Hello all. I just want to point you to a guest post I did over at the Cranking Widgets blog. There, I introduce FileHamster, a version control system for the rest of us. Enjoy.

When I had troubles this week trying to host the new EverNote Template Editor program on my web host, I got extremely annoyed, and decided I wasn’t taking it anymore.

Based on word-of-mouth advertising (thank you Sigler), I immediately got myself a GoDaddy account, and even bought my own domain name, for the super-low price of $1.99.

Now that the initial flush of irritation is over, and I’ve spent some time migrating from the old host, I can look back and examine my impulsive decision. Well, all I can say is, man, why did I not do this ages ago????

Customer Service

I have to say that not only is GoDaddy inexpensive (good enough for a starving student), but the service is great too. I was working away last night and the phone rang. Here is an approximation of the conversation:

“Hello, is GTD there?” (Actually, they did use my real name ;)).

Yeah. (Mentally, friggin telemarkers, what do they want now, grrr.)

“Hi, this is so-and-so from GoDaddy.com. How are you?”.

Uhhhh. Good. How are you?

“We’ve just wanted to thank you for your business, and wanted to know if you had any questions.”

Wow, thanks. No, I’m okay….No, wait, I do have one question. How do I figure out how much space I’m using? (I’ve looked all over the site and can’t find those stats.)

“Oh, well that’s easy, you just….Here, I’ll tell you right now what you’re using…”

Cool, so I just click….

“Yes, that’s it.”

Well thanks.

“Is there anything else we can help you with?”

No, no, that’s great.

Did I ever get a phone call from the other place? Nope. When I sent the other place an email asking a question, did they give me a personalized answer? Nope, they cut and paste from an FAQ. Like I can’t read the FAQ. Did I get satisfaction from the other place? Guess.

FTP

And you want to know the other great thing about GoDaddy? The FTP actually WORKS! You may have noticed that I’ve played with Windows Live Writer in the past, but kept having to give it up because I couldn’t get images uploaded via FTP to my old host. I thought is was a WLW, or even Blogger, problem. Nope. It was an FTP problem. Now, I can use WLW to make wicked long posts with screenshots embedded in them. No more having to clip a screenshot, save it as an image, upload it to Blogger, paste it where I want it. I can just clip and paste, right into my editor. Sweet. This means you’ll be getting even more tutorials/walkthroughs from me, because now I have the technology!

Summary

All I can say is, if you’re looking for a web host, and/or your very own domain name, give GoDaddy a look-see. They offer a whack of services, even services for starting your own blog, creating web pages, etc. Most of the extras (great for newbies to publishing online) cost, but the prices don’t seem extravagant. I’ve gone with barebones service, and I’m loving it so far. I’ve got the smallest amount of space, which is still a whopping 5GB! And how much am I using for my EverNote template pages, catalogue, and recent images?

It will take me a long time to fill that up!

2007-04-30 08:29 Update: Fixed bad link.

You may have noticed that I occasionally do sponsored posts. It’s not that I’m a money grubber, but as a starving student, it’s nice to have a little extra income to support my software habit. The blog thus far has been very good to me - letting me buy wickedly cool software that I wouldn’t normally be able to justify. I’ve just finished another couple of purchases that I’m really enjoying, and someday soon, I’ll put out a couple more “money where my mouth is” posts.

There are several ways of to make money online - but I’ve not yet stumbled on the magic combination that some people manage to use. You know, there are actually some people that can make enough on their blogs to live off of? Can you imagine?

Myself, I’m trying out another service for sponsored reviews, called LinkWorth. Their tagline is “Search Engine Marketing” and they offer several services for bloggers. I’m pretty conservative in my advertising outlook, so I’m most interested in LinkAds, which is just good old-fashioned text link advertising, and LinkPost, which is essentially a sponsored post, actually a review. I actually kind of like doing reviews, call me crazy, but I enjoy trying new things out.

This particular post is ironically recursive; it is a sponsored review of a product which offers sponsored reviews. Get it?

Anyway, if you’re a blogger interested in making a little money from your blog, you can check out LinkWorth. Myself, I find the site a little confusing - almost as if they have too much to offer and I can’t quite figure out my way around. But I’m sure once I use them a bit more, things will make more sense for me.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about ClipMate, and what I use it for. I had tossed out SnagIt as an alternative screenshot capturing tool. There was also a comment on the post from ads, who suggested looking at SnagIt. As I mentioned in my comments on that post, I had tried SnagIt quite some time ago (at the same time I was initially test driving ClipMate), and although I had liked it, I couldn’t justify buying both programs. ClipMate won, back then.

Now, I’ve been playing with SnagIt for the past few weeks. You may have noticed that some of my images in recent posts have sported interesting borders, e.g.,

Yup, that’s me playing with SnagIt.

Screen Capturing, Plus

So, what is SnagIt? Well, It’s not the same thing as ClipMate, that’s for sure. One of the things that I use ClipMate for is to keep track of everything I’ve clipped (say, in the last week). That way, after I’ve clipped an image, or a screenshot, or some text, or a URL, I can go back to ClipMate and find it again, even if I’ve done some other copying in the interim. It’s a serious clipboard manager.

In addition, I use ClipMate for manipulating text that I’ve clipped, e.g., remove trailing carriage returns. Remove >>> things at the front of forwarded email jokes, etc. I’ve even used it to take a full block of text and format it with carriage returns at a specific column. In addition, you can fix spelling errors in text, etc. etc. It rocks for dealing with text after you’ve copied it.

On the graphics side, I’ve only ever used ClipMate to take a snapshot of a specific part of the screen (with a hotkey trigger), which I then export as an image, to be dealt with in some other program. Or, I just take the snapshot and plug it straight away into my EverNote database. This actually, is the main thing I use ClipMate for, in addition to the text stuff I’ve just discussed. But other than exporting an image, there’s not really much you can *do* with the screenshots.

This is where SnagIt excels. It doesn’t have a memory for clips like ClipMate does. Nor can it do text manipulation. However, when it comes time to grabbing something graphical from your computer, or modifying/annotating an image, SnagIt does this in spades.

How Can I Snag? Let Me Count the Ways

SnagIt has a multitude of ways to capture images. I recall reading somewhere that there are over 60 ways to capture an image with SnagIt. I’m not going to try and count all the permutations and combinations, but here are the major categories of capture:

• Region (what I use in ClipMate)
• Window (you can do this reasonably well with just the Alt+PrintScreen in Windows)
• Full screen (imaging just the regular PrintScreen)
• Scrolling Window
• Web Page

And there’s numerous ways of playing with these. Really, too much for me to explore right here. Let’s just say that if there’s something you want to be able to copy from your computer, be it on your (multiple) screens, output from a program, scrolling window, etc. etc., SnagIt has a way for you to capture it.

Spiff Up Your Snapshot

What I really like SnagIt for is modifying or annotating your snapshots after you’ve capture them. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Here, I’ve just taken a screen shot of my entire desktop, then cropped it, and played a little with annotations. I wanted to show you what the menu looked like for capturing options. I’ve added a little callout to point that out to you. In addition, there are stamps available in SnagIt (think ClipArt), and you can download additional ones, like those numbers 1 and 2.

Using SnagIt is very easy. Basically, you first tell SnagIt what kind of capture you want to do. Then hit the big red button. There are also ways to set up hotkeys to make things much quicker. In addition, there’s something about capturing and output profiles, which sounds like ways of saving your favourite settings, but I haven’t got that far yet.

Now, I’m not just pleased with SnagIt because it can help me make better blog posts. I’m actually more impressed with how I can use it to make better walkthroughs for students, and to better highlight screenshots to pass information on to my prof. It has real work-related benefits for me. Really.

Oh, and one of the reasons that I’m really enjoying working with SnagIt is that it (unlike my version of ClipMate) doesn’t mind my multiple monitor setup. So, when I hit the magic hotkeys to take a region capture with SnagIt, I can choose a region on any of my three monitors. ClipMate only lets me play with the primary monitor.

My Money Where My Mouth Is

So, I find myself making another software purchase this month. SnagIt sells for $39.95 US for a single license. However, you might be lucky enough to come across a promotion to bring it down a little. The high end of my sweet spot for software is about $30, so this is not too far out of my budget. And I think that it’s a useful purchase for me.

If you do any kind of screenshot/region capture/snapshots, etc. on a regular basis, I highly recommend that you try out SnagIt. I’m pleased that I can finally put it into my stable, since I’ve liked it since I first saw it years ago.

WishList

There are a couple of things that I’m missing:

1. Scrolling window captures. I have yet to be able to figure these out. SnagIt says that it does them, but I haven’t been able to get them to work. I don’t know if it’s because of the way my system’s laid out, or because I’m an idiot, but I’m having no joy there. Fortunately, it’s not a showstopper for me.
2. Blurring. Why does no one do blurring anymore? I used to use Photo Editor, which came with Microsoft Office (pre-2003) installations. It did a great job of transparency and spot blurring (i.e., only where I want it, not all over). Now, I’ve been using Gimp, and now SnagIt, and I can’t find blurring anywhere. You can blur with some online tools (e.g., Phixr, albeit all over the image), but I miss the spot blurring functionality of Photo Editor. Sigh.

P.S.

Does me buying SnagIt mean that I won’t be using ClipMate anymore? No way! ClipMate still has a quicker “copy region to clipboard” functionality, assuming I’m clipping from my primary screen (which is usually the case). In addition, I like having a record of all my clips, and the text manipulation functionality.

All this means is that I have yet another program running in my taskbar. (Hmmmm, maybe I should do a post on what I have running in my taskbar. Hmmmm.)

Last month, I posted about finding a way to get three monitors working with my laptop (well, two external), one of which was actually attached to my desktop computer. The magic behind this is MaxiVista, a program which “installs a virtual video driver onto your primary PC which fools Windows into thinking that an additional monitor is installed.”

It’s not free, so I decided to try it out for a few weeks and see if it was worth the coin. I’ve tried it and I like it. There are actually times when I *need* three monitors, in order to see three different programs at once. Other times, it’s just nice.

So, here I am, putting my money where my mouth is. When I first posted, MaxiVista was advertising for about $20 USD. Unfortunately, that sale is over. They have a three versions of the software to choose from:

• Standard, which only does extended screen (the scenario that I’ve described)
• Professional, which adds remote control, clipboard synchronization, and supports up to three secondary PCs
• Mirror Pro, which adds desktop mirroring.

I went for the professional version, for $39.95 USD. A bit steep (my sweet spot for software hovers between $20 and $30), but I think it’s going to be worth it. First of all, the remote control mode means that I no longer need Synergy in order to control my desktop’s iTunes from my laptop. I can essentially flip MaxiVista from extending my laptop to remote controlling my desktop. It’s very seamless and smooth, and I have to admit, more robust than Synergy (but keep in mind that Synergy is open source, and does a pretty damn fine job). Clipboard synchronization means it’s easy to copy things from one screen/machine to another. For example, if I copy a URL from my laptop, I can easily paste it into the browser on my desktop.

Anyway, if you’ve got a couple of computers sitting pretty close together, and they’re on a network, and you’re interested in being able to maximize your desktop, I suggest trying out MaxiVista. It’s a software-only solution to a typically hardware problem, and it does a wonderful job.