Behind the Scenes in My Online Business
After a long hard day in Excel, this wine glass might be just about the right size. Did they name it “XL” in honour of our favourite spreadsheet program?
In case you can’t read the box labels, that are behind the glasses, they say, “XL Wine Glass – holds a whole bottle of wine!”
P.S. I wasn’t sure what category to assign to this post, so I picked “Computer tips”. 😉
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Sure, you can program in Excel VBA, but what other programming languages do you know? Maybe VBA is enough, but if you’d like to expand a bit, there is a free course in JavaScript programming that I’m trying out.
The course is online and interactive, and they’ll send you an email each week, announcing the new lesson. You don’t have to register on the website, unless you want to track your progress as you go along.
To get started, I did the mini-course, “Getting Started with Programming”.
So far, I like the lesson setup and interaction. You read a short instruction step, type something in the interactive box, and get immediate feedback. In the screenshot below, I’m in lesson 5 of the total 8 lessons.
I lost track of the time, but best guess is that it took about an hour to go through all the lessons. In the CodeYear course, you’ve got a week before the next lesson arrives, so you could spread it out over a few days. Maybe those lessons will be tougher than the lessons in this intro course.
The course is just starting, but I’ve already learned a few key differences between JavaScript programming and Excel VBA programming.
This should be interesting! If you sign up too, you can let me know in the comments, and we can compare notes.
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One of my hobbies is photography, and I post the results on the family blog, and a few on the Contextures blog. Unlike the old days of film, when you thought about the cost of each print, now you can take hundreds of pictures, and not worry.
Usually, things go smoothly, and I upload the pictures from my Nikon D3100 digital camera (Amazon link) to the computer, with no problems. The camera takes photos and videos, and I clear it off after each upload, to make room for the next photo session. Those videos can take up a lot of disk space!
Something went wrong yesterday though. I pressed Ctrl +A to select all the pictures on the camera’s media card, and copied them to the computer. Then, I put a backup copy on my laptop, as usual, just to be safe. I always take a quick look at the thumbnails too, just to be sure that the pictures were copied. After that, I cleared the pictures from the camera, and put it away.
A short time later, I took a closer look at the pictures on my laptop, and realized that several were missing. I had taken my last picture around 4 PM, and the latest picture on the computer was from 2:30 PM.
I checked the desktop computer, and they weren’t there either. Nope, not on the camera either. Those pictures had vanished into thin air, or the Ethernet, or somewhere.
Google can be your friend, at times like these, so I started searching for picture recovery software. There were lots of suggestions, but all of the programs were free to preview your missing pictures, and pay $25-$50 for the full program, if you wanted to download the pictures.
I don’t mind paying for programs, but vaguely remembered using a free program, a few years ago, that worked great. Finally, I found the free picture recovery software that I was looking for – Recuva, by Piriform. They make CCleaner too, which I should run again soon.
I downloaded the free version of Recuva software, scanned it for viruses (all clean!), and installed it. The program is simple to use, and quickly recovered all my pictures, and even the 3 videos that were missing.
I took the media card out of the camera, popped it into the laptop, and Recuva showed me all the pictures that had been deleted recently. I added check marks on the ones that I wanted, and copied them to the laptop. The recovered pictures were the same quality as the other pictures, so that was a relief.
The program is now on my computer, and I hope that it’s never needed again! But without Recuva, I wouldn’t have this amusing picture from our afternoon game of hide and seek. Can you find my granddaughter?
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Note: This article contains an Amazon affiliate link.
YouTube sends me an email if anyone comments on one of my videos, or on my Contextures channel page.
Most of the time, it’s easy to log in to YouTube and approve the comments. For the past few months though, I’ve had problems with the comments on my profile page. I follow the link in the notification email, and there’s no comment to approve.
It’s frustrating, and I’ve tried digging into every corner of YouTube, with no success.
Finally, after receiving another comment today, I found the solution. Buried in one of the YouTube help forums, there was a suggestion to add a new comment on your own profile, then delete it, and refresh the page.
It seemed clumsy, but I tried the tip, and it worked! All the mysterious hidden comments appeared, and I approved them.
If yours was one of the comments, thanks for posting it, and sorry it took so long to approve.
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When you’re adding a link in Twitter, or in an email, you might not want to include a really long URL. In the past, I’ve often used a site like bit.ly or is.gd to create a shortened version of the link, and use that instead of the long link.
Now there’s a Google URL Shortener, that’s built in to your Google account, so I’ve just switched to using that. It’s easy to use, and I can quickly see all my shortened links, and track the clicks.
[Update: 2023-07-02]
For example, I created a short link for this Contextures Blog post.
To create a shortened link:
To see the details on clicks for the shortened links:
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Do you have Google Alerts set, so you can keep track of specific topics online? For example, you can get an update in your RSS feed if your name appears in a blog, or discussion, or in the online news.
I keep track of a few topics, including my name, with Google Alerts, and just discovered there was an automatic change to the settings. A new column, Volume, has been added, with a default filter for "Only the best results."
This setting will reduce the number of alerts that you get, so you might want to change the Volume setting to "All results", at least of a while, so you don’t miss anything.
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In January, Google proudly announced a new feature in Google Reader — Track Changes. You could quickly set up an RSS feed for any page that didn’t have one, and be alerted when that page was changed.
I liked the feature, and set up feeds for several pages. It’s great for individual pages on a website, when you’re not interested in every update to the site.
Unfortunately, Google is killing the track changes feature at the end of this month. There’s no mention of the reason it’s disappearing, and my fist shaking doesn’t seem to have any impact on their decision.
The Google Reader Blog did provide a link to a similar service, Page2RSS, so I’ll switch to that. Now I have to find those special feeds, in my long list of feeds. But I’m not bitter about this! 😉
And remember, export your RSS feed list occasionally, so you have a backup.
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While reading my morning RSS feeds, I saw an article about creating a custom Twitter background. Since I didn’t have anything else planned for the day, I decided to attempt an update on my profile.
Previously, I had a picture of a lovely orange day lily, with the Contextures web address added at the lower left side. It was better than using one of the standard backgrounds, but didn’t reveal too much about me, or what I do.
The RSS feed article had a link to a blog with Twitter background templates, and instructions for creating your own. My Photoshop skills are minimal, and I’m using a really old version of Photoshop, but I plunged in anyway.
The article gave me some ideas for adding things to my background, and links to some graphic effects (although a couple of them were dead pages).
Instead of lined paper, a coffee mug and stains, I went with the cover of one of my pivot table books, the Contextures logo, and a goofy picture of me. (Yes, I know that every picture of me has some level of goofiness!)
Then I added my email address and Contextures address. They aren’t clickable links, but at least they’re on the page for reference. The image background is white, and I changed the Twitter theme colours to have a white background too, so it will blend in.
Here’s the finished background, which I saved in png format, and uploaded to my Twitter profile. It’s not great art, but it tells people a little bit about me, and livens up the page. If I can manage to do this, imagine what you can do!
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