I enjoy taking photos of my family, home, neighborhood, and city. Over time, I’ve tried a bunch of different apps that do things like filtering, framing, text overlaying, and basic photo editing. Here are 10 that I really like and use regularly…

1Camera+

I paid $1.99 for this app, and it’s my favorite app by far! It’s much better than iPad’s built-in camera app. I take all my photos using this app. It comes with automatic scenes, including clarity, auto-adjustment, flash, backlit, darken, cloudy, shade, fluorescent, sunset, night, portrait, beach, scenery, concert, food, and text. You can rotate, crop, add special effects (i.e., toy camera).

Upgrade for $0.99, and you get the i<3 Analog Filter Pack. You can share via email, message, create a web link, or share on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

2PSExpress

This app is PhotoShop Express by Adobe. It’s free and offers a built-in camera, auto adjustment, cropping, and way more! You can adjust the exposure, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, tint/temperature, black/white, as well as colorize, sketch, soft focus, sharpen, and share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and email. A copy of your original file is always saved, and you can undo and redo changes until you get just the right look.

Upgrade to $4.99 features include: noise reduction, self-timer, and auto-review.

3Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular apps on the web, and for free and packed with features, it’s no wonder! Instagram has a built-in camera or you can use your camera roll. You can crop, rotate photos, auto-exposure photos, auto-soften photos, or use the mini built-in photos. You can share your photos to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, and email. You can also make your photos private, so they’re only viewable by those you approve.

Instagram offer a ton of free custom-designed filters and borders as well as Linear and Radial Tilt-Shift blur effects for extra depth of field.

4Overgram

This free app allows you to add text to a photo. You can change the font color, style, and size, and then align and position them around the photo. You can only share it to Instagram or your camera roll.

All photos are watermarked, but you can upgrade for $1.99 to remove the watermarks. This also gets you 15 custom fonts and more sharing options.

5Vintique

This free app has a built-in camera or photo roll option. You can edit in normal, high, or full resolution. You can crop or rotate and add a variety of vintage filter effects, like some old-time sepia feel, hazey dream-like, and black-and-white.

Upgrade for $0.99 and get a retro-style pack that comes with 25 additional filters. Open in Instagram, save to album, or share to Facebook, Twitter, or email.

iOS Camera Apps 6-10 will be Friday’s post!

Does managing your blog or website seem a bit taxing at times? Contact Drake Intel Group to manage your blog/website, social media presence, or web technical needs and get back to your business!

We all know Google Maps is great for finding locations and driving destinations, and who doesn’t love Google Street Views? But there are also many creative uses for Google Maps which allow you to explore places from around the world, have fun, and even play games. Here are three examples we found.

1MapCrunch allows you to select a country or continent or choose a random location.

Other options include:

• Urban: Puts you in a random neighborhood.
• Inside: Puts you inside businesses such as restaurants, shops, offices, gyms, stadiums, hotels, etc.
• Stealth: Puts you in a random location and removes the map marker info. This feature is good for games, such as the Airport Game, where you move around your random location until you find an airport. Or you can move around your random location finding clues until you figure out where you are.
• Tour: Puts you in a random location, which could be urban or rural, and creates a 360-degree tour.
• Auto: Allows you to set your time, and be placed in random locations for that time until you stop the program.

You can also view the MapCrunch Gallery, which has a view of the day for some of the more unusual finds. Certain countries aren’t available for all options.

2GeoGuessr is a guess-your-location game.

This game consists of five rounds. You’re randomly placed in a location in which you can navigate around until you think you know where you’re located (anywhere in the world). Then you use the inset map to place a pin-point on the location.

You will then be shown the correct location and given points based on how close you were. You’ll then proceed to the next location. When you’re done with all five rounds, you can send a link to your friends to challenge them to beat your score.

3The Secret Door has you enter a random location through a door, which can range from SeaWorld to the North Pole. The navigation in this game is limited; you can only explore for a short distance from the initial starting point. However, compared to the first two games, this one seems to have more unique locations.

These entertaining games can be used in a variety of educational ways, such as teaching geography or for writing prompts. While these websites work on mobile, they’re not so easy to navigate.

If you have different ways of using these sites, or you know of any other games using Google Maps, please let us know in the comments below!

Does managing your blog or website seem a bit taxing at times? Contact Drake Intel Group to manage your blog/website, social media presence, or web technical needs and get back to your business!

If there’s one WordPress maintenance task a lot of site owners don’t like doing, it’s checking their blogs and websites for broken links. After spending so much effort blogging, site owners find out their resource (external) links:

• have had their permalinks changed.
• point to a post or page that’s been deleted.
• point to a site that’s moved to a different domain.
• point to a site that’s moved to a host with frequent server latency.

In any case, these bad links are giving site visitors 404 Page Not Found errors. As if that isn’t bad enough, the search engines won’t exactly reward sites with broken links, either.

Fortunately, there’s a great plugin to help you find and repair your broken links – the Broken Link Checker.

Once you install and activate this plugin, it begins checking for broken links immediately. Depending on the size of your site, this process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

Look for Broken Link Checker under your list of plugins and click on its “Settings” link. You’ll be presented with the options shown here. Let’s explore these options.

• Click on General to see your status, controls for link checking, and notification options.
• Click on Look For Links In to see the parts of your site you can have links checked.
• Click on Which Links To Check to see ways to exclude or filter link checking by list.
• Click on Protocols & APIs to see API selection options.
• Click on Advanced to set the timing for broken links, to set a maximum limit on execution time, and to re-check all pages (to reset the plugin as new).

After the plugin has executed, you’ll want to check the results and, if any broken links are found, take care of them. Within WordPress, click on “Tools” from the left sidebar and you’ll see “Broken Links” with the number highlighted in black. Click on Broken Links and you’ll see the Broken Links screen shown here.

Our example has only one broken link. Notice on the right, you get the page or post source, and options below to edit the page or post, or trash or view it. After you find out what the status of the broken link is, look left and hover over the URL link to take these actions:

• Edit the URL.
• Unlink the URL (make it text).
• Declare the URL not broken.
• Dismiss the URL (make the error message go away).

Finally, you can click the error message itself, 404 Not Found, and find out when the link was last checked, how long and how many times it was checked, the number of times it’s failed, and how many days it’s been broken.

A couple of features I really like is the ability to:

• Get a list of all links ever posted on your site, allowing you to search and filter by URL, anchor text, etc.
• Apply custom CSS (colors, etc.) to differentiate between broken and removed links.

Shortcomings? I’ve been using this plugin for years and I really can’t think of any!

So try Broken Link Checker and clean up the readership and SEO qualities of your WordPress site today!

Does managing your blog or website seem a bit taxing at times? Contact Drake Intel Group to manage your blog/website, social media presence, or web technical needs and get back to your business!

Do you have a WordPress blog that seems to load progressively slower? There are a number of reasons for WordPress latency. Some of the most common are:

• Too many unnecessary plugins, overlapping in functions
• Uploading non-optimized images
• Not compressing the WordPress database after repeated posting or page-building.

Let’s examine the last one.

Practically everything you do in WordPress is added to or modifies a database of code. Much of what WordPress saves for you is not permanently needed. This wasted code quickly bloats your database and slows down the user experience. Periodically, your database needs to be compressed or optimized. This is part of WordPress maintenance. Though you could perform this maintenance with your host’s PhpMyAdmin feature, that’s a little time-consuming.

Our favorite tool for performing this task is the WP-Optimize plugin. Once you install this plugin, you’ll see the WP-Optimize option on the WordPress sidebar. Click on it, and you’ll be presented with the options shown in the image below (click to enlarge). What do these options do?

• Postings: Every time you save a new post or page, WordPress creates a revision of it for you. You probably already have several unneeded copies of (long) posts or pages. Around the time of WordPress 3.XX, a new auto draft feature was introduced, the purpose of which was to improve the revisions and auto save process. This automatic process frequently saves your posts to the “wp_posts” table in your WordPress database and becomes massive in no time.
• Comments: It’s easy to mark comments as spam without actually deleting them from your spam folder. This plugin handles that and also eliminates comments you haven’t approved yet (“in moderation”).
• Database Tables: WP-Optimize removes wasted spaces in your “MySQL” database tables and compresses them. This saves time in parsing code.

The image below shows our database stats before using this plugin (our WordPress site doesn’t really need to be optimized). Stats include each table’s name (whited out in our example) along with its size, status, and space savings. Also shown is the database’s name and size and the optimization size possible.

To optimize your site, simply check the appropriate boxes and click “process.”

IMPORTANT: Make sure you have your database backed up first, just in case a problem occurs! We use a premium plugin called BackupBuddy, but there are other options as well.

After compression (left), you’re given the database size, the space saved (negligible in our case), and a breakdown of the number of posts and comments deleted.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this plugin:

• It doesn’t allow for scheduling.
• It doesn’t remove posts in draft or trash.

So try WP-Optimize and feed some speed to your WordPress blog!

Does managing your blog or website seem a bit taxing at times? Contact Drake Intel Group to manage your blog/website, social media presence, or web technical needs and get back to your business!

Do you have more bookmarks on your Firefox bookmarks toolbar than you know what to do with? Does the right side of your bookmarks toolbar show a right-pointer indicating that bookmarks continue?

There are a lot of ways of alleviating this crowded bookmarks problem. One is simply by creating folders on your bookmarks toolbar containing dropdowns of bookmarks. Another is the Roomy Bookmarks Toolbar add-on, which allows you to control icon sizing and the spacing between icons. But one of my favorite tools to combat this problem is the Custom Buttons add-on.

Custom Buttons allows you to take a bookmark, turn it into a toolbar icon, place it on the navigational toolbar, and delete the bookmark! That’s assuming, of course, you feel you have ample room on your navigational toolbar to do so. If not, you can always add the All-In-One Sidebar extension, but that’s a whole other post!

After you install Custom Buttons, go to options for this add-on in the Firefox Extensions page. You’ll probably decide to leave the three checkboxes unchecked by default, as I did. To add a custom button, go to View -> Toolbars -> Customize and you’ll be presented with the box shown on the left. Below “Customize,” you’ll click, “Add new button” (highlighted in red).

When you do, you’ll be presented with the “Add New Button” box shown below. The “Code” tab (highlighted in red) is our main objective. The “Button Settings” tab is to add a keyboard shortcut to execute the button you create. The “Initialization Code” tab is for execution at browser launch, though I haven’t needed to use it yet.

So, let’s create our first button which will simply take us to a specific URL. You may leave the “Button URL” field blank. Give the button a name. I’m going to call mine, “Wikipedia” (don’t type quotes). Next, select one of the colored stars in the “Image” dropdown or, better yet, browse for one of your own icon files. Most image formats are accepted, and I generally size my images around 20px in height–you’ll have to decide for yourself what looks best. Now go to the Code tab, and type (copy and paste) the following line exactly (delete /*CODE*/)…

Note the URL can be changed for whatever site buttons you wish to create. Click “OK” to finish. You will need to find your new button from View -> Toolbars -> Customize and drag it to your navigational toolbar. Then, click and test it.

When you want to create additional buttons, you can right-click on your existing button and you’ll get the pop-up box shown on the left. Select “clone button” and then just right-click and edit the new button which will pop up to the left of the old one.

Let’s create a second button type. This time, we want to create a button that will perform an action within our browser using, you guessed it, Javascript. How do we code that?

One of my favorite website tools (not an add-on) is CiteBite. It allows you to highlight text on a webpage and share the given URL on the Web. Once again, we would go to the Code tab. Here is the code we would use…

Notice the code above will show up as one very long line horizontally in the box. That’s alright–it will work just fine. Notice the single quotes inside the parentheses (starting after loadURI and ending before the semi-colon–the very last character on the last line). The javascript for some sites will only work with double quotes. When you create your own buttons in the future, you may have to experiment to see which quotations work.

Clippable–a site that makes a webpage print-friendly–is a good example. Here is its code (note the double quotes)…

Let’s take a look at one last example of what Custom Buttons can do. It can perform actions by accessing Firefox’s internal (“Chrome”) links. (Think of Chrome as a protocol or reference–not the browser.) Suppose we want to create a button to access our Bookmarks manager like a webpage (not to open as an external window). Here is the code for that button…

There are a lot of Chrome links which allow Firefox to do many things. Many of these Chrome URLs are becoming outdated quickly (restructured/renamed by Mozilla) as Firefox versions are rapidly released. One of the better resources I’ve found is SuperUser.

After a while, you’ll probably want to delete any buttons you aren’t using. Otherwise, you may have to sort through a fair amount of unused buttons in your Firefox customization window to find the one you’re looking for.

One thing to keep in mind is that Custom Buttons uses about 1MB of memory – a fair consumption of Firefox’s resources. However, by my estimation, Custom Buttons is well worth it! For me, it’s a tool that speeds up my work by allowing considerable customization of Firefox. Try it out and let me know how you like it!

Does managing your blog or website seem a bit taxing at times? Contact Drake Intel Group to manage your blog/website, social media presence, or web technical needs and get back to your business!

Over time, when you install and uninstall programs in Windows, residual fragments of code are left behind in the form of registry keys, folders, and files in Windows Explorer. Likewise, when you add and remove Firefox add-ons, a similar process occurs.

In my last post on this subject, I reviewed eCleaner and explained how to clean up these left-behind fragments. For quite some time now, I have been using and loving another add-on to do an even better job. When I say, “better job,” I have seen the results first-hand. My Firefox is free of partially visible toolbars, sidebars, or icons.

Preferences Cleaner does a remarkable job of cleaning up junk files in Firefox.

Let’s take a look at how simply and effectively this installed add-on works. Go to the Firefox add-on menu, find this add-on by name, and click “options.” Looking at the first figure below, begin by clicking on “Uninstalled Extensions” (shown in red). In the top pane, you click once to highlight the name (or line) of any leftover add-on you wish to remove. When you do that, you will see lines of files in the pane below that comprise the add-on above. You can either click each one to highlight it (or press CTRL-A to highlight all in Windows) and then click the “X” icon on top to delete or use the delete key on your keyboard. Make sure you delete all lines in the lower pane.

Next, click the third icon from the left on the top menu, “Loose Preferences” (shown in red). That will take you to a screen that looks like the second figure below. Carefully read down the left pane (alphabetized) for the same name of the add-on you’re trying to fully delete. You may need to expand some of the folders to look inside, just to be sure. If you find anything, again click to highlight the folder (tabbadge in our example, shown in red), and then delete the files in the right pane (2 in our example, shown in red).

That’s it–you’re done! There are a couple of other things you can explore, like a list of your installed extensions (add-ons) and preferences you can import or export. You should actually get in the habit of exporting preferences before deleting them so you can restore them at a later point in case the deletion renders an installed add-on useless.

Remember, by taking a minute to clean up your uninstalled extensions in this way, you’ll help keep Firefox free of extraneous code and more responsive to your browsing needs which, in the end, will require fewer restarts.

Does managing your blog or website seem a bit taxing at times? Contact Drake Intel Group to manage your blog/website, social media presence, or web technical needs and get back to your business!

Real estate agents who use Facebook as an unimaginative, self-promoting posting tool are really missing its potential. Visitors to your Facebook business page want to see more than just real estate news, listings, foreclosure rates, or mortgage information. Your page should show that you’re a knowledgeable resource to your local community!

1 Choose a Local Charity.
Post information about your favorite charities. Include any fundraisers, volunteer needs, wish lists, or photos.

2 Share Business Development.
Stay up-to-date on new businesses coming into your area, zoning issues, and redevelopment and share them with your Facebook community!

3 Share Events
Share events with your page followers. There are more than just open houses. Is the neighborhood you farm having a neighborhood garage sale? Post an event about it!

4 Use Amusing Real Estate Stories.
Show the humorous side of real estate. A funny news story can keep people coming back to your page. For example, a story about a company offering to pay your mortgage in exchange for painting their logo on the front of your house is a real conversational starter!

5 Ask Questions.
A good way to engage on your page is to ask questions. What is the one feature you must have in your home? What do you wish you knew before you bought your first home? Would you rather have a maid or a gardener?

6 Share Homeowner Tips.
Offer useful homeowner tips, such as reminders about changing the battery in the smoke alarm, replacing A/C filters, or how to select paint colors (include smartphone apps).

See, that’s 6 ideas and not one listing in the bunch!

Don’t forget to contact us to manage all your social media business needs!

Does this sound familiar?

• “I’m not getting any leads.”
• “No one is calling me.”
• “No one shares or comments on my blog.”

When I’m contacted about our SEO services, one of the first questions I ask is, “Do you have any analytics installed on your site?” Quite often the answer is no.
How can you figure out what is working and what is not if you don’t have some form of analytics on your site? You simply can’t and we can’t make recommendations for SEO services. If you don’t have any installed, I advise you to install them and, after a few weeks, we can review them to determine your SEO strategy.

We recommend Google Analytics. It’s free and has a robust set of features. You can view a wide range of information including:

• Unique visits
• Pages per visit
• Traffic sources
• Keywords
• Time on site
• Bounce rate

There is so much more, but when you’re getting started, you just need to look at a few pieces of the pie until you get more familiar with Google Analytics. Take a look at these simple, basic terms:

• Unique visitors are the number of people who visited your site. They might visit multiple times and look at numerous pages, but they are only counted once.
• Pages per visit tells you the average number of pages each unique visitor views.
• Traffic sources simply tells you where the traffic is coming from.
• Search traffic includes visitors from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and numerous other search engines.
• Referral traffic includes sites that link to you or sites you have shared your content on, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
• Keywords shows you the keywords your site visitors typed into a search engine to find your site. This is known as organic search.
• Direct traffic is from those who typed your web address in directly. This could be because they have it on a business card or bookmarked it from a previous visit.
• Time on site is the amount of time they spent on your site.
• Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who landed on your site and then left without visiting another page.

Obviously, this is a simple overview of Google Analytics, but without this basic information, it’s hard to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

If you really want to delve into learning more (which will only help you), Google has a great set of learning resources available, free of charge. Topics include:

• First Steps
• Fundamentals
• Interpreting Reports
• In-Depth Analysis

If you’re using WordPress, you can easily install the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Yoast. And if you want to monitor on the go, there are numerous apps available.

Contact us for all your SEO needs!

The year is 1969 and space travel is no longer the realm of science fiction. Computers take up entire rooms.

In my childhood, I remember the Jetsons’ vision of a future world with computers in every room of the home. Who could imagine what changes 43+ years would bring?

Not many people in the 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s thought much about computers, or even considered the possibility of having one in their home. Karl bought his first computer in 1980 and I got mine in 1986. When we got together, we each had one. Since you hooked it up to what might be your only phone line to the outside world, having two wasn’t really necessary. Computers have really come a long way since then! Now, many households not only have one per person, but they also have smart phones, laptops, and tablets. Our household now has four devices for getting online.

I found a video from 1969 showing what people thought the future of the Internet might be like. Predictions included multiple computers in a home, online shopping, online banking, and email. All of which we do now. Of course, women can pay their own bills today!

What kind of computer gadgets do you think the home of 2055 (in 43 years) will have in store for us? Comment below!

I get many new Twitter followers every day and since I don’t autofollow, I review each one. I’m amazed at how many people set up a new account and start following a lot of people without taking care of the most critical things first. So, here are my 7 secrets to creating an awesome Twitter profile:

Avatar – The default avatar on Twitter is an egg–a big, white egg on a solid-colored background. This doesn’t say anything about you. Your first priority should be to change the default avatar. Use a nice headshot or your company logo. It doesn’t need to be a professional photo, either. I’ve seen many nice ones taken with a cell phone.

Header – You can include a photo that adds more pizazz to your profile. It might be a photo of your family, your office, your employees, or a product line.

Name – Use either your name or your company’s name.

Location – This is easy enough. Where are you located? I’ve seen people use city and state, state only, or even global. The nice thing about using the city and state is that many Twitter directories list by city, so it’s nice to be included there.

Website – If you have a website, include it here. If you don’t have a personal or company website, you could always use your LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social media profile.

Bio – You get 160 characters, so you can’t write a book here. But you can include a few basic pieces of info that might help me decide to follow you. Things to include: what you do, kids, pets, hobbies, products you sell, things that might clue me into what you will be tweeting about.

Tweets – I’m not going to read hundreds or even dozens, but I do like to see a few to get an idea of what you might be tweeting about. I always suggest seeding your new account with five tweets of a variety of content that would give people a general idea of what you will be tweeting about.

Remember, an awesome Twitter profile is the first step towards an awesome Twitter following! For more tips, be sure to follow us on Twitter!