LinkedIn

Are any of you also on LinkedIn? I've updated and expanded my profile there - so if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn just click here.
I'm also thinking of making a facebook 'fan' page but I'll have to look into it a bit more to see if it's worth it.
I had a nice weekend in Holland - saw my cousin+wife and my grandmother. My gran was in good form and we had a good chat about all kinds of things. It was snowing on and off there and it's still cooooooooold here too. Roll on the spring, I say!!

lastfm

Ok, I may have been one of the last people to twig to lastfm.com but just in case I'd thought I'd write about it today in case someone out there doesn't know about it. If you're into music, any music, this is a great website. You just go to the website www.lastfm.com and in the black box (right hand side of the screen) you type in the name of any band you like and it will play tracks from that band and other bands in roughly the same genre or that other people who like the band like. It's a great tool to get into new music without wading through too much stuff you don't like. Plus you can 'heart' or 'ban' tracks that you like or don't like, so it gets better the more you use it. There are more sites like it, but I reckon this is the best one....not that I've extensively tried other sites because this one was great straight away. So, there we go - a potential web tip if you hadn't heard of lastfm before!

Heh, exciting, I just figured out how to get that little icon in the address bar of your browser for my website. Hm, probably not very clear from that sentence, but you can see it clearly in this screenshot: (I've only put it on the homepage of www.magpienest.co.uk but it seems to be showing up on all pages, not sure if that's just my cache though...)

Ok, I thought of a little tip I could tell you about that might be useful for some people. You know those sites that you visit over and over again? (*cough* that means you, Etsy addicts!) You may already have bookmarked those sites, or listed them under favourites. But, an even faster option is to have a link on your browser bar so all you have to do is one click to get to the page you want. Here's how to do it:

1. Go to the site that you want and highlight the URL:

2. Put your mouse on the URL or the little icon on the left of the URL if there is one - in this case the little orange "E" icon:

3. Hold down your left mouse button and drag the URL down to the bar right under it. I know the picture is a bit small, but you can see in the picture below that it now has a button that says "Etsy::magpienest::" and if I click on that, it will bring me straight to that page.
4. If this doesn't work for you, it could mean that your browser bar is locked. OR you're using Internet Explorer and this is another useful reminder why Firefox is better than Internet Explorer :-)

(thanks to Bob for this post, as he showed me this shortcut this morning!)

It's already April 3rd. That means 10 days until the 10k run and 23 days until my first craft fair of the year. So in turn that means I need to run more (eek!) and I need to make lots of items so I have enough for the craft fair!
I thought I would mention something I did a while ago today. I joined Indiego, which is a site where you sign up, you enter your info and a photo and thus create a little ad for yourself. Then you add a bit of code to your blog so that other people's ads show up on your site. The idea being that everyone helps each other -- the ads that show up rotate, so your ad will show up somewhere and so will everyone else's. You can see at the bottom right hand corner of this blog that there is an ad...for something homemade. So somewhere out there in internet land, my ad is showing up on someone's blog or website. How many times someone clicks on your ad is measured so you can see how effective (or not) this is. According to Indiego, my ad has been clicked 4 times. That's in about 2 months or so. So it's not much. But hey, it's also not nothing. So, might be worth considering. It's free, you're potentially helping out other artists and/or yourself, so why not.

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend, I certainly did! I'm going to find out more about Google Ad Words, Ad Sense and Checkout today so will report back later!

Right, so Reddit and Delicious are two more social bookmarking sites. They work the same way as Technorati, really. And StumbleUpon. And Digg. All these sites are very similar indeed. You register, you see the list of sites that people have given the thumbs up (ie marked as a favorite, submitted, or whatever wording that particular site uses). The more people like something, the higher up the list it goes. With Reddit, the set-up is, in terms of format and font, pretty old school. It's not very pretty and it's just a list of links. But they do have a very cute little icon:

<-- this little creature is the Reddit icon. So, yes, these are two other social bookmarking sites.....you bookmark, other people bookmark, and hey presto you get to see the sites that are the most bookmarked. (One advantage of using one of these sites to hold your bookmarks is that you can access them from anywhere, not just your home or work computer. Also, you won't lose your favorites/bookmarks if your computer dies!)I still prefer StumbleUpon because you don't need to go back to the StumbleUpon page to find links. With the others, it seems to me, you always have to return to their page to browse through pages that are popular. With StumbleUpon, you just keep clicking the "Stumble" button on your address bar, so you don't need to go back to a central page. Just to make that clear, here is a screen shot of the StumbleUpon buttons: (Incidentally, if you want to make a screenshot and don't know how - find the button on your keyboard on the right hand top side which says "PrtScn" and press it once. Then open "paint", which is under accessories in the start menu, and go to edit-->paste. It will paste in your screenshot. You can also paste it into PowerPoint directly.)

Also, if you want to read more about StumbleUpon, Technorati or Digg, see my previous posts. (you can find them by looking at the right hand side of this page under my labels.)

I just finished labelling my posts. I didn't do the labelling initially because I didn't think it was worth it. But I have written a couple of posts about StumbleUpon, Technorati, and some other social bookmarking sites which could be useful and it was impossible to find those posts easily without labelling. So I labelled all my posts and put a label link list on the right hand side of my blog right above "Links". So, if anyone wants to find old posts, it's a lot easier now!!

I will be looking into some of the other popular social bookmarking sites next week, so if you're interested, keep an eye out for that...

I am going to participate in a craft show on Saturday 26 April at the famous (infamous?) Rising Sun Institute here in Reading. The Art Market will be open from 10.30 - 4.30 so if you're interested, please come visit! The reason I put the infamous in there is that I've seen many a band at the Rising Sun Institute and it can get pretty rammed in there for gigs....I saw Bloc Party, Saloon, and erm lots of other bands whose names escape me at the moment. Anyway, it is a great small venue to see up and coming bands. I'll post more info about the Art Market nearer the time...

Still no head in the post, sadly. I have emailed the seller to see if they've already sent it, so we'll see. It does say on the shop that items are sent out same or next day, so I'm confused as to why I haven't heard anything.
Anyway...so I may be the only person who hadn't already heard of Wee Mee. It's like mini me (Austin Powers, anyone?) but online and you can build your own. I think the website is yet another option for social networking, but I just wanted the mini me. I don't need yet another website/network/etc that I need to keep updated! I've already lost my login to LinkedIn and can't retrieve it because I can't remember what email address I used to sign up!! Anyway...that's another story.
So, wee mee. You just go to the site, www.weeworld.com and click on "create a wee mee" and then when you're done building your mini-self, it will ask you to register (of course). That's easy and free. Don't forget, whenever you're registering, to untick or tick the boxes to make sure you're not agreeing to lots of junk mail. Anyway, then you can use the Wee Mee on your blog, facebook, digg, or whatever else it's compatible with. Kind of amusing. No useful purpose whatsoever. So this is my WeeMee with a cup of tea in my hand...and so I need to get some more tea!!

So yesterday I looked into Digg. It's pretty much the same thing as StumbleUpon, except it doesn't seem to have a button you can put on your address bar. Both sites are an easy way to search for website that might interest you. With StumbleUpon, you indicate what you're interested in (arts, finance, etc) and you just click the StumbleUpon button and it randomly takes you to sites that are in those categories. With Digg, you go to the Digg website, register (for free) and on the Digg website you click on the sites in categories that you are interested in and they open in a new window.
The advantage to StumbleUpon is that you don't have to open a new window and you can mark the site as "I like it" or "I don't like it" without leaving the site itself. With Digg, you have to go back to the Digg website and click on "Digg it" next to the entry for that site. That's not terribly difficult, but it is one extra step.
The advantage of Digg, though, is that you can easily add the "Digg it" button to your own site or blog. I tried to do that with StumbleUpon and I couldn't figure it out. I think it's possible, but maybe it's not compatible with Blogger or something. I figure if it takes that long to figure out, most people won't do it. The "Digg it" button is easy to add (you can see it on the right hand side of my blog). Of course....that's only useful if people recognise it, otherwise they'll just ignore it. Same goes for the Technorati button to add to favorites....but it's nice to give visitors the option if they do use those sites.
If you click the Digg it button and someone has already submitted the site as interesting, then your click will just add one to the number of people who digg the site, thus pushing it up the rankings on the Digg website. If nobody has yet submitted the site, then you will get a very simple page asking you to write a short reason why the site is interesting.
Just to test how it all works, I submitted one of my Etsy listing as fascinating (well I had to use something!) and it got another 15 or so views within a minute or so. That's because when a new site is submitted, it *briefly* shows up on the top of the Digg listings for its category. But these views short lived and are unlikely to do your business much good. On the other hand, it won't do it any harm either.
And that's the sort of technical news for today.
While clicking through StumbleUpon, I came across this photo from a presumably Chinese artist - a pretty impressive table and a very clever idea:

Another gloomy and extremely windy day today. I did a fair amount of exercise yesterday, so rather sore in my arms. Exciting news, huh!?
So I am trying to find out how useful Technorati is. It's a site which gathers data about blog use and allows you to easily find blogs about topics you're interested in. I'm working on registering my blog on the site to see how it works. To do so, I have to include this link in today's post:
Technorati Profile
So I'll post this and then see how it works and post about its usefulness later....

Right, so I posted the above link and within a minute Technorati confirmed that it is my blog and I was free to write a description. Then you get an "authority" number, which is the number of blogs registered with Technorati which have a link to your blog....which is sort of useful.

Then you can add a bit of HTML which Technorati offers which allows users to mark your blog as a "favorite" if they use Technorati to keep tabs on blogs. That's the little green logo on the right hand side of my blog that says "add to favourites"...

So, for a small blog, it does no harm to register with Technorati but I can't see it making a huge difference either. I guess I will find out....if suddenly there are more comments, I will change my opinion!

So tomorrow's the fair. I have nearly everything ready....well, it's all piled on a table at the moment. Tomorrow I'll do the last polishing and packing it all in a suitcase. Hopefully it all fits. My friend kindly gave me a possibly Victorian insect box - you know, the kind of glass top shadow box that insects are pinned in? As seen in old museums? It's a lovely box, with old style glass in it. Anyway, it has now been de-insected and I will be displaying most of my rings in it.

I should write something about FTP...it just means File Transfer Protocol. It is literally just for transering your files. So you make a website, for example, on your home computer. You have folders with files in them. Then you need to move those files to a server (either the server space provided free by your internet provider or the server space you paid for as part of a hosting package). So there will be site name given to you (by internet service provider or hosting company) which will start with "ftp:" (instead of "http:" as usual). You then paste the ftp address into your address bar in either Firefox or Internet Explorer or whatever web browser you use. Then you will most likely get a screen asking for your login. If you get an error message but no login request, just right click your mouse and there's an option for "login as...".
Then you log in and you see a bunch of folders. You paste your files from your computer to that computer. Then if you've set it up properly, your site will be live.
Note: opening an ftp site in Firefox doesn't work very well for me, so I usually use Internet Explorer. If that gives an error message, I go to "page" on the right hand site and choose "open ftp site in windows explorer". I really want to just open it in Windows Explorer, but that just doesn't seem to work for me. Here's the screen grab:







Anyway....hopefully that is of some use to someone.

So the interesting thing about the advert that I have in Glamour is that I now get emails from PR companies and advertisers. I wasn't expecting that, although I could have guessed had I thought about it. Today I met up with fellow etsian skeinqueen, since she works near where I live. Check out her shop, some beautiful colours there!

I was going to write a bit about setting up a website. Sometimes I talk to people and they seem to be very aware of what one needs to do to set up a website. Sometimes people really want to set one up but don't know where to begin. There are three basic options:

1. free
2. pay for domain name only
3. pay for domain name and hosting

(a domain name is the name (aka URL) of your site, for example, mine is www.magpienest.co.uk)

So the details are:

1. Free. If you just want to set up a website for fun and don't mind too much what it looks like, then your internet service provider will most likely give you some free space on their server (usually there is a limit on space, but it's often plenty to set up a basic site.). Your internet service provider is the company that you pay for your internet access - either dial-up, or broadband. This means that you can use some space on their computer to host your site. That means the name/url/address of your site is likely to be something like this:
http://freespace.virgin.net/username/mywebsite/
That's fine but the limitations are that it's not an easy name to find or remember. It also does not look professional if you are using it for business purposes.

2. pay for domain name only. You can buy your domain name from many different companies on the internet. Usually you buy the name for 2 years and then you renew it. You must not forget to renew, or someone else can buy it! Usually you go to the domain name buying site and then type in the name you want and it will tell you if it is available. Of course many are not available, especially if it's something popular or obvious, like www.madonna.com! Names ending in .com are more expensive than those ending in .co.uk, .org, .de, .fr, etc etc. An example of a company where you can buy the name is www.blackfoot.co.uk
Once you have the name, you can ask the domain name company to "redirect" the name to your free hosting (see #1). This is what I did for my mom's site, which is www.mariekedewaard.co.uk
So when you type in that name in your address bar, you will get directed to the site but the name will change to http://freespace.virgin.net/dougall.dougs/Website/
The benefits are that you have an easy to remember name/url/address. The downside is that the name/url/address shows as your free space url once you are on the site. It's up to you if that's important or not. You may even want to buy more than one domain name and have some of them redirect to your main name or site, such as www.mysite.org and www.mysite.net etc.

3. pay for domain name and hosting. You can also buy your domain name and then also pay for hosting. If you use the same company, it makes things a bit easier, but you don't have to. You buy a hosting package - there will be options depending how much space you need and how many extras you want for the backoffice of your site (email addresses, etc.). Once you pay, the company will send you details on how to access your hosting site and how to connect to your FTP site (the location of your website files). What this means is that your whole site will have the name that you bought. For example, on my website, all the pages' names start with www.magpienest.co.uk (e.g. http://www.magpienest.co.uk/about.html) Once you pay for hosting, you can also get detailed usage statistics to see what the traffic to your site is. You also get at least one email address which matches your site, such as machi@magpienest.co.uk
and you can create forms for people to email you directly from the site, such as on this page:
http://www.magpienest.co.uk/contact.html
All this adds up to a much more professional looking website.

Prices vary, but domain names that do not end in .com are around 10 UK pounds per two years. Hosting varies quite a bit as well, but roughly 50-60 UK pounds a year.

Ok, tomorrow hopefully I'll have some time to explain a bit about what FTP is and how to start building a basic site. That's all for today...

Right, well, I guess I need to start posting! So, erm, I thought I'd start with an extremely nerdy post about why I love Google. Google is brilliant for lots of reasons that are very useful for people trying to run their own business from home.

First of all, there's the calendar. The calendar works just like the microsoft outlook calendar, but you can access it easily from anywhere! brilliant! It makes it very easy to keep track of appointments and so forth.

Second, there's the documents - you can create, save, and access documents from anywhere! So for instance, if you need to access your budget (in Excel) then you can do so from any computer. And change it AND save those changes. No more carrying around a USB stick! Not that carrying around a USB stick is terribly difficult, but it's annoying when you forget it and a lot of email cafe's that I have been to don't allow customers to use USB sticks since they are afraid of viruses. So anything that you can do in Word or Excel, you can do in Google Documents.

Then there's iGoogle. If you use google as your main search engine, you should set up iGoogle. It's SO easy. basically, when you go to the google homepage, in the top righthand corner, you can sign in. Then you click on igoogle (also top right hand corner) and you have your personalised google homepage. Very useful for getting to everything you need easily. So, for instance, I have links to various websites I use a lot -- but this is the minimum -- of course you can use favorites for that as well. But I also have a world clock that tells me what time it is where my parents are and where my sister is, so I don't call them in the middle of the night (ok, i have done that several times). I also have a quick mini currency converter. And a to-do list. And a summary of the current BBC news headlines. There are hundreds of extras you can choose from, you just make your page useful for yourself!

There's also Picasa. I know lots of people use Flickr, which also seems great, but I like Picasa 'cause it makes uploading photos from your own computer so quick and easy.

Ok, last thing I'm going to mention is google checkout -- if you have your own website and want a cheap way of allowing people to buy directly from you, this is super easy! It's also free in the UK until the end of 2007. If you are not a web whiz, then you can use put the "buy it now" buttons on your site. It's not super sophisticated, as it doesn't work like a shopping trolley, but at least people can buy items on your site. And you can customise the buy it now buttons for whatever purpose you need - multiple items, single items, etc. You can see how I used it on my site - www.magpienest.co.uk I think you need to know a little HTML to get the most out of these, but google even generates the code for you, so it is pretty easy!

The great thing is that all these things are available for free! so why not use them....more info is on google. hopefully some of the above is useful to someone....