I decided a little while ago to attend Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in January 2012. For the conference I needed some business cards and wanted to add a QR Code to the card to make it easy to contact me by scanning the code. The problem is most of the QR code generators that you find out on the Internet only generate a low resolution QR code that goes all blurry when you try to print them.

Thankfully doing a Google search for lead me to the QReate & Track QR Code Generator. They allow you to create high resolution QR codes for free if you do one at a time. If you need to do bulk QR code generation you would have to sign up and pay.

For my limited use all I needed was to create a couple of high resolution QR codes for printing on my business card. I used the web address generator since I wanted to allow people to come here to my website and visit either my contact page or a new tweet me page that allows people to send me a tweet easily. The generator allows you to create QR codes of more than just URL’s including email addresses, business card information, event information and more. You can choose the colour and then just have to download your high resolution QR code.

I just got my business cards and the codes work great. The colour is a little off from what I wanted but that is my own fault. Silly me for forgetting that RGB and CMYK print different. If I need to get more cards printed I will have to remember that.

Over two years ago I signed up with Dropbox and wrote a quick little review of it. Since then I have gotten constant comments on that post of people wanting to increase their Dropbox referral space by leaving their Dropbox referral code. At one point it got so bad I just finally turned off comments on the post and the flood stopped.

It would not have been so bad if people had actually left a short review of what they liked or did not like about Dropbox, but often it was just a short blurb like:

Sign up with my code and get extra space!

Well, last week I had an idea so I took a couple hours and created Review Dropbox. It simply is a place where people that are interested in Dropbox can come and read reviews by other Dropbox users.

Current Dropbox users can leave a short review of the service and in return their referral code is placed in a referral lottery and when someone clicks through to Dropbox one of the referral codes are used.

The site has already started to get some visitors and clicks through to Dropbox. If you are a Dropbox user already come and leave a review and your link. If you don’t use Dropbox come and read some of the review and click through to get and extra 250mb of space free. At the very least you can use your Dropbox account to help backup your blog.

I realized that I have taken quite a break from updating my blog and thought I should get back into writing here more often. A lot has happened since I have been updating here regularly. Many of you have discovered how much better using Google Chrome is as a web browser. I was reluctant to switch to Chrome after it first came out, mainly because some of the extensions I loved in Firefox simply were not available for Chrome.

One of the Firefox addons I used regularly was SEO for Firefox and I still will start up Firefox for that alone, but I have discovered (well many months ago already) the SEO Site Tools extension for Google Chrome and it is one of the best tools I have come across.

Not only can you get some great information about a site while you are browsing it, the best part of SEO Site Tools is how it integrates with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. With the SEO Site Tools Google Chrome extension Google Webmaster Tools has become even more useful. My favourite is how it adds the links from the Webmaster Tools Search Queries page to Google Insight for Search. This one feature alone has helped me come up with new ideas for keywords for websites and helped tremendously to to help target existing keywords.

If you do SEO for your website at all and want to improve and make your SEO work more focused try the SEO Site Tools extension for Chrome. It has become a tool I use everyday.

A video overview of SEO Site Tools.

One of the tasks I have been doing regularly lately is converting older static HTML websites into WordPress websites. For smaller websites it is not difficult to copy and paste the data into the new WordPress site. The problem is, what do you do with a larger website of a few hundred to a few thousand pages? The very thought of copying and pasting that many pages from plain HTML into WordPress does not thrill me to say the least. Thankfully I have come across the BlogPig CSVPig Import plugin.

BlogPig makes several WordPress automation plugins, some of which could be seen as more on the darker side of blogging, but CSVPig is a tool that is badly needed to help import data into WordPress. It does pretty much exactly what you would expect it to do, it imports a CSV file into WordPress.

You can choose to create post or pages, create different templates depending on what you are importing and even schedule the posts to be published at some future date.

Now, you might be wondering how I use BlogPig CSVPig to import static HTML files, well it is pretty easy actually. I wrote a PHP script that takes a list of URL’s processes the page and saves the content into a CSV file. It helps that I created many of the sites that I am converting so I can make sure the HTML structure is consistent. I won’t post my script because there is a potential to use it to scrape a site.

You can also use BlogPig CSVPig for creating many other sites. I have seen it used to create affiliate based sites using merchants datafeeds. You could use it to create your own store or even to manage your own website using a spreadsheet if you are more comfortable using spreadsheet software.

For now I have found BlogPig CSVPig very useful to help clients transition from basic HTML based websites to a WordPress powered site where they have more control over their website and information.

Having a reliable and fast serving website is essential today. You can have the best website in the world but if it is not up when people are trying to load it then there is not much point. Not to mention how important it is to have a fast loading website. Having a content delivery network can improve your website load time, but a decent content delivery network costs money and if you are on shared hosting you might not want to pay more money for a content delivery network just yet. Not to mention a content delivery network does not help to keep your website safe from hackers, spammers and botnet zombie machines.

This is where Cloudflare comes in. Cloudflare helps to protect your website by doing several things. First it helps to protect it from the visitors you don’t want to visit your website. It uses threat data from Project Honey Pot and a variety of other third-party sources to identify online threats. Cloudflare will then challenge. You can even use the threat control panel to ban ip addresses even entire countries.

Cloudflare can also keep your website online when for some reason or other your server goes down. Cloudflare can offer visitors cached pages while your server is offline allowing them to browse and read your content while your server is not available. Visitors will see a small notice that your server is not available. The notice will disappear as soon as your server comes back online again.

Cloudflare will also improve your websites load time, by caching the most used parts of your website. Images, javascript files and cascading styles sheets can all be cached and served through Cloudflare.

I have been using Cloudflare for just over a month on several of my own websites and I have been impressed so far with the service. I am only using the free service, but with the four sites I have added to the service I have seen a overall speed increase of 49%, saved 3.1GB in bandwidth and saved myself from 9,406 unique threats. I have also had the opportunity to test how Cloudflare can keep a website online when the server goes offline. While it was only for a short time the websites content was still available while the server was offline. Cloudflare has certainly improved several of my websites that on shared servers. I am currently only using the free Cloudflare service on some personal websites, but Cloudflare does offer more stats and control.

To get a sense of what Cloudflare can do for your website check out the 90 second video of what Cloudflare does. Also be sure to check out the Cloudflare tour page for more information.

Overall, Cloudflare is am impressive service. I am going to continue to use it for my personal sites and see how the performance improves over time. If you want to try out Cloudflare it only takes a few minutes to setup. If you do come back and leave a comment about what you think of the service.

I am sure if you have stopped by here in the past and read a few posts you would know that I am a pretty hard core Mozy online backup fan. I have good reason to be, they have helped me keep my business data safe with MozyPro. I have survived a hard drive failure with no data loss and it has helped me to occasionally recover files that I deleted by accident.

I liked MozyPro so much I started to use MozyHome to backup our family data. Mostly photos and videos. There is some other files in there as well, but the large majority of the files I backup with MozyHome are photos and video. It adds up to several hundred gigabyte, not a small amount. It has been great knowing that those files are safe offsite in the event that my local backup fails or both the local backup and computer are stolen or destroyed somehow.

Recently though Mozy has announced new backup plans for MozyHome and as result my several hundred gigabyte backup will go up in price from $103.95 every two years to over $825.00 / two years and that is assuming I create no more photos and video in the next year and a half I have on my current subscription. That is a fairly large price increase. Thankfully I do not have to worry about it until my current subscription expires in about a year and a half.

I understand that Mozy has not had a price increase for MozyHome for a long time, I also understand that I am probably part of the 10% of users that backup a lot of data. I looked at what I backup to MozyHome after the price increase was announced and yes there are some files I can remove, but the majority of them are files I want to make sure are safe. Things like photos of my kids, videos of their first steps, their first school concerts, and so on. These files are precious to me and despite what someone else might say, I want them to be backed up and safe. That is why I keep local backups of them, and why I want an online backup of them as well.

I still like Mozy, and will continue to use MozyPro to keep my business files safe, but I have to admit when my MozyHome subscription is close to over I will likely be moving my family backup to another service. I do not say that lightly, but the new MozyHome plan quotas are to small and too costly to stay with them.

When it does come time to move my home backup I am leaning towards Backblaze. My wifes laptop has Backblaze installed on it and it works well just automatically backing up everything. I like the fact that if I need to restore all of my files from them I can have a USB drive shipped to me with the files on it. You can read a Backblaze review over at Online Backup Deals if you want to know more about the service. Of course if you want to sign up you can go straight to the Backblaze website.

If you are like me and have a lot of personal data that you want to keep safe take a look at Backblaze. If I referred you to MozyHome for your home backup and you are not happy about your price increase take a look at Backblaze, they appear committed to staying an unlimited backup service.

Yahoo’s stupidity continues with news that they are closing down Delicious. While not making many headline lately Delicious was a fantastic service that allowed people to bookmark websites so you could access them anywhere. I used to use Delicious regularly to save sites that I would find so I could access the bookmarks from anywhere. The mere fact the Yahoo is closing down a service that was used by millions regularly giving them a database of website bookmarks with tags is astounding to me. How could they not find a way to make money with this service shows how poorly Yahoo had and is being run.

Of course if you use Delicious you are now going to have to export all of your bookmarks to use on another service. Search Engine Land already has a roundup of 10 alternatives that you can switch over too and a good place to start if you want to maintain your bookmarks in the cloud. One service that is not mentioned is Xmarks. While Xmarks is not the same as Delicious, it does provide you with the ability to sync your bookmarks across web browsers, and access your bookmarks over the web from any web browser. Xmarks also had a close call with closing down recently but have been acquired by LastPass so they will be around for a little while longer. At least if Xmarks does close down you will not have to worry about exporting your bookmarks since they will already be one your computer.

I wonder how long until Yahoo closes down Flickr? Course maybe someone could help out my buddy Rhett raise some money to buy it from Yahoo and make it work.

There are some applications that I use all the time and has made my life easier. Dropbox is one of those applications that I mostly use to sync files between my main desktop and my laptop so I always have the latest version of the files I am working on. It is also great to sync my latest favorite album so I can listen to it on the laptop as well. I was looking forward to the Android application coming out so I could use Dropbox to always have the most important files I need available on my phone. After installing the app from the Android market here is what I like and don’t like so far.

The Good

• Allows me to easily upload files from my Motorola Milestone to Dropbox.
• Can stream music to my phone, which is handy on a wifi connection.

Things I wish it could do

• Sync – I am amazed the I cannot sync at least some specific folders to my phone. This is one of the things Dropbox does best and it is missing in the Android app.
• Download a whole folder – I can download individual files, but it is not possible to download a whole folder at a time.

Dropbox on my laptop and desktop are great, but I have to admit I am a little disappointed in the Dropbox Android app. It seems like they just missed ignore what makes Dropbox great. Sure streaming music to your phone is cool, but I want to be able to wirelessly sync data, music and video to my Android phone so I have it when I am not connected.

I was reminded recently that I am human. I made a mistake and when I make a mistake it tends to be a big one. Now I am pretty paranoid about backing up data so when I discovered what I did I knew I would be able to restore pretty much everything from the backup I had, but there was a few pages of new content that I did not have a backup for.

As I started fixing my error I kept wondering how I was going to restore that new information that the client had placed on their website between the last backup and my screw up. Then it dawned on me, I had read the pages that the client added to the site on both Firefox on my desktop and Firefox on my laptop. A quick about:cache?device=disk and sure enough they information was cached. The only problem is that Firefox does not give you a very user friendly view of the cached files. I needed an easy way to save the information so I could add it back into the website.

This is where I discovered the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It allows you to sort the items in the Firefox cache by key, size, type and date. Using the Firefox CacheViewer I was quickly able to find the couple items I needed, save them as HTML files and copy the information out that I was missing.

If you every need to go looking though your Firefox cache for some information that you might have lost, or just want to browse the cache and see what Firefox has saved take a look at the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It sure helped me when I made my mistake.

Your IP Address Is: 38.107.179.207

 
It seems like I need this information at least once a day lately from one client or another so I thought I would make it easy for me to find.

If you need to find your IP address often you might want to signup for a service like DynDNS that will assign a domain name to your DHCP IP Address. I use it for my office IP Address and it makes it easy to connect to my office network.