Mobile sites, while useful for what they were designed, are also useful in other situations, such as the one I described above. For that reason, I compiled a quick list of the mobile versions of some of the bigger, most used sites that could come in handy on those “slow connection” days. And since I usually share useful information, I’m sharing them with you as well.

Mobile Versions of Popular Sites

News / Weather

BBC
USA Today
ABC News
Reuters
Yahoo Weather

Search

Google
Yahoo

Start Pages and Feeds

Netvibes
NewsGator
Bloglines

Flights and Shipments

FlightStats
FedEx

Social Networks

Facebook
MySpace
Flickr
Twitter
Pownce
Plurk

Miscellaneous

Remember The Milk
Wikipedia (Wapedia)

And finally, a site that promises to load mobile versions of any site:

Baresite

Obviously, I’ve only scratched the surface with these few sites, but now that I’ve reminded you to use mobile sites when you have a slow connection, you can seek out the ones you use most often and bookmark them for future use. Also, directories like MakeUseOf often have mobile categories that list the mobile versions of sites you may use.

Original post:

Twenty-Two Mobile Sites For Slow Net Connection Days

The most impressive part of Flexx is the layout options screen, so let’s start there. As you can see below, the layout options are almost limitless. You decide where to place various elements.

• Want a list of pages above the header?
• Want categories below the header?
• Both above?
• Both below?
• Want Featured widget blocks at the top?
• How many? 1? 2? 3?
• Where do you want your sidebars?
• How many do you want?
• Want widget blocks in the footer?

I could go on and on, but you get the point. By simply clicking on the choices in the layout options, you can create the layout YOU want - and see the results REAL TIME in the Layout Preview at the bottom. Don’t like what you see in the Layout Preview? Just click on different options and make new layouts. Check out the screenshots below to see what I mean. The first one shows a preview from options I chose at first, and the next one shows a preview from options I changed. Keep in mind that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of possible layout configurations, not just the two I’m showing below.

First options I chose for my Flexx layout:

Options I changed to make a new Flexx layout:

Ok, now let’s look at some of the other options available.

First, there’s the Custom Header options screen. This makes it very easy to use your own header graphic. Here’s what that option screen looks like:

Oh, and at the last minute, they added the ability to have flash-like rotating header images!

Next, let’s take a look at the settings you can customize. This is pretty cool.

• First, you can choose which pages and categories get shown in the menu. This gives you flexibility to include/exclude certain ones.
• Next, you can paste your stats tracking code (such as Google Analytics code) into the Tracking Code box, and it will be inserted properly into the theme.
• Finally, it gives a couple of SEO-related options you can customize to make the theme even more search-friendly.

Finally, let’s take a look at the Contacts Page options screen. Here you can give a Subject for your Contacts Form email and the email address to send the contact us email to.

The Flexx premium theme comes in two color options, however, you can easily upload new background images (setting every different combo with it) and set the color through a Photoshop-like color picker. Here is an example of one of the color options.

Obviously, with so many layout choices, this is only one of many possible looks. Yours would likely look much different.

To get a bit of a better birdseye view, you can watch a couple of really quick screencasts to see how it all works.

First, the Flexx Layout Options Screencast:

Then, the Flexx Contact Page tutorial:

I am crazy about this new premium theme. Flexx is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Brilliant! Simply brilliant.

Flexx WordPress theme

Original post:

Flexx - A Game-Changing Flexible WordPress Theme

Here’s a little more info about it:

If you’re thinking about switching to green hosting, good for you! Green hosting is an important step in dealing with climate change. But be aware- once you start asking some questions you’ll find that not all of the .green. hosting options out there are nearly as green as they claim to be. HostGator’s program stands out from the pack for a number of reasons . . .

One, HostGator is using renewable energy to both power and cool their servers, whereas a number of green hosts only offset the electricity used to power their servers. That represents a big difference, because servers generate a lot of heat. For every watt of electricity that a server uses, 1-2 watts of electricity are typically required to cool it. What that means is that HostGator is investing in about twice as much renewable energy, on a per server basis, as those green hosts only using renewable energy to power their servers.

Two, HostGator has invested in Green-e certified Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). Green-e is run by the Center for Resource Solutions, and both sets standards for US renewable energy project and verifies those projects. Green-e certified RECs are verified, tracked and monitored. Sure, there are cheaper carbon credits out there, but HostGator wanted to go green the right way. HostGator can’t very well build a windfarm in downtown Houston, so it’s doing the next best thing and greening its energy at the source with rock solid RECs.

Three, HostGator has purchased RECs for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool its shared and reseller servers. Good luck finding another green host that has gone this far. Believe me- if they had, they’d let you know it.

Four, HostGator has invested entirely in wind RECs generated in their home state of Texas. Even those green hosts that have opted for Green-e certified RECs are generally sourcing them from wherever is cheapest.

HostGator, on the other hand, is thinking globally and acting locally. By insisting on 100% Texas wind RECs HostGator had to pay more for their credits, but they (and you) can rest easy knowing that they’re doing their part for the environment and the local green economy.

Now I can proudly say:

If you are looking for a great hosting company that’s also GREEN, I highly recommend HostGator.

Original post:

My Favorite Hosting Company Has Gone Green

Gotcha #1
You forget to re-include your analytics code in the footer template. If you are using any kind of analytics program (and if you aren’t, why not?), such as Google Analytics or my favorite, Clicky Web Analytics, you’ll probably have a bit of javascript code or something similar added to your theme (usually in footer.php). If you change themes, make sure you add it into the new theme’s template.

Gotcha #2
You forget to re-include social networks code in your sidebar or footer template. Quite often, bloggers participate in one or more social networks and they either display that network’s widget, or they agree to display some sort of banner image in exchange for participation and/or traffic. If you’ve agreed to include code, and then forget to re-include it in your new theme’s template, you may lose your social network privileges and/or traffic.

Gotcha #3
You forget to re-include an advertiser’s ad. While this doesn’t tend to happen often, because it involves money, when it does happen, it’s not pretty. The last thing you want to do is make your advertisers mad at you. Plus, your reputation is on the line, so don’t ruin future ad possibilities by making this mistake.

Gotcha #4
You move from a widgetized theme to a non-widgetized theme, and all of your sidebar information disappears. Oops. New themes almost always come pre-widgetized these days, but if you have to choose one, buy one, or create one that isn’t widget-enabled, and you are used to using widgets, you’ve got a problem. Luckily, it can be fixed. Here’s a nice tutorial to help you widgetize that theme of yours.

Gotcha #5
Your new theme doesn’t include hooks that your old theme depended upon. Plugins often depend upon hooks in the header or footer of a template for them to work properly. There are other hooks as well, but more often than not, the two hooks that are needed are wp_head and wp_footer. You can get more info about these and other hooks at the WordPress codex - scroll down the page to find the Plugin API Hooks section. Luckily, it’s very easy to re-include these hooks, so just consult that codex page for instructions.

So those are the top 5 gotchas that I always seem to stumble over when I change blog themes. What about you? Got any to add? Let us know in the comments, so we can learn from your mistakes.

Original post:

Top 5 WordPress Theme Change Gotchas

It’s impossible to compare apples to apples in all cases, because there are just too many wide-ranging features offered. That means you’ll have to do a little investigating on your own if you want to see all the features offered by the following companies. But I’ve made it as easy as possible to get you started.

I started out by comparing just four basic criteria that must be met for everyone before additional features ever come into play. Those four criteria are:

1. Price
2. Number of Responses Allowed at Each Price Point
3. Overage Fee Charges For Going Over The Allowed Number of Responses
4. Number of Questions Allowed For Each Survey

Everyone will have a different idea about what cool features they want for their online survey (lots of quick start templates, for example), but there’s no disputing the need to compare those four items head to head. The information below gives an overview of each of those four criteria for each of nine (9) online survey sites, with information current as of this post date. Prices and features may change in the future, so keep that in mind.

Below is an embedded spreadsheet of the information (thanks to Zoho) that you can save to your computer if you wish, as well as screenshots of sections of the same spreadsheet. Scroll down after the images for clickable links that lead to additional information on price plan differences and features available for each site.

My favorite is SurveyGizmo, because for my needs all the price points and features listed here come together perfectly, and the extra features you get (which you’ll have to discover when you visit the site), makes it my Editor’s Choice. Still, your needs may work best with one of the others. I hope I’ve helped you get started. Here is the list again, with clickable links for more information. Each link opens in a new window/tab to make comparing each a little easier.

SurveyMonkey - More Info

Zoomerang - More Info

InstantSurvey - More Info

QuestionPro - More Info

ZapSurvey - More Info

ConstantContact - More Info

CreateSurvey - More Info

CheckBox - More Info

SurveyGizmo - More Info

Original post:

Nine Online Survey Sites Compared

The entire University-level free course phenomenon began with the illustrious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) back in 2002, when they began the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, which was a goal to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. They now have over 1800 courses online - free. Since then, numerous Universities have joined the initiative, now known as the Open Courseware Consortium. I’ll list those here, as well as a number of other places that may not be a part of the Consortium, but they offer free courses in a similar manner.

Don’t expect to earn a degree by taking these courses. They generally don’t count as credit towards a degree. But if you’d rather not spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a higher education, and would love to learn everything you want for free, it’s all at your fingertips. Enjoy!

First, here a list of the United States Open Courseware Consortium members. See the official site for an all-inclusive list, including universities from around the world, in countries such as Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UK, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tufts University
UMass Boston
University of California, Irvine
University of Notre Dame
Utah State University
University of California, Berkeley

Next is a list of non-OCW university-level courses you can take as well.

Stanford University’s Intro Computer Science classes, Artificial Intelligence, and Linear Systems and Optimization courses
UC Berkeley Webcasts of Fall 2008 Courses
Stanford on iTunes - Stanford to go
OpenLearn from The Open University

Finally, you may want to see an even larger list here.

The number of courses available is almost staggering in its scope. Anyone, wanting to learn almost anything, can do so with just an Internet connection. Don’t have one of those? Your public library does and it’s free too. There is literally no excuse, even in these difficult times, to not get an incredible education. Wanna learn? Just do it!

Original post:

Learn Anything, Be Anything, For Free

Backup every day.

Use automation so you don’t have to remember.

What do I do?

I backup all my data onto an external hard drive first, so that I can grab it and run if some natural disaster is about to strike, or if I need to bring lots of data with me on a trip. I use a 500 GB Western Digital My Book external hard drive for this (the one pictured below). But keeping your backup in your home isn’t the safest thing to do either, so I double my backup by using Mozy’s online unlimited home backup for just $4.95/month. It’s all automated, and after the initial backup (which takes a while), it only backs up changed files, so it’s super-quick. Oh, and they’re having a special this month so be sure to use this coupon code to get 10% off annual and biannual MozyHome Unlimited signups. The code is OCTOBER. Just type the code into the referral box at signup to get the discount. So now I’ve done my bit to save you from those geeky tears, and helped you become a backup freak too!

Original post:

Backup Freaks Are Smart Geeks

I woke up yesterday morning, only to realize that the holiday season was looming large. Is it really October already? Anyway, that got me to thinking about holidays, and I realized that it was my turn to host Thanksgiving dinner. So I went in search of recipes and ideas and I stumbled on a cool turkey calculator. This nifty little piece of javascript coding lets you tell it how many adults and children you’ll be feeding on Thanksgiving Day, and it tells you what size turkey to buy, how many cups of stuffing will be needed, and then gives you a schedule for cooking the thing - even when to start defrosting it! What a cool widget!

Of course, that led me to looking for other cool food-related widgets and I thought I’d share a couple of the ones I like here.

Kraft has a downloadable widget that lets you conduct searches on Kraft’s extensive recipe database, without having to launch your internet browser. It also provides reminders and recipes of the day. Pretty cool.

I’m a big fan of the Food Network tv shows, so any widget they provide is worth checking out. This is actually a script that you can put on your own site, and here’s an example (below) of their free recipe widget.

They also have a food trends widget, if you’re into being food-fashionable.

There are tons of food widgets out there. What are some of your faves? And don’t you just love how web technology makes even cooking easier? Sweet.

Original post:

Thanksgiving, Turkey, Widgets, Food, and Technology

The slogan for LastPass is “the last password you’ll have to remember”, and well…it’s true. LastPass just does everything right, including allowing me to sync up all my various computers - each of which runs a different OS - so I never have to deal with password management again. (Oh and yeah, it’s free).

Top Reasons I Love LastPass:

• Saves and syncs passwords across all browsers / computers / OS’s, including Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Only have to remember ONE password, so you are free to create super-strong passwords at sites knowing you won’t have to remember them later
• Totally secure - encrypted on YOUR machine - LastPass.com never knows your passwords because all they ever receive is strongly encrypted data. If they get compromised, no big deal. Thieves get nothing but garbled nonsense.
• All your PCs go up in smoke at the same time? No big deal. Retrieve your passwords online.
• Worried that LastPass company might disappear, with your passwords? No problem. You have lots of options of retrieving your passwords. You can grab them via your browser plugin. You can export them right now or any time in the future. Or you can download LastPass Pocket for backup onto your USB flash drive.
• I was able to import all my existing Firefox and Roboform bookmarks easily. They import lots of other ones as well.

Those are my fave facts about LostPass, but there’s lots more info at their FAQ page. And to get a quick birds-eye view of it, here’s a video to watch.

Thank you LastPass. My life is infinitely easier now.

Original post:

I Am In Love - With LastPass Password Manager

If you don’t yet have it on your kicker, but you want to add it, simply right-click the kicker, and choose Add Applet to Panel and then scroll down to System Menu and choose it. While I like having it handy, I kept wishing I could add a few items to it, but there didn’t seem to be any way to do so. In fact there is, but it’s definitely not straight-forward. I wanted to be able to essentially add shortcuts to my most frequently used folders such as Pictures, Music, and Downloads, and as you can see from the screenshot below, I was able to successfully add them.

Here are detailed instructions to help you add shortcuts (or bookmarks) to your favorite folders into the System Menu Applet.

1. Open Dolphin File Manager (Home)
2. Choose View / Show Hidden Files
3. Open .kde
4. Open share
5. Open apps
6. Unless you see a folder named systemview, you’ll need to create it. To do so, right-click in any empty space and choose Create New > Folder
7. Name it systemview
8. Open systemview
9. Right-click in empty space and choose Create New > Text File.
10. Name it Something.desktop (where Something is whatever descriptive word you want to use to describe your new System Menu item). If you have a folder called Pictures, for example, and you want to add that folder to the System Menu, it would make sense to name this text file Pictures.desktop
11. Edit this text file using Kate or whatever text editor you wish. Just right-click the Something.desktop icon and choose Open With > Editors > Kate for example.
12. Type the following into the editor.

    [Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Icon=camera
Name=Pictures
OnlyShowIn=KDE;
Type=Directory
URL=/home/yourusername/Pictures

    Note: You’ll want to change 3 things in this file to match whichever folder you are adding.

    >> change the icon name so it uses something that makes sense. Not sure which icon to use or what its name would be? Here’s one way to find an icon and determine the name of it… Open Dolphin File Manager, right-click any folder icon, and choose Properties. Now left click on the actual icon on the General tab that is located just to the left of the name of the folder (and just above the word Type:). Here is where you can choose from lots of icons in various categories (Actions, Applications, File Systems, and Devices are the ones I use the most). Once you find one you like, just make a note of what its name is, which is listed just below the icon, and type that name in the Desktop Entry you’ve just created on the Icon= line.

    >> change the Name= from Pictures to whatever descriptive word or phrase you want to appear on the System Menu

    >> change the URL= to the correct path to the folder you want added to the System Menu. This is the part that had me confused for a bit, because I kept getting the path wrong. The structure I used above should work for you in most cases.

13. Last step. Open a terminal window. Type the following to reset the System Menu and show your newly added item:

    dcop kicker kicker restart

That’s it! You’ve successfully added an item to the KDE System Menu. If you want to add more items, repeat steps 9 - 13 for each.

Props to both this post and this thread - Although neither gave me the instructions in the clearest or most detailed manner for me to understand and follow, together they got me started on the right path to making this happen.

Original post:

How To Add Items To KDEs System Menu Applet