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Wicked World Wide Web and the games it plays with us..
ScreenHunter 5.0 is a free Snag-IT replacement screen capture software. You can download it here - Screen Capture Software. Here's my review about it. The product is a great tool for simple screen capture. If you are looking for Area/Window to JPG/GIF screen capture, this tool will do it for you. And it's stable, never once crashed on me. The interface is very easy to use and the screen capture works every single time. It works like a charm on XP Home, XP Pro, Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. I am sure it works on other OS too, though I haven't tried it. Often, when we look at a new software product, the hardest part is to figure out what it does NOT do. Obviously, the product owner/seller does not talk about the deficiencies of the product in detail and online reviews are often not detailed enough to get a real picture. So, here you go - the cons:
Over the last few months, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my career moving forward. I have a post-graduate degree in MIS, a few years experience as a Business Analyst, working mainly as a consultant on Workflow projects on Opentext Livelink and a little bit of everything else. I also founded an SEO/Web Marketing company about 2 years ago and I've been spending a lot of time growing that as well, in the process learning Joomla CMS, CRE Loaded, Plone, Etc. Overall, I've enjoyed my work quite a bit, but I feel like I am at crossroads now. I am debating whether to pursue my entrepreneurial venture - the SEO/Web company, full time and grow it further, or take on consulting work. I already have about 10 staff members around the world, mostly part-timers, working for me for the SEO company, which is what this site is sort of about. I've spent a lot of time and energy bringing it up to this point and I know that I've just started. If I put in enough time and make some smart decisions, this company can be big enough to fund my full time involvement with it soon enough (my estimate is that it will take 9-12 months). I think I am an entrepreneur at the very core and this option seems like a fun thing for me to do on a long term. Afterall, there's potentially endless growth possibilities and that's what makes the entrepreneurial life so exciting. It also has its share of stresses though. My day will start with irate client calls and staff issues and end with that too. I am a very technically and analytically inclined person and I am not sure I will get enough opportunity to work on technical or analytical things if I choose to run this company full time. The clients will be small businesses - less sophisticated and less state-of-the-art usually compared to large enterprises. So there you see where the dilemma comes from. Also, of course, there is far more risk in running a small business like this to make my living than being a consultant.
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Oct 17, 2008
Right now...October 17, 2008, around 2 AM PST..I am trying to get the last few bits and pieces of work done and invoices generated, payments made...and boom! Yahoo mail goes down...Yahoo displays a friendly message: You've stumbled upon a temporary problem we're having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing. In fact it may be taken care of now.
Posted by: admin in setup, mojoblog, joomla, blog on
Oct 6, 2008
This blog was built using Joomla and a few blogging components and bots. I am planning to enhance this blog, mainly using tips from forums and other blogs. I will document my experience as I proceed, for the benefit of anyone that wants a blog in Joomla and chooses to go with mojoblog. If you are not decided on what blogging component to use just yet, I wrote a previous post about blogging options in joomla. Pre-requisites: 1. A Joomla 1.0.13 - 1.0.15 installation. mojoblog is not guaranteed to work with other versions as of this writing, to my knowledge. I got it working on a 1.0.13 installation.
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Oct 3, 2008
Start at this URL which only members of this group receive: http://www.bradcallen.com/seomindset/. If you are interested in SEO and are not a member of his group yet, I strongly recommmend it. He is one of the best out there. You get his book SEO Mindset for Free ($7.99 for shipping) and a lot of other bonuses inlcuding Audio sessions with a lot of SEO experts, free membership to http://www.searchmarketingelite.com for 1 month and the best UNADVERTISED part - SEO Elite ($167 value) FREE. I got mine today. Unbelievable offer, totally worth it. By the way, I am not affiliated with him in any way and none of these links are even affiliate links or anything. I just genuinely think this is a great offer, the best I've seen in a long time from any of the SEO companies. I am not sure how long this is going to last. Probably not more than a day or two. Get it fast!
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Sep 30, 2008
I used the !jocomment on on of my client sites - check it out - http://www.visionomics.com/Leading-With-Leading-Measurements.html
It installed without any issues and does what is says. It's easy to set up and you can get your site's commenting system going in minutes. However, I am not too impressed. Today's web 2.0 Internet users are used to the slick commenting options in Wordpress, Type-pad and other blogging platforms. They are not going to feel too motivated to comment with !jocomment. The user interface is the biggest issue in my opinion. It's just not sophisticated and enticing enough to get people to comment. Just my personal opinion. If this component gets much better, then it has a huge market out there though. There are tons of mojoblog and My Blog users, both of which have their limitations as explained in my post here. If I had the option, I would much rather use pure Joomla components that were written from scratch instead of using bridges or wordpress-flavored products that interface with Joomla. Similarly to !jocomment, most other blogging features (Rafcloud for example) are availble as Joomla components or modules, they are just not good enough yet in my opinion.
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Sep 30, 2008
I recently launched a website about the issues that legal immigrants face in the United States. Being a legal immigrant myself, I am very closely associated with this area and this is more of a personal website than something that I am looking to make money with. The website is at http://www.endlesswait.com. I launched the website on September 4. On September 28, I noticed that page rank of the home page went from 0 to 3. That's the fastest that any of my sites has ever gone up in rankings. Page rank 3 is not too hard to achieve with Google, but neither is it too easy. I've known websites that are live for years, do professional backlink building for months, but never got their PR past 2.
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Sep 3, 2008
I always wondered how people buy and sell businesses. I assumed that it must be through market-specific seminars/contacts or by using middle-men companies that facilitate such a deal. Going by the complexity of such deals, the third-party service I assumed (and later found out) is pretty expensive. It could be up to 10% of the company value. Not a paltry sum when you are trying to sell a business and make a profit from it. Often, 10% means sacrifising up to 2 more years worth of profits on a company that does nothing more that help you shake hands with your potential buyer. I found this website today from an ad on Yahoo - http://www.bizbuysell.com and I was intrigued by it. It's like any other marketplace, what an obvious idea, damn I did not think of it first! If I were you, I would post my business on it just to see how many parties show interest. The site is pretty basic. There you go, a great idea and an opportunity for someone to come up with a much better site (perhaps even bidding and auction features instead of a direct price) specifically for business buy and sell. Even if you charged 2%, you would still be undercutting marketing companies that do this by a long shot. I am going to research some more sites like this and post it here. If you know of any, please enlighten me.
I always thought one of the biggest problem with Joomla was that it did not come with a standard commenting system or a set of features for bloggers, like Wordpress does. But over the years, a lot of blogging components have been added for Joomla by third parties. See the full list of Joomla blogging components here. Of these, the two most prominent and feature-rich ones, in my opinion, are: 1. My Blog by Azrul.com 2. mojoBlog by Joomlify.com (This is the one I chose eventually even though I rated My Blog higher. Read on to know why.)
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Aug 9, 2008
Yay Yay the blog is up and running, so I am going to celebrate by paryting with my wife all night. OK alright, we were gonna go out for a party anyway. Different things can make people happy. And just this simple act of installing the blog and getting it work did it for me today. There are 2 reasons for that: 1. The "As Seen on TV" reason": Joomla, the Content Mangement System that I am using for this website (also something that we specialize on at Simplosys), is the best, alright. But if you've had the chance to work with it for a while, you'll know that it does not have a default commenting system, much less a default blogging platform. There are several third party products that provide those features and actually come pretty close to being a nice solution. But you never realize all the bumps along the road to get them working until you download and start hackin' at it. I used 2-3 pieces to get this blog up and running on Joomla without spending a single penny other than my own time (and I love working on this stuff, so that's double the reward actually ;). I am going to write a separate post about how I got this working, in detail, soon, so watch out!
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