Jim F Munro

Get More Good News With the Reeder App

June 14

If you get your news from the internet like ten bajillion other Americans these days, you might be wondering how to manage it all.

I get my daily dose of the latest happenings from a variety of sources on the web, usually via RSS (what is RSS?).

I used to view all my news with Google Reader, but that was before the iPad.

If you don’t have an iPad or iPhone, this may not be the most useful article for you, but it may provide you with a good excuse for getting one.

Reeder to the rescue

Reeder is a marvelous app I use every day. It basically takes the Google Reader news data and gives you a prettier and more user-friendly way to view all things coming in. By putting this app on the iPad, you now have a mobile way to get your news and read it easily without having to either be tethered to a computer or manage piles of newspapers that end up creating more waste.

Sharing Is Caring

If you’re at all familiar with Google Reader, you’ll know that you can do a lot with your incoming news. You can save your articles, mark them to be read later, you can keep them unread. Reeder offers you all these features and more, you also have access to some great ways to share interesting items to friends or coworkers who might share your interests.

With a few quick taps, you can send any article to Twitter, you can email all or part of the article, or you can share it via your own RSS feed on Google Reader for other people to access.

I may sound like I’m selling this app, but I’m not. (Sadly there are no iTunes app affiliate programs that I know of, yet.) I just love this app and wanted to be able to be able to point people to my explanation without having to repeat myself endlessly when I gush on about how much I love Reeder. Did I mention I love Reeder?

Visit the Reeder site to view more information about it, then go buy it!

If you haven’t purchased an iPad yet, I highly recommend that too, but that’s another article for another day.

Did you buy Reeder because of this article? Come back and share your absolute delirious love about the app in the comments below!

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What’s Really Missing Here?

June 2

I recently got an email from a social networking site that bills itself as “”Your address book for life”. (The fact that they don’t rank #1 for this phrase in Google is interesting.)

Don’t lecture your customer that they aren’t using your service right.

This email had the subject line “Your profile is missing a photo”. (The account profile was originally created probably two or three years ago.)

Did I hurry up and update my profile and thank them for the reminder?

Read the full article →

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Designer Pull Quotes Made Simple

May 30

I’m always looking for ways to enhance my blog articles easily. I may be lazy, but I also like small changes that have big impact.

Pull quotes are a fun and, more importantly, easy way to give a more professional or journalistic look to your posts or pages. I’ve read several blogs recently which gave tips and suggestions on how to use them in your posts.

Pull quotes are used to pull a text passage out of the reader’s flow and give it a more dominant position in the post or the article.

What are pull quotes? The short definition of Pull quotes is that they are simply short excerpts from the text you are presenting. They are used to pull a text passage out of the reader’s flow and give it a more dominant position in the post or the article. I take that to mean any important key phrase or special point you want your reader to take away from the article.

I have put together a couple of screencasts showing you the basics and how to make them useful to your blog. I’ve also included a few image files to get you started.

Read the Tutorial >>>

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Google Mayday Updates Impact Long-Tail Search

May 30

If you’ve noticed any change in your rankings over the last few days or weeks you may be feeling the sting of Google’s recent changes to their ranking algorithm. These have been confirmed by Google’s Matt Cutts and he indicates that it is a ranking factors change, versus crawling or indexing methods. The change was designed to increase the quality rankings for long-tail searches that target more specific search terms like “three-legged German shepherd dog training” rather than just “dog training”.

Who Is Affected?

Read the full article →

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Edge Blueprint Time Savers and My Cheat Sheet

May 26

If you’re interested in a quick method to test a market, I’ve found to the Edge Blueprint is an interesting way to get started fast. Also, I like that it doesn’t rely on Google to provide you with your traffic source. The whole PPV thing was new to me as a traffic generation method, but it does get you traffic. Still with their “internet marketers promise” of canning your day job in 6 months, I figured it was worth a look.

If you haven’t seen the Edge Blueprint yet, check out their website. You have to opt-in register, but they haven’t spammed me… yet.

They’ve done a good job creating videos are clear, and the steps pretty straightforward. But if you don’t have your own team to work with (and their unlimited budget), you could easily waste invest a lot of time on data gathering steps. This is repetitive and tedious stuff I hate. So I created a way to shortcut the process.

Get An Edge and the Shortcuts >>>

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Customizing Thesis 404 Pages

May 20

I like to think that my websites are error proof. WordPress does a great job handling cases of mis-typed URLs, outdated or broken links, and general server-farts. But no matter how bullet proof the system is, it is possible to crumb up your own system as it gets older, obtains more internal links and posts and others link to who-knows-what on your site. These will often create a 404 error condition and how you handle them on your site can be important in order to keep visitors from leaving your site too soon.

Read the full article →

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The Secret To Creating

April 12

Saw a great quote, but it was longer than 140 characters so I couldn’t just reTweet it. It came from a Q&A with the author William Gibson (link). (I’m a sci-fi wanna-be—I don’t really ever read it, but I want to. So I just read about it on Boing Boing.)

His answer to a question about “writer’s block”:

… The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work…

Really useful words for anyone who finds it difficult to create and who procrastinates when faced with “the block”, me included. The feeling of being blocked isn’t the problem, that’s just the way it feels to create. The same reason exercise feels like work, if it didn’t it wouldn’t be accomplishing anything. The problem is letting it stop you from the act of creation.

If you feel like your facing a block, don’t let it stop you, don’t complain about it. Creation is hard, painful, and full of self-doubt. Those that seem to create endlessly no doubt deal with this constantly and are able work through it. Which is reassuring, because it means the rest of us can too.

A similar quote from “The Power of Thinking Big”. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is: Don’t wait for conditions to be perfect in order to get started, conditions will never be “just right”.

You could apply this to anything where creation is involved. Just get started. Don’t wait for perfection, the muse will never come and do the work for us.

Not the answer anyone wants to hear. Sorry.

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The iPad Post

April 8

I’m not exactly the first person to post my thoughts post-April-3rd-iPad-launch, far from it. But relax, I won’t go into a technical review since it’s already been covered in amazing detail here.

Most reviews seem to be favorable, the only negative ones I’ve really seen are from people refusing to buy it for a variety of reasons, some valid, some less so (i.e. haters).

Dropping The Clichés

To begin with, I promise I won’t use sports analogies like: game-changer and changing the rules. They are true, but you’re sick of hearing them. Aren’t you?

Let me simply demonstrate by example:

Onward To The Article >>

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Amazon to Colorado Associates: You’re Fired!

March 8

Screwed By Amazon and Colorado HB 10-1193

My email this morning was like a scene out of the The Apprentice.

I was fired… by Amazon.

Twitter was abuzz with all sorts of tweets about Ritter, Amazon, getting the rug pulled out. Plenty of links to the email, but here is the highlight:

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate: We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take. [snip...] Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date.

Read the full article →

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