Review the Market

For those who like dating over the internet, making friends online and looking for their soul mate over the sound of a keyboard and a mouse click, you have now a cool place to do so that we have just discovered via Sponsored Reviews. We are talking about JustsayHi., a brand new site where you can met plenty of friends sharing common interests or simply willing to find new people for dating, and, who knows, engage in a serious relationship :-). At least the steps to do so could not be easier, just register in the website, it is 100% free ( which is so far something that makes them different from similar sites like True.com, or a few others), enter some basic info about your profile so you can be contacted ( it takes about 1 min to do it), and well ,start dating!.

The features offered are as good as any paid website of similar purpose, but the idea behind is that everyone should be able to meet new people and date easily without paying anything. Cool, isn’t it? It is all about not being shy at all and be willing to meet thousands of singles waiting for a chance to know you :-), you can really never guess when your half-orange is coming, don’t you? Let me know if you suceed, it will be interesting to read about all your experiences :-).

Well, actually I am not able to let you put your stuff at my living room , but you can indeed find some other people who will love to let you do it . I am talking about the project Store at my House, a very interesting website initiative where you can find people with plenty of empty room to rent you some square meters for your things. The idea can be lucrative for you also, should you have some place to store somebody’s boxes, you can offer it online. It is no wonder that such ideas can have some success on the web, the storage houses are normally pretty expensive and sometimes you just need a couple of square metters and not to pay too much for it. So, keep an eye and let us know if you participate in it, it would be great to read about it :-)

Thanks to MaxGlaser we have just discovered a nice online application to organise and share your ideas in the form of several graphic schemas that can be shared among colleagues. We are talking about MindMeister, that joins the group of several tools already in the market to create mind maps, some of them  already well known as FreeMind. I like this kind of tools, but at the beginning I found difficult to understand how to use them effectively. The logic behind is that you have to be able to convert your ideas and thoughts in something that can be easily explained and shared to people, so new projects or brainstorming sessions can have a well defined estructure in a graphic chart. The good thing about MindMeister is that you can also import previos mindmaps in other formats ( it supports the most common ones) so you can continue editing something someone else started in another program, or your own ideas when you just want to upgrade the software you use to draft them :-).

I have been playing today with a new FTP software to replace the very old and basic one I have been using so far ( won’t say which one :-)). I came through the website of IPswitch and got the basic version of their WS-FTP. It is quite ok and simple to manage, in less than 5 minutes my sites were added to the site manager and I could already upload some new themes for Wordpress that I may try in this blog later :-).

Apart from that, the software comes in several languages, and it is very intuitive. Get your files from your computer on the left side of the screen, your server folders on the right, choose the ones to upload and hit the arrow :-). One thing that you also may like to do is to enable the deleting of folders that are not empty. This is in case you have upload plenty of stuff that you do not need anymore, if your ftp is not configure to delete full folders you will have to erase file by file. Quite annoying. Just go to the tools and options menu and activate the box to do so.

For any of you not very used to work with any FTP software there is also an interactive tutorial about how to use it.

 It is amazing how cheap are USB-pens nowadays, when I got my first one, several years ago, one of 128Mb it was a small fortune for a student to pay for having such a thing :-), now you can find USB stick memories up to 8Gby and more in the size of a lighter for just 20 or 30 euros.

What I have been using recently is a new LG 2Gbytes memory-stick that I carry on with me all the time. Inside I installed the portable apps that I mentioned before and it is like having your full computer on your pocket. I always choose USB drives that have a retractable USB port, so it keeps well safe inside from possible damage or dirt.

LG is also a brand that I particularly like in portable devices, it is reliable  and the quality and  look  of the product is ok.  Speed of  data transfer is  pretty good, 480 Mb/seg and it is compatible with all operating systems but Linux, although compatibility drivers are already being made available on the net.

It is also very light, around 12 grams and resistant, which is something important when you carry it with you all the time so I believe it is definitely a good product :-).

People who regularly writes blogs, news, letters, etc, use to need some graphical resources to illustrate what the text is about. Most of the images come today from the internet, and one of the easiest tools to get them in the shape and format you want is Capture Express. Although it is not a free tool ( you have a trial version of 30 days before purchasing it), it is quite straight forward and easy to use. Once installed and configured you just need to push a key on your keyboard ( usually F11, but it can be changed) and the capture screen will appear. You select the area you want to capture, select the format (jpg, gif, bmp, directly to the clipboard, directly to the printer, etc) and it is done. It is actually what I use to get images that I need for this blog, so I can’t say I am not happy with it :-).

Whether you have a succesful blog ( like this one,LOL) or a website, you have most probably one, if no more, applications to check your statistics. Although many people use Google Analytics or the new Reinvigorate, I’d like to talk about another system that also being free, has surprised me and prove powerful enough, in its free and basic version, to be considerer as one of my traffic analysis tools.The thing that I like most on ShinyStats, is the simplicity and easy look of their reports, coming also with a simple HTML code to be installed in your pages for those where a Javascript code is not permitted. You get every week an email with the basic data of the week/month so to keep, in a quick glance, the status of your site. The free version comes with 10 reports including total visits, page views, unique visitors, referrals, location, etc. You can get up to 40 reports in the immediate next version. The limit in the basic one is also 1000 pages per day, so good to start for any site.