How to add A2DP support to Windows 7

Windows 7 came with no A2DP support and MS asked bluetooth hardware manufacturer to add this feature in driver upgrade. All bluetooth hardware on laptop where most of the time we need A2DP are made by Broadcomm (widcomm software), Toshiba or CSR. The last 2 manufacturer seem to have A2DP in Vista which should work in W7 but for Broadcomm nothing around.

I followed the steps and worked great for my Motorola S305 Bluetooth Stereo Headset


Source Here

Vista “hacks” to run more like Windows 7

Want your vista to be more like Windows 7, but don't want to pay?
Here is great vid I found while researching Windows 7.

These are all hacks and use 3rd party software so "enter at your own risk"

Here's the video:

 
And for those doing a clean install of Windows 7, even if you have a OS installed, check out this Video.

 

Facebook Places : Mobile app

I would like to thank Thomas Price of S.H.E Works for pointing out what appears as a new breakthough for Facebook on the mobile platform. Just filmed yesterday so this is hot off the Digital presses!
Thomas is active in the Eugene/Lane County Area and is one of my goto people when it comes to mobile and social networking.
If you have the hour to learn what great breakthoughs are happening at FB and mobile watch the video below.
And shoot a Thank you over to Thomas on Facebook.

Watch live streaming video from facebookinnovations at livestream.com

Import Your Old Hotmail Messages into Gmail

As many of you know I am gmail advocate.
So if you find yourself wanting more that what Hotmail has to offer, or you are already using other google applications and you have been looking for a way to make the transition I found this great blog posting on how to do just that.
Right Here
CLICK

DW 8 crashes at Initializing Extension Data

 

So it was bound to happen at some point. I have over 90 websites setup in dreamweaver and have had an occasional error, but this was a new one on me.

Every time I tried to load Dreamweaver it would get stuck at

 

Initializing Extension Data

Off to find a solution in search and found this nice little gem that fixed it right up.


 

I have a similar solution in Dreamweaver CS4 Windows.
The folder in question can be found at /Documents and Settings/[login ID]/Application Data/Adobe/Dreamweaver CS4/[language code]/Configuration/SiteCache.
In my case, I found it sufficient to delete the folder and file for the site I last worked on. When I re-launched Dreamweaver, it automatically rebuilt the cache for just that site.

Source Here

 

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Basic and Advanced Creative Strategies for Pay Per Click (PPC)

From The Internet Marketing Club
Time: 40 mins with Q&A.
Presented at GoToWebinar.com

Overview Of Webinar:
1) Start with a Strategic plan, measurable objectives.
2) Do Competitive research
3) Use tools for your keywords (free online)
4) Plan your budget and bidding…prepared for flexible up or down
5) Plan a mix of media: Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc
6) Target: geographical with keywords and message
7) Jump in and start testing -it’s a real time, trial and error, process.
8 ) Track, report analyzed, and refine
———–
Do a test your self for PPC:
Do a Google search and think about where you would click.
In high ranking organic results 70% of users still prefer to click on left side, not the PPC on
right of search results
—————
5 Ideas for a winning strategy
1) Relevant/Target message, Copy/Keywords/ landing page
2) Use available real estate wisely (35 character limit)
3) Read their minds: Dynamic Keyword Insertion
4) The Margie Trick : Display URL
(Margie was giving the webinar)
5) Use ‘Eye Grabbers": Symbols & Numbers in your ad
———

Winning lay out using 5 Ideas above:
1)Keywords: i.e Tigers was the example give. Need to be specific. Tigers brought results to broad. You will be wasting your time and money
2) Use available Real Estate strive for 75% +  Aproximatley 33 characters in the ad
3){Keyword: Health Insurance Quotes} Appears in Bold
if exact match to user query
4)Display URL must go to the Landing. Make a custum Page URL, so it looks more relevant in the ad listing
**Tip—-you can remove the www. from the ad and give yourself 4 more characters
5) Use Symbols & Numbers (Google does NOT allow @ ~ | and other unusual)
—Although when using ‘Eye grabbers’ don’t let it become cryptic with to many
Example :
PLAYSTATION 120GB
Save up to 5% +
$9.99 Flat Shipping
GamingOnly.com/playstation120gb

Landing page success
Google reports about 50%-80% bounce rate for landing pages
Landing page relevancy to keywords and ads – Google Quality Score
Google Quality score now determines your minimum CPC, impressions and positions

What Works On the Page/Lander:
Focus the reader – i.e create a funnel (no extra navigation on the pages)
Add a UVP – Unique Value Proposition like an ebook download. Or the first chapter, a tool or article. Some sort of MUST have a call to action.
Testimonials about your product or service speaks volumes. Be sure to have a few of those on page
Offer more content upon conversion(give preview -directly related to UVP above )
A pic is worth 1000 words, but text is still important.
Fulfill the promise in the ad copy. NO Bait and Switch! Google will smack you down!
Relevant content on landing page will give a higher Quality Score and help your positions

Example Used:
eDiet.com home page is a great landing page.
They push the sale from the very home page
Search Google for: Adkins Diet…
The page created and owned by eDiet on the results pages takes you to a custom landing page.
Point being you can use a the home page, custom page or a inner page of the site.
Test and track to see which brought in more ROI..
What to test and track?
Keywords
Creatives
Offers
and landing pages
Cost per conversion
Track ROI with advance tracking using amounts.
**Final tip: Use Google Website Optimizer and dynamically test landing pages, offers, creative, etc. A/B testing. You will need some technical no-how to set it up. Once you have the understanding and it’s all set up it is well worth it.

Something New in the Works:

Margie also demo’ed that Google is offering something new..a beta + drop-down that will show products
images, prices and titles in the sidebar adds. It looked very good. To have products images right there in the sidebar ad. I would think those would help decide which web surfer/searchers are more serious about buying. I mean they can see some images without ever clicking through the ad to the lander. That saves you some $$$ on those that may just click through to see some type of product. Very cool new feature. No idea when it will be released…and I wish i captured a screen shot.

Testing with:
3 ads in an add group based on volume and Click-thru and conversion
Retire the ads that aren’t measuring up.

Google search network: Adwords
Also Google offers a Content network. (pick and choose which networks/websites) your ad will show up on. Getting more targeted placement on websites that YOU CHOOSE.
Nifty tool mentioned:
SpyFu: Spy on your online competitors. Download competitors keywords and adwords.

Another good webinar.

Thanks Jay at TenGoldenRules. Looking forward to the next on!

 

Corrupt preferences file in photoshop

Photoshop acting bugging on you?
It started to do so to me today.

My particular Foobar reared its face in the form of “invisible images.”
That’s where you open a file and you can see all the layers in the Layers Pallet, but the work area is blank. Just an empty gray background just as if you had not even opened anything.

Ok the fix is much simpler than pulling out the install disk and going through all of that mess. Besides that would require you to save all sorts of plugins, brushes, action scripts, hotkeys, and anything else you have made custom to you give you a more productive and creative workflow.

Just erase your current preferences file and see if that fixes your photoshop woes.
Here’s how:

After starting Photoshop DO NOT WAIT for the the splash screen, and quickly press and hold <Alt><Control><Shift> simultaneously, if you are on a windows system. On a Mac press and hold <Option><Command><Shift>.

That little fix seems to fix about 85% of photoshop woes.

Oh, be sure to note any changes you have set-up in your preferences file, like scratch disk, units & measurements etc. Those are what you are resetting!

Happy Designing…

IE CSS :hover needs link reference

I noticed another silly IE CSS quirk when styling links.

In this particular case I was using a CSS Sprite and on mouseover the Sprite-image should slide up to show the hover state to the next link in a jquery coda slider type display.

The Sprite’s CSS attribute :hover worked fine in FireFox, but when testing in IE there was no reaction to the CSS :hover state.

Turns out that you have to add a hyper link reference or IE will not recognize that there needs to be a switch.

I applied the href and now the silder arrow button-images are  is working great in IE7

Example:

This worked in FF but Not IE  :<a class=”prev”></a>
This was the fix <a href=”#” class=”prev”></a>

Don’t you just love messing around with cross-browser compatiblity.

This little nugget of info only took me about an hour and half to figure out….after I had adjusted much of my CSS code to figure out what was going on.
Nope the CSS was fine…geez.

Checking Page Rank with Google

Search Google for “info:domain.com” (without the quotation marks, replace domain.com with the domain that you want to check).

If there are no results or if the returned URLs don’t match the original URL then it’s likely that the PageRank has been faked. If Google returns only one URL for the query and if the URL is the same as the checked URL then the PageRank is okay.

Thanks POLiSH from DNF for the tip!

Also Here is a great site to check PR and a few other things about your website

Fun Google Game

Found this posted on the ABW forum.

Fun game that challenges you to guess the Keyword associated with the images/pics that is used to full up those images on a Google image search.