Internet Marketing Tips and Freebies

How many times have you taken pictures of a property you have listed and needed to send them via email to someone?  If you have, then you know that all to often your email is returned to you or not sent because the files are too large. Sometimes zipping them is the answer but oftern it is not enough if you have a lot of larger photos to send.  Ever wished for an easy way to reduce the size of all of your photos at once?

Well I have a frebie for you called Fotosizer.

This program is easy to use and you don't need a degree in computer science to figure out how to use it.

There are three basic steps to use this program.

1.  Find the photos or folder full of photos you want to re-size.

2.  Select the resize settings that you want.

3.  Start resizing the photos.  You can choose which photos to re-size and where to save the re-sized photos.

I recommend putting all the re-sized photos into a folder with the same name as the original images - re-sized That way they are easy to find and send.

Yes, it really is that easy.   You can reduce the size of the photos dramatically and make sending them via email a snap.  No more messages that the files size is to large.  You can shrink the size of  JPEG and other supported formats.

You can re-size photos for email, websites, on-line printing services, slide shows (re-size all the photos in the slide show to the same size giving the show a better overall appearance) and photos that are going to be inserted into Word, PowerPoint or other presentation software making the overall document size smaller and easier to manage.

I have used this program often and recommeded it to the agents in my office and my clients. Everyone loves it.

Visit their site for a full list of product features.

This weeks blog is a bit of a change from my usual tech tips.  If you read this blog regularly, you know I am a big fan of a blog called Urban Garden Casual and an Urban Gardner myself.  This weeks Urban Garden Causal had a blog written By Cindy Naas about Edible playgrounds.

What is Edible Playgrounds? It is a all about teaching kids to grow and cook their own foods.  They have sow it, grow it, eat it projects.

They are involved in an ongoing movement to bring urban gardening to schoolyards everywhere all across the UK. 

An awesome concept that we here in the US should embrace.

It is sponsored by Dorset Cereals ( a UK brand of healthy breakfast cereal) and there is a fun and inventive site called Edible Playgrounds.  The site offers monthly garden activities that include protecting your beds for the winter, what crops can be planted now as well as pictures of edible playgrounds and fun activities for children like how to make Christmas Tag stamps from potatoes and win an apple tree contest.

If you are a gardening fan you owe it to yourself to spend some time at this site and poke around.  Great tips for getting your kids involved in gardening even if it is not in your local school yard but you own back yard! 

I grow my urban garden in containers on the deck of my condo. 

The site is great and even includes a page dedicated to ideas for projects using the cereal box and each box gives kids a mission to make something. Below is a screen capture of the page(it is animated and worth visiting just to check out the animation).

When was the last time you updated real player, quick time, media player, java run time or Adobe Flash Player?

These third party programs if not updated contain vulnerabilities that could leave your system open to hacker attacks and contain security threats that exploit software vulnerabilities and code flaws.

The Security patches for these programs are usually free and available for download from the program vendors. Visiting each vendor and downloading the latest patches could take some time and who had extra time to spend doing this.

I have a solution that will scan your computer for needed updates and provide the links for you to update the programs.

Secunia offers some free ware to scan your system and tell you what programs need updating and provides the links to the programs to make keeping your system security in top-notch condition. It is a great little program and worth checking out.

I was amazed to find out that I had several old programs on my computer that needed patching and uninstalling!

You can download Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 1.0 from downloads.com. It is Freeware and it is really easy to install and use.

If you want to check it out first, they have an online version that also works great! Find it here Secunia Online Software Inspector.

If you want to get it for your company network, they have a network version called Network Software Inspector (NSI) 2.0 This is not free cost is $30.00 per host seat (the host seat is the number of computers on the network). So, scan your computer today and download and install the patches the easy way.

Clip Art from WPClipart - Free High Quality Public Domain images.