Quick Tips will be short posts on simple things you can do and/or use to make life a little easier. These will include websites that offer great services, simple tricks or shortcuts you can use on your computer, cool online freebies and other worthwhile tech discoveries. I hope you’ll find them helpful!

My first Quick Tip is for making free personalized calendars with ePrintable.com. The site allows you to create weekly, monthly and yearly calendars that you then can download as PDFs and print. Each calendar format on ePrintable.com leaves room for a small photo and text—the site offers a dozen or so stock photos and inspirational quotes to choose from or you can upload your own photo and write your own text. The entire process is simple, and you can have your very own calendar ready to hang within two minutes!

I hope you’ll find this Quick Tip (and future ones) useful, and, as always, thanks for reading my blog!

Copyright © 2009, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.

With all the buzz Twitter receives in the tech world, I assumed that everyone had heard of it and that I was a relatively late adopter. (I created a personal account in December 2008, and I created a TechKathy account in January 2009.) And while it has taken me a few weeks to understand what all the fuss is about, I have to confess that I’ve grown to like the service.

In a word, Twitter is “microblogging.” What does that mean? If you think of blogging as writing about your thoughts, feelings, activities, secret crushes and other things on your own personal site, then imagine Twitter as a miniature version of this. You get your own page (mine is http://twitter.com/techkathy), and you write about whatever you want in 140 characters or less. How much is that really? Here’s a post that I wrote that’s exactly 140 characters:

I made my first animated gif using a cool Twitter logo I found thru Smashing Magazine. My new gif is now at the bottom of www.techkathy.com.

So obviously, you’re not going to tell your life story in 140 characters. Twitter tells you to just answer the question, “What are you doing?” One thing I really like about Twitter is that only people who actually WANT to know what you’re doing will see your Twitter posts. When you join Twitter, the site prompts you to find friends to follow so you see their posts, and it allows others to choose to follow you. You’re never spamming people with your posts, and you’re not getting spammed either—what you see or don’t see is completely up to you.

I have chosen to follow tech writers like David Pogue and Gina Trapani and tech-related organizations like Macworld and WordPress, so most of what I see on my Twitter homepage is tech-related news.

Most of what I write and post on Twitter is also tech-related. When I first joined Twitter, I started out writing rather mundane things, but it recently dawned on me that I could use the service to provide additional small tech tips to people as I discover them. My tips are usually for websites and services that I’ve found useful that I may or may not have time to write a full blog post about. You can see my tips, and all my Twitter posts, without having to join by visiting http://twitter.com/techkathy. If you do decide to join and choose to follow me, you’ll get my posts delivered to your Twitter homepage automatically.

If this all sounds interesting and you want to learn more, please check out this two-and-a-half-minute introductory video from the Common Craft:

And for still more on Twitter, here are a few articles:

• Twitter Tips for Beginners, by David Pogue,
• What is Twitter?, by BBC Panoramic, and
• How to Use Twitter Like a Pro, by Sean Tibbitts, (a response to Pogue’s article).

As always, thanks for reading my blog, and happy tweeting!

Copyright © 2009, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.

In 2005, I decided to give one a try. After all, millions of others must be using these sites for some reason. I joined LinkedIn, mainly because my husband had joined and found it useful for keeping up business contacts and networking. I made a profile, but because of my fears about privacy and my general wariness, I gave LinkedIn the absolute minimum amount of information I could. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t contacted by (or linked to) anyone, and I saw very little value in it. My husband, however, filled out a detailed profile and linked to a number of respected friends and colleagues, and he began receiving messages from recruiters with job possibilities.

After a while, I started to reevaluate my position. Obviously, there was some value in LinkedIn – my husband was benefiting from it – and maybe, if I took the time to check it out more thoroughly, LinkedIn could help me too. I slowly began expanding my profile, and I found a number of past and present colleagues and linked to them.

This slow change of heart spread to other social networks as well. I was once staunchly opposed to Facebook, but, after finding many of my friends from college, high school and even elementary school there, I joined that one too. I’m now a member of a few social networks, and I’m happy to say that I think they have enhanced my life in some small, but meaningful, ways.

Through Facebook, I’ve been able to reconnect with old friends; my profile has begun appearing in searches by recruiters on LinkedIn, and I’ve started to use Twitter to keep up with friends and other technology bloggers. I’ve joined some other sites less for the networking and more for features they offer. For instance, I like to keep track of my books and get new recommendations with GoodReads and LibraryThing, and I like to listen to my favorite musicians and discover new ones through Last.fm.

Although I’m much more open to social networking sites now, I still think it’s a good idea to be a little wary of them in terms of privacy. It’s very difficult to decipher many of these privacy policies, and companies sometimes do share and/or sell users’ information (or use it other ways users haven’t specifically authorized). In 2007, the site Quechup was widely criticized for harvesting users’ address books without permission. And possibly worse, hackers often try to mine user data from social networking sites. Two MIT students were successful in downloading the personal data of over 70,000 Facebook users in 2005. I don’t want to scare people from using these sites at all, but I do think people should consider these risks and think carefully about what personal information they’re going to share.

When I sign up for a site, I always use an email alias rather than my real email address. (Both Yahoo Mail and Gmail offer these options.) That way, if the site sells my address or if someone uses that address to spam me, I can just delete my account with that site and delete my email address alias, and I stop the spam problem immediately. Another option would be to set up an email account that’s only for social networking sites.

I also avoid giving out my earth address, phone numbers and other sensitive data to these sites. Do Facebook or Last.fm really need that information? I don’t think so. If I decide later that I want to share that information with other users, I can easily just email them with it.

Social networks are great tools. They let us stay in touch with family and friends, help us find job opportunities, indulge our personal hobbies and more. But social networks are tools – kind of like hammers. They can help us build great things, but they can also hurt us, if we’re not careful with them.

As always, thanks for reading my blog, and happy networking!

Copyright © 2009, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.