A Day in the Life of a Mom Palm

• 6:00 a.m. – Alarm goes off. Feet hit the floor, head down the stairs to the coffee pot! While coffee is being made, I quickly check my email on the Palm Pre Plus (ok, I’m impatient) and let the dog out.
• 6:30 a.m. – Get first of 3 kids up for school – others staggered by 15 min. each. Check the weather and my calendar for the day on the Palm Pre Plus and look up a recipe for dinner (using the What’s for Dinner app) while making lunches.
• 7:30 a.m. – Everyone in the car and drop off kids at school – get a text message from my walking buddy wanting to do our workout at 8 a.m.
• 8:00 a.m. – Take Palm Pre Plus on the walk. Since we are trying to get back into running shape we use the cool countdown timer app to alternate 2 minutes walking with 2 minutes running.
• 9:00 a.m. – Back from workout, showered and plug the Palm Pre Plus back in to charge while I work. Get text messages from hubs and friends in between.
• 12:00 p.m. – Alarm on Palm Pre Plus goes off reminding me of a conference call I have.
• 2:30 p.m. – Afternoon craziness officially starts and this is where the Palm Pre Plus seriously gets a workout. Head out to pick up kids from school. Check email in carpool lane and can actually open the PDF file (thanks to the built in PDF viewer) containing event sheet for upcoming swim meet and read them (big improvement over my last phone).
• 4:00 p.m. – Drop off two kids at swim and head to grocery store with third. Use shopping list created from Whats for Dinner app. Drop off third child at gymnastics. Check in with husband via phone in between.
• 5:30 p.m. – Back at the pool waiting for swimmers to be done. Check email, upload a cute picture of kids to Facebook, use TweeFree to check in with online pals on Twitter, make notes on favorite websites using Evernote app – and did I mention I can do all of this with my headphones on listening to my favorite music?
• 6:00 p.m. – Youngest one done with practice waiting for older one. Let her play Flash Cards on the phone followed by Crossword Light (I seriously love this app) while we wait.
• 7:00 p.m. – Back home and time for dinner. Pull up our dinner recipe on Whats for Dinner and get dinner started. Check email in between and respond to client questions without walking into the office.
• 7:45 p.m. – Chill out time with family.
• 9:00 p.m. Get text message from my daughter who is still at gymnastics practice to let me know her carpool is on its way to the meet up point. Pick her up and head home to make sure all homework is done and get all three kids in bed.
• 9:30 p.m. – Palm Pre Plus goes back on the charger while husband and I hang out, watch TV and surf on our laptops (not always but most nights) – we are a multitasking family!

Now that is a cell phone that works!

Overall, how has the Palm Pre Plus scored during my trial with it? I’d give it an A-. Minus? Really? Yep, because while this phone rocks, but there are a few little things that are either missing or could be better. For example, the camera is great but there is no capability to take video yet (coming in version 1.4);  I’d really like to be able to assign different notification tones for email and texts; and I like the Google Maps but wish it had the built-in free navigation (I’m sure that is just a matter of time, too).

Now something good for you!!

I have been given a $50 Visa Gift Card from Verizon to give away to one of my lucky readers. That’s $50 to spend on what ever you want!

How do you win?

Leave a comment on this post no later than midnight March 16, 2010 answering one of the following questions:

1. What is your favorite feature on your cell phone (or mine )?
2. How do you use technology to keep your busy life on track?

Get an extra entry by getting social – use any of the buttons at the bottom of this post to spread the word about the giveaway. Leave a separate comment telling me whether you tweeted, stumbled, or otherwise shared this post using one of the social buttons. I will select a winner using Random.org and will post it here.

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Disclosure again – I have been given the Palm Pre Plus and the service package for it by Verizon for a few months, they are providing the gift card for the giveaway as well. I am also being compensated for my time.

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UPDATE: We have a winner!! Lucky #21 Courtney. Thanks again to all who entered.

So, in full disclosure, I am letting you know that I have been given a Palm Pre Plus and the service package for it by Verizon for a few months. I am also being compensated for my time and will be hosting a giveaway in the upcoming months to go with the review. However, knowing that I am a truly a geek girl – you know the one that asks for a Wacom Bamboo Fun Tablet for Christmas, totes a pink Vaio laptop and has been known to dress her cell phone in red leather, you can bet that I will be giving the Palm Pre Plus a serious workout and will give you the real scoop on the phone.

When the phone arrived last week I had to seriously fend off the rest of my technology crazed family. The kids hovered around me as I opened the box and my middle school aged daughter immediately declared that she wanted a Palm Pre Plus of her own and if I didn’t like the phone, could she have it? Uh, no. It’s. MINE. Of course my teenage son immediately went into a full fledged monologue touting the features of the Palm Pre Plus (because he started researching it the day I told him it was on its way) and how it runs on the Palm webOS operating system, has 16GB of flash storage and 512 MB of RAM, uses multi-touch technology, has a 3MP camera with a flash, and on and on and on. I couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.

After declaring it the “Mom Palm” the kids finally let me have a few minutes to play with my new phone without their commentary. I totally LOVE the way the Palm Pre Plus feels. It’s smooth finish and rounded corners make it very comfortable to hold (unlike the smartphone my husband has which feels like you are holding a brick). The Palm Pre Plus is also small (and mighty) – measuring 3.9″ x 2.3″ x .67″ – it even fits in my favorite red Vera Bradley wristlet that goes with me everywhere!

The Palm Pre Plus is a combination touch screen phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. The touch screen area uses something called “gestures” which are simply movements of your finger across the screen in a certain motion that cause things to happen. For example, sliding your finger from right to left across the bottom of the screen takes you back one screen; you can close applications on the “desktop” but sliding them upward off the top of the screen; and you can zoom in and out on pictures by placing two thumbs near the center of the photo and “pulling” out diagonally. The keyboard ROCKS. It has a “clicky” feel to it much like a full size keyboard would.

Once I got finished playing with the gesture area and oohing and aahing over the keyboard, I started to set up the Palm Pre Plus. Within minutes I had made the Palm Pre Plus “my own” - by simply logging into my Gmail account I instantly had my complete contact list, calendar and email. This is exactly the type of functionality I need. Additionally, I synced the contacts with my Facebook account so not only can I call, text, Google Talk (IM), and email my friends right from the contact list – I can also see their Facebook status updates, profile photos and add notes to their contact details.

By syncing the calendar with my Gmail calendar (you can sync it with your Outlook calendar and others, too) I can keep track of my commitments from anywhere and get friendly reminders so I don’t miss a thing. If I add an event to my calendar from my phone it immediately shows up on my desktop. I have shared calendars with my family and with some clients and the calendars all show up in different colors on the Palm Pre Plus so I know at a glance who the appointment belongs to. Too cool!!

In addition to the standard Smartphone features of phone, text, email, web, camera and calendar, the Palm Pre Plus:

• acts as an MP3 player,
• lets you watch videos – with amazing quality too,
• has a cool “corkboard” for writing yourself memos,
• has a great to-do list (my favorite),
• can give you directions to anywhere in a flash using Google Maps (no GPS unless you want to subscribe to the Verizon Navigator service for $9.99 a month)
• and through the App store you can find free and low cost apps for just about anything you want to add to your phone.
• No news yet if it will be released in T-Mobile 4g, anytime soon.

Having used the Palm Pre Plus for just under two weeks now, all I can say is WOW! It may be small, but it sure can do a lot and look fabulous doing it! This phone and I will be spending a lot of quality time together – from my home office to the carpool line, pool deck and everywhere in between. I’ll keep you posted along the way – especially as I find out what other amazing feats this phone can help me conquer in my busy life.

The list of bloggers interviewed is very impressive – there are the obvious leaders:

• Aaron Wall (SEO Book)
• Yaro Starak (Entrepreneur’s Journey)
• Neil Patel (Quick Sprout)
• Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion)
• Seth Godin (Seth Godin)

But there are 35 more bloggers interviewed who have taken their niche, voice of authority, and passion and created a successful blog.  The book is by no means an exhaustive list, but the easy to follow format makes it a quick read.

Each interviewee is asked similar questions like:

• What’s your best tip for writing a successful blog post?
• What are your main avenues for marketing your blog?
• What was your most successful blog post ever?
• What’s the most common mistake new bloggers make?
• What turns you off most when visiting a blog?
• What’s the best way to make money from your blog?
• Which books and websites do you recommend to new bloggers?
• Which five blogs do you regularly read?

In the end, this book does not give you an exact formula for success or guarantee you anything other than it gives you direct access to the answers to the questions you would love to ask the leaders in the field.

One of my goals this year is to help my Printables4Kids.com website gain more popularity via online and offline methods. I am constantly mentioning the site to teachers, librarians, homeschooling parents, and friends who have young kids and needed a card I could give out that would give them a reason to visit the site. After hearing so many people singing the praises of Moo.com, I checked them out. Since one of the things I wanted to do with the card is highlight activities on the website, I needed a double-sided card. With Moo.com, no problem!

Moo allows you to pick up to 100 DIFFERENT designs for one side of the card for no additional cost. You can grab the images from your Flickr account, your own collection and a variety of other sources. This was the perfect solution. I chose 5 different printable activities from my site that would reduce well and set them up on the Moo.com site. Then I designed a very simple card front using their interactive design interface.

The result:

One front design and 5 different backs all for a really reasonable price! For 100 cards (20 of each design), I only spent $20. You can’t beat that – especially for small businesses or for marketing your blog offline!

Last week I had to mail something to fellow designer, Randa Clay, and I decided to include one of my new business cards for Printables4Kids.com (one of my other sites). After receiving her package, she sent me a tweet via Twitter that went like this:

Coming from Randa, the compliment means so much, but it also reinforces that putting the activities on the back created my desired result. Everyone I have given them to has also loved them – thanks to Moo!

If you have had fun making moo-velous cards with Moo, I’d love to see them! Leave me a link so I can check them out.

Regardless of which of these answers came to mind first, you were right. Each of those concepts is part of website optimization. In Andrew King’s most recent book, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, he methodically takes you through all aspects of website optimization from:

• Search Engine Marketing Optimization
• Pay-per-Click Optimization
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Web Page Optimization
• CSS Optimization
• AJAX Optimization
• Advanced Topics (Server Side and Client Side Optimizations)

While Website Optimization is well written with plenty of screen shots, useful graphics and case studies, this is not the kind of book that you sit down and read in an afternoon. Rather, I recommend focusing on one chapter of the book at a time – reading, understanding, then implementing the recommendations.

Andy King’s first book, Speed Up Your Site, was released in 2003, but the web landscape has changed so dramatically. His new book takes the trends, tools, and technology of today into account. For example, in 1997 the average web video was 45 seconds – but thanks to faster computers, faster connections, YouTube, Flash, MySpace and digital video cameras, the average web video in 2007 was 192 seconds. As a result, his new book contains about 10 pages on optimizing multimedia for better server and end-user experiences.

Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, is a great reference book not only for web professionals, but anyone who wants to know how to tweak a website so it performs at its very best. You can also visit the  companion site of Website Optimization Secrets for sample chapters, chapter summaries, full-color figures, and the latest news.

Most of these sites feature two things – cPanel and Fantastico – both of which are requirements for ease of use in my book. cPanel is easy to navigate and loaded with features allowing you to easily check stats, set up email, create database, password protect directories, and more. Fantastico offers the fastest and most straight forward installs for more than 20 of our favorite Open Source programs and scripts like WordPress, phpBB, ZenCart, Galleries, and other utilities. For the average website owner or blogger, these features cut down on a lot of tech support/webmaster support time.

In alphabetical order the web hosting companies I recommend are:

1 & 1 Web Hosting is a very well known web hosting option for many bloggers. A lot of associates use it and while they don’t have cPanel they have a reasonable substitute. For a limited time you can get the first 6 months of Business Hosting Package FREE!

Based out of Atlanta, GA, A Small Orange provides both shared hosting and virtual private servers. They advertise no limit hosting, cPanel, multiple stats packages, Fantastico and advanced email options.

GoDaddy is my personal choice for domain name purchasing/registration but I do have clients who love GoDaddy’s web hosting, too. They don’t have Fantastico, but do have their own version of it called Hosting Connection which gives site owners access to a variety of one click script installations. They provide shared hosting, virtual dedicated servers and dedicated server plans.

HostGator is my personal choice for web hosting. They have been doing a great job of hosting 30+ web sites for myself and my clients for the past two years. HostGator is very affordable, offers cPanel and Fantastico, and has had amazing uptime! HostGator has tech support that is second to none! Anytime I have had issues with my sites they have been able to help me identify the problem and resolve it immediately. You can read a review of them here.

HostMonster is another popular choice for affordable web hosting. They allow you to host unlimited domains on one account which is great for owners of multiple web sites. Fantastico and cPanel are included, and you can get $50 of PPC credit for both Yahoo and Google with your account.

HostRocket offers unlimited bandwidth, 1,000+ GB of RAID protected storage space, cPanel and Fantastico, 10 websites per account plus add a new site every month, and $50 Yahoo search credit.

I have been a customer of Jumpline since their first year in business – 1997 to be exact – and currently have about 15 client websites hosted with them (some of them have been hosted there since 1997). Jumpline’s uptime has been close to FLAWLESS, the tech support is knowledgeable and helpful, and they have been very stable. They do offer ValueApps – their own library of scripts – but it is not as intuitive as Fantastico.

Lunarpages.com offers enterprise level redundancy and security in their Tier 4 data centers with a dedicated staff of over 120 support professionals.

Do you have a high-traffic site that needs scalable, high end web hosting solutions? If so, MediaTemple is my first choice! Powerful grid service replaces shared hosting and the dedicated physical virtual servers in their Nitro program run on quad core processors.

Mosso is another service for sites that need instant scalability like a popular blog (that regularly gets Digg front page traffic), a large e-commerce site or 20 medium sites under one account. Mosso uses cloud technology which is basically instant, easy access to large scale computing.

NetworkSolutions.com is probably what I would consider to be the most credible and most likely to be around forever web hosting company there is. I registered my very first domain name with them in 1997 and have never once questioned the quality of their services. They have a more options and plans than most providers – in other words, you will be able to find a solution to fit your needs.

Site5, a great solution for eCommerce, Blogs or Ruby on Rails sites, is co-located with The Planet. Site5 uses extremely high-end servers and doesn’t crowd them. Additionally, they handle their own tech support and offer a 60-day money back guarantee.

I hope this is a helpful resource.   Finding a good web host is not easy, because many hosts offer sub-par support.  I’ve tried my best to list only the best web hosts there are. Or you may find you need to sign up for dedicated hosting services from a trusted provider.

Nitro PDF Professional goes above and beyond the basic PDF creation capabilities of many of the services I listed. Just a few things you can do with Nitro PDF Professional include:

• Create a PDF from any file on your computer
• Create a PDF from the items in your clipboard or from your scanner
• Combine files from different sources and file types into a single PDF
• Extract PDF parts for use in other files
• Edit text and images in your PDF file
• Highlight and add comments to the PDF
• Add headers, footers, and watermarks
• Convert your PDF to MS Word
• Different security options to control how your document is accessed

I really like the program and will now use it for my daily PDF needs (I am always working with PDFs) and you can, too! The Nitro PDF team has offered to giveaway 3 full licenses for Nitro PDF Professional to my readers. Entering to win one is easy. Leave a comment on this post letting me know you’d like to win. You can blog about it to get a second entry. But act quick! This giveaway will close midnight Sunday, April 6, 2008. I will be drawing the winners at random on Monday, April 7.

Can’t wait to get your full license? You can try out Nitro PDF Professional free for 14 days!

UPDATE: Congratulations to lucky numbers 8 (Lori), 12 (Lindsey) and 23 (OrgJunkie) – I will be in touch with your prize info! Thanks to all who entered! Nitro PDF contacted me last night and loved all of your comments – they have decided to give full licenses to ALL of you who left a comment on this post and entered the giveaway. I will be forwarding your contact info to Nitro and you can expect to get your site license via email shortly. Thanks Nitro PDF!!

I got the Medium Bamboo Fun Black Tablet that came with a pen, mouse and the graphics software. Within 5 minutes of opening the box I was using it.

Installation was so easy. I removed the tablet from the box and plugged it into a free USB port and I was in business! The mouse immediately worked and I quickly figured out that I could use the pen to navigate my screen like a mouse. When the pen tip is close to the tablet surface but not touching, you can use it like a mouse. Tap on the tablet for a single mouse click and tap twice for a double click. It did come with two CDs – one with the Bamboo software/drivers to give you access to all the advanced features and settings and one with software such as Adobe Photoshop Effects and a few others.

Getting started was pretty simple, too. I opened a photo and was easily able to do red eye touch up, select areas I wanted to work with and such. Writing and drawing on the tablet are both very easy and feel just like writing on paper. You do have to practice to get the exact feel – something that I am sure will take some time for me.

The Bamboo Fun plays well with everyone! I have had no problem using it with Fireworks, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements (came with the Bamboo Fun), using it on the PC and then taking it over to my Mac to work in Illustrator and Photoshop there.

I certainly have a lot to learn about the Bamboo Fun and how to really maximize its use. A lot of that will just take practice and just flat out using it. I may have to spend some time at iSketch.net for practice (thanks for the tip Randa). If you know of any other tools or sites that are good for developing my Bamboo skills – let me know!!!

Lisa sent me a copy of the book to review (and I’m giving one away at Casual Keystrokes right now). All I can say, is that it doesn’t matter whether you are an experienced WordPress pro or a brand new blogger needing all the basics, this book is worth every penny. There are over 350 pages of how-to’s, screen shots, tips, and real life examples for WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and WordPress MU.  There is even a foreword by Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress.

Lisa starts the book off by explaining benefits of WordPress – what it can do for you and she then talks about Blogging Basics – from personal blogging to business blogging.

One whole section of the book is dedicated to using the WordPress.com hosted service and how to make the most of its features.

Another section of the book is about self hosted WordPress.org usage starting at the very beginning from buying a domain name to file transfer and installing WordPress. She explains the administration panel and its capabilities and how to establish a blogging routine.

Chapters 9, 10 and 11 are excellent resources for the intermediate to advanced user who want to customize the look of their site using templates, themes, plugins and such.

Do you want to run multiple blogs with multiple authors with a single installation? WordPress MU could be the solution you are looking for. Lisa dedicates another whole section of the book to explaining MU, how to install it, configure it and how to make it your best friend.

My favorite section of the book is the chapter on using WordPress as a Content Management System. More and more I am moving traditional web sites to WordPress for quicker development times and easier updates from the client side. WordPress for Dummies chapter on WordPress as a CMS is a must see resource if you are considering using WordPress for this purpose.

As a bonus, Lisa has included the best free WordPress themes and plugins that she recommends.

I am very impressed with this book as a whole and fully expect my copy will rapidly become dog-eared as it gets daily use!!

You can get a copy of WordPress for Dummies for yourself at Amazon or your local bookstore, but if you act quickly, you can win a free copy of the book at my other site, Casual Keystrokes by simply leaving me a comment over there. Either way, you need this book.

I confess, I am a statistics junkie and I know that many of my readers are too!! We want to know what is going on behind the scenes of our blogs down to the minute. We are nosy. We want to know what are readers are interested in. We want to know where they are coming from. And there is nothing more exhilarating for a stats junkie than to watch a wave of traffic sparked by a Stumble, a great Digg or a link from a high profile site happen REAL TIME! Yes, real time.In my webmaster toolbox, I keep a handful of stats packages – basically, because they all serve a different purpose. I like the big picture traffic information I get from Awstats that comes with my web hosting package. Google Analytics gives me pretty detailed stats, too, and its free.

However, Performancing Metrics (pMetrics) does it all – and it does it all REAL TIME. pMetrics makes it so easy to capture a great amount of information about your site’s visitors quickly and in logical groups.

Let’s take a look at what pMetrics has to offer!

The Dashboard

When you log into your pMetrics dashboard you can quickly get a sense of the traffic, visitor actions, and what is popular at a glance. pMetrics uses tabbed navigation so you can get to different types of data quickly. Data is also presented numerically, using a bar graph, and by percentage increase or decrease from the previous time period. You can grab your data by day, week, month and more through a simple drop down.

Detail Pages

The visitors detail page shows the time, IP address, country, operating system, browser, number of actions the user took, how long they were there, where they came from, and what search term they used for each and every visitor to the site. You can get aggregate information by country, city, language, browser, operating system and screen resolution as well.

Action information is available by page views, searches, incoming links, outbound links and downloads. You can get detailed information at every turn.

Get content details displayed in multiple formats. If you prefer to see aggregate data as a bar graph, its available. Prefer a cloud display? You can get that, too. You can even export data to Excel for more analysis.

Using the pMetrics Spy tab, you can watch visitors interact with your site as it happens.

Stay informed without logging in! You can subscribe to feeds of your traffic summary, visitors, searches, and incoming links.

Save yourself a step. You can even monitor your feed statistics, subscribers, item views and click throughs directly from your pMetrics dashboard.

Get the most information on your visitors! Another cool feature is that readers who have left comments on your blog no longer show up as IP addresses, they show up as the name they use when leaving a comment.

Conclusion

pMetrics has it all. You can get more information on your site traffic, visitors and source from pMetrics than you can from any other stats package. The pMetrics developers have managed to deliver all of that information in a logical, easy to read, and meaningful way.

pMetrics is a must have for bloggers, but even more so if you manage more than one blog. You can access all of your sites from one main page. With the basic free version of pMetrics you can monitor up to 3 sites at once. If you are like me and manage more, I recommend upgrading to the Pro version for $2.99 per month. With Pro you can monitor up to 10 sites at a time and you get access to all of the pMetrics features. When you register, you get 21 days of Pro for FREE anyhow, so give it a whirl!

If you use pMetrics or decide to try it, let me know what you think!