design reverb

Microsoft LiveWriter or Liveâ„¢ Writer or Livewriter (whatever they are calling it) is, to quote Microsoft:

Windows Liveâ„¢ Writer is a free, downloadable program that will help you include rich content in your blog posts and know exactly what your blog will look like before you publish it to the Web.

Here I’ve added an image with left text-wrapping, a photopaper border, and right margin of 5px. LivewWiter even gives options for adding a watermark and other “effects” such as sepia tone and more.

I do find though that if your content doesn’t extend below the image when it is set to left or right text-wrapping, the content of previous posts is subject to wrapping also. To fix this I found I either had to change th size of my photo in LiveWriter, or edit the page in WordPress.

What’s pretty cool, at least in my humble opinion, is that when you insert an image, LiveWriter automatically links to the larger image. Also, since I have the lightbox plugin installed, it sets that up also. Go ahead, click on the image and see. Excellent, huh!

LiveWriter is basically a WYSIWYG editor. While there are several views you can use to view you post as you edit, I have found Web Layout to be the most useful. In Web Layout view, you see your post how it will look in your blog, css styles intact. Pretty cool.

All in all I’ve found Live Writer to be a useful tool, especially if you are not on the web all the time. Give it a try and lemme know what you think.

Crazyegg is site tool which tracks what your visitors click on. It gives you an inside look at where you visitors click and where they click the most.

They have three types of visualizations, to help you see what’s being clicked. You can view your results in Overlay, List and Heatmap. Overlay gives you details of each individual element. List is a summary of your “raw click data”. Heatmap, well Heatmap is pretty cool. It shows an hot and cold type of infrared style image. It shows you which areas are “hot” and which areas are “cold”. Very, very cool.

Give it a try. They have a free version. It will track up to 5,000 hits a month, and you can track up to 2 pages. Their Standard Plan is only $19 a month, and tracks up to 25,000 visits, and unlimited pages. Plus the Standard Plan has live updating whereas the free only updates every few hours.

Crazyegg should definitely be a tool in your SEO toolbox. Especially those of us using google ads, or any ads for that matter.
Check it out – Crazyegg.com

I’ve been trying out an online collaboration/project management tool that you may or may not have heard of: Basecamp. Some clients like it, some don’t, or I should say some use it, some don’t. Seems it would be nice to have more control of the process, without worrying about wether you are paying for something your client won’t use. Well now I’ve found a free competitor that does all of the same things as Basecamp, yet is free and you can host yourself: activeCollab.

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free!

activeCollab is written in PHP 5 and MySQL, and will not operate under PHP 4, so be sure you have PHP 5 installed. Give it a try, since its completely free, unlike Basecamp (from $12 to $149 per month), you have nothing to lose.

On a sidenote, this is a nice read: How to live happily with a great designer.