I’ve been using a service called MyFax for a couple of years now, and since my account came up for renewal today I was doing some price checking among other services. I decided to stick with MyFax for now, since it’s only $10 per month for sending and receiving, but I did find this nifty tool for Internet fax price comparisons.

Well, I’d signed up to take the CompTIA A+ exam at the end of November but things got very out of control business-wise (one got busier, and the other got sold) so I haven’t done a lot in terms of getting ready. I’ll have to postpone until early next year…

I bought a book with a CD containing a few tests, but the book is literally like 1200 pages. It’s a bit intimidating, although it’s well written and very thorough. I can probably use it as the be-all and end-all of PC troubleshooting guides.

However, I’ll probably buy a uCertify prepkit to facilitate my studying rather than try to slog through this tome. I used uCertify’s kits for taking the first two CIW exams and passed with much higher than needed scores. These were reasonably priced, compared to what I paid for the book, and I like the interactive structure a lot more than just reading.

Although there were a couple of spelling errors in the two kits I bought (and a few programmer’s notes that hadn’t gotten removed), that wasn’t that big of a deal. One thing I liked was the tracking page that kept track over how well you were doing - it would show you when you were getting closer to obtaining that passing grade.

The best thing about the kit was the number of tests. The two I bought came with 5 and 8 built-in tests, respectively, but the cool feature was the ‘create test’ function that lets you pull together any number of questions from the entire pool of questions for all topics on the test. So, you can create a customized test based only on the things you need to improve. And the review sections show wrong answers and explanations for every test you take.

Plus, they were 100% guaranteed. If I failed (which of course I didn’t) they’d refund my money. I couldn’t ask for more than that. So I suspect I’ll be buying another one of uCertify’s kits in the very near future.

I built a website using Joomla last year. I found it to be cumbersome and very unintuitive, and although I did get the template looking pretty good, it felt like I was designing the site backwards.

So right now, I’m building another CMS for a client, this time in Website Baker.

What a huge difference! WB is a much smaller and simpler CMS than Joomla, and in turn it has fewer choices when it comes to templates and modules. But it’s super-simple to use - I will admit that it took me the better part of a day to figure out why I couldn’t see my CSS styles in FCKEditor, one of the available WYSIWYG editors that you can install as a module.

I’ve found the forums to be so-so. I couldn’t find the answers to my questions about styling there, and only got one response. However, once I figured out the CSS issue, I cranked through a lot of other work very quickly.

Styling lists, images, and other elements has been pretty easy. The templating only took a few hours, maybe about half a day, and it looks really nice. I started with one of the free templates available for download on the WB site and worked from there, inserting the pertinent bits of PHP code into my layout.

I made the template first, then dropped in and styled the content. Right now I’m working on styling the sidebar menu and I have a few other elements to work on, but I’m close to handing this over to the client for more content.

I’ve been really impressed with the program, especially after a rather frustrating experience with Joomla, and I would recommend Website Baker for both experienced users and newcomers to CMS’s. The user interface is so much simpler than Joomla but still it’s a powerful little program.

I found this extremely neat little tool today. If you’re a freelancer and have struggled with setting your rates, try this Hourly Rate Calculator.

I tried it and it came up with something fairly close to what I’m actually using, happily.

I found this today - 125 code snippets for web designers on Paul Spoerry’s blog. Some of these will be very convenient, I can tell already…

I found this nifty little script from Justin Cutroni’s blog Analytics Talk that’s used to remove a single computer’s traffic from your Analytics results.  So like if you are running a site and accessing it all the time from your machine, but you don’t want to exclude others in your company (the same IP address) from the traffic reports, try this script.

It puts a cookie on the machine that accesses it - your enter your own text for the cookie, then go into Google Analytics and create a custom filter that checks for your cookie. Very simple (not that I could have come up with this!) and an elegant solution.

Having to do a clean install of Windows can be a good thing – it gets rid of amazing amounts of accumulated junk on your system. But if you’re not prepared, it can be terrifying - you can lose all of your work and personal files if you’re not careful.

Just recently I installed XP Pro on a new motherboard and to prepare myself, I wrote up a checklist of things to check, save and print before getting started. I hope this helps you as much as it helped me.

• Open up Windows Explorer, navigate to C:/Program Files and take a screenshot of all your currently installed software. This was integral to making sure I reinstalled what I really needed, and also let me know what I could afford to get rid of (approximately 3/5 of what was in that folder). Print a copy or two so you can mark it up, and save it to CD-ROM.
• Take a screenshot of your desktop – this will help you remember what icons you had and where they were placed (if you don’t care, don’t bother. But if you’ve carefully arranged your icons, take a screenshot). Print it and save it to CD-ROM.
• Get a free program like drivercontroller.exe, which will let you save all of the drivers on your machine to CD-ROM in one folder so you don’t have to go hunting them down later.
• Pull out the CD-ROM’s for all the boxed software you want to install (including your Windows XP disk). Note – if you purchased Windows with a computer from a manufacturer and are installing to a non-manufacturer computer, be prepared to go buy a new copy of Windows. Yours probably won’t work.
• Pull out the CD-ROM’s that came with your printer, graphics card, sound card, speakers, monitor, wireless networking card and any other hardware you’ve installed.
• Put registration keys, licenses or serial numbers for downloaded software into a text file and save it to CD-ROM.
• Obviously, save all of your documents – spreadsheets, word processing files, photos, music files, etc. either in a backup set or to an external drive that you can access later. Preferably both.
• Export favorites from your web brower(s) – Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. – and save them to CD-ROM.
• If you’ve downloaded fonts in addition to what comes standard with Windows, zip them up and save to CD-ROM.
• I recommend you save the following to CD-ROM by folder, and put a little text file in each application’s folder reminding you where to install this information on the newly-formatted hard drive. You may need to visit the software manufacturer to find out how to do this:
  • Export mail and contact information from your mail software (your profile if using Thunderbird).
  • Backup financial files from Quicken/Quickbooks or Money.
  • If you use planning software, make a backup.
  • If you use project management or time tracking software, make a backup.
  • If you use FTP software, save the profile if you can.
  • For any specialty software you use (in my case it’s HTML, server and Adobe Creative Suite), save your settings if possible. You will probably need to check out the manufacturer’s site to find out how to do that, but it’s worth the time if you spent time getting your software configured just right.
  • Any other databases, like a client management system – make a backup.
• If you’ve made a number of Exceptions in your firewall software, save them by taking screenshots. Print and save to CD-ROM.
• If you have a complicated home network, consider taking screenshots of the settings screens. Print and save to CD-ROM.
• Anything you’re not sure of, if you can back it up or take a screenshot of it, better safe than sorry.

Here’s an excellent guide from Paul Thurrott about clean installs of Windows XP.

Note especially the need to defragment your hard drive after getting XP up and running. It’s good advice; I checked my new hard drive before starting to reinstall software and it was 27% fragmented just from all the XP updates….

Good luck! Reinstalling your operating system is a pain in the neck because of all you have to remember, but hopefully this checklist will save you some time and worry.

On Saturday night my husband and I were talking on Skype, and the call quality was pretty much what it has been for the last few months - poor. Only on Saturday we got dropped four times in about a half hour.

This has been happening - though not as frequently - for the past few weeks; being dropped while talking so you don’t realize the other person can’t hear you.

Fed up, I went searching for ‘Skype alternatives’ and came across GoogleTalk. Hadn’t heard of this one, but it offered free voicemail (the main thing I use Skype for at this time) so I downloaded it and told my husband to do the same.

Five minutes later, we were on GoogleTalk resuming our conversation. The call quality was not crystal-clear (it sounded somewhat like we were in mutual tunnels) but it was soooo much better than how Skype has been for months. And how many times did we get dropped? None. Zero.

GoogleTalk is not as feature-rich as Skype for sure, and it’s mainly aimed at Gmail users (which I’m not) but its voice calling feature works very nicely.