Whether by design or sheer luck, updating my profile was incredibly easy… because everything I needed was already in my completed LinkedIn profile. I was able to pull dates and copy/paste descriptions straight from LinkedIn, saving a tremendous amount of time. My profile was done in about one-third the time I had set aside for the project – time I used instead to fill in some holes I discovered on LinkedIn. I then transferred the information to Plaxo.

Join my network

Plaxo profile complete, it was time to find people. I took a cursory look at my recommendations (”People you might know”) but realized that until I had built at least a small network, I was unlikely to get many good hits. So I did something I swore never to do: I allowed Plaxo to pull information from another network.

Like most social networking sites, Plaxo offered a tempting shortcut to finding friends: tapping into an existing wellspring of information. In this case, my options were limited. There were the sites I don’t use (Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL) and the account I wouldn’t use (my personal Hotmail account). My attempt to follow LinkedIn’s directions were a miserable failure. There was one candidate for success, however: Facebook.

Double exposure

I studied the text carefully and confirmed that yes it would only bother people in my Facebook network who were already registered Plaxo users. I clicked the button to access my Facebook account, and noticed an immediate change in my Plaxo view: a photo appeared in my profile. Plaxo had co-opted my Facebook image – an Xbox Live avatar – for my professional profile. Panicked, I immediately went to update my photo… and found several photos of my child. In my Plaxo profile. That I had not uploaded to Plaxo.

Apparently, when I tied my Facebook account to Plaxo, it took the liberty of pulling my various friends-and-family-only photo folders and added them to the “Photos” tab of my profile. While there was nothing incriminating (keep your Facebook clean, folks), I don’t want strangers to have access to family photos – even if they are just my child drinking hot chocolate at Starbucks.

All images were in folders, just as they appeared in Facebook. Fortunately, Plaxo allowed me to delete entire folders, saving me a lot of time. If I had to delete each image individually, odds are the only thing I would have deleted was my Plaxo account itself.

After I finished cleaning out my personal photos and updating my profile pic, I reviewed ALL sections of my profile to ensure no other stray Facebook goodies had moved over. It appears contacts and photos were the extent of the damage.

Contact Us

Satisfied with my damage control, I moved on to the final section: Websites and Personal Info. Opening the Websites section results in an icon explosion – add your Facebook! Share your Amazon Wish List! Tell the world your twitter name! (Just one? I have two, but had to choose…). Not to mention Facebook, YouTube, Last.fm, MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr… and that’s just a very, very small fraction. If you’ve ever shared content online, odds are you can share it with your Plaxo network. (Or everyone. Or just Friends. Or just Family. It’s up to you.)

I chose a few resources, reviewed my restrictions and unleashed my profile on the world. All this took about an hour, during which time I received numerous mails in the background. I finally went to catch up and discovered I had four new Plaxo and two LinkedIn requests/friends.

Every single one was from Facebook.

Twittelator for iPad (click for larger view)

We picked up an iPad for our social media, Web consulting and copywriting business based largely on positive feedback from many people we trust on Twitter and our own great experiences using iPhones for the past two years. It’s a remarkable device, but expensive for what you get and very limited for many usage scenarios.

I’ll be blunt: The iPad is not a laptop/netbook replacement, and it’s a poor choice for anyone who really needs a full-featured Windows or Macintosh computer. The iPad is a touchscreen slate that’s limited to running approved apps from Apple’s iTunes Store and isn’t particularly good out of the box at accessing documents from your computers or file shares. And no slots or USB ports means you can’t just plug in an SD card or flash drive to access your media. Expect to purchase one or more apps to facilitate file sharing or else spend a lot of time e-mailing files to yourself!

We went with the WiFi only version to save some money and because AT&T has capped its already overpriced 3G plan. Frankly, we’d rather pay hotels for the occasional WiFi key than give AT&T a monthly stipend for so-so service we’ll rarely need.

You can (and should) add a Bluetooth keyboard to make the iPad passable for writing and light editing. You’ll have to reach up to tap the screen anytime you want to move the cursor, which takes a bit of getting used to and isn’t as efficient as using a mouse. It’s not a pressure-sensitive tablet, so it’s only moderately effective for sketching, and its built-in mike is adequate but it’s not going to replace my Zoom H2 for podcast recording.

I’ve been eyeing the ClamCase (due this fall, price unknown), which promises to give it a hard shell and attach a keyboard, making it look (and hopefully work) a little more like a laptop – but in the meantime I went with a $25 case that doubles as a stand and a $30 Vakoss TK-853-BK keyboard from Fry’s, which has different buttons to power it on and off but functions reasonably well once you get it working. (I’m pretty sure the first one I picked up was defective, but I might have just been pushing the wrong button!)

All that said, I rather like the iPad and it is highly effective for certain tasks. Namely gaming, e-mail and Twitter. I won’t dwell on games here since I’m focusing on its features as a work machine, but it is most definitely the best portable gaming device I’ve enjoyed to date – and as the founder of BusyGamerNews.com, I’ve tried nearly all of them over the years. The larger screen and fluid finger touch interface makes gaming even more fun than on the Nintendo DS, my previous go-to game portable. But unless your business is gaming, this won’t be enough to sell you on an iPad for the office.

Overall, social media is a mixed bag. The current iteration of the Facebook app is the iPhone version pixel-doubled, and this really shows its flaws under a magnifier. Sure, it works as well as the iPhone version - but the iPad deserves better here. Honestly, you’re better off just bookmarking Facebook.com on Safari, which on the iPad is more like the desktop version of the Web browser than the puny iPhone Safari app (though you will still run into the occasional mobile app restrictions and of course Flash is still completely blocked).

In the end, Twitter is where it’s at for the iPad – at least for me – and there are three apps that I’ve found that excel in different ways at helping you manage your tweet streams:

Twittelator for iPad ($5). The iPhone version of Twittelator is the gold standard for iPhone Twitter apps. It’s fast, full of useful shortcuts and – most importantly – fills in missing tweets and remembers your place if you have to quit and come back. It makes poring over hundreds of tweets reasonably efficient. The iPad version is in mostly even better than its iPhone predecessor but in a few ways takes some steps back. In landscape mode, individual tweets or streams (such as @ replies, direct messages and searches) that you select appear off to the right of your main timeline. Scrolling is fast and twitpics appear larger in the feed by default, making it easier to see whether you want a closer look. The downside is that, at this writing, it loses tweets greater than the 200 it can grab at once, doesn’t save your place if you quit, clicked links appear as an popup window instead of adjacent to your stream, and there’s no way to save images except to switch to Safari (which, again, loses your place!). But overall, getting through a couple hundred tweets is faster and more enjoyable here than with any other app I’ve tried. I’m hoping future updates address timeline bookmarking and recovery of missed tweets.

TwitePad ($2). This is sort of like the free TweetDeck – with lots of optional columns you can summon – but unlike TweetDeck (and Twittelator for iPad!) it remembers your place in the timeline and has a Web browser that opens at the far right alongside them. It even lets you open multiple links and keep them waiting as thumbnails along the bottom of the browser area. Ultimately, this isn’t as elegant as Twittelator and thus hasn’t replaced it as my primary app, at least not yet. The developer is aggressive at releasing feature-rich updates, so it’s definitely one to watch. For now, this is a good choice for Twitter accounts you monitor less often, say daily or even weekly, since it can easily fill in what you miss and it saves everything for offline reading in its own local database. For that reason alone, it’s perfect for my social media consulting!

Osfoora HD ($4). I bought this on impulse during a brief sale, and it has real potential. If you’re very methodical, you’ll appreciate the option to keep tweets marked as unread and there are up/down buttons to move through your timeline, though I found using this method slowed me down though may be useful for timelines that I need to focus on more closely (and finger scrolling is still an option). It does have those two very important features that Twittelator lacks: the ability to keep your place in the timeline if you quit and fill in missing tweets.

Other must have apps (all free):

EverNote. This is great for getting down drafts of articles while they’re fresh in your mind and then passing them to another device (e.g., PC, iPhone) through its cloud-based storage. No, I didn’t write this article on the iPad due to the level of editing required to make it sing. But if I did, I would have used EverNote.

WordPress. I’m a big fan of Windows Live Writer, but for some reason it always messes up my WordPress posts to this blog. So I thought I’d try this free app. Still, when it came time to post this article, I didn’t have the patience to try it out. But if I had a quick post with little to no complexity, it would be perfect.

iBooks and Kindle. The iPad doesn’t have the crisp display of the iPhone 4 (at least not yet), but the larger form factor makes it feel more like a solid ebook reader. I’ve avoided the Kindle and Nook because I prefer a backlit device, even if it’s not (supposedly) as good for long-term reading. I tend to read for short periods these days, and I like the flexibility to be able to switch to other apps when I want, so the iPad is now my preferred digital book platform.

Overall, it’s hard to recommend the iPad unless you find that your needs greatly overlap mine, or you can’t overcome your technolust for shiny new gadgets. Consider it a nice-to-have, particularly if you do a significant amount of work on Twitter.

But after three weeks of podcasting, they’re nearly gone. The key here is to edit the podcast yourself. Every speaking stutter during recording is one more edit you’ll have to make later. You’ll also get a really good sense of what your voice sounds like to others and how fast or slow you tend to talk, in case you need to make adjustments there too.

If you want to get started podcasting, here are the basic tools you’ll need:

• Audio recorder. I recommend the Zoom H2. It records high quality stereo audio, it’s easy to learn and saves your recording to an SD card, which you can pop into your computer when it’s time to edit. It’s also very portable, should you ever need to record something out in the world.
• Audio editing software. Audacity is free and the v1.3 beta lets you drag audio segments between tracks, which greatly eases editing. Seriously, don’t waste your time with v1.2.6.
• Leveling software. The Levelator is free; just drag and drop your final exported WAV file and it will even out the sound levels for you. This is particularly important if you mix in more dynamic audio, such as music.
• Music (optional). You don’t need music, but it does enhance your overall production value. You can find lots of free music at Mevio’s Music Alley as long as you register as a producer and provide proper credit.
• Podcast feed. To publish your podcast, you’ll need to create an XML feed. Since Apple iTunes has become the de facto standard, I recommend using their podcast feed specs to get started. You can also look at our feed as a guide (DON’T view it in your Web browser; instead right click the link to download and then open it in a text editor, such as Notepad). It’s basically just a text file that describes your overall podcast and each episode you release. Some blog packages such as WordPress have plug-ins you can use to automate feed creation.
• MP3 tag editing software. Your final podcast audio file should be exported to MP3 format (Audacity requires a free optional plug-in for this, so after you level your audio, open the resulting file back in Audacity and export it again). Once this is done, you may want to tweak the file’s tags and add an image that shows up in MP3 players. MP3tag is free and a quick way to prep your final file for release, or you can do this in iTunes by importing the file and selecting Get Info if you prefer.

That’ll get you started. Record something every week and see if your public speaking improves. I bet it does!

I do like to play it safe, so I attempted to run the Upgrade Advisor program to confirm that my laptop would do well with Windows 7. Due to a glitch with my Vista system, I was advised that the Windows Installer had failed and that I should contact my “support personnel” for assistance. Uh, that would be ME.

I figured I would be OK with my relatively recent machine, so I took the plunge. After awhile, I returned to find that the Windows 7 install had failed due to remnants of Kaspersky antivirus software that I was sure I had uninstalled at least a year ago. After several failed attempts to uninstall it (resulting in that same message to contact myself for help), I found that most antivirus software companies have removal tools – and Kaspersky was no exception. (Get their removal tool is here.) 

That did the trick. The rest of the install was smooth sailing, though it did take the better part of 6 hours to run since I chose the option to upgrade rather than wipe out my hard drive and perform a clean install. It was my hope that doing so would preserve the many licensed programs I had downloaded from Giveawayoftheday.com - but the track record here was a mixed bag. Some of the software does still work fine, but other programs have reverted to 30-day trials or require immediate purchase to be functional.

Most notable among these programs whose licenses did NOT survive the Windows 7 upgrade is Macrium Reflect, backup software I liked so much that I later bought licenses for two additional computers. Windows 7 Ultimate (along with other versions, including Pro) offers built-in backup software that can save files and a recovery image to a network drive, but I’m concerned that it states it won’t backup my installed programs – which would necessitate reinstalls should I ever need to restore from backup. No thanks. I’ll just shell out for another Macrium Reflect license.

Overall, my limited experience with Windows 7 is that it’s much zippier and programs seem to load much faster. My two-year-old machine now seems much quicker than I recall after spending a year on a newer, higher-powered primary laptop.

I’m not quite ready to upgrade our day-to-day work computers to Windows 7 (in part because our projects may require us to use Vista for at least another week or so), but now I am rather looking forward to it.

There are a few lingering issues that trip me up pretty much every day. If Windows 7 solves these, I’ll be very happy and even more productive:

1. Remember my windows and monitor setup. The one thing I’ve wanted from Windows for years is the ability to shut down or restart and have Windows remember every single open app and window placement. This includes Outlook messages, Web browser windows and tabs and even Notepad files. It seems like there should be a relatively easy way to write this information to disc and then restore it upon reboot. I work best with a lot of open windows that I then work through – sometimes over several days. When I have to restart my computer, it can take me 15 minutes to save and record all of the things I’m working on – and a crash or unexpected reboot can really wreck my day. The other part of this is monitor arrangement. I extend my desktop to the left, which is apparently backwards from what Microsoft expects. So everytime I disconnect and reconnect my laptop (say, to run to a meeting), I have to open and fix my monitor settings. I’d probably undock my laptop more if it wasn’t such a hassle to restore my extended desktop settings.
2. Bring back pinpoint text selection in Internet Explorer. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in the past year or so I found that selecting bits of text in Internet Explorer text windows (where I do a lot of writing, editing and posting these days) has been hit or miss. Mostly miss. Words that I want to set to STRONG get clipped right in the middle, words I’m cutting and pasting are truncated right down the middle, spaces and punctuation that I don’t want are selected, etc. I waste a lot of cumulative time correcting these little errors. It wasn’t always like this! I used to have more pinpoint control over text selection. Bring it back.
3. Be smarter about alerts and pop ups. I know Windows is programmed to inform me the instant that a meeting reminder is scheduled to pop up, or when it needs a password or to bring an alert to my attention, but please hold off while I’m typing vigorously into another window! Odds are that I’ll only be actively typing in short bursts, and you can check and wait a few seconds until I pause. Use the microwave popcorn rule: When there’s more than three seconds between bursts of typing, you can stop me. If you find you’re having to hold a particularly urgent alert for more than 30 seconds, go ahead and break in. At least I’ll know you tried to wait, and most of the time I won’t type an important sentence into a password box.

I’ll pick up Windows 7 soon after it comes out, but wondered if these sorts of things have been addressed. What about you, any Windows peeves that you’re hoping will finally get fixed this year?

Nowadays, most people use tools that take care of all that pesky HTML for them. Only problem is that, despite a decade plus of evolution, these WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors still don’t do a very good job. Working as I do with a number of organizations, it surprises me sometimes how little HTML some of the people who work daily on the Web know – and it shows in the lack of control they have when creating even simple layouts. When I look at the underlying code, it’s often a sloppy mess that reveals a telltale trail of many failed attempts to add a simple line break or modify a font.

If you want good results, you still need to know the code. Here are some tips to gain greater control over your Web-based content:

1. Never paste directly from word processing documents into a WYSIWYG editor. Your resulting code will be a nightmare that’s nearly impossible to read and modify. I believe many folks’ fear of HTML stems from having once looked at this type of intensive machine-built code! Instead, paste first into a plain text editor such as Notepad to clear the formatting (while you’re at it, search and replace any curly quotes, non-straight apostrophes, long dashes and compressed ellipses with their standard equivalents). Finally, cut and paste the raw text into your page editor and then add any formatting you need either using the WYSIWYG tools or, if you’re brave, directly with an HTML editor.
2. Review your code. Most WYSIWYG tools add unnecesary HTML. They may introduce incorrect font tags, add non-breaking spaces ( ) that can affect layout and create unhelpful ALT text (used to describe the content of an image). Learn your way around and fix any errors before they are published.
3. Learn some easy HTML. You don’t need to master stylesheets and scripting to build in HTML. Start with the basics: STRONG (bold), EM (italics), FONT (to control font selection, size and color), BR (line break), P (paragraph), A (anchor, which is how you make links) and IMG (for adding images). You’ll work your way up to master coder in no time. Note that this will NOT make you a professional developer; HTML is a simple markup language and NOT the same as writing software. But it’s a start, and can be a valuable job skill. More skills = more opportunities.
4. Use WYSIWYG strategically. Fancy HTML editors often provide good tools for complex tasks, such as table creation. You can build your table layout using a WYSIWYG editor and then switch to HTML to fine tune it, as needed.
5. Re-use, re-use, re-use. Once you have a piece of code that works, recycle elements of it. Save your favorite code snippets someplace handy (I use OneNote, but Notepad is fine too). And if you’re creating pages or HTML e-mails that are part of the same campaign and really need to be consistent, you should re-use the code (changing out images, links and copy where needed) rather than rebuild it from scratch. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a muddled mess that delivers a sloppy customer experience.

If you need to create Outlook profiles, here’s a step-by-step guide.

The majority of my accounts - including a rarely used Exchange account assigned to me by the company that finds some of our projects – are part of my first profile. An Exchange mail account that I use extensively for an ongoing client project is my second profile. The good thing about this configuration is that when I’m working, I am entirely focused on this client’s mail and there’s no risk of me sending out a mail from the wrong e-mail account.

The major downside is that when I’m locked into work, I cannot easily see what is going on with my other mail accounts. The best workaround I have found is to use my iPhone to browse my most important POP mail accounts throughout the day (it too can handle only one Exchange account at a time, and there’s no profile option – at least not yet). If I didn’t have an iPhone, I would use a secondary mail client such as Eudora. The important thing here is to tell Outlook (and any other mails clients) to leave your mail on the server, so you can check it with another client. For the secondary Exchange mail account, there’s Outlook Web Access available – so I leave that open in a Web browser and check it periodically.

The only other major issue is that when I make the Exchange server the primary account on a profile shared with POP mail accounts, it seems like Outlook gets confused and tries to send POP mail replies via Exchange. This can cause all sorts of problems including bounced mails. My workaround was to make one of the POP mail accounts primary, but now I have to be very careful or I’ll send mails to clients from the wrong account. 

I probably should create a third profile to completely separate personal mail from work mail accounts, but this would create a lot more daily effort to manage all of the various mail streams. It’s easier to just be careful when sending mails that I double-check that the account I’m sending from is correct. If you don’t have two Exchange servers, using profiles to separate personal from work mails would be much more efficient than it is for me, where I have all of my secondary work accounts (for The Writer’s Bloc) mixed with accounts used for personal mail and our gaming blog.

While Outlook is a good choice for managing multiple accounts, as you can see it’s far from perfect. Apart from the issues I’ve already mentioned, here are some of the things Outlook could do better:

Fast profile switching. It would be great if I didn’t have to quit and close all of my open mails and reminders to swap profiles. One of these days, they’ll figure out how to take a snapshot of Outlook’s work state and restore it when I switch back to that profile. At least, that’s my dream and I’m sticking to it.

Smart credential matching. When I sign in on profile A, why does it nearly always prompt me for the sign in credentials for my profile B Exchange server (and vice versa)? The profile should track this and prompt you appropriately. It’s not like I’m ever going to need to sign into the first server with the credentials for the second.

Overall, though, Outlook profiles are a powerful tool and pretty much required if you need to access more than one Exchange mail account. Here’s hoping these tips help you make the most of them.