Why you shouldn’t use Word to edit your website

May 17, 2013 Leave a comment

You’re not a coder – we get it. But sometimes you need to make some quick changes to your website and your developer isn’t around. In this post we’re going to talk about why you should never use Microsoft Word to work on your websites files. At the end we’ll present two alternatives.

Word uses its own special format for how it displays text. This format, or “character encoding” is different from the standard types of character encoding you find on the web. When you copy and paste material from a Word document directly into your website files, you’ll copy that special formatting right along with it. This can result in some unusual behavior, such as ““” and “— being displayed instead of quotation marks.

If you’re running into this problem, you can fix it by opening up your website files in a plain text editor and replacing the special characters with what you really want. And, of course, if you use a plain text editor in the first place, you won’t ever run into this problem! Here are my two favorite free text editors:

Notepad++ for Windows
TextWrangler for Mac OS X

By Sharon Campbell

Filed under Browsers, Microsoft, Software

Project management software review: Basecamp

May 3, 2013 Leave a comment

When your team starts to grow beyond the number of employees you can count on one hand, it becomes harder and yet, at the same time, more important to coordinate deadlines and tasks between everyone so that everything gets done in a proper and timely manner. And, like most things these days, coordination comes easier with the right software. Today we’re going to look at one program that works for team coordination, called Basecamp. Basecamp has been around for a while – 2004, to be exact – but it’s still a very popular piece of software for project management.

Basecamp

Basecamp

Basecamp lets you set up projects, to-do lists, and to-dos. To-dos are individual tasks with checkboxes that can be crossed off when they’re done. Tasks can be assigned to a specific person and given a due date, but anyone who’s invited to the project can see its progress, add comments, and upload files. Basically, it’s a way to coordinate all the people, tasks, discussions, and files related to a particular project into one place, while granting visibility to everyone who needs it.

Basecamp is more of a coordination tool than a reporting tool – if you’re looking to generate productivity reports, you might be better served somewhere else. It’s built for the people working through the tasks and their immediate project coordinators, and not necessarily the people who need an org-chart level view.

You can try Basecamp for free. If you like it, their smallest subscription is $20.00 a month, which limits you to 10 open projects, but you can add an unlimited number of people.

By Sharon Campbell

Filed under Small Business Services, Software

Backups

April 15, 2013 Leave a comment

Think about all the information you rely on for your business. You have emails from your coworkers and clients, sales records, contracts and proposals, client profiles, your website, form templates, and more. You really don’t want to lose all that – or any of it.

Backing up all of your digital information is your best form of insurance against data loss. Data loss can occur for a number of reasons:

  • Hardware failure
  • Hacking
  • Data corruption
  • Accidental deletion
  • Software changes

With all those threats to your data out there, a backup is definitely a good thing to have around. In fact, I’m going to argue that you want to have at least two backups on hand: an older one and a newer one. The reason is this: the newer one will have all your recent changes, while the older one is more likely to be free of whatever problem caused your data loss. If you got hacked a week ago, having only yesterday’s backup is unhelpful.

The details of how to make your backup and where to store it are things you can discuss with your IT provider. For example, Janus Networks can set you up with automatic backups to a secure data center. Here are a few questions you might want to consider: Do you want to back up to an external server, a dedicated server in your office, or even a desktop computer or portable hard drive? How often does your data change? You might need a new backup once a month, once a week, once a day, or once an hour. If you’re backing up frequently, you might want to set up an automatic backup so you don’t have to remember to do it manually. Finally, make sure that the format you’re using for the backup is easy to use when it comes time for a restoration.

In the end, whichever method you choose, just make sure you have a backup.

By Sharon Campbell

Filed under Small Business Services, Software

Obama’s $100-million brain-mapping initiative

April 3, 2013 Leave a comment

In the next ten years, the U.S. government will be spending $100 million to map the human brain. Just like we mapped the human genome, and are already seeing a great return on the investment even though the truly exciting technologies (personalized medicine, etc.) are barely here yet, the government hopes the brain-mapping initiative will yield many benefits to science and business.

The Human Brain

The Human Brain

The first business benefits will likely be in the medical field. With a more thorough understanding of the brain’s functions, doctors should be able to better treat diseases and conditions like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. If your business is in the medical field, be on the lookout for improved drugs and treatments for brain disorders. Think about looking for health benefits for your employees that include new treatments for brain disorders, as well.

Mapping the brain should also yield tremendous results in the area of mind control of electronics. Like we mentioned in the previous post, more natural controls for our electronics are just around the corner. This year it’s magical armbands – next decade it’ll be a headband. Amputees are already using mind-controlled prosthetic limbs with great success. Better understanding of the brain should lead to more fine-grained control and the capture of more complex thought processes.

The next wave will likely be improved AIs. As we understand how our brains work, we should be able to replicate them more exactly in artificial beings. If you think Siri is cool, wait until you have Jarvis (Iron Man’s personal assistant, if you didn’t see The Avengers). We’ll be able to offload annoying mental tasks, like counting calories and taking notes in meetings, to our digital assistants.

After that, who knows? If the brain mapping project achieves even one of these outcomes, it will have been a rousing success. For now, stay tuned for technology news and keep taking advantage of the innovations that come down the pike.

By Sharon Campbell

Filed under Technology

With a flick of the wrist

March 17, 2013 Leave a comment

Wouldn’t it be cool if your app worked by magic? Just wave your hand to turn the page in your ebook, go to the next slide of a presentation, or send an email. And if you’ve ever played a video game like World of Warcraft where you had to bind all of your abilities to different key combinations – just think what it would be like to cast your spells with a flick of the wrist rather than ALT-CTRL-F7!

It’s not called magic, it’s called MYO. And it’s coming out this year.

MYO is an armband that reads the subtle electrical signals produced by your body when you flex your muscles. It also senses its own motion. It’s kind of like a next-generation mouse, where your hand isn’t merely guiding a hunk of plastic around on your desk – your hand is the mouse.

The MYO is more intuitive to use than a mouse, provides a finer level of control, and has more points of input. Suddenly, you can fly a plane in a flight simulator by describing its arc with your own palm. It doesn’t even have to be a simulator – hook up a drone to work with your MYO, and you can fly it through the air using your hand as the remote control.

You don’t have to have a complicated virtual-reality application for MYO to be an improvement. Think how nice it would be if your whole desk – or your airplane tray table – worked as a touchscreen for your computer or smartphone. When your body is the controller, anywhere you can go and anything you can do can join the information age.

By Sharon Campbell

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWu9TFJjHaMtwo_rings

Filed under Hardware, Technology

Mobile Payments

March 1, 2013 Leave a comment

Smartphone credit card payment processors are easier to set up than credit card merchant accounts and get you your money much faster than checks. For very small businesses, businesses that don’t process enough payments to warrant getting a merchant account, and businesses with tight cash flows, mobile is probably the way you want to go.

Think about it: you can finish a client tour of your facilities, sign a contract for a big order, then swipe your customer’s card for the 10% up-front fee and have it sitting in your account the next day, rather than sending out an invoice at the end of the week and waiting who knows how long for the check to come in the mail.

Or maybe you make most of your money from house parties or conventions. Rather than lugging around a cash box and losing sales because the attendees forgot to go to the ATM, you can take their plastic. Voila, extra sales for you and extra value for the customer. I used to work the comic convention circuit and having a Square device to plug into an iPhone definitely sealed the deal on a number of sales.

Before mobile payment processing started heating up, Square employees would walk around conventions and hand out their credit card swipers to the sellers manning their booths with their cash boxes; at least, that’s what happened at Comic Con (Comic Con 2011, if I recall). They were the first mobile credit card processing company that I had ever heard of, but the idea has gotten popular fast. There are now several contenders in the field, Intuit GoPayment and PayPal Here being notable among them.

If you want to start taking mobile credit card transactions, start by researching the different offerings currently available – it’s a hot field so new providers are constantly springing up and established ones are regularly adding new features to their services.

By Sharon Campbell

Filed under Hardware, Small Business Services

Bitcoin, the digital currency

February 17, 2013 Leave a comment

Bitcoin, a completely digital currency, is slowly becoming accepted at more online stores. Just this week, Bitcoin gained its biggest-name user yet: Reddit just started accepting payment in Bitcoins. There are thousands of digital currencies in place online already (think of World of Warcraft gold and Farmville Farm Cash), but Bitcoin is the most popular currency that’s not tied to a specific game, website, or app, and thus the one that’s most likely to become an accepted general-purpose currency.

bitcoin

It’s quite possible that Bitcoin itself won’t amount to anything. However, on the other hand, it’s highly likely that someday soon a digital currency will be just as widely used as a national money like dollars, yen, or euro. And why not Bitcoin? It has a decent and growing amount of traction. It’s extremely easy to start accepting Bitcoins, with fees lower than those required to accept credit cards or Paypal.

Bitcoins can be exchanged for dollars at several exchange services, which are listed on Bitcoin’s official website, weusecoins.com.

Why not start accepting Bitcoins as payment? It’s another way for your customers to buy from you, and it’s one that’s fairly easy to implement. Even if you choose not to join now, you should be prepared to update your payment infrastructure for Bitcoin or another digital currency in the next few years.

By Sharon Campbell

Filed under Internet

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