Bed Head Gallery is Live

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A few months back I ran a series of posts I called the 40 Days of Bed Head. The idea was fairly straight forward.

Each morning shortly after I woke up I took used the web cam on my laptop to take a photo of myself. And my bed head.

Yes my hair sticks up in the morning. It’s always sticking up, but hardly ever in the same way twice.

I’ve gotten a lot of feed back on the project, and lots of laughs. Folks have been telling me that I should bring the photos together all in the same place.

So I finally put together a little photo gallery with all the photos in one place. One glorious frightful display of wild hair captured for your amusement.

So go check out all the bed head photos. Click though to the individual posts if you want to see what other folks had to say about the photos. And feel free to add your own comments.

Enjoy!

Mac Friday - Easily Protect and Remember Web Passwords with 1Password

I have an insane number of website accounts and profiles to keep track of. It goes with the territory of one who makes his living in the virtual world. Between my own profiles on dozens of social media sites, various email accounts, the blogs I own, banking and online bill paying sites, web hosting accounts, and the client work I do - it can truly get nuts sometimes.

The problem is twofold. First I need to keep the passwords someplace that’s organized where I can find them all. Quickly. The old paper and pencil password log I kept back in the day wouldn’t be able to keep up.

Then there’s the security issue. Paper and pencil is a bad idea. Even worse is keeping a spread sheet or text document on your computer with all your passwords in it!

Secure AND Easy

Fortunately 1Password keeps track of my passwords for me while keeping them secure at the same time. It was one of the very first purchases I made when I got the first Mac here at SuccessCREEations and at just under $35 for a single license is arguably some of the best money I spent getting started.

I’ve been using 1Password for about a year now and the program is easy to use, secure, and saves me countless hours hunting for my passwords.

1Password Makes Browsing More Secure

With all the social media sites that folks can join the the temptation can be strong to just use a standard password on all these different accounts. That’s a very bad idea.

And with 1Password it’s unnecessary too.

Because the program securely remembers all your passwords for you, there is no longer any need for passwords that are easy to remember. Now you can use truly random character strings for your passwords and still have them available in all your browsers.

Even better

Coming up with a random sequence to much bother for you? No worries.

1Password can generate truly random strings for you within parameters you can set. All you have to do is click your mouse and get remarkably strong unique passwords for every account you have.

That makes it much less likely that someone will hack your online information. Even if one site were to be compromised the damage is isolated to that account because all your others have randomly different passwords.

And they are even working on a web based version that will give access to this great service for Windows users too. Very nice.

Check out this video. If you are on a Mac and have too many passwords to manage, 1Password is worth a look.

Image Formatting Issues on Upgrading to WordPress 2.6

Got a call yesterday from a buddy of mine who had just upgraded his blog to WordPress 2.6 and found he wasn’t able to get images to align in his new posts the way he did before. No matter what he did the images just displayed one way.

I knew right away what his problem was because I’d seen the same thing when I upgraded SuccessCREEations.

Adjusting to New Features

The culprit is the new image caption feature that was added in WordPress 2.6, which is something both me and my buddy who called are glad they added.

However, to make it possible for the captions display under images, WordPress has added an extra div around images. This extra div requries a style sheet adjustment for many WordPress themes.

Many theme designers style the post images either within a div for the specific post content area or within a paragraph so you might see something like this in your style sheet: Read more

WordPress Upgrades to Version 2.6

WordPress rolled out their update to version 2.6 the other day with some great new feature improvements. Here’s a quick rundown of the new features.

WordCount

Ever wonder how many words you have in your blog posts? I do. I’ve been a longtime user of the TD Word Count plugin. But now WordPress will tell you how many words are in your post right on the edit screen.

Revision Tracking

Now WordPress will track various revisions of a post. This feature will be especially handy for multi-author blogs. Not to mention those of us who occasionally delete big chunks of a post by mistake. Now we can restore an earlier save of the post and not loose all that work!

Photo Captions

This is a wonderful little feature. Now WordPress has the built in ability to add captions to your post images automatically like you see under the screen shot to the right. You might have to adjust your style sheet to display them the way you like though.

Press This

They’ve added a shortcut that you can drag to the toolbar of most web browsers so you can blog about things you see on the on the web with just one click. Click the “Press This” shortcut and a new browser window will open up with all sorts of goodies to make posting to your blog faster and easier.

WYSIWYG Image Control

They’ve integrated several of the most common image control features right into the WYSIWYG editor. That means you can have more control over how your images display without having to know all that HTML coding stuff.

Improved Gravatar Support

Now you can select from a variety of default avatars to display for folks without a Gravatar account. I went into my theme and manually changed my setting from the old WordPress default to the Gravatar logo. With version 2.6 you can make that change right from your WordPress dashboard.

And Much More

There’s a ton of other things included in this update from being able to select multiple check boxes via shift-click to a bubble to let you know when you have plugins that are out of date. They also fixed nearly 200 bugs with this release along with numerous security enhancements.

And Early Too!

Not only did they make all these improvements but they got version 2.6 ready for release nearly a month ahead of schedule! Great job for the WordPress development team.

If you’d like to check out what some of those changes look like here’s a short video they prepared to show you. Check it out.

UPDATE: For some reason I can’t seem to get the video embed to play from here. If you want to check out the video head on over to the Upgrade Announcement over on the WordPress development blog.

Analog Networking eWomenNetwork Style

I flew out late last week to join Gorgeous in Dallas at the eWomenNetwork annual national conference. I bought the latest Technology Review to read on the flight because the current issue is all about social media and the future of Web 2.0, which is obviously something I’m interested in.

On page 56 is an article about the coming bandwidth crunch and how much video content is passing around the web. One of their examples is a video called Evolution of Dance by a guy named Judson Laipply. They pointed out that this particular video was viewed 87 million times.

Evolution of Dance

I mention this because the very first speaker of the eWomenNetwork conference was none other than Judson Liapply. Turns out he’s a very entertaining speaker.

His message is pretty straight forward. If you don’t adapt to the rapidly changing nature of our society you’re going to be left behind.

In the social media environment that is especially true. And it turns out that Judson’s video clip has been seen another 5 million times since that Technology review article was penned.

I don’t know what the lead time is on an article for that publication. Regardless it doesn’t seem like the demand for video content is going anywhere but up! Since that’s the case take a moment and check it out for yourself. Read more

Supercharge Your RSS with FeedBurner

There are very few blogging services that I universally recommend to all my clients and FeedBurner is one of them.

(If you aren’t sure what RSS means or what feeds even are, feel free to check out a post I wrote a while back on RSS and Feeds to get the basics.)

What is FeedBurner? FeedBurner is quite simply a free service that greatly enhances the RSS feed experience for both publishers and subscribers.

Here are some benefits.

1. It’s Free – I’m a big fan of free, especially when it comes to top-notch services. And since FeedBurner was acquired by Google last year even their “pro” features are free. Very nice.
2. Feed Stats – We bloggers tend to be a bit obsessed with numbers like visitors, page views, inbound links, and comments. The best way I know to track RSS stats is with FeedBurner. You want to know how many feed subscribers you have? How about how many views and clicks your feed is getting? FeedBurner can tell you all that and much more.
3. Easy to Subscribe – There is a dizzying array of feed readers out there. With FeedBurner you can give your readers the flexibility to easily subscribe to your feed in whatever reader they prefer without having to clutter your blog with a ton of subscribe buttons.
4. Email Subscriptions – There is a small percentage of folks out there who will prefer to read your blog content via email. FeedBurner can give them that option so you don’t have to pay for another email publishing option.
5. Customization – With FeedBurner you can customize your feed by integrating a podcast, adding links, advertizing in your feed, connecting your feed to your Flickr account, Geotagging it, and so much more.
6. Bandwidth -  Using FeedBurner means they provide the bandwidth for your feed. Granted it isn’t an issue if your blog is just getting started and only has a few subscribers. However bandwidth is part of what you are buying from your web host so it’s nice to have someone else take care of that for you.

I’ve been using FeedBurner for years and have been very happy with their service. If you are at all interested in a more enhanced RSS experience for both yourself and your readers consider using their service.

Sunday Morning Goodness - July 6 2008

This week I’m bringing back our Sunday Morning Goodness feature that’s been on hiatus for nearly a year.

You see there is so much good stuff being published out there. And some of the things I find in my feed reader are simply worth sharing.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee, click through the links and enjoy your a great start to your Sunday.

Let’s start with a quote from an author who never fails to amuse me, Douglas Adams.

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

Now on to some good blog postage…

• If you’re having trouble getting your blogging groove on check out Chris Brogan’s Sample Blogging Workflow. Not only does Chris address some good blogging strategy ideas, but he then goes on to share some critical tasks, and some tools to make blogging easier. Then he ends with some ways to get your creative juices flowing when you run short of post ideas.
• David Bullock give us a social media explanation using a senator, Twitter & you. David takes a look at how the radically different approaches of the Obama and Clinton campaigns towards social media in general, and Twitter in particular, produced an Obama victory. David’s spot on. Back in February I pionted out that Hillary’s approach to social media killed her campaign not realizing then that she’d hang on as long as she eventually did. Wonder if things might have gone differently for her if she’d changed strategies then?
• Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, takes it offline for a bit analog advice with some great tips on How to Stop Junk Mail. Tired of a mail box stuffed  full of unwanted catalogs, direct mail pieces, and a flood of credit card offers? Matt gives has some great suggestions on how you can some headway towards reducing the junk.
• Finally there’s a fun post from Christine Kane called 22 Sparkly Ways to Shine Your Inner Bling. I had to include this one because the dog photo made Goregous laugh out loud when she read the post. (Click through and you’ll see what I mean.) And despite the, um, less than manly sounding title, there’s some good advice in there from Christine for all of us.

Have a wonderful Sunday. Enjoy!

Photo Credit: Konaboy

Freedom from Tyranny

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Looking back through the lens of history over the 232 years since those 56 determined men chose to formally take a bold stand for the cause of liberty it is easy to loose sight of the fact that the outcome was far from determined. By defying the British crown they made themselves enemies of one of the most formidable military forces of the day.

In a land where nearly all the materials of war were of necessity imported via ship they were picking a fight with the world’s preeminent naval power controlled by a nation whose empire would continue to expand for another 160 years, right up to World War II.

To stand against this force they had an army which had been authorized less than three weeks before, effectively existing in name only, and a handful of smaller war ships, which were still largely under construction.

They knew the implications of the resolution they were adopting that sunny but cool July day in Philadelphia. A fleet of British ships transporting a sizable army with the express purpose of crushing the growing rebellion had landed in Boston just two days before. Years later one of the Declaration signers, Benjamin Rush recalled the seriousness of that occasion to his good friend, and fellow signer, John Adams.

Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants?

Read more

Written by Chris · Filed Under Principles 

Older Versions of WordPress Hacked

WordPress blogs are starting to get hacked in greater numbers lately. The problem is getting serious enough that the WordPress podcast recently addressed out of date WordPress blogs being hacked.

Even my good friend Mark Goodyear went to log into his blog and discovered that GoodWordEditing was hacked. In his case he couldn’t even log into the blog’s dashboard anymore.

Old WordPress Versions Vulnerable to Hacking

In Mark’s case, as is the case in the overwhelming majority (if not all) of cases, not keeping his WordPress installation current exposed his blog to hackers. In Mark’s case the hackers were going after his passwords.

The trend seems to be the hackers gain access via out of date blogs and insert some password snagging software. Then when the blogger realizes there’s a problem and finally get around to upgrading their WordPress the hackers can come back at their leisure and do whatever they want with the blog. If the blog owner doesn’t change his passwords, that is.

Mark changed his. All of them.

Fortunately for Mark I was able to recover his blog, find and remove the malicious code that the hackers added to his blog. We got him up and running normally over the weekend. He’s now secure and good to go.

Bad to Worse

If left unchecked hackers can put code on your site that will create problems for you with the search engines. As an example Skinny Moose Media has a blog called Main Outdoors Today that will show us what can happen.

If you Google “Maine Outdoors Today” you will get the results shown over on the right here.

Right underneath the page title in the listing is a notice that says “This site may harm your computer.”

If you happen to be a gutsy type and clicked through the listing anyway, recklessly unconcerned of the potential dangers to your computer, Google would direct you to the a page that looks like the image below. Read more