If You Can Believe, You Can Achieve !

… YEAH RIGHT

Don’t get me wrong I do believe that people can accomplish things, however, people need to stop thinking that wishful thinking is enough. Hard work, risk, and luck are the only things that will get you anywhere. Even then there is no guarantee that you will succeed. History praises the winners, but for every winner there are hundreds of loosers that no one will ever speak of.

On that note finally motivational posters for the pessimist inside all of us. Or maybe they should be called unmotivational posters. Well in their case they call them demotivators and they can be found at Despair.com

I mean with gems like these how can you go wrong.

Read on about the technology overload that I have been going through and how I am trying to streamline my processes.

For someone who works with computers you would think that technology would be second nature. The truth is I know the web, when it comes to cell phones, printers, operating systems, computers, smart phones, blue tooth, etc I am probably only a few steps above the layman.

The first thing that has changed my life is a new Blackberry Curve which resulted from an upgrade in my phone plan. Some people call it the Crackberry because of its addictive nature, and after a few days I can see why. It really is amazing to have the internet at your finger tips. I feel like I am back in 1993 when my father bought a dial up modem. I can also see what the big deal about “mobile” is and why so many startups are trying to get it right.

Here are two interesting things I discovered for my blackberry. Hopefully this list will continue to grow.

Nimbuzz – Picture Skype for cell phones. In addition to a plethora of features, this little guy allows me to sign on AOL IM without having to pay for text messages (currently I don’t have unlimited).

Google Sync – Sync your blackberry calendar with Google Calendar. Speaking of Google Calendar, I used to be skeptical, but the “Quick Add” feature alone shaves hours of my time.

Other productivity tools I decided to invest in include Harvest. This is by far one of the best time trackers, budget estimators, client phone book, invoice generating applications I have seen in a while. It is super intuitive and comes with great downloads for your vista gadgets and your cell phone. No more spreadsheets to track client work.

To speed up the way I use the internet I downloaded Flock Browser. Coolest thing about flock, besides the fact that it sounds like another four letter word, is that it really gets web 2.0. I am able to keep all of my email, bookmarking, social, rss, media content all open at once with an easy way to share any content. In fact, this post is being written using flock without having me actually have to go log into my wordpress admin to log in and make changes.

I decided to download Skype again. The first time I downloaded it a year back I did not really need it. I have to admit Skype is awesome. The voice is crystal clear, and video chat is pretty fun. I also don’t have to waste my cell phone minutes since you can call land lines at a very cheap rate.

Now lets talk about some things that drive me nuts about technology.

My girlfriend and I recently purchased an old iBook for $350. After three months the thing starts to freeze upon startup. I spend hours reading forums trying to figure out different boot options and try all of them. I soon learned that the issue was a common issue with my model and Apple used to have a trade back program because it was so rampant. Well lucky for me the program expired and we are out some serious dough.

Another thing I noticed about Apple people is how they handle their technology failing. In the past I had issues with Vista and when I visit their forums people were angry and irritated using four letter words that rhyme with Flock. Apple people react something like this.

That is to bad that the logic board is fried and I have to buy a brand new computer. Oh well I was due to clean out my hard drive anyway.

For my birthday my folks sent me over a printer/fax/scanner. I am pretty psyched, but the damn thing didn’t come with a USB cable. So I go buy one and its the wrong USB. I take care of that and the CD that came with it can’t download the drivers for Vista. Typical BS in the world of technology, where standardization is not embraced by everyone you get some angry people.

Tags: web, online, online tools, blog, technology, blackberry, flock

I have been creating sites for some time, and in particular blogs. It is no mystery that I am a huge fan of Wordpress. I have heard of people using it as a CMS because of the ease of creating new pages and the ability to set the homepage to a static page. I decided to investigate Wordpress as a CMS and invested in purchasing WP Remix.

Before I jump into the review I just want to be clear about a few things. I have used Typepad, Joomla, Drupal, and Open CMS as content management systems in the past. In addition, my link to WPRemix do have affiliate code attached to it, but that does not mean my review is biased. If you find my review useful and decide to purchase it there is no reason why I should not get part of the share for contributing this review.

UPDATE: I just launched a new site called Wordpress CMS Blog where I posted a WP Remix 2 Video Review

Design Templates I have to admit the thing that drew me to WPRemix were the stunning template layouts. To be clear these were not themes. If you want to create good looking websites you have to know CSS and some HTML. None the less the layouts look great with nice layouts. There are 6 homepage layouts, over 10 content pages including about, event pages, about pages, contact, etc etc.

CMS Capability - Unfortunately I would not call WPRemix a content management system. It is more like a theme on roids. If you are not comfortable working with HTML and PHP you will not be able to update content with ease. What it is good for is creating sleek websites using wordpress.

SEO – The theme is SEO friendly, but like with any theme I recommend adding SEO Plugins to cater to your SEO needs.

Learning Curve - Like most new things there is a slight learning curve. For example I did not realize that if you want to create multiple sub pages with the same layout you have to copy the file and rename it in the php field. The one thing I did notice is that the support was fantastic. Within 12 hours I always got a thorough response on my question.

Now you might be wondering what is the site I built using WPRemix ? Well recently I decided to start a site about Absinthe since now it is legal in the United States.

Below you can find a screen shot of the site. I used stock images, CSS edits, and the copy was provided to me by a copywriter. It took me about 20 to 30 hours but that was because I kept messing up and got stuck in a few areas. I think the next site can be built in half the time, and after that the goal is 5 hours per site.

Click Image to Enlarge

In summary I just want to say be careful when you think of Wordpress as a CMS. WPRemix is a great tool in creating a website, but it not a true CMS. It is also not easy to scale if you need to create full sized sites.

If you have any other wordpress cms tools please post links or give back feedback.




UPDATE: WPRemix 2 has just been released and the features are amazing. I have been messing around with it for a past few days and now I can call WPRemix 2 a true Wordpress CMS. You can check it out here.