quality” version that can be licensed for use in the workplace. commoncraft.com

Alan Petersen talked about adding eBay to your wordpress site and it never really dawned me that it could be this easy but once someone shows you, it’s a no brainer moment…Ugh, why didn’t I find this? I’m a programmer by trade so I remember thinking that it would be good to have this functionality so I’m always looking to build it but there’s just not enough time in the day if you’re trying to run an internet business to build all of these plugins so take the road of do what you’re good at and let others do what they’re good at. It’ll be a win-win for everyone and that’s what it’s all about. The beauty of this plugin is that you literally can set it and forget it, let me know what you think.

Take a look at the picture, Firefox has been turned off for the least 10 minutes but it’s still taking up memory and cpu. My cpu bounces all over the place but what the heck is going on here? Why after 10 minutes are you still in my task manager? I have a lot of windows open so yeah … I’m a bit of power user but should Firefox chew up my cpu and memory all the time? Absolutely NOT, please keep working on it because this browser is an absolute dream for every user who want to be a power user and it needs to move away from the 4-cylinder and move into that powerful v-12 engine.