In the video below, I’ll guide you through the steps for creating pin-worthy graphic from scratch using Pixlr, a free online tool. This tutorial is about 18 minutes long and is packed with tips especially if you are new to graphic creation.

After you watch the video, don’t forget to download my Pixlr Pinterest Graphic Templates below.

FYI – you can certainly download GIMP which I also highly recommend. Like any professional grade image manipulation software though it’s a huge program. That’s why I love using Pixlr for Pinterest graphics. Since it is online, it means I can access it on any computer with an Internet connection. It also has mobile apps which I must admit I’ve not used for this purpose but is nice to know.

Get creating Pinterest graphics right now using my templates. Click the button below to download.

Get Templates

There is one silver lining though. I’ve always thought of myself as being stubborn and determined. After listening to Angela Lee Duckworth, I like ‘grit’ much better because it explains so much more.Well worth listening to. Particularly if you don’t feel you have what it takes or feeling a little beaten.

I also loved this bit from her talk

Also, there is a short ‘gritty’ quiz you can take to find out how ‘gritty’ you are. Check it out. I scored 4.25. What did you score?

My husband unfortunately, suffers from this very dilemma. Lest someone think I’m picking on him, It was him who asked for help so we’re good. In observing his computing style, I realized he’s the type who organizes (or tries to) from the desktop. Naturally, he’s looking at the desktop pretty regularly but doesn’t have a good system.

After a little bit of brainstorming, I figured out the perfect tool. A desktop wallpaper.

Yes, seriously.

While there are many productivity geared wallpapers all over the Internet, I thought he needed something more specific. After spending a few minutes in Photoshop, the result is this wallpaper.

We’re not quite done tweaking it, which is one reason why there is ample room to add other points of organization as we go. For now, it is a good start and a huge improvement over the previous method. It also forces you to keep your desktop clean – that’s a bonus.

How do you use it?

The original intention for the two yellow notes on the left is to put a text file or two with to-do’s in them. One text file could be a list with today’s to-do’s, another for the stuff that’s upcoming. My husband had other ideas though because he had gotten used to those virtual sticky notes. He places two sticky notes over those instead. Whatever works.

In the center are two shelves for tools. These should hold shortcuts to the apps you need to accomplish what you do every day. For example browsers, Evernote, PhotoShop, Office, Excel, FTP, DropBox, PLR and so on.

There’s a shelf specifically for WordPress simply because we work so much with WordPress. The intent is to have three shortcuts on the shelf. One going to the folder that holds all WordPress Core downloads, another shortcut for themes and the last shortcut goes to the plugins folder.

The last shelf is for Learning. It should have a shortcut going to the folder that holds all info products you purchased or downloaded and want to learn from. You could also have a “current” shortcut to it this shelf. That way, you can dive in directly each time you’re ready to learn.

As you see, there’s still plenty of room for other things you may absolutely need on your desktop. Don’t go crazy though. The whole idea is to keep your space uncluttered so you can view your tasks at a glance and access your tools without much mucking around in your file system.

If you’d like this wallpaper, you can download it as a PNG or grab the Photoshop file so you can customize and add more organizational containers to it if you need them. If this type of thing is right up your alley, use it and let me know how it works out.

Download PNG
(2560 x 1440)

Download PSD

Over time, there are a couple of apps I’ve come to rely on daily and I’m happy to share them with you.

Quick Window Snapping

Even with two monitors, I still like to quickly snap windows side by side when working on code, blogging while researching, recording videos on Camtasia and even when balancing the checkbook. Having many apps quickly arranged in a grid is nice too.

In Windows 7 and 8 you can already do this. It’s just not customize-able. When you want one window larger than the other, or 4 windows on a screen, you are out of luck. The solution is GridMove for Windows and Moom for Mac that I found not too long ago. That is huge. While I love my Mac, I am not impressed with its window management so Moom is a lifesaver.

A Better File Manager

Windows Explorer sufficed for many years and really it isn’t all that bad until I found myself having so many Explorer windows open, it became a bit of a problem finding the one I want. With the increased usage of DropBox between JV partners, mastermind groups, helpers, and multiple external drives, I was moving files around a lot.

I found myself wishing Explorer had two panes like an FTP program. Then, I heard about FreeCommander for Windows, downloaded it and fell in love. It even comes with FTP which is a little buggy but a real time saver when you need to quickly load a file or two without firing up another program.

I also love the ability to save frequently used folders. If asked to name a pet peeve it would be spending too much time looking for stuff on the computer. Favorites folders solves this.

For the Mac I haven’t had much chance to really dig in. However, I just secured a license for PathFinder. Haven’t even installed it yet but it sure seems like it’ll do the job.

Easy Frequently Used Folder Access

This has to do with the pet peeve mentioned above. There’s quite an elaborate filing system on the computer and I hate getting stuck in folder hell clicking through folders inside of folders. While FreeCommander takes care of some of that, when you are in another program and asked to open a file, the default folder shortcuts in Windows are not helpful.

Good thing you can edit those folders – hallelujah! Just use PlacesBar Editor by Melloware.

Do note you are limited to only 5 locations. If you have lots of folders you often need to access quickly but don’t have enough room, just create shortcuts to these folders and move the shortcuts to the Favorites folder.

Clipboard Manager

When you copy and paste as much as I do, it is a real pain in the rear to have to keep going back to the different places and copying stuff over and over. A clipboard manager allows you to store temporarily or even permanently depending on the software – stuff that you copy and paste a lot.

I use ArsClip on Windows and ClipMenu on the Mac.

I think anyone can really use this one especially bloggers. In writing this post itself, I’ve had to copy several URLs. The URLs of the software pages and URLs of the images so I can grab the images from those sites and load it into WordPress. With a clipboard manager, I can copy all those URLs in one go and come back to WordPress to work. Much more efficient than jumping from one tab/site to another.

And there you go. Hope you find something here that will help you crank up your workflow. Do you have a little tool you can’t live without? Let us know what it is.

Having documented a lot of things for helpers, students and even as blog content, I know full well creating textual documentation with screen shots has its challenges. It takes many, many steps, tediously switching between the browser, the screen capture tool and the word processor to get it done.

I’ve often wanted to give up documenting a process because it’s just too painful until I came across ScreenSteps desktop. What made me want to download it was its ability to connect and publish to websites like WordPress. This is perfect because much of the documentation I write is put up on this blog or in a closed private area powered by WordPress.

How ScreenSteps Work

You can create lessons or manuals. Manuals are a collection of lessons. You start by creating a step in the lesson or by capturing the screenshot. Where it saves you a ton of time is this – captured screenshots are immediately added to the step. From there, you can add annotations all inside the ScreenStep software. No need to launch something else or buy another screen capture software. Add some textual directions and you’re done.

Here’s another thing I love about this software. If you make a mistake in your screen capture or you added something and need to re-capture the screenshot, all you need to do is go back to that step and capture your screen again. ScreenSteps will remember the spot so you don’t have to re-frame your screenshot. <- Awesome!

ScreenSteps work on Mac or PC. It starts at $39.95 but if you want to create PDFs, Word documents or publish directly to other places like Zen Desk, Drupal or Google Sites, you will need the pro version that costs $79.95.

It also has a sister version called Clarify-It for $29.99. It does most of the basics but has fewer export options. It certainly does not publish to WordPress so if that is important to you, you’d be happier with ScreenSteps.

Check out some of the tutorials done using ScreenSteps.

• How to create memorable social URLs
  
• How to create limited access PayPal accounts

These only took me 15 minutes compared to the 30 – 60 minutes before. Heck yes I’m happy. It will even shave off time creating manuals for plugins, help documentation for customer support or to help your clients, students. Plenty of uses.

“Clear cookies from your web browser”

When you do that, you’ll have to re-login to many sites you are in and out of daily or even several times a day. If your work is entirely online like mine. This is a huge pain but at times very necessary so you can gain access to the site you are having trouble viewing or when you need to test out a plugin.

The great news is, clearing your cookies doesn’t have to be an all or nothing exercise. Especially if you use Firefox and Chrome. If you don’t then… you should Below are steps how remove a single cookie or all cookies relating to a particular web site domain.

Removing Selected Cookies On Chrome

1	Click on the Customize and Control Google Chrome button, then on Settings
2	Make sure you are in the Settings section. Scroll all the way down and click on Show advanced settings.
3	Click Content settings under the Privacy section.
4	In the Cookies section, click the all cookies and site data button.
5	In the pop up, enter the domain name of the cookie you’d like to delete. You may find several records as seen in this case. Click on each to find the cookies attached to them.
6	Clicking on the record will show you the various cookies attached to the domain. In the screen shot above there are 2 cookies. Click on the cookie name and it’ll show you details about the cookie. To delete that particular cookie, click Remove.
7	If you want to remove ALL cookies attached to that domain, click on the domain name and the X to the right side of it. You may have to repeat this for each www, non-www and each sub-domain for this site.

Removing Selected Cookies For Firefox

1	Go to the Firefox tab on the top left corner of the browser. Then click Options.
2	Go to the Privacy tab. Click on remove individual cookies.
3	A Cookies dialog box will pop up. In the search box, type the domain name of the site whose cookies you’d like to remove. Firefox will shortlist them for you below.
4	To remove ALL cookies attached to that domain, click Remove All Cookies. Just be sure you have done Step 3 above (filter cookies by domain).
5	To remove individual cookies, select the ones you want to remove from the list. To select multiple cookies, hold your Control or Command key down while selecting, then click Remove cookies.

Years ago, I somehow came across a marketer who had a fairly large stable of WordPress plugins. It came across that plugins were his business and all he really did at that time were plugins. Being also in this business, I’m always on the look out for people of like minds not just for market research but to see if there were opportunities to work together. So I joined the list.

Photo by konarheim

One day, he pushed out a super interesting plugin. It was something I wanted to create myself but he beat me to the punch. But you know, that’s OK because there’s always something called an affiliate program and what better way to earn and not having to spend time building on my own right? So I bought the plugin. It was unbelievably cheap, something like $7. The plugin looked fabulous with its beautiful graphics, nicely designed admin interface. So yeah, I’m a sucker for great user interface or in geek speak UI. You can witness my obsession on Pinterest. It really looked like a plugin I could wholeheartedly recommend.

Until I installed and dug into it.

You don’t even have to be a tech geek to see the plugin is incomplete.

Now, don’t misread me. Plugins by nature are somewhat incomplete because they are not fully blown software. They are plugins. Meant to extend the functionality of the core software it snaps into. A good plugin does one thing only and should do that very well. The rub is, this plugin didn’t even do this one thing very well. What bothered me even more, people were fawning over it, giving it the highest reviews and ratings.

Sidebar – I won’t be listening very much to those reviewers. So remember, your reviews matter and can come back to bite you.

Over time, I’ve seen quite a number of these type of plugins. Here’s what I mean by it being half-baked.

• A plugin that lets you display limited offers, yet after the expiry date the order links still get displayed. It is not a bug. It was simply not coded in.

I know what many of these marketers do though. They create these plugins, hire developers as cheaply as possible, then they create huge hype and earn thousands of dollars on the launch, funneling hundreds and thousands of people…

You got it. Into their mailing list.

In short, these plugins are list builders. Not just any old list but a list of people willing to fork over money. Plugins – software isn’t really their business. Their business is to build lists, offer affiliate stuff and on to the next. No continuity.

Now you know… just watch out. $7 or $10 may be a small amount to pay for a plugin but don’t ever think you can pay someone that kind of money once and expect long term support because there’s simply no way anybody can make that $7 or 10 stretch that far. Also, there could be huge security holes in them that could cost you $7000 down the road and by security, I’m not just talking about hijacking, hacking and stealing. It could be something as simple as leaking your products, showing your slip.

I didn’t start off the post as promotional but just to be up front and clear, at TechBasedPlugins that’s not how we operate. I’m not saying there’s anything crooked about that model. We just don’t agree with it. If you like that, check out our plugins, get on our notification list.

Though I’ve been a Google Reader user from the beginning, would you believe I hardly log in? For one, I never liked it. Perhaps the biggest thing around the whole idea of RSS feeds (not just Google Reader) is this.

RSS is simply best read on the go.

It is awfully difficult to read feeds on a desktop/laptop. There are too many distractions, the pressure to get work done on them and it’s quite uncomfortable! I like to think of RSS feeds as this huge digital magazine that I compile on my own and magazines are meant to be enjoyed on the couch, with a cup of your favorite beverage, while waiting for an appointment or (ahem) in the bathroom.

Photo by brianyeung

With Google Reader gone, this could mean more people will be considering fuller featured RSS reader apps for mobile devices. As it is, mobile devices have taken over and according to Cisco recently, there will be more mobile devices than people by the end of the year. Yikes!

It is easy to dismiss this and say not everyone can afford a mobile device but I’m not buying that. Mobile devices have huge companies pushing for them.

Just take Amazon for example. It’s no secret the margins on Kindle devices are razor thin. A low end Kindle Fire costs $159. You’ll be hard pressed to find a computer for that price. While there are many things you and I can’t do on a tablet (yet), the average consumer does nothing more on their computers than read emails, check Facebook, browse the Internet. The lure of a mobile device is huge.

I’ve also witnessed it first hand. It is one thing to say there are X number of mobile devices all over the world and quote numbers. Quite another to see the impact yourself.

In my recent trip to Asia, even in countries deemed as Third World, smart phones and tablets are everywhere. Throw a stone and you’ll hit someone using one.

Coming back to Google Reader. This makes me wonder why the reader didn’t simply get absorbed into Android. Yes, I think this is good for app developers and perhaps even marketers. I never thought dedicated blog apps were a great idea – because there was Google Reader. Perhaps now it will be.

Years ago, I had a desktop based RSS Reader built and pre-loaded it with feeds of a few good friends (and mine of course). It was given away free and used to build a list. Should you create your own branded RSS reader app? I don’t know, but it could be something to consider. Give it a creative twist and you might have something.