Tom Rogers

I am the very proud owner of a MacBook running OS X Leopard. Although it used to be a display model before I got my hands on it I am still very happy with its performance. Nothing can ever be perfect, of course and my notebook is far from it. One of my main gripes with it is the rate in which the battery is losing its capacity.

In the six months that the laptop has been in usage the battery usage time has gone down from around 5 hours to barely over 3. That was a huge, unexpected and unwelcomed leap in the quality of service (QoS) of my system. I don’t want you to have to experience the horrible feeling that I did when I saw my notebook’s full change capacity, so, to make that you don’t, here’s some tips that may help you.

Firstly, be sure to run a battery-monitoring tool on a semi regular basis. By monitoring tool I am not talking about the little icon the sits in the OS X’s menu bar nor the icon in the Windows notification area. Those just simply don’t offer enough details. If you’re a Mac user I recommend a free tool called Coconut Battery as it is something that I personally use. I am unable to suggest an equivalent as I’ve never used one – if you search Google you will likely find something to suit. 

This next one is one that I am especially pleased to share with you as I overlooked it myself. If your like me you never take your notebook with you and just leave it running on A/C power 24/7, well that is one of the worst things you can possibly do to “help” extend your laptop’s lifespan. It’s actually dam bad for it. So, I guess, this tip is make regular use of your battery even if your right next to a power outlet in your home or office unplug your laptop and exercise the battery.

A lot of the lower end portables on the market don’t seem to give very true readings as to how much power is available in the battery. If you wish to try to reconfigure or recalibrate the two. check if there are any options in your computer’s BIOS to help you to do this.

Lots of reviews have been kicking around the interwebs of laptop coolers and stands. If for nothing else they are fantastic for extending your laptop life. I say this because having your laptop hot is bad for the battery. Lithium ion batteries hate heat so keeping them cooler is always a positive thing.

The battery technology in most notebooks is lithium ion. It is not supposed to retain any of the information from your previous charges but occasionally it does. The fix for this maybe to burn as much power of the battery as possible and then just leave it to charge up completely.

Lastly, you may just have to come to terms with the fact that you may have to buy yourself a new battery. If you chose to do this you might as well look on the vendor’s website to see if they offer a longer life battery option.

So, I really do hope this list has helped you a little. All of these tips will not have helped everybody but hopefully there’s something in this post that you’ve learned.

I use AdSense as the sole monetisation strategy for my websites and the blog. The money is really not important to me especially as I have not even received one payment from them yet. It’s really an awful lot more critical that the visitors enjoy the content. If your going to even bother to write content if your not truly passionate about, committed to and believe in what your saying.

The reason for me really not putting all that much faith in the AdSense business model is the fact that people aren’t really that attracted to ads however relevant and softly and carefully placed they are. If I’m on a webpage and see ads I see them as an irritation and not something that adds value for the end user. My heart does go off to Google for their efforts in trying to combat that mindset by allowing its publishers to customise their ad units to blend in with specific style types.

What I’m trying to say is I believe that somebody needs to come up with an entirely new solution were by the visitors are rewarded for helping the content producers make themselves a decent amount of money. I don’t know what solution to that is and, quite franticly, I’m sure I never will. The point that I’m trying to make is, for consumers to truly care about helping the person behind the server is they need to also be able to see what’s in it for them. Sad, but true.

I honestly couldn’t give a piece of dirt even if I figure a solution that does these such things tomorrow. This is because, if there is service like that, it is certainly not well established or widely trusted. Just for the record I sticking with Google for now, and most likely will be for the life of my websites.

I have a blog and a static website. Both I love and utilise for completely different purposes that are equally as important and are of the same value to me. Here are some top tips for creating and maintaining an amazing site or blog.

Blog Setup Tips

The first and biggest tip that I can impart on to you is that, before you plop down your hard earned cash, realise how much work it will take. To help you to discover that you should actively blog using a free blogging service such as Blogger or WordPress. Doing this for a few weeks will give you a better picture in terms of the amount of work that is required.

AFTER that initial trial period, if blogging is your thing, you’ll need to make sure that your own the copyrights to your content. When you have a hosted blog on WordPress or Blogger they own the rights and, if you do something that is in violation of their terms of service they will just delete your blog with no warning. The solution to this is to install word press on to your own hosting account.

For god sake decide on your theme early. You need a theme that looks good and, more importantly, is functional. I have been very happy with the default that came with my installation of WordPress (2.5) but am aware of distinct lack of customisability. The things that I suggest you look for when selecting a theme are one or more widget ready sidebar(s), the ability to add a custom header graphic and more importantly legible font types. I am using Contempt on this blog.

Next you’ll need to make sure that when your blog is setup it is SEOed correctly. This is so that search engines like Google are able to index your blog. Often you will be better off downloading a plugin to do it all for you as a pose to spending endless hours trying to do it yourself.

Write some content. What the hell is the point of spending all that getting traffic to and optimising your blog if when it gets there there’s nothing for the people to see?

Website Setup Tips

Make sure you know what your website will be about and know why your visitors would want to come to your site. Figuring this out will later help you when you come to add content.

This next tip is specific to the kind of website hosting service you choose. If you are an advanced user you are likely going to just be using a plain text editor. For the novice user I highly recommend WebSite Tonight provided by GoDaddy as it everything that you need to get started. Utilising basic hosting and a content management system. If you ask me what I’m using I’ll tell you that for my static website I’m using a CMS called WebsiteBaker.

Write some content. What the hell is the point of spending all that getting traffic to and optimising your blog if when it gets there there’s nothing for the people to see?

1. Automatic Updater – as the name suggests this is a plug-in that allows you to update your installation of WordPress with absolute ease. All you need to do is hit a few buttons and it will do the rest. So that you don’t have to go and download the new version, clear your data tables, back them up and well, I think you get my drift! This plug-in does it all for you! I mean think about it for a sec, is it really worth all the hassle for .1 of a release?

2. PodPress – This is also a fantastic compliment to the platform. If you are a podcaster you need to be using a WordPress blog. I say this simply because of one plugin. The PodPress tool will manage the uploaded files, take care of RSS, not to mention AUTOMATIC submission of your feed to the iTunes Music Store. It will also help you enter Meta data for each episode so that the search engines can index them.

3. All in One SEO Pack – Indexing is very important if you want anybody to find your blog. When Google and others find websites they put you in their indexes. Things known as spiders go round the Internet searching for new sites. This is all done on the basis of certain keywords. Well, the letter O in SEO stands for optimisation. So, this plugin knows what spiders are looking for and changes your blog’s meta tags accordingly.

4. WP Touch – This one is kinda hard to explain. It’s a plugin but also a theme. When activated what it’ll do is optimise your blog theme specifically to be viewed on iPhone or iPod touch while still retaining things like that header graphic. You just said that you are worried because most of your readers do so in a desktop environment and you don’t want to give them a mobile, restricted experience! Don’t fret the only people who see the optimisations will be those who are using an iPhone or iPod Touch.

5. Add to Any Subscribe Button – This plugin will install a sidebar widget that allows users to subscribe to your content in many popular readers. Even to get the latest posts via email.

So, there you have it. Those are just a few of my many picks as I felt it necessary to narrow it down to 5. If I did not do so I would be writing for days and I’m quite sure that none of you would like to read for days.        

I love to receive people’s questions whether that is through YouTube or email. Actually, the sole reason for me producing video content is because I want to help you guys. Think about it, if there’s nobody benefiting from my efforts why bother? Let’s face it, doing videos and writing good blog entries is an awful lot of work, especially as I have a lot of schoolwork to do and I can’t dedicate my whole life to it.

Peter Johnson emailed me today, just like you can by using tom@therogersfamilyonline.com, asking me a question. It was in regards to some software that runs on the linux operating system and it acts as a virtual webcam driver. The question was as follows:

Hello Tom,

I’ve seen a few of your videos and it looks like you know your Linux stuff - so I thought I’d give a shot at asking a question.

I take it your familiar with the ‘cheese’ web cam application in Linux.

Do you know a way around changing the video input source?

As I have a TV card and web cam ‘cheese’ selects the TV card as default and I am unable to change it to my web cam.

Any ideas?

many thanksr

Peter

Well, before I begin even trying to answer your question, I would like to thank you for your participation in my community. From what I have gathered, you can correct me if I’m wrong in this, Cheese is an application that is based on the GNOME desktop environment and was inspired by the Mac OS X application called Photo Booth.

I’m really sorry that I couldn’t help you any more but I’m not going to lie to you – I’ve never used it!

If you are reading this and you have ANY scrap of help for Peter comment down below or email me at tom@therogersfamilyonline.com.