Using Affiliate Skills to Pay The Bills!
By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Free Software, Web Based Apps
I was excited to see that PC World has released the 2007 edition of their 101 Fantastic Freebies. In the article, they cover ways to make your computer more productive, informative, secure, and entertaining with free software and services. You can check them out by category or in alphabetical order.
For your reference, here is last year’s list (which seems suprisingly outdated).
By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under SEO
SEO Title Tags is one of those plugins that I’ve come to heavily rely on for this website over the past few months, and has quickly become my SEO plugin of choice. It allows you to easily add title tags to not just your posts, but each of your pages, your homepage, your archives, your 404 page, and basically every page on your website.
I pretty much thought it had everything you could ever need, but version 2.0 was recently released, and now it features integration with the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) plugin. Like everything else with this plugin, the UTW integration is easy to setup. Simply select the UTW integration box and a UTW Tags subscreen will be created where it lists all of your tags. From there, you can go in and create custom titles for each tag page.
To install, upload and activate it. Once that is done, replace the title in your header with the following:
<title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?></title>
Now go into the Manage and Options panels and assign your title tags as you see fit.
Note: If you use the Add Meta Tags plugin, you’ll want to avoid assigning tags to your category pages and instead let the Add Meta Tags plugin do its work. Otherwise, have at it!
By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Free Software
I’ve been waiting for awhile now for Mozilla to catch up to Microsoft Office 2003 (which I am currently using) in hopes of switching to open source, so I’ve been beta testing Thunderbird 2.0 since they announced their first beta version. Now it looks like they are confident they have gotten rid of all the bugs, as yesterday they made Thunderbird Release Candidate 1 available for download.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the tabs feature we were all hoping for (Thunderbird 3.0 hopefully!), but here are a few of the things you can enjoy in the new release:
If you’ve been waiting to make the switch from Microsoft Outlook, now is as good a time as any. In my experience, the release candidates are pretty stable, so I recommend giving it a try.
By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Web Browsers
According to Opera Watch, it looks like you can now download the new beta version of the Opera web browser. You’ll find some new developer tools, but the main new feature is the Opera Speed Dial, which is unique only to this browser.
I have a big problem with this release, as it appears they have also removed the Start Bar, which would pop up and give you access to your bookmarks and more whenever the Address Bar is clicked on. I don’t use Opera to often, but I definitely find uses for it. I will not be upgrading to this new version, as I want to keep my Start Bar.
If Opera is listening, hopefully they will at least add an option to activate the Start Bar for those of us that like it.
By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Miscellaneous
If you’re shopping around for a new look for your WordPress website, Tickle In My Mind has posted a list of 20 Great Looking WordPress Themes. You’ll find a lot of nice themes that can be downloaded for free, including Greenery, which would look great on a wide variety of blogs.  Back when I was looking for a theme for this website, I tried a few of these and would definitely recommend them to others.
By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Free Software
Lifehacker is at it again, providing an amazing Top 10 list of Free Windows Downloads. As always, it looks like they’ve done their homework in creating a great list, giving readers an idea of which applications to download and what software they replace. Â
For example, here is #10:
Top 10 Windows Downloads, #10: Replace WinZip and WinRAR with 7-Zip, a free open source file archive manager that can extract and zip up multiple file formats, from regular old .zip’s to .rar’s and .7z’s.
If you hate constantly clicking over to the next page to see the full list, you can also grab the whole list at a glance using this zip file.Â
