How To Create Your Own Twitter Background

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook make it easy for everyday people to quickly get an online presence and start networking. The newest case is Twitter where practically everybody is micro-blogging.

Your profile page is like a shop window to others viewing you and people can spend hours perfecting their profile pages. Twitter, while having a nice set of clean templates built in already, also gives you the opportunity to personalize it.

There are a number of sites that has additional pre-made templates, but the fun of personalizing is giving you the choice to design your very own.

Online Designers

http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com

One of the best flash based Twitter background designers I’ve found so far. It has a limited selection of backgrounds templates, but that shouldn’t stop you from creating your own.

Supports adding shapes, images and texts and as each item is an “object”, these can be edited further to rotate and resize. It even has image filters to allow you to blend your images into your background easily.

Once the background is created, its a simple process to save the image and upload into Twitter. I love the preview feature and the ease of creating your own professional looking Twitter backgrounds.

http://www.twitbacks.com/

Similar to FreeTwitterDesigner, Twitbacks allows you to choose from a wide range of pre-made backgrounds and apply your own personalization on them.

Twitbacks has a wizard type approach that asks you some questions to help fill out the profile area in the background. This is preferred by people who cannot work with a blank canvas.

The only gripe I had when playing with this site was the fact that you need to create an “account” where your backgrounds will be saved to.

Offline Designers

Spoon Graphics

For the more graphically skilled in us, I would recommend Chris Spooner’s blog which has (amongst some excellent Photoshop tutorials) how to make you very own Twitter background using Adobe Photoshop.

This post also has some excellent design practices that you can follow when creating your own Twitter background.

Chris includes a PSD document that you can open in Photoshop as a starting point and offers step by step instructions on how he created his own Twitter background. As always, his tutorials are excellent and easily followed. It certainly gave me a lot of ideas on how to structure our designs so that they stand out from others.

Conclusion

I haven’t had a chance to design my Twitter page (http://www.twitter.com/newbtech) yet, but it will be on my list of things to do :) Feel free to link your twitter pages as comments so i can view your efforts!

6 Free Mind Mapping Applications for Brainstorming

Mind Mapping is a technique that allows users to create relationships out of pieces of information. It is extremely useful when a group of people are brainstorming a particular issue or idea and can be used to open up to ideas that you may not have normally thought of. It is a creative way to think around an topic and allows people to visualize thoughts and relationships in a meaningful way.

Historically, mind mapping (loosely related to concept mapping) started off with a group of people in a room standing around a blackboard/whiteboard and throwing ideas around. These ideas can then be joined to other ideas and spawn off sub-ideas, etc etc. A mind map application brings that level of interactivity and creativity onto your desktop computers. Mind mapping has a use both in the work space as well as at home.

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Getting Rid of Windows – Why I Won’t Do It

Lets face it, the grass is always greener on the other side. Whether its moving jobs, houses or operating systems, people are always lamenting their present situation and looking for changes. That’s natural human behavior. Mix that with the other human trait “procrastination”, and you have a lot of people who are unhappy where they are but refuse to move on.

There may be a lot of reasons why people need to change, but there are always more reasons to delay the change as much as possible. We tend to get comfortable living with the inadequacies of our current situations and finding workarounds to get things done. While at the same time we complain about how our current world can be a whole lot better. Funny thing is that it can, but putting a change into what we perceive as a working environment, can be like jumping off a bridge.

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ScreenToaster News and Updates

Recently I test drove a free screencast application called ScreenToaster (a free application that can record your screen and upload to YouTube!).

You can check it out here: ScreenToaster Article

One of the major gripes I had with the application is the lack of online help support in the form of a Forum. A forum for any product is important as that builds the community and is one of the first places to look in terms of help and support. Additionally, its a place where others can showcase their ideas, tutorials and suggest ways to use the application well beyond what the original developers have intended for the application.

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Live SkyDrive – How To Set Up As Network Drive via Gladinet

This post has now been superceded with an updated one. Please go below to see the new post:

Updated Article – Setting up Live SkyDrive with Gladinet 2.1

Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.

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Stardock Fences and BumpTop – Keep Your Desktop Organized

A typical user rarely re-installs Windows on his/her machine regularly, and over time, the desktop becomes cluttered with shortcuts to installed applications, documents that one needs saved quickly and within reach and quick downloads and extracts. I used to be one of these people though over the years, I’ve taught myself to become better at managing the number of desktop icons I have. Nowadays, I rarely save many documents on my desktop simply because that saves it to my c: drive which is the first thing to go if I have to do a reformat/reinstall. And I don’t really want to lose those documents if I forget to back them up (which unfortunately I have done in the past).

While Windows offers many ways to put quick links to your documents, such as the quick launch bar beside your Start button or the pinned Start menu items, etc, the desktop is usually the most convenient place to put important shortcuts (application or documents/folders).

Today I’ll look into two of these applications, Stardock Fences and BumpTop…

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Meebo – An Integrated Web Based Instant Messenger

Admit it.. practically everyone is on either MSN, Yahoo, or the million other IM clients out there. Every IM demands that you install their full clients to make best use of their capabilities. Having to juggle all these applications can become painful quickly especially if you have many contacts spread over these applications.

There are also clients out there that try and integrate different clients into one package (a la Pidgin and Trillian). Meebo is another one of them integrated instant messenger applications, but its main feature is its web based and so you don’t need to install yet another application just to make use of its features.

Meebo offers the following features on its website:

• As an IM Client, it allows the user to connect to MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace, AIM, Facebook, Gtalk, ICQ, Jabber, Flixster and more. That’s a whole lot of clients :)
• It provides a “meeting room” type functionality a la chat rooms
• It enables integrated live communications on any websites that incorporate Meebo Rooms and IM.
• It’s web based, so no application downloads or installation is required.
• It does offer notification services to allow messages to pop up without going through a browser as well as mobile chatting facilities.

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Vixy.net – Download Videos From YouTube Easily

Vixy.net has been around for a number of years now and has been an excellent way to download youtube videos for offline viewing (or for viewing on portable devices such as your iPods).

It has a simple user interface and in a few simple steps, the user can grab a video, convert it to a number of formats and download onto their computer.

It supports conversions to the following formats:

• AVI (Divx)
• MOV
• MP4 (for iPods and Sony PSP’s)
• 3GP (for Mobiles)

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Zoho Mail – How to add a new mail account to Zoho Mail

Welcome to Part II of my Zoho articles. (Part I here). This drills down further into one of the Zoho applications (namely Zoho Mail) and gives you some guidance around setting up Zoho Mail as your primary mail application.

Zoho Mail by default gives you a @zoho email address (yes, yet another email address), which I’m not too keen on as i have many already. Instead I wanted to add my Newbtech and Gmail mail accounts so that i can access them via Zoho Mail.

Most broadband providers have an online offering in terms of allowing you to access and create mail from the web without having to use large windows/linux based clients such as Microsoft Outlook. However, if you’re anything like me, you may most likely have quite a few of these accounts and Zoho mail allows the user to maintain all these accounts within one application.

Zoho Mail is a fully featured mail application with facilities to attach documents from your local drive through to Google Docs. It supports folders, labels and other functionality commonly found in Microsoft Outlook for instance.

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Windows Live Writer 2009 – Installing on Windows Server 2003

I’m now starting to use offline blogging software to write some of my posts. I had a look at a couple of offline blogger applications to see which one suited my needs best. The two that looked most promising were Windows Live Writer and Zoundry Raven. Both has had an excellent feedback recently especially when blogging to engines such as Blogger and WordPress.

While I had the latest version of both installed at home, I had a major issue installing Windows Live Writer at work. I run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop at work and the installer for Windows Live simply refused to work on it.

After a bit of research, i found that it was only the installer that had the issue and I could install Windows Live Writer via the .msi. In the end, I found the .msi file in my temp folder on my Vista machine at home. (I also found an .msi on the net, but that was for either Dutch or an older version). This one is for Windows Live Writer 2009

For others who are running Windows Server 2003 and the installer complaining, I’ve uploaded the .msi file to my Skydrive. You can download it from here:

http://tinyurl.com/gimmeWindowsLiveWriterMSI

NOTE: This is the 32 bit version!

If you need any other MSI’s (eg, Live Messenger, etc), please leave a comment or send me an email.

I’d appreciate a comment if this helps you in any way :)

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