Kristofers Blog » 2007 » November
It seems like everyone puts out some sort of buying guide this time of the year, so we decided to do a short one as well over at DragonSteelMods.
Tom wrote up a nice selection of things he’d like to see under his tree this year, and I think a lot of other people would too!
Tom wrote it up, but I searched around for the lowest prices I could find on the things he choose, so if you’re looking for that perfect gift for the Techie in your life drop by and give it a look. You could always forward it to other people as well who might be wondering what to get you this holiday season!
Click HERE to check out our picks for this holiday season!
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A couple days ago I was browsing around a bit and ran across a very interesting site called Bloggers Showroom, the idea of the site is to showcase blogs essentially, but it’s more than that really…
One of the more interesting parts of Bloggers Showroom is that it can actually help to make your blog or website a better one. The owner, Vince Enzo, takes a nice large screenshot of your site and posts it, under that are several questions about the appearance, feel and style of your site so others can vote on it and you can see what people think of your site.
To submit a site you’ll have to join the site, free of course, and then vote and comment on two other sites he has listed, then he puts your site on the front page just like the others.
It’s a great idea really, and it can help bring traffic to you as well by allowing people to ‘discover’ your site through Bloggers Showroom.
I submitted DragonSteelMods to Bloggers Showroom, and I’ll be submitting this site as well soon..
You can see the page about DragonSteelMods HERE and vote on it as well.
So hop on over and join, vote/comment on a few sites and submit your own to the Bloggers Showroom! I like the idea a lot, it’s a really cool concept!
I’ve had four people vote for me already and I can see that someone voted the worst for me for every question.. That’s nice of them wasn’t it? Thanks!
Click HERE to go there About page to learn more about them.
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I enjoy writing reviews and well honestly it’s kind of hard to come up with content for my blog from time to time, so a couple months ago I signed up with Sponsored Reviews and finally I got my first one which is what you see here…
This is a brief review of CatalystOffice a new web-base office suite, or specifically small business software, made to help small businesses mange their daily affairs better and to help employees keep in better contact with one another.
This suite was officially launched last week actually, right before Thanksgiving, you can learn more if you visit the Catalyst launch blog about all that.
Before we get into the review here’s a bit of info from the CatalystOffice website about the product:
- Its goal is to take away a lot of the frustrations small businesses have trying to get things done with Microsoft Outlook and Windows
- It works right through the web – you need a Firefox browser and a PC and there is no software to download
- It works with other Microsoft products – Word Excel PPT etc. – and you can import your Outlook contacts and calendar into CatalystOffice
- The software was designed for the needs of small businesses, with multiple users in different locations, and has a lot of “little” features that are missing from Microsoft Outlook and Windows
-There are 4 pricing plans starting at $25 per month – companies can add as many users as they want and the price does not increase, it’s only dependent on how much storage you use for your files (for example you get 10 Gigs of file storage for $25/month)
I like how it says you ‘need’ Firefox browser to use their software…
(All of the following thumbnails will open in new window to 1024×768 size where applicable.)
For this review I signed up for a free trial account on their website, they sent me my id and password to access the account and actually a special web address as well. Clicking the address took me to the login page, then through a series of pages to set up the basic account:
Once through you’re taken to the main Admin menu where you have numerous choices of things you can do related to CatalystOffice and all of the user accounts involved. Here you can set permissions for what users can do and many other options as well. At the bottom of the screen though is nine icons related to the various things you can do with CatalystOffice, from left to right they are: Admin-Messages-Documents-Calendar-Contacts-Tasks-Alerts-Notes-Journal, and here are screenshots of each:
From the Admin panel you can also check the stats for your server and the users logs as well.
Being this is brief I didn’t get into doing too much with CatalystOffice, but I did play with the email and the Documents feature to get an idea of how it all works. Setting up an email account is similar to using Outlook where you enter your information and your basically done, but when I tried to retrieve my messages it didn’t quite work.. but more on that later…
The next I did was try out a document and see what happens there. The idea here is that you can upload documents for all of your employees to use and access if need be and they open it with the software that is on their machine. So I uploaded a Word document and tried to open it, Java Opened and then I got an error, after I clicked through the error messages my software (OpenOffice) opened the document for me and I was ready to go.
So I continued playing with the Document part of CatalystOffice and I thought I would click the ‘Send’ button.. big mistake there, it opened the mail program in another window and it found all of my emails at the same time as well, opening about 40 pop-ups with briefs about the emails, then Firefox stepped in and blocked the other 942 pop-up email windows from opening..Thanks Firefox!
So after clearing that mess up I went back to the email and there were my messages! The email application is very similar to Outlook as well, but most email programs are really anymore.
Seeing all those emails there I decided I wanted to delete them, there I ran into my next small problem, another error telling me that no items were deleted due to system error. After I clicked ‘OK’ about 15 times my emails were all gone.. odd really it is..
So, what have we learned here?
Well I did play around with it a bit more and I found it to be a very interesting solution for a web/browser based suit of office tools. Obviously it’s not without its faults as we’ve seen, but I do believe that if they address these problems CatalystOffice could shape up to be a very useful product.
One thing I did notice was there was not any support for mobile devices, or I may have missed it, but you can IM through it to contact your employees etc.
Overall I think it’s useful solution for those businesses that need to keep in contact and have things readily available for their employees.
Now if they can just work out the bugs they’ll be alright!
And finally here’s a bit more about CatalystOffice:
CatalystOffice is an integrated suite of productivity software—email, document management, calendar, contacts, and instant messaging—created specifically to meet the needs of small businesses like yours.
Our applications are enterprise-grade. They’re the same tools big companies use, but they’re tailored for your small business—and far more affordable.
Our software is especially flexible. After all, people are more productive when they can work their way. With CatalystOffice, they can. We don’t tell you how to file your emails. And we don’t tell you how to share your documents. When it comes to organizing and managing your company’s information, you decide.
CatalystOffice was created by businesspeople, not IT folks. You’ll feel it in the intuitive functions. You’ll see it in the systems and controls. You say who has permission to read a document or change your appointments.
The best part is that all of this is quickly and easily delivered and managed over the web. Want to get a new hire hooked up with email? Snap. Done. That’s CatalystOffice.
What can we say about security? Redundant. Redundant. Redundant. Your data’s covered. And impressively located in the same data center as some of the best-known web companies in the world.
And you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get started.
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Well I’ve just ran across rssHugger and I thought I’d give it a try to see what’s it’s all about.
To join rssHugger you need to do a review of them or pay $20 if you don’t want to do the review…
I’m curious as to how you’re supposed to do a review when you aren’t really using their service yet though, I’m not quite sure how I can review something if I really have no experience with it. I don’t think they want a review of their service as much as they just want the exposure for rssHugger through a post on your blog.
But from their site:
rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.
To get your blog listed, you must make a blog post/review about rssHugger on your blog and submit the link. All you have to do is register your blog. Your blog will not be listed until an admin manually approves of your post (FREE).
Of course I’ll give anything a try to get some more traffic, and I’ll update this post and maybe just make a new post as to how rssHugger works out for me. It all sounds interesting and it would be nice if it worked out as well as it is suggested it will.
EDIT: and HERE is my rssHugger page… I ran into a snag that Collin (the owner) personally fixed when trying to submit my site, now that’s service!
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So I got the new Noctua NF-P12 120mm fan today for review, and I got a very nice surprise with it as well..
Two surprises actually, they sent me a nice Noctua branded pen, which is ok, but the real surprise is the recognition that DragonSteelMods got from Noctua…
I almost missed it actually, there is a fold out section on the box that displays the technology involved in the design on the NF-P12, but at the bottom is a little section about awards their previous fans have received.. and DragonSteelMods is listed!!! WooHoo…
Some real recognition for all my hard work! It feels very good to see that, it’s actually very exciting, especially since it’s from one of my favorite companies, I love Noctua products and always have..
Check out the pics:
It might not mean much to most people but it makes me feel really good.. a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside!!!
and heres’ the links for the reviews of those fans
NF-R8 HERE
NF-S12 HERE
So Thanks Noctua for the recognition!
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I’m sure most people already know that ATM fees are just stupid, why should we have to pay blackmail to get access to our own money?
Seriously though, does it really cost $3 for a bank that is not mine to let me use their machine and give me money? So basically they are charging me three dollars for them to connect to my bank and see if there’s enough money to give me what I requested.. It’s goofy, it’s extortion is what it is…
So I had to go downtown recently and of course there were no parking spots on the street so i had to use a parking garage, it sucks really because I only had to run in for a quick 15minute meeting, but of course I got charged for 30 minutes. Luckily this was on a Saturday and 30 minutes to 1 hour is only $2 at the garage I parked in.
Normally I like to have some cash on me, or I’ll hit the ATM on my way to town, well that day I didn’t have any cash and of course the ATM was out of order at my bank, they were doing the maintenance on it… So of course I figured I’d be alright because I had change for the meter or I could just use my card to pay for a parking garage.. So as I said there were no spots on the street to park so I went into the garage to park, well when I got done with my appointment I went to pay, it’s all automated so there is no one there to take your money, and when I try to pay I find out that the machines are not accepting credit cards right now… So my nearest bank is about 5 blocks away, I really didn’t want to walk, so I hit the closest ATM that was only about 100Yards from the parking garage. I took $10 out, got charged $3 by that bank, so I get my statement in the mail from my bank and THEY CHARGED ME $1.50 as well for that transaction!
So it essentially it costs me $6.50 to park for 15 minutes. The ATM charged me $3, my bank charged me $1.50 for using a strange ATM and the parking was only $2….
$4.50 FEE for withdrawing $10 OF MY MONEY!
There’s something wrong with this system, there really is…
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