Tales of a Technology Omnivore

This is shameless. I have created this post to draw my colleagues to my blog once again. What makes it worse is that I better understand my need for attention after taking the DiSC personality profile at my monthly departmental meeting. It says that I require “enthusiastic public praise for my verbal ability and interpersonal skills”. So colleagues, after reading this, please respond appropriately — I need it. And it will help you better communicate with me… and Sonia said.

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The need to contact parents and student in case of emergency has become more important over the last several years. The Virginia Tech tragedy brought this to national prominence where if school officials had an effective way to contact students and parents immediately, some of the devastation may have been averted. Recently at St. John’s University, another student gunman was caught with the potential damage avoided… and text messaging played a part in this. Here’s an amazing way schools can create their own emergency texting system for free using an amazing service called Teleflip.com.

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I stumbled upon this program from Microsoft that is actually very useful. Windows Live Writer is an application “that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog.” It’s compatible with most blog services and gives you Word-like editing for blog postings. No more suffering with draggy web-based interfaces! Place your pictures where you want, add tables, maps, tags, videos, and hyperlinks, all with ease and simplicity. I like how easy it is to format the flow of text around pictures. I probably sound like an info-mercial but this product has really changed my life and it can change yours too! Try it! You’ll be glad you did!

You can use http://www.addthis.com to make your site easier to be RSSed. Just create an account and get an RSS feed icon for your blog! Then copy the code and add it to your site as a widget. When people click on it they get a very friendly screen that allows them to add it to any of several RSS feeders automatically! Highly recommended if you want to simplify the RSS adding process.

For two reasons.

One — that I want to share the Soapbox service with you as an alternative to Youtube! As Americans we love choices and now we have another choice for our video sharing needs! Soapbox is connected to MSN Video which is connected to MSNBC so tons of video content ranging from Nightly News to the Today show already populates the site and is embeddable in your blogs. For those of you who work in the internet jail called the NYC Department of Education, you already know that YouTube is blocked. For now at least, it seems like Soapbox works. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Two — that I wanted to share this video that I watched this morning on Soapbox. (more…)

OK So I found a widget that counts how many visitors have been to your site and gives you a detailed report. It’s called Statcounter.com and it’s really amazing what data can do for you. Looking at the site visit statistics I see how many visitors come to this site on a daily basis. Not many I tell you. But enough to make me feel guilty that I haven’t been updating on my target frequency: daily (except on the weekends when I can’t think of anything to write). I’m fully aware that regular updates are what drives repeat visitors which is the key to building readership. So it’s time to practice what I preach! If I want people to come back on a regular basis I should provide new content for them to see on a regular basis.

OK — so Statcounter.com. Create an account there and they give you a widget with directions on how to add it to your Blogger page (or any blog actually). You paste the HTML code in and voila! Site statistics. There are options to make the site visit statistics available publicly and hide the Statcounter logo. Many asked how they can see how many visitors they’ve had? This does that and more. Check it out:

http://www.statcounter.com

I love StumbleUpon.com — a toolbar that helps you find websites that are selected based on your interests (which you tell it when you set up the toolbar). Stumble saves all your favorites for easy access from any computer.

I hate toolbars in general but this is one that I wouldn’t live without — definitely makes surfing the internet a more fun and fruitful activity (almost addictive!). SO when I installed Internet Explorer 7 and found that my stumble toolbar caused it to crash from time to time, I was crushed. So I uninstalled it and lived without Stumble for 2 months. Now that’s over. On Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 add-ons site, you can download the toolbar for IE7. Stumble is in the top 10 of recommended add-ons for IE7! After that, visit http://www.stumbleupon.com/ to create an account and start stumbling.

The above photo is an Aye-aye: “a strepsirrhine native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker.” (25 Worlds Weirdest Animals). I wouldn’t have found it without stumble. See how useful it can be?

If you have a cell phone that can go on the internet then you can probably access your iGoogle page with the same up-to-the-minute information you have on your desktop iGoogle page!

Just point your web browser to the following url:

http://www.google.com/ig/mobile

Sign in with your username and password and check “Remember me”.

Which phones work? Most Blackberries, any phone with Windows Mobile, the iPhone, many Nokia phones…. actually — most phones today have internet access. Make sure you have a data plan (unlimited to be sure) so that you don’t incur needless charges.