pctoolbox.co.uk

Windows Live Writer is a free desktop application for publishing to blogs and will work with almost any blog provider in the world including Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad and more!

It’s a very simple piece of software which enables you to link your blogs to one central point for posting, rather than logging on to each website.

Live Writer has a variety of different tools available for use…from hyperlink, to pictures (single photos/albums), tables, videos, tags and more! Some of which may not normally be available from your software.

Interested in the software? Well download it from the Windows Live Writer site

I think it is safe to admit that I am not the only one who has a wordpress blog, facebook account and a twitter profile, all of which get updated from time to time.  Some more regularly than others and some with the same info!

In fact I have three wordpress blogs! Brandstar, PCToolbox and a Personal Blog. I also have a personal and business twitter profile and I was thinking, there must be a way of linking all this! After a bit of digging I found, there is!

Basically I decided that I want to get information, updates and more off the WordPress and Facebook accounts and published on Twitter. It seems like the logical way round to me.

The key tool for doing this is TwitterFeed as it makes it nice and easy with just these steps

Register for a TwitterFeed account (you only have to do this once and you can then link lots of RSS feeds to twitter through your TwitterFeed account.)

• Link to your Twitter profile, (make sure twitter is open in another tab), then in TwitterFeed choose ‘Create New Feed’ and choose Connect your feed to your Twitter account
• Give the Feed a name
• Link to the RSS Feed of where the information is coming from!  (more info below)

Ok, so the last bit might be the hardest for some people I admit. On WordPress you just have to look for the icon that looks like the orange one to the right (some themes have varied the style and colour but should be recognisable) or you can go direct to the feed by typing /feed after the blog address … e.g. for PCToolbox it is www.pctoolbox.co.uk/feed and the brandstar.co.uk feed is www.brandstar.co.uk/wp/feed  (the wp is teh directory wordpress is installed in).

Facebook doesn’t make finding the feed that easy … so follow these instructions and you will be away

1. Log into Facebook
2. Click notifications in the bottom right hand corner of the screen
3. Press ‘See All’ when the notifications pop-up appears
4. Under all the tick boxes you will see ‘Your Notifications’, click that
5. You will then see a big list of ALL your notifications, this could be the feed you want, but if you just want YOUR status updates like I did then keep reading
6. The URL in the address bar at the very top will read something like “http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=123456789&viewer=1234567891&key=t4654562v&format=rss20″
7. You need to change the word ‘notifications’ that I have bold-ed above to read ‘status’ so the URL reads similar to this “http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=123456789&viewer=1234567891&key=t4654562v&format=rss20″
8. Hit ENTER and that will show you all your Status updates, copy that URL from the address bar and that is you FEED when you are setting up TwitterFeed to send info to Twitter!

I hope that helps, enjoy, have fun and stay connected!

Grae.

Today we launched our new theme, one of the best things about WordPress is the vast amount of freely available themes that are on the web and how easy it is to change them! So here we are an orange version of the red theme used on www.brandstar.co.uk. We will continue to make a few tweaks to the site over the coming weeks but don’t worry…we won’t let it get in the way of our normal post writing!

Let us know what you think

Part three in our Basic Website Setup Series! So far we have looked at

• Part 1 – Domain Names
• Part 2 – Hosting

This week we are looking at Site Building Tools.  Now professionals tend to use a program called Dreamweaver by Adobe, or something similar. However for beginners this is a steep learning curve and one that can often be avoided.

We recommend that you use a pre-written tool to create your site and manage it as well. For most people a simple blogging tool will be more than enough, however for those that want something more they will need a Content Management System (or CMS for short!).

The tool you use will need to work with your hosting provider, for this tip we are going to work with tools that come with Fantastico as that is often installed on the control panel of a Linux hosting package.

For full details on how to install these tools you will need to see your hosting providers support pages, but just to give you an idea. You can log into your control panel (cPanel) and select fantastico and without any programming or web building knowledge install tools such as:

• WordPress (our favourite)
• Nucleus
• Joomla
• Mambo
• PHP-Nuke

The first two are Blogging tools and the last 3 are CMS tools. Our favourite is WordPress, it is easy to use, easy to install, there are many themes and plugins available to make a site that does just what you need it to.  Check out our User’s Review of WordPress here.

With a tool like this you just have to learn to use their Admin area, which in my opinion is much easier than learning Dreamweaver and getting messy with an FTP application. It often involves just filling in form types pages to get your content online!

Once your domain and hosting is setup (see your hosting provider on how to do this, you will need to point the nameserves of your domain to your hosting space) you can literally have a site up and running in minutes with a tool like the ones we have listed, all that takes the time is you coming up with valuable content to put on it!

I hope this helped, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments or if you get a site up and running like this link us to it!

With the release of the great new Microsoft Office 2007 package we thought that we would let you know of some of the cool new features!

Why the extra ‘x’?

For years documents on Office programs have been saved as in the same format e.g. Word’s format used to be .doc and Excel’s format used to be .xls. However, Microsoft have decided that now is the time for big change! All Office 2007 documents will be saved with an ‘x’ on the end, for example, Word is now .docx and Excel is not .xlsx. Why the extra ‘x’ I hear you say? Well basically the ‘x’ stands for a technology called XML which now helps run all office documents. The main differences between the two are that having the ‘xml’ technology makes the document smaller so that your software can handle with them faster, and also all of the Office 2007 software will ‘speak’ to each other so the software is more efficient. The documents are also more robust so are therefore less susceptible to becoming corrupted etc.

PDF and XPS

In the past if you emailed a document to somebody and they didn’t have the same version of Microsoft Office as you they wouldn’t be able to open the document without a compatibility software from a third-party company, which could potentially have cost hundreds of pounds! However, now Microsoft Office 2007 have provided a free download so that you can save your documents in .pdf format without having to use any thrid-party software. PDF is a format developed by Adobe, they offer a free reader to open files. PDF is ‘Portable Document Format’, this means that it can be opened on many types of computers or operating systems, e.g. different versions of Windows and Apple Mac’s. XPS stands for ‘XML Paper Specification’, and it is very similar to .pdf however it isn’t used quite as much over the world as it hasn’t been as round for as long. To download the software which allows you to save your documents in Office 2007 as ‘.pdf and .xps’ click here.

Blogging from Word

Word 2003 could produce simple codes for websites but not as detailed as you would expect from a specialised web layout tool. If you were to cut and paste the text from Word to your blogging tool you would have to ensure that the text format had been converted, as if it hadn’t been converted the post would be messed up! Therefore it was very stressful and not always worthwhile. However, now Microsoft Office Word 2007 has been given a dedicated blogging mode. Which can hook directly to a number of popular blogging tools, such as; WordPress, Blogger and MSN Spaces. Therefore it is even simpler to get yourself on the Internet! A huge majority of Blogs talk with both Microsoft Word 07 and Microsoft OneNote 07.

Fluent Ribbon

On Office 2003 it was often hard or long winded to find the feature you wanted as they seemed almost hidden within the ridiculous amounts of menus. Therefore we just assumed they weren’t there, when they most likely were, just in a less obvious place. However, the Office 2007 system has a new fluent interface! It is used for most of the applications in the suite and splits up the commands on offer to an easy to used structure and obvious grouping. Its a great time saver and your guaranteed to find some features that you ever knew existed!

For more on the new Microsoft Office Suite keep an eye out over the coming weeks

Before using a new product it is always helpful to know what users of it really think. That is the reason for this todays blog. There are many blogging tools available, some free like WordPress and others costing some of your hard earnt cash. So is WordPress really any good? Well here are my thoughts…

I haven’t been using WordPress too long but I have spent a lot of time with it over the last couple of months, from setting up, customising and generally playing with its capabilities. The first blog I released powered by WordPress was the Brandstar site, follwed by this pc toolbox site and there is a third non IT site on its way!

Ultimately I think it is an amazing tool and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to friends, family or clients. But why do I think that, is the most important question!

Firstly the Basic Install – Even if you just use the basic installation of WordPress without changing the theme or adding any plugins it boasts with a huge number of excellent features.

• Ease of use – within a few minutes (literally) you can be posting your thoughts on your own weblog. The only experience you really need is the ability to fill in an online form.
• The ability to have static pages as well as your blog really makes it more than just a blogging tool.
• Easily link to other bloggers with the “BlogRoll”.
• Spam prevention checks users comments to keep your site clean and tidy.
• User registration.
• Multiple Blog Administrators, Authors and Editors.

So out of the box the is plenty to get started with.
Themes – There are a huge range of free themes for WordPress that can be very easily installed, as simple as 1.2.3

1. Download your chosen theme
2. UnZip the downloaded theme
3. Upload the theme folder to your WordPress directory (you will need an FTP program to do this, I like Filezilla)

Plugins – To make more of your WordPress blog there are a huge number of plugins available, here are a few we have installed on PC Toolbox:

• Sociable – allows you to add the links to bottom of your post enabling visitors to share your post on some of their most favourite sites such as Digg.
• Adsense Deluxe – allows you to add GoogleAds to some / all of your posts.
• WP Polls – A Polls plugin built with Ajax. Easy to install and use and works well.

Fantastico – Many web hosts running a variant of linux have Fantastico installed which enable a very easy installation of WordPress in the first place, so users need very little knowledge of websites to get it installed. Need a webhost for this? Visit Brandstar’s webhosting company Wildhosting.co.uk and they will get your sorted.

Any questions or thoughts just leave a comment!

Happy Blogging