Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Time for a link dump from my browser – clearing out tabs.

Education

How to Create a Portfolio with Evernote (Education Series) – Evernote is an awesome app – We use it all the time on various android and windows platforms.

Social Marketing and Web Development

Building trust - The Connection Constant

Want to build a online store? Choosing a payment gateway

Facebook – how to convert your personal account into a Facebook Page - for all those people who created a “person” for their business page.

More how to convert Facebook profiles into business pages including tricks and traps

Drupal

Configuring and adding images to Drupal 7 content with Wysiwyg, IMCE and Lightbox2 – very good tutorial

Excel

Probably the best explanation of using INDEX function for non volatile dynamic range creation in Excel

Windows 8

There will be lots coming on Windows 8 on this blog later – for now heres a very good read about how Windows 8 can pool data storage

Business

Realities of Business is a new website by a great friend to promote his new book. Worth a read! Buy it now!

Photography

Two local photographers worth checking out.

Helen Graham

Dale Travers

What have I been doing this week?

Running a volunteer project assisting with the terrible natural disaster flooding here in Queensland Australia.

I started www.qldfloods.org website on Tuesday morning as the rains came down. I asked on some technical forums for some assistance and next thing i know its 4 days later and I'm still in my office.

The site provides a one stop hub for resources and news and a bed matching facility for displaced people staying in evacuation centres with people offering space in their homes for them.

I am estimating some 50+ hours for myself and another 100 for my staff. The other volunteers have probably put in 600 plus hours. We have been on national TV at least three times, numerous radio interviews and also on CNN.

The site now has registered nearly 700 families and close to 2000 beds available for temporary accommodation - individual Queenslanders prepared to make room in their homes for strangers to come and stay.

This is my chart of what I've have been doing thanks to RescueTime.

I wanted to shout out to the helpers and sponsors - without whom this project would not have been possible

Thousands of dollars worth of servers in a server farm provided by OntheNet - 5 servers altogether and hours of time to put it together.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are very important for websites to hit that coveted number number 1 spot on related keyword searches.

With Drupal there are some specific tools that can assist with this. The major Search Engines, (Yahoo, Bing and Google) provide tools to do this and there are some Drupal modules that work with this.

The following process takes you through the entire process - excluding signing up for the accounts at Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Before starting make accounts (or sign in with your existing accounts) to each of these services:

• Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
• Yahoo https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
• Bing http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/#

Then make sure you have a current download of these modules:

• Global Redirect http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
• Site Verifications http://drupal.org/project/site_verify
• Xmlsitemap http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

Microsoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

Microsoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.