BlueCapra

Using Technology To Solve Problems and Create Solutions

The Versatile Bar Code – 9 Faces Of The QR

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9 faces of the QR - Krispy Kreme Doughnuts sign with QR bar codeTechnology is a great thing.  Smart phones are becoming more popular and the efficient transfer of information from the people who have it to the people who want it is always needed.  This information transfer is often in the form of websites or apps but can also a variety of other sources such as RSS feeds and QR bar codes.  Even though we are moving toward a more digital world, much of the communication and information we receive is in print form or other method of one-way communications.  To help bridge the gap between print and digital communication, we have the QR, or Quick Response, bar code.

QR bar codes have a variety of uses and they are becoming more popular.  It is common to see the strange looking square symbols on products, menus, and buildings.  A while ago I wrote a post entitled Practical Small Business Technology Marketing about the benefits of QR bar codes and a few ways to use them to help your business.  As with all technologies, there are improvements and updates.  In an effort to stay up-to-date with those advances, I have compiled some information concerning the creation of QR bar codes, their possible uses, and the results when scanned on a smart phone.

UPDATE: If you are using QR codes, check out my other website ScanThisGuide.com.  It has tons of QR code reviews from real products that you can learn what to do and not to do.  Plus, you can download my free ebook that has more in depth QR code goodness.  Now, back to the post…

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1st on Google – Week 11

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Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. If you missed the first few posts, you can find the first one here, 10th Week update here, and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 04-08-12 (click here to do your own search):

  • #15 – The About Me page from my personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 10 places from last week at #5)
  • #30 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 18 place from last week at #13)
  • #31 – My LinkedIn profile (down 11 place from last week at #21)
  • #44 – BlueCapra.com tag page; posts tagged ‘Alan Reeves’ (down 10 places from last week at #34)
  • #50 – The post, How Would You Use a MeTag™? from CoachRadio.tv about one of my laser engraving products, the MeTag™ (up 29 places from last week at #79)

This week was similar a few weeks ago (week 8) when my results tanked.  At first glance, it looks like another terrible week but there is a little bit of a silver lining.  My first occurrence is at #15 and overall, my top 5 results decreased 20 places.  I showed up 10 times in the top 100 search results (my silver lining).  This is two more times than I have ever showed up in the top 100 which is promising. I’m not sure I like the trade-off, the drop in my first showing vs. number of listings in the top 100, but that is the way things are.  It does seem that the results can fluctuate a great deal week to week (sometimes referred to as the Google dance) but the same big sites are showing up time and time again. [Read more…]

My WordPress How-to: Learning Shortcodes

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If you use WordPress as your website framework, you have probably used shortcodes even if you have never heard of them.  A shortcode is a bracketed code that you can insert into a post to perform a particular function.  For example, if you have an image gallery on one of your posts, it was likely created using a short code.

For a more complete list of the built-in shortcodes, visit Support – Shortcodes on WordPress

In this post, I will walk you through setting up your own shortcode and give several examples of how they could be used.

For my particular issue, I needed about a paragraph of text and a few links to show up on certain posts.  There are plugins, such as Bottom of Every Post, that will put the text or code just at the title suggests, at the bottom of every post, but I needed something a little more selective.  Before creating my own shortcode, I just copied the text I wanted and pasted it into 10 different posts.  Worked great, unless I ever wanted to change the wording. [Read more…]

1st on Google – Week 10

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Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. If you missed the first few posts, you can find the first one here, 9th Week update here, and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 04-01-12 (click here to do your own search):

This week was similar to previous weeks.  My first occurrence is at #5 and overall, my top 5 results decreased 8 places.  I showed up 6 times in the top 100 search results.  My picture did show up 5th in the image results which is also intriguing.  Something else that is interesting is the sites that show up in spots #1 through #5: [Read more…]

Portable apps – An office in your pocket

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Imagine yourself getting ready for a day in your small business.  You wake up early, eager to start the day.  You exercise for 30 minutes and feel amazingly energized.  You are ready for anything.  You kiss your spouse, tell you children bye, and head to the office.

You have the most amazing ideas on the drive.  Product concepts, new sources of revenue, a cure for the common cold (well, maybe not that amazing…) all pop in your head with ease.  You carry your laptop into the office, sit down at your desk, ready to make history.  You press the power button and………… nothing.

Portable apps computer problemYou spend the next hour trying to revive your poor laptop.  How could your computer do this to you?  After all the amazing idea on the ride to work, how could this happen to you?  The ideas are fading.  You scramble to write down as much as possible before getting too frustrated about your computer.  Sure, there are other computers that you can use but all your information is on that dead laptop; passwords, documents, work files.  Not gone, but locked away.  You can hear the poor bytes just screaming to be let out.  What can you do?

Anyone that uses a computer for work runs the risk of losing data or productive time due to hardware problems.  Computer hard drives can crash, fans can die, and operating systems can go a little wacky, all for no obvious reason and often at the worst possible time.  You can backup your data but even if you remember that, all you have is backed up files, not a workable computer.  What can you do?

Portable apps to the rescue

Portable apps listUSB drives have come a long way.  One of the first one I purchased was a 512Mb ( 0.5Gb).  The more commons sizes now are 8Gb and higher.  They are faster, smaller, and more reliable than ever before.  They are so fast that you can run programs directly off the USB drive.  These programs are called portable apps.  There are a variety of portable apps that are free and easy to use.  Here are the ones I personally use (for a more comprehensive list, check out PortableApps.com):

These programs turn your USB drive in to an office in your pocket and any computer you use into a productive machine.  For example, let’s say most of what you need access to is web-based in the form of a blog.  With the portable version of Chrome, you now have a browser you are familiar with.

But what good is a browser without your bookmarks?  Xmarks is a plugin for your browser and free service that backs up and synchronizes your bookmarks on their servers.  You can have your bookmarks at your fingertips, even after your main computer dies.  As long as you have the Xmarks plugin enabled, you can have the same bookmarks on multiple computers, updated constantly.  I highly recommend it.

What about web development?  Last year, I decided to learn PHP and MySQL.  To test out the pages, you have to view them through a browser on a web server.  If you are just learning, the result is a lot of extra time transferring the data up to the server.  To remedy that, I installed a web server on my USB drive.  The particular one I used was XAMPP.  It is easy to install, easy to use, and works great.  If you want to learn web development, you can use XAMPP to get more done in the same time.

Portable apps can be a productivity-saver on those days when your regular computer decides not cooperate.  You can have your browser and bookmarks, FTP program and sites, and audio recording software as well as a number of other great programs at your fingertips, no matter what computer you use.

With all these options, how will you setup your portable office?

(photo by: David Castillo Dominici)