Create an Awesome Home Business » Online Home Business

My Twitter Account Was Hacked

Martin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:33:11 +0000

My Twitter account was hacked yesterday. It started sending out the ‘This You..??’ Direct Message to people I’m following.

The DM has a link and, out of curiosity (and with bated breath), I decided to see where it went.

I closed everything else down so I could invoke AVG quickly and get rid of nasties if I needed to, clicked the link and …

… ended up on a completely blank page.

Why on earth would someone go to the trouble of hacking an account and spamming DM’s with a link, only to send people to a completely blank page?

Maybe they were being altruistic. Giving me a gentle nudge, and telling me it was time to change my passwords.

Maybe.

So anyway, I clearly need to sort things out but I’m not an expert on Twitter. If someone hacks any of my WordPress or static sites I can be back up and running in a flash.

But Twitter – hmmm.

Luckily @jchronowski47, who kindly let me know that I was spamming all these DMs, also gave me some guidance on what to do and where to look.

So here (with @jchronowski47’s guidance) is what I did:

Changed my Twitter password. (I’m ashamed to say it’s the first time I’ve changed it since I set up my Twitter account, so being hacked probably served me right)
Went to my Settings > Connections screen in Twitter and revoked the access rights of all the applications that accessed my account. (There were 5 of them)
Went to each of those applications, logged in and removed the links to Twitter. In some I had to delete the Twitter reference, in others I could simply deactivate the link.
After removing the links to Twitter I changed the passwords on each of those sites and logged out.
After changing those passwords I logged back into Twitter
After logging back into Twitter, I then logged back into 3 of the applications in turn (using the new password) and reactivated/re-authorised the link to Twitter. The other two applications I no longer use so I didn’t reactivate them.

Since then I’ve kept a close watch on my outgoing DMs and, so far so good.

I’ve no idea how the hackers got hold of my password. But, as I’ve written in articles on WordPress security, there are any number of ways.

So, following the principles I wrote about here I ran Malwarebytes and AVG to check for any nasties on my machine and then changed the passwords of my other important sites (my online banking and so forth).

So hopefully I’m now clean again – but I’m keeping a close eye out

Cheers,

Freeloaders and Avoiding Responsibility

Martin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:30:50 +0000

Another excellent article from Nathan Hangen this week, with which I totally empathized.

It continues the theme I referred to here with the point that there’s a ‘freeloading’ mindset today.

Along with ‘freeloading’ I would add ‘responsibility avoidance’. And it’s not healthy.

I see it reflected in so many ways.

It’s the kind of mindset that the British Airways union leaders demonstrated before Christmas when they tried to organize a 12 day strike over the holiday period.

Had that strike gone ahead it could have done irreparable harm to BA’s financial health, quite possibly resulting in its going into liquidation.

Apparently the thought of their employer going into liquidation didn’t weigh too heavily on their minds – presumably because they had the safety net of social security.

No, the unions were concerned with their rights and making sure their members didn’t have to work too hard. ‘It isn’t right, Guvnor’. ‘We have our rights’.

What about the company’s responsibility to make a profit, provide a return for shareholders and financial income for its employees? What about the employees’ (and unions’) responsibilities in that scenario? And what about the employees’ responsibility to provide for their families?

Talk about getting priorities wrong!

Another example affected me directly a couple of years ago.

I was part of one of those direct sales business opportunities (that I’ve since learned to steer well clear of) and someone signed up through my link.

I did actually make money from that business, but I didn’t like the way things were done. Way too much hype and a focus on the wrong things, so I got out of it.

But it was possible to make money from it.

Anyway, this person signed up. They did it while I was asleep one night. They did it purely on the basis of reading my landing page and making a decision to get involved with the business.

It was entirely their decision, without any persuasion from me (I was asleep) or anyone else (as far as I’m aware).

And it didn’t work out for them.

So they processed a request through their bank that resulted in SafePay (another thing I steer well clear of) refunding their initial investment and all the subsequent monthly payments.

And they did this by simply removing that money from my account without any prior notification to me.

I was totally floored.

I was floored by the fact that SafePay were legally able to do something like that without prior notification to me, and I was floored by the person in question refusing to accept responsibility for their own decision.

I’ve always lived by the principle that if I make a decision it’s my decision, and I own responsibility for it.

Including if it turns out to be wrong.

Making a decision, for me, includes assessing the downside and deciding whether I’m prepared to accept that if it doesn’t work.

It does not involve me saying ‘it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work – someone else will pick up the tab’.

I think something’s wrong when a society has built in so many protections for people that they no longer accept responsibility for their own decisions.

And one of the fundamentals of succeeding in business is a willingess to make decisions and take full responsibility for them. However, they turn out.

OK – rant over!

I Hate These People

Martin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:51:35 +0000

It’s such a shame that people like this can’t channel their skills into something worthwhile, instead of screwing up other people’s PC’s.

A friend called me on Saturday morning because his PC had caught a Virus. Could I help him sort it out, he wanted to know.

We met up just after lunch and I switched on his PC to be met by a typical warning sign in big red letters, telling me that his PC was infected and we had to download a specialist anti-spyware application.

No surprise there.

Then one of those Windows nag balloons opened up at the bottom right of his screen. It told me that Windows had discovered the PC was infected with the Worm.Win32.Netsky virus and it was going to download and install the latest anti-spyware application to clean it.

It was very well done, that one. Made me read it a second time. But, of course, Windows doesn’t have its own anti-spyware application.

Then a warning popped up telling me that the Windows Firewall had been disabled. That was a genuine warning – it had been.

So I tried to switch it back on and got a message telling me the application had been infected and, therefore, disabled.

Hmm – the first alarm bell sounded.

It got worse. I tried to access the Internet so I could install Malwarebytes – no luck. All network connections disabled.

So I ran a full scan of his PC with his antivirus application. It ran at roughly half the speed it normally does and found nothing.

Next I decided to grab the Malwarebytes set-up file off my PC (had to run home and get it) and install it on Robert’s PC from a USB Memory stick.

No luck there, either. A message popped up telling me I had to format the disk (which was rubbish because I’d been using it for months) and, when I tried to format it, got the application disabled message again.

My next thought was to get Malwarebytes onto his PC via Bluetooth – and you can probably guess the result.

So I went online with my PC and looked up the Worm.Win32.Netsky virus and pulled up an article on how to remove it manually.

Only to discover that there were no relevant files on Robert’s PC. It wasn’t Worm.Win32.Netsky at all, they’d sent us on a wild goose chase.

So the only thing left was to get the data off the PC and reformat the disk. A pain in the butt but it worked.

As much as I hate these people (and I do), I have to respect the thoroughness of the job they did. But what a shame they couldn’t channel their skills into something worthwhile.

And, in case you’re interested, Robert’s PC was infected by one of the UPS spam emails that have been floating around for a while. He’s recently ordered some stuff from the UK and was expecting delivery, so when he saw the UPS email he opened it.

And got zapped.

Moral of the story: install one of the top Internet Security applications (not just anti-virus), install Malwarebytes (that’s a brilliant application) and, if you’re going to open an email from someone you’ve not corresponded with before, check the email headers.

Make sure the ‘From’ and ‘Reply to’ email addresses look genuine when compared with the ‘From’ display name.

Why Do You Blog?

Martin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:04:25 +0000

Interesting article on Nathan Hangen’s blog this week: There’s More to Life Than Blogging.

In it he asks why you blog and suggests you should know the answer before you start.

It reminded me of the number of times I’ve seen this question (or something like it) on Twitter:

“I just started a new blog – what do you think I should blog about?”

I guarantee that people asking that question will not be blogging 3 months from now.

If you’re going to start a blog you need to know why you’re starting it. If you don’t, it won’t be a blog – it’ll be a passing fad.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s for fun, your personal enjoyment or for business. Make sure you know what it’s for.

Here’s my reason for blogging

I started this blog specifically to enable me to attract visitors from the widest range of sources possible, so that I could introduce products and services that I market.

To date it’s doing its job, which is good, but as I’ve become busier I’ve started to wrestle with another problem that Nathan touched on: scalability.

I have a limited amount of time each day that I can devote to earning money: 24 hours, less some time for sleeping, eating and all the other bits and bobs. Let’s call it 8.

And blogging is not a very efficient activity if I look at it purely in terms of the amount of time I’m hunched over the keyboard versus the money it brings in.

My consulting gigs, which are one of the streams of revenue that my blog brings me, are not efficient either, because all I’m doing is hiring myself out for an hourly rate.

It’s a 1:1 ratio, whereas what I really need is something that’s a 1:many ratio.

So my plan, for a while now, has been to develop and launch a membership site off the back of this blog.

The membership site has an enormous amount going for it as an online business model:

You get a regular monthly income from member’s subscriptions. Preferable (in my eyes) to the stop-start revenue streams you get from a product-launch model
The bigger it gets the more you’ll be able to get keen, enthusiastic members to help with things like moderation and content development. Plus experienced members will help new members – it happens in all membership sites, and when it does you’re starting to develop scalability
It’s a business you can constantly evolve to meet the changing needs of your members which, to me, is highly satisfying.

Blogging (as I’ve said before) is hard work. But having that end goal in mind is the reason why I push through the times when I just don’t feel like it.

It gives me the motivation and the kick up the butt I need to keep at it, when all I really want to do is go out and play.

So if you’re blogging for business what’s your end goal?

You need one, and you need to be sure it’s something that’s more scalable than simply blogging.

Let us know in a comment

Why Should Expertise Be Free Just Because It’s Online?

Martin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:27:49 +0000

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.

I’m continually making resolutions to improve the way I do things, so what’s so different about January 1st?

But two articles recently caught my interest and, since it is January, they’ve provoked the closest thing I’ve come to a New Year’s resolution.

It’s about being paid for my expertise.

This article on Men With Pens and this article on CopyBlogger both question the ‘tradition’ and wisdom of free information online.

And, although I heartily agree with the sentiments of both articles, we who work online only have ourselves to blame.

We’ve created a rod for our own backs and it’s not going to be lifted any time soon.

The problem is that blogging started as a personal diary (free to set up and free to read) and steadily moved towards commercialism.

When people started monetising their blogs it produced quite a backlash. From what I’ve read, that is, because I wasn’t blogging at the time.

Then came social media – which was an even easier way for people to create online diaries and, in addition, to hook up with friends. And that was free too.

Bloggers and Internet Marketers soon cottoned on to the potential of promoting their products or services through the social media – but that produced an even more violent backlash (I was around for that one).

People were banned from Digg, not allowed to advertise on Stumbleupon and had their pages suspended from HubPages.

All those (and more) happened to me.

By the time Twitter came along marketers had cottoned on to the need to be super low key with any promotional activities they tried.

My own approach has been to monitor questions people are asking about WordPress. To write blog articles when I find a common question and direct people towards the articles when the question is repeated.

My blog articles are not promotional. They are all aimed at providing useful information to people.

But I’ve been slagged off a number of times on Twitter for doing exactly that (providing useful information) because they saw it as me promoting my article.

Somebody asked a while ago whether anyone knew any sources of educational WordPress themes.

Although I didn’t know specifically of educational themes, I do have an article on here with links to nearly 2,000 themes on different theme sites.

So I sent in a reply that said exactly that: No educational themes that I can point to directly, but there are links on here to nearly 2,000 themes and you may find something you like among them.

I received a barrage of abuse in reply. Telling me that I knew there were no educational themes in that article (err – yes, that’s what I said at the outset), that what I did was out of order and that I was just trying to get links to my page.

I wasn’t – but so what if I was?

What’s wrong with trying to let people know about my work? If they don’t like it they can leave at the click of a mouse.

This blog takes a lot of work, all of which I do myself. I enjoy it, so I’m not complaining about the work.

But the result of my work is to provide information that will help other people to improve their lives.

Just as I’m trying to improve mine.

The fact is, though, we’ve created this monster: the culture that everything online is free and anyone who dares to promote their work or charge for it is a charlatan.

So what can we do?

There are several things that I’ve resolved to do as part of this almost-resolution:

I’m going to continue to provide as much value as I can (for free) wherever I am online, be that the social networks or on this blog
I’m going to stop under-valuing the knowledge and expertise I’ve built up. Yes, I’ll provide as much value as I can, but after a certain point it will become chargeable
I will ignore the howls of protest when I point people to articles that contain useful information
I will set up a more regular routine of promoting good sources of information on my various sites. Yes – I will attempt to get more links to my pages

You see, we can’t beat this monster. We have to work round it.

That means that we have to continue to provide good quality, valuable information for free.

But we have to learn where to draw the line between free and chargeable.

How to Add Another Domain to Hostgator

Martin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:12:34 +0000

I was helping someone restore their blog the other day. They had tried to add a new domain to their Hostgator account and the result wasn’t pretty.

Their existing blog (the primary domain for their Hostgator account) was suddenly not available at all. In any guise.

We couldn’t navigate to it as a visitor and we couldn’t log in to the Admin screens as the blog owner.

After accessing her account via FTP and poking around a bit, it became clear that the only solution was to wipe the slate clean and start again.

She had installed her new blog over the top of the old one

Having got everything working again it seemed like a good idea to write a post on how to add another domain to a Hostgator account.

So here goes…

Setting up your new domain

Step 1: Get yourself a new domain

Enter the domain name you want into the box at the top of your Hostgator Control Panel and click ‘Go’ (circled below):

You’ll be presented with a screen offering various TLDs (Top Level Domains: .com, .net, etc.) for the domain name you’ve entered.

Select the TLDs you want, the number of years you want to pay for, create your password and pay.

Step 2: Manage your new domain

You’ll shortly receive an email from Registry Rocket – the company that manages domain names for Hostgator.

You’ll need to access your domain and change the name servers. So click the link they give you and login in using the domain name you just bought and the password you set up.

Step 3: Set the Name Servers

Copy the name server details for your account from the bottom left of your cPanel screen (circled below), 1 at a time:

Paste your name server details, one on each row, into the first two name server fields in the Registry Rocket screen – (circled below):

Save your changes, and you’re done for setting your name servers (sometimes referred to as DNS).

Step 4: Create the new domain in Hostgator

Go back to your Hostgator cPanel screen, go to the Domains area and click ‘Addon Domains’ (circled below):

You’ll come to this screen:

Add the domain you just bought into the New Domain Name field. The next two fields will be populated automatically so all you need to do is set a password.

You can use the same password you set up originally, or change it if you prefer. The password you enter here is the one you’ll need to set up in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever you use) to get your email.

Then click ‘Add Domain’ and you’re done.

Managing your new domain

When you click File Manager you’ll now see your new domain as a folder underneath the public_html folder. You’ll see the same when you access your site files via FTP.

Initially it may look a little confusing because all the files and folders for the first domain you set up also sit under ‘public_html’.

New domains you add sit under the ‘public_html’ folder as well, and they get mixed up with the files and folders of your first domain.

So you need to be careful to ensure when you upload files to your new domain that you’re uploading them to the correct place.

They must go into the new folder, which will be be named your-new-domain.com, or whatever name and TLD you chose.

Follow exactly the same process to add 3rd and subsequent domains and it will soon become less confusing, because each new domain you add will sit in its own folder under ‘public_html’.

It’s only the first domain you added (the one you opened your Hostgator account with) where the files and folders are mixed in with the other domains.

As soon as you’ve set up your new domain in Hostgator you can upload files to it, but you won’t be able to access it for anything up to 48 hours.

This is the time it takes for all the elements on the Internet to be updated with the details of your new domain.

If I need to clarify anything leave a question in the comments below!

5 More Useful Internet Marketing Tools

Martin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:51:18 +0000

I introduced some of the online Internet Marketing tools I use in this article, with the promise I’d review more.

So here they are.

Again, they’re all free to use although some do have some limitations. To get around them you’ll need to either upgrade or pay.

The cost is usually insanely cheap, though, and these are all good resources if you’re starting out.

HTML and CSS Tutorials.

Even if you build sites quite regularly, you’ll find that you often come across something you’d like to do but you can’t quite remember how. Happens to me all the time

The Web building tutorials at W3Schools cover HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML, SQL and database. Pretty much everything you need to know.

They’re wonderful resources, very easy to follow and very easy to find what you need if you’re just looking for a specific command you want to code.

Even easier, and probably better for people who’ve never touched CSS before, is this beginner’s tutorial on CSS.

It takes you step by step through the process of building a page from scratch using CSS to do all your styling. It’s an excellent way to learn the fundamental principles of CSS and it lays the perfect foundation for the more advanced lessons you’ll get at W3Schools.

Colour Code Conversion Tables.

This is a great site for correlating Red Green Blue (RGB), Hexadecimal and CMYK colour codes.

RGB and Hex codes are both used on web pages, and Hex is used more frequently now than RGB.

CMYK colours are used for printing.

This table saved my life when I designed my business cards. I did the design on my PC and the colours were all in Hex codes, but the printers needed CMYK. Not a problem thanks to this site.

Optimise your Website Quality.

This is a great site for analysing the SEO effectiveness of your site.

You type in your URL and you’ll get an abbreviated report back giving a summary of SEO related problems and pointers for fixing them.

The initial evaluation and report is free, but if you want the full monty you’ll need to pay. The full monty does get you a very detailed report, though.

Website Grader.

This is another tool that evaluates your site.

The reports generated by Website Grader are not as comprehensive as Lipperhey, and the emphasis is a bit different. These guys focus on what they call the Marketing effectiveness of your site rather than the pure SEO effectiveness.

Therefore they look for opt in forms and RSS feeds – not specifically SEO related items, but definitely items that help with the marketing effectiveness of your site.

They do cover SEO, though, and in more than enough depth to satisfy the search engines. So I recommend this site, especially if you’re just starting out.

Hack Checker.

This is a super useful tool if you have reason to believe you may have been hacked.

Remember – not all hackings are immediately obvious. Sometimes the hacker will place discreet links which are hidden in your footer. Neither you nor any of your visitors will know they’re there. In fact you won’t notice anything at all until your search engine traffic suddenly dries up.

If you’d like to know what Google holds on your site all you need to do is type your URL into the box and hit check. The tool will go off and get a copy of all the off-site links in Google’s cache – i.e. the links from your site to others.

If you’re managing your site carefully you should recognise all the links it returns, but if there are any you don’t recognise you can click them to check.

If any of them are going to spam sites you can immediately identify and remove them.

If things have got to this stage you’ll need to clean up and check your site thoroughly and then re-submit it to Google with a request to re-index it.

They may take up to a couple of weeks to do so, but you will eventually get your rankings and traffic back.

OK – that completes the online tools I use regularly. If you have other tools that you use please let us know by leaving a comment!

Some More Internet Marketing Business Tools

Martin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:31:20 +0000

In this post I described the primary desktop tools I use in my internet marketing business.

This time I’ll take a look at some of the on-line tools I use.

All these tools are free to use, although some have limitations – for example the sitemap generator will create free sitemaps for sites with up to 500 pages. More than that and you’ll need to pay.

But still, for people starting out these are great resources.

So here are some of the web based tools I use:

Adwords Wrapper.

If you’re a user of Google Adwords you’ll know the value of wrapping your keywords to achieve broad, phrase and exact matches. (If you’re not familiar with that let me know and I’ll do a separate post).

It’s a real pain doing that manually, but with Adwords Wrapper all you need to do is paste the keywords you want to use into the ‘Wrap Adwords’ box. Click the button and your keywords are automatically wrapped – meaning they’re converted into the broad, phrase and exact match variations in all of 5 seconds.

Copy the wrapped keywords, paste them into your campaign and you’re done.

Browser Shots.

This is a great tool for checking how your pages look in different browsers. Simply type the URL of your page into the box, check the browser types you want to review and click submit.

It takes a while to collect all the data, but you’ll be presented with a series of screen shots of how your page looks in all the browsers you checked.

You’re not short of browsers, either – I’ve never heard of some of the ones they’ve listed. The latest versions of IE and Firefox are included as well as old versions going back to the ark.

HTML Validator.

If you’re getting some strange results when your page is viewed in different browsers you may want to validate the HTML mark-up of your page.

The HTML Validator will scan your page and alert you to all the errors and warnings it finds in your HTML code.

Correcting these will go a long way to making your page render consistently in as wide a range of browsers as possible, but it won’t guarantee it.

Even if your page is perfectly validated some browsers are just badly constructed and your page will still appear wonky as a result.

There are a couple of things you need to look out for, and the experience I had here may be helpful.

Some website builders and HTML tools include a link to the validator, which means you can validate and correct your pages before you upload them. Neat.

META Tag Generator.

I’ve written often about why I believe it’s important to create your META tags properly.

You’ll find lots of people who poo poo the idea, but META tags are part of the accepted standards of building web pages and, even if Google doesn’t use the Keywords META tag (which, apparently, it doesn’t at the moment), other search engines and directories do.

So it’s worth completing your META tags as fully as possible.

If you’re not familiar with META tags, I’ve written here about the importance of them and what they do.

Sitemap Generator.

I’ve also written regularly on the importance of creating and maintaining an XML sitemap (for the search engines).

The sitemap tells the search engines how your site is structured and makes sure they index all your pages. If you use Google Webmaster’s Tools (which I highly recommend) having a sitemap is almost obligatory (but not quite!).

At the Sitemap Generator site just type your URL into the box, set the initial parameters and click ‘Start’.

If you have a large site it’s worth setting the priority to ‘Automatic’, but if you only have a few pages you can set the priority manually after you’ve downloaded the sitemap file.

Just open it in WordPad and look for the priority tag for each URL – it’s usually just before the /URL tag. The maximum priority is 1.0, so assign that to your most important URL and set the other pages’ priority in relation to that.

Generating your sitemap could take quite a while if you’ve got lots of pages on your site, so be patient. It will tell you when it’s finished and all you need to do is download the sitemap.xml file, edit the priorities if necessary and upload it to your site.

Colour Matcher.

There are lots of colour tools online. Google ‘colour (or color) matchers’ or ‘colour tools’ and you’ll get pages of results.

I like the one I’ve linked to above because it collects the colours on an existing page and suggests additional or alternative shades you can use.

For initial colour planning when I’m starting a site I use the Colour Scheme Designer.

OK – more online tools in the next post (and there are lots more to come!).

As always, let us know of tools you use or know of – both ones you like and ones you don’t.

Some Useful Internet Marketing Business Tools

Martin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:39:56 +0000

I was helping a friend the other day and needed to get FTP access to their site. So they fired up the web based FTP tool provided by their hosting provider.

And it was one of the least intuitive applications I’ve ever seen!

So I showed her how to install Filezilla and it took us just a few minutes to get done what we needed to do.

Which reminded me: when I started out I had no idea what tools I needed, let alone which the good ones were.

So I’ve set out here the PC based applications I use in my business. In the next article I’ll set out the web based tools I use.

Site Builders: Coffee Cup, Kompozer.

Kompozer is a free, open source application. It’s primarily designed as an HTML editor to be used in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode. Meaning that you use it exactly as you would a normal word processing package like Word.

It’s a great HTML editor for newbies. It’s simple, robust and it doesn’t cost anything.

It does have a source mode (meaning that you can write your pages in HTML if you want) but I don’t recommend using this. The reason is because Kompozer’s designed to be used primarily as an HTML editor and its HTML editing functionality will occasionally clash with your HTML writing.

The result is not pretty.

But use it as a WYSIWYG HTML editor (write and layout your pages as you would in Word) and it does a great job.

Coffee Cup is also an HTML editor, so it can be used in the same way as Kompozer. But its default setting is source – meaning that it expects you to write your pages in HTML.

It’s a bit of a reach for newbies, but an excellent choice once you’ve cut your teeth on something like Kompozer and you’re ready to spread your wings a bit.

Coffee Cup costs $49, and comes with some useful tools.

I particularly like the code cleaner and validation functions because they help me ensure that my pages are W3C compliant.

This also gives them the best chance of being displaid consistently across lots of different browsers. However, since that also depends on the browser’s design you can never guarantee consistent rendering, even if your pages are W3C compliant.

Coffee Cup produces a whole range of additional web building tools, and if you decide to use the HTML Tool it’s worth checking out the others.

The one I use most frequently is the web form builder. It’s very intuitive and you can whip up contact forms (or surveys, booking forms, etc) in just a couple of minutes.

CSS Editor: Topstyle Lite

This is a free CSS editor. It creates an external style sheet which holds the styling for your site. I described CSS and how it works here.

You do need to understand how to set up a stylesheet, (it’s very straightforward and there’s a great tutorial here), but once you’ve got that sorted out Topstyle Lite does a great job and it’s very easy to use.

It’s also free.

Header Image generator: XHeader

XHeader is a neat (and free) tool for editing and creating header images for your site. In fact you can use it for manipulating any image – not just header images.

As long as you register, you get 500 header image templates, broken down into a wide range of categories. You can also load images from your PC or the web and turn them into header graphics, so you’re not going to be short of options when you need a header image.

XHeader is part of the XSitePro portfolio (XSitePro is another web building application) and registering involves you opting in to their email list.

But the emails are well spaced out – probably not more than 1 every couple of weeks, although I’ve never actually counted. And they’re usually pretty useful, because XSitePro is a good site builder – or at least it has a good reputation, because I have no personal experience of it.

FTP Client: Filezilla

FileZilla is one of the most popular FTP clients around today. It’s a free (open source) application which you can download here.

It’s easy to install, allows you some flexibility in how you set it up, fully supports SFTP and it’s very fast. Much faster than the paid-for FTP client I was using before I moved to FileZilla – it cut my complete blog back up time by nearly 50%.

It enables you to access and manipulate your site files (as do all FTP clients). So if, for example, something goes horribly wrong with WordPress you can get into your WordPress installation with FileZilla and do what needs to be done to fix it.

And that, by the way, is why I use SFTP – more details here.

Screencast Video Tool: Jing

Video is all the rage online now and there’s no question that a lot of people prefer watching or learning stuff by video rather than text.

Jing is a free video screen capture application that allows you to make a video of something you’re doing on your screen – setting up a new post, for example.

The downside is that you’re limited to 5 minutes per video.

This isn’t necessarily all that bad because, especially if you’re producing training videos, doing them in 5 minute chunks makes them very digestible.

But, of course, using Jing for longer, more complex videos would be frustrating.

Still – it’s a good way to cut your teeth on creating screencast videos without making the type of investment required by Camtasia or one of the other top flight applications.

Audio Tools: Audacity and Flash Audio Wizard

For creating audios I use Audacity and Flash Audio Wizard.

Audacity enables you to record and export your projects as MP3 or WAV files. You have a multi-track recording capability which means you can record a music track to introduce your message and then play it softly in the background while you’re talking.

Once you’ve created your audio files you import them into Flash Audio Wizard. This is where you create the buttons and files that you then upload to your site so people can listen to your masterpiece.

Ok – so those are the primary desktop applications I use. Please leave a comment to let us know of alternatives or additional tools that you use and like (or don’t like!).

Next time I’ll cover the web based tools I use.

Don’t Know What to Write? Take a Walk

Martin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:36:46 +0000

Thanks to my time and salary being cut by 30% at my day job, I’ve been able to work at home and focus more time on my Internet work.

So what have been the benefits?

Well it’s nice not to have to work until 1 in the morning because I’m doing 2 jobs, and it’s nice to be able to spend focused time on my on-line work.

But the best benefit of all is being able to go for a walk.

Ha – he’s falling into the trap of having no routine, I hear you say, that’s the start of the slippery slope.

Well, no it isn’t actually.

I have a very good routine. Here it is:

First thing in the morning, after the bathroom: Do my email, stats, and see if there are any questions I can answer on my social sites. This can take up to 2 hours

Second thing: Go for a walk. This usually takes one and a half hours.

Third thing: Start my tasks for the day. This could be to write a post, make a video, put up a new web page, site maintenance or whatever.

Fourth thing: Lunch

Fifth thing: Run any errands that need doing

Sixth thing: Complete any outstanding tasks for the day.

Seventh thing: Email and social sites

Eight thing: Dinner.

And the best part of that is my walk.

It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re concentrating on something, and you end up spending hours hunched over your PC.

This is not good for your blood circulation, it’s not good for your clarity of thinking and it’s not good for your health.

Yet, when I’m working my day job as well as my night job this is exactly what I do.

So when I started working at home I made a conscious decision to take a good walk every morning. And, since Hong Kong is very mountainous, a good walk can be a pretty tough workout. Especially in the heat at this time of year.

But the best bit about it is that, in addition to helping me feel great, it’s also helped my writing.

I’ll often not have a clue what to write about once I’ve finished my emails and stats. But by the time I get back from my walk I know what I’m going to publish and whether I’ll publish it as a video or as a written article.

So when I get back I can take my shower and then get down to writing and publishing the article – which I really enjoy doing.

You see, walking is great cardio exercise – especially in the hills around here.

So that gets the blood flowing and all the benefits you get from that.

But it also enables me to put things into perspective and it gives me an hour and a half of absolutely uninterrupted thinking time. Brilliant.

I’m able to work on problems, plan the rest of my day and come up with subjects to write about.

The second (and more expected) benefit is that I feel so much better for having the exercise. My digestion’s better, I sleep better, my sense of humour is better, and the list goes on.

And, while we’re talking about the benefits of exercise, there’s a great article on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog about exercises you can do during the day to release tension in your wrists, elbows and fingers.

These are all parts of our bodies that those of us who spend a lot of time at our PCs rely on. But they’re also parts that can develop painful and debilitating conditions if we’re not careful. Like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (or RSI).

Get a serious does of RSI and your blogging could suddenly become a lot more painful. Or it could be stopped altogether. Not good.

So whenever you’re stuck for something to write about, take a walk.

And, when you get back, hop over to Problogger to watch these videos on elbow, wrist and finger exercises.

And whatever you’re doing, try to break up your time at the PC by standing up, doing some stretching and moving around a bit.