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As a Virtual Assistant, I love exploring new programs but am sometimes skeptical towards some until I hear from others of their own personal experiences. Free programs I do view warily until proven otherwise, I don’t want to get caught with something I wished I hadn’t downloaded.

However, recently my team were discussing a photo storing program called Picasa which is a free download from Google and it is worth checking out. It does a full scan of your computer or will only scan the sections you specify. So, if you have photos you don’t want suddenly exposed using this program, it would be best if they were not in your My Documents folder or any of the folders you want the program to go through.

Once it’s collated all that information you can view them in year order or alphabetical order and sort them into categories, or whatever. It has this great facility for collecting your chosen pictures for emailing them, or create an html file which you can upload to a webspace (your own webspace that is) for sending out to anyone. It has 3 different background colours (grey, black and white) and 2 different layouts. I expect since it converts them into html you could fiddle with them afterwards and make changes – I haven’t done that yet, but I like how easily it creates the thumbnails with a viewing screen.

This program could save you a lot of time if you work with images for clients and need to quickly upload images in a suitable format for viewing. If you also work with photo blogs or other sites that have a lot of images in it, this would be a worthwhile tool to work with. I had a bit of fun with it as you’ll see if you click on this link. KMT

Picasa, images album, photo blog, free download

Tags: Author's Thoughts, Technology by Kathie Thomas
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Who’s to say whose time is more important?

I am really fed up with the amount of telemarketers who call, using the predictive dialler method. I mean, telemarketers at the best of times aren’t my favourite callers but when I answer a call only to be left with a dead line and having to wait to find out who called me is a gross disrespect for my time and I don’t like it. I know they might think it’s only a short period of time but it adds up over the days and the weeks and is disruptive. I don’t care if what they are calling about is important and perhaps I might be interested in what they have to offer, but it starts them off on the wrong foot immediately and I usually let them know that. I mean, why should I answer a call and then have to wait for the other person to come to me? I feel it’s rude and a disrespect for my time – and I am a prospective client, aren’t I?  What do you think? KMT

predictive dialler, waste of time, telemarketer

Tags: Author's Thoughts, Technology by Kathie Thomas
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If you read my VA Blog you will know that I’ve not been able to get much work done in this past week.  I experienced a computer crash and it took some time to get back on track again.  It wasn’t the reformatting of the hard disk or the reinstalling of the software that was the issue – they’re pretty straightforward and can be done in just a few hours.  It was all the other things, the extras, such as re-setting up usernames and passwords, re-establishing my rules for Outlook, bookmarks for my browser and a number of other things that I didn’t have a backup plan for.  Needless to say, that’s now been changed and it took me over 3 days to finally get back in order.  It also meant spending the weekend tweaking things so I could be ready for work on Monday.

So, do you have a back up plan – not just your data, but for all the extra bits and pieces?  Don’t assume that those things will be backed up with your data, often it’s not.  Why not pop over to read about what I had to do to get back on track again – hopefully it will save you some time! KMT

computer crash, reinstall software, usernames, passwords, bookmarks, back ups

Tags: Author's Thoughts, Technology by Kathie Thomas
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You will have noted, I’m sure, that I’ve been on a learning curve relating to both networking and blogging and the connection between the two. Networking is so important for small business and if you have a business that has some kind of presence online, then it is important to nurture that. Not all of your client base will come from online and so offline practices shouldn’t be ignored either, but my current posts relate to online activities.

I recently joined the LinkedIn Bloggers forum at yahoogroups and am learning even more about blogging, which is great, because it means I can share that information with you here! Currently the majority of blogging platforms do not allow links from comments to be followed and have a nofollow code inserted as a default. This is mainly due to the problems with comment spam and people who use scripts to pull together portions of posts to manage their blogs in the hope of attracting traffic and whatever else they want to happen. The comment spam is a pain and the others who use that script I view as basically too lazy to maintain their own posts, but it remains that the rest of us who leave genuine comments are penalised by our links not being followed by the search engines.

It is true that visitors can click on the link and come to your blog – that’s one way your readership can increase, but all the same it would be good to see the same reflected in searches showing where all the links are that lead back to your blog. Hence the reason for this particular plug in. I was going to try LinkLove as recommended by Andy Beard at the Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins but the server was producing an error so I’ve elected to try Dofollow (WP Plugin) instead and will be interested to see how it might assist commenters on this blog. It was very easy to install and set up – just follow the instructions. KMT

blogging, blogger, LinkedIn, networking, virtual assistant, Australian bloggers, blogosphere, VA blogs, business blogs, nofollow, dofollow, wp plugin

Tags: About Blogging, Technology by Kathie Thomas
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