Twitter Theme Finally Updated

After procrastinating for ages, I decided to give our twitter page a bit of a make-over. Following the excellent guide by Chris Spooner (Twitter Background Design How-To and Best Practices @ Blog.SpoonGraphics), I think I’ve finally come up with a look and feel that I was happy with.

  http://www.twitter.com/newbtech

Its a little on the lighter side, but I think it works for me :)

My previous attempts was a little too Web 2.0’ish… so i decided to change the colour scheme around a bit to make it look less so:

I actually wanted a darker “logobar”, but then decided against it.

Anyways, let me know what you think :) and if anyone wants any backgrounds done, I’ll looking for practice :)

Microsoft Offers Free Online Translation Services

Microsoft Translator is a free translation service to allow you as the user to get the most out of on the fly translation of web pages and excerpts and provides tools to users and webmasters alike to deliver these types of services to the web user.

It is API based and there are several applications that use this API that would be useful to both webmasters as well as developers in addition to IE8 users.

Today, we’ll look at 4 ways to use Microsoft Translation services:

1. Translation Accelerator for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0
2. Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger
3. Windows Live Toolbar Translator Button
4. Webmaster uses for Microsoft Translator (via Widgets)

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2 Web Based Applications To Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts

It is quite common to build up a huge list of people/accounts that you follow on Twitter. So much so, that tweets can be flying in faster than you can read them. While using tools like TweetDeck can give you better control over your tweets, ultimately it doesn’t stop the amount of scrolling you have to do to sift through all the information.

Even worse when you have a single account that subscribes to work as well as personal interests. Many people have resorted to creating multiple twitter accounts to manage their subscriptions. This is a good alternative, but then it can get painful sending a tweet across more than one account.

While I started with two accounts (one for personal and one for newbtech), I’m now favoring separating my @newbtech account further into areas of interest (such as Photoshop, Linux, collaboration, storage, etc). This way, each account can have its own followers (and follows). I needed an application that can support easy reading of these accounts as well as the ability to send a tweet out across multiple accounts…

My requirements are for a web based client rather than a downloaded/installed one simply because I tend to use these across multiple machines/operating systems…

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11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing & Collaboration

Storage has come a long way from the good old days of keeping data on floppy discs and DVD’s. Its advanced to external hard drives and storage media such as iPods and SD Cards and so on. These forms of data storage are very common nowadays.

All these are good methods to carry information with you as you go however they have a few disadvantages. They are physical devices prone to accidents and subject to demands of physical transportation. They can be lost or stolen and can end up placing information into unauthorized hands. They may also require special drivers or slots installed on the machines before the information can be seen. Collaboration and versioning can be difficult unless if additional transportation methods are implemented.

• The alternative to carrying physical storage devices with you is to store the information in a secure online facilities. Depending on the online facility, this can have the following advantages:
• Its accessible everywhere as long as you have access to the internet.
• It is safe and secure (provided the online facility has good authentication and authorization practice).
• It may be possible to edit your documents online directly on the online facility’s site. Alternatively, some facilities offer offline editing with automatic synchronization back to the online document.
• It is possible to share documents with selected or public audience.
• Some online facilities provide for collaborative editing of document.
• Lastly, its possible to keep physical stores synchronized across multiple devices

Here are a few applications and services that can provide for online document storage, collaboration and remote synchronization:

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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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