Backup Windows Live Mail

If you’re using hotmail or livemail on the web only, you may want to consider getting the free desktop client to install on your desktop. This way, you’ll have off-line access to your mail account and the desktop client has a few features that the web doesn’t. You can get it here by itself, or as a suite of free downloads from Microsoft.

Here’s a quick 3” video that shows you how to export your Windows Live Mail into an .ini file that you can store on your computer or a backup drive. Of course, you’ll want to back up at regular intervals to be as up-to-date as possible.

Backup Windows Live Contacts

Contacts are also important, so there’s a section here on how to export your contacts into a .csv file. This file can be imported into Outlook or Gmail, if you wish.

Windows Live Calendar

Calendar items can’t be backed up at this time. But if you use the web-based calendar along with the desktop client of Windows Live Mail, your calendar items will be synced. If you lose your account though, this won’t help you, will it? There are third party programs (for pay) out there that will back up your Live Calendar if you have that need.

Do you use Windows Live Mail or Hotmail for your business or just personal use? If you are a business, I’d suggest Office 365 at $6/month from Microsoft. For $6/month, you get Exchange mail that’s backed up for you – peace of mind. Read here for other advantages of O365.

I wrote about LastPass awhile back and it has been an application that has truly saved my sanity ever since I realized how safe, effective and timesaving it is. It’s been endorsed by the paranoid Security Expert, Steve Gibson, and that’s good enough for me.

Recently, LastPass added a multi-factor add-on for all their customers. Multi-factor simply seems that whenever you log in to an account, you must give more than one piece of identification. So in addition to entering in my password, I also will use Google Authenticator on my mobile phone to let LastPass know it’s really me. It’s something I know (password) and something I have (phone).

Since this is from Google, it’s easily installed on any Android phone or device. There’s also an iPhone/iPad/iPodTouch & Blackberry app that will help you get going. I have a Windows Phone 7 and I was happy to see that someone had developed one for the WP7. I wish I could say I had an easy time getting it installed and working, but alas, it was difficult. Below is one of the steps for getting the WP7 app on my phone.

After you have installed the app on your phone, then click to follow directions to authenticate your phone with LastPass. You’ll be taken to a screen at the LastPass site where you can either scan your barcode into your phone, or you can choose to get a code delivered to your phone, type it in the box on the computer screen, click ‘Authenticate’ and you’re in.

It should be noted that you’ll have to use multi-factor authentication (your phone), to access your LastPass Vault only on unfamiliar or untrusted devices. I’m glad they built that in as it would be silly to have to use this system with your desktop or laptop. There is also a drop down to allow or disallow off-line access. This means, if you are having connectivity issues and are off-line, you can still log into your LastPass Vault. Again, a smart move.

This page contains a comprehensive User’s Manual for LastPass. If you don’t have a smart phone, there are still other ways to keep your LastPass account safe and secure. There are many other great features of LastPass in the manual, it’s a good one to look through.

Screenpresso came cross my radar just a week or so ago. It seems they are pretty new to the web because when I went to follow them on Twitter, I was just the 84th follower.

Screenpresso is a screen capture/editing/effects/twitter tool. Oh, and it’s free! It’s a bit like Microsoft’s Snipping Tool—only more feature-rich. After it’s downloaded, it resides in your system tray (I know, another resource drain, but you can turn it off). When you’re ready to get a screen shot, just right click on the icon and you’ll get a menu of items. This is where you choose if you want an entire screenshot or a certain region of a screen. There’s a cool feature called ‘screenshot autoroll’ which stitches together more than one screen-full.

Above is a shot of their main features—let’s take a look at the more advanced features:

• screenshot history – if you don’t want to save your captures, just leave them in the history of Screenpresso. If it’s something you won’t use again, just delete it. If it’s something you’ll use over and over, there’s an option to save it to a folder on your hard drive. It looks like they are saved in a date order and with a .png extension. If you find yourself making a lot of captures, I’d suggest filing them in folders to keep things manageable.
• add effects – here’s where you can add borders, shadows, etc.
• capture scrolling part – this feature lets you capture more than one screen-full using a stitching mechanism. I didn’t try out this feature, but this is pretty cool!
• screenshot to email – this is very nice because all you have to do is have your history open and drag your capture over to your email task bar and it will put it in your email as a .png attachment.
• screenshots to Twitter – pull up your history and you’ll see the twitter bird icon at the bottom of the screen. Click it and you’ll get a popup to sign in to your Twitter account and send it to twitpic and add a message.
• edit/enhance your image – here’s where you can add explanatory text, arrows or other formatting features to highlight an item or feature. Also a nice feature is the blurring tool – great for blocking sensitive/identifying data

Conclusion

Since this is a start-up, they are still working out kinks and probably trying to make everything work. They are working on a Pro version, which will probably be a for-pay service. I see it looks like they will be offering video – but that service isn’t ready just yet.

I liked using it, the features were pretty intuitive and didn’t take too long to catch on. I think Jing is a competitor of theirs (you can read my article on that), and has an advantage because you can video and record what’s on your screen and share it. I’ll still use Microsoft’s Snipping Tool most because I usually don’t have a need to put effects on my snips or save them. Screenpresso is great for full screenshots and being able to point out with text or arrows what you want your reader to see.

First, you’ll want to see for yourself how much memory Firefox is using. Mozilla has made it easy. Simply type about:cache in the URL bar to get a look at your current memory situation. I have 4GB of memory on my machine and I just had logged off and back into my computer, so you can see my storage in use was very low after doing this. Try it after you’ve had your browser open and going for a few days and see what it is.

Things to Do to Speed Up Firefox

1. Close your browser and reopen it. Simple, but effective.

2. Reduce the session history number. This setting keeps track of all the pages you’ve visited and this number can be safely and easily reduced. The default is 50. I changed mine to 25. To do this, you’ll first type in about:config in the Firefox URL bar. You may get a warning, just click OK. Then hit Ctrl + F (find), and type in “browser.sessionhistory.max_entries” and you’ll see it as I have pictured below. Right-click on the line and select ‘modify’. Then type in a number.

3. Go through your Add-ons, Extensions and Plug-ins and delete the ones you’re not using or no longer need. To do this, hit Ctrl+shift+A and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can go through all of these and just remove the ones you’re not using. I found quite a few add-ons I deleted.

4. Set Firefox’s max cache size. This can be a bit risky, I’ve read. I prefer to let windows take care of how much memory is used for anything I do.

Now you can check how much memory FIrefox is using and take some steps to reduce all the memory being used. Good luck and if you have found other solutions, please leave a comment.

Changes to How You Share Content in Notes – You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer available, although you’ll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your timeline. Learn more about notes.

Notes is an easy-to-use application from Facebook. It has a feature on it to import your blog whenever it detects a new post. However, beginning November 22nd, the import feature will be gone. The reason they give is that… We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible. That’s why as of September 30th you’ll no longer be able to automatically import posts from your website to your Page notes. The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans.

Be that as it may, the Notes application will still be there for you to use and post manually (so you can add your pithy comments), but it won’t be automated.

So what alternatives are there if you want automation in posting your blog articles?

I’ve been signed up with NetworkedBlogs to automate my blog articles into my Facebook newsfeed. It’s pretty easy to set up and it’s more effective in getting traffic because you can register your blog with NetworkedBlogs in a strategically chosen category and then your blog will be listed in their database of blogs. I’ve gotten a great response using this free app.

     Ping.fm is another web tool I use. If you want your blog to be posted to multiple social media accounts at the same time, try out ping.fm. It’s a web-based tool where your login information is collected and then automates posting to various social accounts.

I heard of Posterous through a WordPress friend. I’m becoming very interested in it, especially since I read they’ve added scheduling to their list of features. So I can’t vouch for it personally, but I’ve heard great things.

The good old RSS feed is also an option. This will need to be set up from within your blog.

If you’re a WordPress user, check out the plugins available from WordPress. I think the best way to find a plugin is to do some internet searches and read some reviews, or else from within the repository, see how many downloads it has and how many stars it has.

So here are five ways available to you to replace the Notes feature soon to be gone. Let me know what you’re using and why. If anyone’s used Posterous, I’d like to hear your experiences.

There is no registration and no download needed for people joining you. On the presenter side, just go to join.me and download the little applet. Open it and you’ll get the small set of controls that pop up at the top of your screen (pictured below). There’s a link that you can copy and paste and send to people right from this screen, or you can send via your email, or you can just tell the person to navigate to join.me and put in the number and they are connected to your desktop.

Features of Join.Me

• free conference call number & access code you can give to all participants (of course, normal phone charges apply) – the pro version capacity is for up to 250 people, not sure about the free version
• chat – since everyone has to type a name in before joining, you’ll see the names and can send private messages during the presentation or send  message to all participants – nice
• pause – the large middle button pauses the screen in case the presenter needs to do something on his computer the others don’t need to see
• list of participants – this button shows who all is on the call
• mouse – for giving control to another person on the call (pro feature)
• file exchange – the presenter can share a file with the group

Since there’s no registration on anyone’s part, the little applet has to be downloaded each time you need to use it. The number is a 1-time use number and if you close it down, the session ends and you can’t get back to it, only start a new one.

Join.Me Pro Features

• ability to schedule a meeting
• get your very own personalized link to share – you get to choose your username
• personalized background – great for promoting your brand with clients
• other features & pricing listed below
• 256-bit encryption (same as banks use, they say) this is for either version of join.me

Join.Me Pro Features & Pricing

There’s really no downside to this free software – even internet babes should be able to use it. Try it out soon!

I’ve made a video that both shows a project I did while telling you how I did it. In our article today, I’ll go into a few more details. Here’s how I did it:

1. Take pictures or scan your pictures or documents. I chose to use my camera.
2. Import your pictures into your favorite picture-saving software (Windows Live Photo Gallery, Picasa, Flickr, etc.)
3. Then import your pictures into your favorite movie software (Windows Live Movie Maker or Picasa will work). You could also choose to import your pictures into PowerPoint 2010 and make a slide show from there.
4. Download & install Jing, a free screencapture software. There’s plenty of documentation at TechSmith regarding how to use Jing, so I won’t go into it here.
5. Start your movie or presentation and start Jing. You have 5” to speak about your slides – that’s the Jing time limit. I recommend paying $15 for Jing Pro. Your video can be easily uploaded to YouTube and put in a format ready for sharing either via a link, on Facebook or other social services.
6. Be sure to back up both your photos and your video to the clouds.
7. Now you’re ready to share your video with friends and family. If you use cloud storage, DropBox, SkyDrive and many other cloud storage choices make it easy to share with people.

A Limitation of Jing

In order to use Jing, you must either start it up by clicking on the yellow ‘sun’ object, or start it from the system tray. It’s not possible to start up the movie you’ve made in full-screen mode and then start Jing. This is because when the movie is running, Jing isn’t available. The work-around for it I found was to make my movie large on my screen, then I started up Jing and ‘drew’ the rectangle above the start button for my movie. I could then start the movie and it would go through the transitions – just not in full screen mode. If anyone knows how to get around that, I’d love to hear it! (If you’re not familiar with Jing, let me explain the ‘draw the rectangle’ phrase I used above. When Jing is started, your computer screen will go dark and you’ll see a yellow outline on your screen. Then you select the part of your screen you want to highlight and show, this is the ‘rectangle’. Anything inside the rectangle means you can’t use your mouse to click inside while Jing is recording.)

The one way I did get it to work full-screen was in PowerPoint. I was able to ‘draw’ my rectangle in such a way that I was able to start my presentation and then I could start Jing.

Go Digital and Ditch the Paper

It does take some time to sift through thing and decide what’s worth keeping but once it’s done, you’ll have more space and you’ll have a better and long lasting way to archive your memories – both for you and your family. What are some things you do to save your memories?

I’ve got a video (under 3”), that shows you step by step how to insert your pictures and then spiff them up a bit to make it look professional before saving and sharing.

Share your Photos

If you have a large photo album, you may want to send it via email. There is a compression feature you can utilize if you wish to do this.

There are several other options available to you below. Let’s go over them:

Save to Web – this will save it to your SkyDrive (free, just need a Windows Live ID)

Save to Sharepoint – this is a paid service (you can get it with Office 365)

Broadcast Slides – this looks really cool and easy, but when I tried it out, I found out that the presentation has to be seen by all viewers simultaneously. At least it seemed that way to me. Kind of strange.

Publish Slides – This was also a bit strange – it shows a list of all slides and there’s a check box by each slide and I can choose to ‘publish’ a single slide.

Photos Saved Another Way

There is also the ability to make your slides into a movie. I tried this option and it would convert the presentation into a .wmv movie file. I can add transition effects too. Nice.

You can save it into a .pdf for sharing/emailing to people who don’t have PowerPoint..

Microsoft is really coming along with some forward-looking features in PowerPoint. I hope you’ll check this one out and let me know your results.

Last week, I wanted to do a Jing video for my blog article and it’s easy enough to use the free Jing to record and share my video. The sticking point is that it’s NOT easy to put on YouTube and then embed the video on my website. I know there are programs to convert the Jing .swf file into something YouTube likes (MPG4 is best), but once I run the conversions, the resulting video still didn’t work right. I tried both iWisoft and one other converter and couldn’t get either of them to do the conversion correctly.

Then I remembered the Jing Pro for just $15/year. So I signed up for it! Now, I had to re-record my video since it won’t convert what’s already been recorded, but no big deal.

What You Get With Jing Pro

• Jing condenses your video so it’s not as large – better for sharing.
• Upload directly to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, FTP or Flickr (note that you will need to setup/link these services before you do your video. It’s nice to have the 1-click and ability to send right where you want it.
• Ability to go from your webcam (for a shot of your face), and then back to your screen. This is kind of cool.
• No more ads at the end of your video
• Still restricted to 5” of recording. Wish it was 10” for Pro users

Here’s my current configuration. The instructions to upload to multiple social places are easy to follow.

Regarding the 5” Time Limit

Jing explains in their blog they did not increase the time limit because they want the product to be for more for the on-on-fly type videos that you want to quickly do and share with people. File sizes with longer time lengths was also mentioned as a deterrent.

Most social media people say that videos are a big attraction, but they need to be short – under 3” to keep surfer’s attention. It seems we get on-line, our patience and attention levels go way down. I know when I’m searching for information, I like to get right to what I’m looking for.

So if you’re into video for posting on a website or sharing socially, what are you using and why? Please leave a comment or contact me via lynn (at)extremevirtualsupport.com.

The Conference was held on the University of AR campus. The organizers did a great job of communication with all attendees, giving us updates, encouragement and directions. Unfortunately, the directions to our building on the U of AR website were horribly wrong (the school had them wrong, not the organizers). Finally got there with the help of another lost soul.

This WordCamp had three tracks, or focuses. There was the Developer track – for those who are coders and those who really like to get into the meat of WordPress. I did not attend any of these sessions.

Next, they had a Business track, which focuses on using WordPress in or for a business. I started out here listening to Collin Condray & Eric Huber speak on Yin and Yang of Your WordPress Site. The link is to the slides from their presentations. You can find many of the video presentations here, but I started listening to a couple and the quality was such that I couldn’t hear very well.

The last track was for Bloggers, for those of us who want to learn some skills to get us on the road to being a better blogger, both mechanically and in our writing styles. I attended Andy Crofford’s Guest Blogging: How to find the best and avoid the Pests. I especially enjoyed this one as I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people wanting to guest blog and some of them are a bit strange. His tips on how to manage requests and manage the process were helpful.

When it was Jane’s turn to speak, she opted not to do her presentation and instead took questions from the audience.That was a disappointment to me as I wanted to hear her talk about the ‘State of WordPress’. It looks like she does this at about all the WordCamps she attends, so perhaps she wanted a change. Then there was the ear-splitting audio feedback problems that plagued both her and the next speaker.

I listened to Lela Davidson speak on Social Media Consistency: Skip the Overwhelm and Create A Schedule that Works. She gave tips and drew upon her personal experiences with social media and what she did to become comfortable and eventually successful in using social media to increase visibility and become connected with the ‘right’ people.

I finished my day in the Business Track listening to Cotton Rohrscheib speak on Making WordPress Profitable for Design Firms/Agencies. He brought to our attention some of the ‘housekeeping’ chores that are necessary with any WordPress site, such as hosting, software upgrades, training and maintenance. He pointed out that providing these services can provide consistent monthly revenue for those of us who build sites or develop with WordPress.

I missed the last hour of the day as I decided to hit the road for Oklahoma. I got to meet some nice folks and talk to them a bit about why they were there and their experience with WordPress. I believe close to 200 were registered for the meeting, so a nice sized group. I’ll be looking at their agenda next year to see about returning.