More than one of my clients have remarked on how many icons I have on my desktop… this morning I went looking for a utility to save that icon layout (it would take me forever to redo it if anything ever happened to it) and found one in PC Magazine’s utilities archive from PC911.

Download and save the two files to /Windows/System32/ and double-click on layout.reg. Now when you right-click on any of the ’standard’ desktop icons (like Recycle Bin), you’ll get the option to save or restore the desktop icon layout.

I hope I remember this the next time my desktop gets screwed up…

I use both pMachine Pro and Wordpress for blogging. pMachine Pro is a really handy little program; basically you just put PHP includes in your existing site to use it.

But it’s kind of twitchy sometimes. Occasionally it will refuse my password and I’ll have to change it. Here is the process I use to do that - kind of simplistic, but this is applicable to any simple login process when trying to recover a password.
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We have a retail website, Silver Fantasy, that’s been around since 1998. It’s well-ranked for its top search terms in the major search engines, has a good client base and has been very successful for us.

The problem was that it was a static site - with over 1,000 items. Keeping track of prices, out-of-stock and discontinued items was a huge pain in the neck. So this summer we rebuilt the site using a nice PHP and MySQL database.
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I have a number of sites that I use for graphic inspiration. One of my favorites is Design Meltdown because it groups sites and examples by categories that make sense to me - Stripes; Retro; Super Clean; color usage and so on. There’s also a nice section on solutions and (Photoshop) tutorials. This is a good place to spend some time looking around…

Well, my outsourcing experiment is over - here’s how it went down.

I chose one of the programmers (I got five bids of $12-20) because he/she had four good reviews, but they never responded. So I chose the second respondent and he got back to me in about a half hour.

We talked twice via email - he was fast, his code is clean and it works. That’s all I needed, and it was well worth the negligible amount of cash I had to spend. I’ll definitely consider doing this again the next time I get stuck with a programming task I can’t figure out quickly.

…that might sound silly for a small company like mine, but yesterday I spent two hours trying to figure out why external Javascripts aren’t working in IE6 but are working fine in FF and Opera.  I even went to Barnes & Noble and bought ‘Learn Javascript in 24 Hours,’ which I think will be a smart move in any event, but I just don’t have 24 hours to read it today, oddly enough…
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I’ve used OptionCart for a number of websites in the last 14 months. It’s an administrative front-end for Mal’s E-commerce, a cart provider I’ve used since 1998 for my retail website.

OptionCart is inexpensive, works quite well and as open source software has a LOT of potential for customization (all written in PHP using a MySQL database).

But what really sets them apart is their outstanding tech support. Susan and Sherri have sent me many lines of custom code to accomplish some pretty demanding requests from clients… They are always exceptionally helpful, timely and polite and go way beyond the call of duty.  No other company I’ve dealt with as a web designer even comes close.

If you’re a user of Mal’s cart system (which I also highly recommend) and need more functionality for your clients, really consider checking out OptionCart. They offer a reseller program for web designers and developers too.

I migrated from Outlook 2003 to Thunderbird a few weeks ago. I really like Thunderbird, especially the adaptive junk mail filtering…

Just a few minutes ago I was checking my mail and suddenly everything in my inbox was blank. It was there, but I couldn’t view anything. This had never happened with Outlook so I was (1) terrified momentarily that all my recent business mail was gone but then (2) resolved to find it….

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