Creative Home Computing

All of my family are on Facebook, so it was just a matter of time before I registered too. It’s nice to keep up with what everyone is doing and much easier to post photos once for all to see.

And that is the one thing that I also don’t like about Facebook. The fact that if someone on my friends list posts photos, it’s possible for people that I don’t even know to see them.

For example, someone where my daughter works tagged a picture of her, so it showed up in daughter’s tagged photos. When I clicked on the photo, I was taken to the group of photos it was originally with. In this case, pictures of the company party. So I was able to look at all of the photos this other person took even though I don’t know her at all.

Maybe I’m being too sensitive about it, but I don’t like the fact that private pictures are not really private at all!

Technorati Tags: Facebook, photos, privacy issues

For any of you who are using the old adhesive plugin with your Wordpress blog, once you upgrade your Wordpress, the plugin won’t work anymore. But there is an update called the Sticky plugin.

When I first installed it, I thought it wasn’t there, because it didn’t show up in the Publish Status field anymore. Now you have to scroll down, down, down to the bottom of your page and you’ll find it listed under Advanced Options.

So I found it and selected “Sticky” and then it worked, right? Of course not - this is a computer, remember? Next I tried selecting “Announcement” within the Sticky options and it put my post right at the top, just like I wanted it to. Again, I have no idea why this is. If anyone can tell me when I would use the Sticky selection in options, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: Adhesive plugin, Wordpress, Sticky plugin

If you’ve been on the Internet any length of time, you no doubt know more than many of the people around you. I was at a ladies’ get together last night, to bid farewell to a friend leaving for the States. It was the first time I had met a number of the women.

One was a fairly accomplished entrepreneur and mother of a university age daughter. When she found out that I did Internet training she began to ask me some questions about an email problem. I explained a few things and told her that her offending emails were probably spam. Her response “Spam? What is that?”

I kid you not. There are perfectly well educated people walking around out there who know very little about the Internet world. You are an exception, a trailblazer. So give yourself a pat on the back, you almost computer geek!

Technorati Tags: email, spam

If you missed watching it on Oprah, here’s the scoop. I’m saving my pennies.

Technorati Tags: Amazon Kindle, video

I had a question from one of the seniors at our computer club yesterday. In XP, it was a simple matter to remove contacts in Outlook Express. You just went into the address book and deleted them. But she couldn’t figure out how to do it in Windows Vista. Now called Windows Mail, there is no longer an address book command.

It is still pretty simple though. Just not what you’d expect if you were used to the old way. You have to click on “Windows Contacts” in the Tools menu and find the contact you would like to remove. Then right click on that person’s name and select “delete”. Told you it was easy!

Technorati Tags: Vista, outlook express, removing email contacts

As you can see, I am finally back online. After a number of back of forth emails and long chats with tech support, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I did what I always do when I want to know something.

You guessed it, I did a Google search for a video tutorial, found an easy to understand one, and followed it step by step. One nice thing about those tutorials is you can pause and rewind as often as you like. It took me awhile, but I’m feeling very proud of myself.

Here is the video if you ever find yourself in my position and want to give it a try. Oh, and I found that my phpMyDomain was a separate icon on my cpanel, rather than a link at the bottom of the sql database that’s mentioned in the video. Now don’t I sound like a techie!! (Just don’t ask me what any of that means)

Technorati Tags: wordpress, backup and restore, cpanel

My mother and I really enjoyed out time at the World Internet Summit Toronto. This is the first time it was ever held in Canada. There were a couple of highlites for us: one was meeting a lot of the Internet marketers that we only knew online.

The other was when one of the organizers, Brett McFall, found out that mom was 84 years old, has a blog, and has made some money online. He had her stand and introduced her to everyone there. If you happened to watch the videos, that happened on the last day.

Here is a picture from our time there. I’m on the left and next to me are Terri Champigny, my mother Eleanor, Doug Champigny, and John Cussons. 

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Right now, I’m attending the World Internet Summit in Toronto. This is the first time the summit has come to Canada - four days of top Internet marketing speakers showing us how they think, how they work, and the products they use to help them.

Today, Mike Stewart talked about using video and showed us onstage how to record and get it onto a blog in only a few minutes. Very informative and enjoyable to watch - he’s got quite a sense of humor.

So far I’ve met a lot of interesting people and a number of them have been interested in my ghostwriting service. Quite a few Canadian warriors (name of an Internet marketers forum) are here, so it’s nice to get together. I am with my 84 year old mother, who is a blogger, so it’s never too late to get in the game.

If I’ve got you wishing you were here, you can sign up to watch the rest of it live online and see the ones you’ve missed at your leisure. And for a whole lot less than I paid too. Enjoy.

Watch the summit online

Update: This link is good for 30 days, so get it while the price is so reasonable.

Technorati Tags: World Internet Summit Toronto, Internet marketing, video training

I started a new computer club at the community center here in town. When we lived in Toronto, I ran one that became very popular with the over 50 crowd. And we didn’t even have computers there. We just discussed our problems and gathered around a laptop I brought in (no Internet).

Anyway, the new club is off to a slow start, but that’s normal until the word gets around. We have six computers and people can drop in and work on whatever they like. For instance, some of the people are taking evening computer classes once a week, but they want to practice what was taught. I’m there to help if needed and I usually bring in any new gadgets or computer books I find. Plus the week’s computer ads, which we discuss.

This week, one of the members started a document in Word and then pressed the email icon to see what it would do. I’ve never done my emails in Word and was pleased to see how this worked. Right away, the email toolbars appeared above the post. We were then able to add a photo and a fancy cursive signature. We even added a little audio file. Through teamwork, we all learned a little and enjoyed the time.

Another person wanted to create a table in Word. Easily done, but I wasn’t sure if it we could sort the contents of the table, since I’d never done it there. But the table function sorted easily, both for alphabetic and numeric data. Nice and easy to use if you don’t really need a full database program.

Bottom line: working together, we all learned a lot, had a good time, and look forward to next week.

Technorati Tags: computer club, Word, tables, email