So opening chrome today I noticed a new section called Apps:

At first it kinda seems insignificant. Ok so what, I can play games and run apps that runs on android-based devices through my browser. So what right, we can play games and run apps from the web already but this looks to be some type of extension to chrome that is running android. I may be wrong on this one but this is what it looks like at first glance. To me this seems like a first step to something possibly much bigger for Google. Such a seemingly small update sneaked into the browser but I think it was planned all along when they developed Chrome and Android.

It kinda goes hand in hand with what I was talking in my last post. If they have an operating system running inside a browser. Suddenly that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. The browser becomes the operating system and it’s as light as a feather compared to what we’re used to with Windows and the like. Maybe it’s communicating with the Google servers which handles the processing requirements, freeing up your machine. This is all very interesting to me. I’m anxious to see what their next step will be. I predict a very cheap or free Google PC at some point in the future, it’ll just be built with chrome installed and that’ll be running your operating system and from there you can install your programs (apps) and basically do anything we do through traditional operating systems today.

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Where I thought we’d be

Over 3 years ago, I wrote a blog post about a war that would take place between Google Vs Microsoft. What the post was really about though was a shift in the way we used computers to access and use data that I believe would be happening by now. In that post, I mention a discussion I had even a couple of years prior to that blog post. A discussion which had me debating with a friend doing his thesis on a related subject. In short this is what I believed (and still believe is the direction we should be going in):

1) Large and bulky operating systems and software wouldn’t be needed [ to be installed on individual computers ].

2) As Internet speeds steadily increased, more and more software would  be web-based and the storage that goes with these would also increase.

3) The result would be that more and more of the computing power and data-storage would actually be happening on servers (on the web) instead of our local machines. Ok now we know that as the “cloud” but that concept wasn’t really nicknamed as such backed then.

As the next logical step, the whole operating system would be hosted on the web and our machines would merely be terminals that would boot to our “computers” that would actually be instances of operating systems with blocks of storage within the cloud, on the web. So merely windows to where our data is stored online. The computing power needed for this terminal would be very minimal, our current machines would actually be way over the necessary specifications. The vast majority of the computing power would be happening in the cloud, you’d be merely accessing it via your window (terminal).

Since then we’ve seen some of those come to reality. We’re seeing more and more apps being web-based and SAAS (software as a service) which is basically just another name for web-based apps/software

For fun, here’s a little video I had embedded in that post 3 years ago:

So ok, I was on the right track, I wasn’t alone in my thinking of course, I don’t mean to try and come across as making you believe I’m some sort of Geek Prophet – LOL – I’m not – far from it…

I was just merely deducting logical outcomes based on shifts in technology uses I was observing happening around me at then time – with things like Gmail offering more and more storage and then Google coming out with their web-based office-suit type tools like docs, etc. Anyone who sat down and observed these changes and gave some thought as what it meant for the future of computing probably came to some similar conclusions.

Where we are now

Ok – so, one of the things that didn’t come true – yet –  is the fact that the whole shebang the data AND the operating system AND the software would be the cloud – as one. Now I still think this is the direction things *should* be going in – BUT with one modification. I don’t think that our local computers should be merely windows to the “cloud” anymore. This conclusion comes from my experimentation with having a hosted OS in the cloud – yes I’ve done it (it’s not as hard as it sounds to do – the technology is already in place in various places, I just worked with my programmer and made them work together ) – but by doing so, I came to a few conclusions that made me re-think so my “predictions” about how things should be.

First, I still believe the OS and the data should be in the cloud and accessible from any terminal / computers / window / whatever you want to call it. BUT there are 2 problems with having it in the cloud exclusively:

1) You’re subject to fluctuations in Internet connection speeds or bottlenecks between you and the location of your cloud / network. So delays can be present – so it’s not as user-friendly / pleasant as working with the software locally on your machine where the feedback is almost instantaneous without Internet connection speeds delaying things. So using software locally on your machine, your command doesn’t have to travel through the Internet to reach the destination and get executed

2) With no connection, you don’t have access to your data / software.

3) It’s more expensive to use your “computer” than if you just used it locally because you have to pay for the computing power in the cloud, locally (your computer) and the data transfer between your computer and the cloud (there’s the data transfer between the cloud and your interaction with other web- apps / websites etc but technically you’re paying for that when using a local computer too).

So there are clearly advantages of having your OS / data in the cloud but there are slight disadvantages that could be annoying to deal with on a day-to-day basis. The advantages however include things like:

-Being able to access all your programs from any computer with a web browser. Also as a side-note; some web-enabled phones ( I was able to access my “computer” in the cloud via my iPhone for example but the small screen made it really hard to do anything meaningful – because obviously the programs on a regular windows install are not meant to be access via a phone! so you have a lot of zooming in and scrolling up/down left/right to do constantly to use programs).

-Not having to rely on local computing power to execute programs.

-Ability to easily clone my “computer” and create many clones. For examples, have you ever wished you could clone your computer and be able to do many resource – intensive tasks at a time that way? For example if you’re using something that is eating up all your resources, like video editing for example, wouldn’t be nice to be able to clone your computer and do some more video editing – or anything else – while your other computer is churning away? So technically you could have as many “clones” as you wanted doing and unlimited number of tasks simultaneously and then kill those clones off when you didn’t need them so you only paid for the extra resources when you needed them.

-Not having to worry about “computer crashes”. Have you ever lost data because of a hardware failure. Had to spend a day or two re-installing programs whenever you bought a new computer? Technically when everything the cloud you don’t have to worry about losing your data that way ever again (note I said – technically ).

Where I think we should go now

So – after these experimentation – I came to the conclusion that it would be better to keep our ever-more powerful local machines but have everything synced to a clone computer in the “cloud”. So you could still access your programs, data, etc outside of your local machine, from any computer with a browser connected to the Internet – but you didn’t have to suffer the inconveniences listed above on a day-to-day basis. You could still have the advantages of the powerful local computing capabilities but then also be able to fire-up your “cloud” computer to have it do some additional tasks in the background so as to not use your local computer’s resources and even, as mentioned, create clones for even greater computing power.

With everything synced, then you don’t NEED your local computer but you can still use it and you don’t NEED to be connected to the Internet to access your programs and data but you still can (though a connection will be needed to synced any data addition / changes you do locally).

So I’m a little puzzled as to why we haven’t seen this yet. It seems to me that we’re all still in awe of the possibilities of web-based software and too busy trying to re-invent the wheel and turn all the software we have on our local computers now and turn them into web-apps in the cloud that we overlooked that we could just put the whole thing in the cloud instead and save a lot of time and effort.

Don’t get me wrong – I love web-apps as much as the next geek, in fact, I’m using them whenever possible just because of the freedom of being able to use them from anywhere and also because – generally – they’re much more “web conscious” than traditional local software – that is, they usually allow you to share things via the web easier – like Google docs for example, allowing you to make documents public and share them with people. I just think there must be a better way than re-inventing all software to make them web-based and have them scattered throughout the web with various providers, accessed with different logins in different locations, etc.

In my opinion, this is what Microsoft should be doing – it would be the next logical step. If they don’t do it, someone else will and if they do- then goodbye Microsoft – hard to imagine a world without Microsoft it’s also even harder to imagine people not jumping at the chance to move to something better, something that would give them unlimited computing power at the touch of a mouse and free themselves from having to worry about data loss and being without their software / data for periods of time when they don’t have their “computer” within reach or when it’s broken – yet gives them all the same benefits that they’re used to.

Plus, I mean, for someone else OTHER than Microsoft to do this, they’d have a lot of ground to make up – perhaps Apple could do it, they’ve made the most ground and are gaining more and more users as time goes on but still – for Microsoft it seems the most logical step – the best way to ensure their continuity in our lives. Then again, it may also just be what a rival needs to finally take on Microsoft. Someone else to look for to do this would be Google. They’ve already created Android so they’re already in the Operating system “game”.

I think this is an exciting time and in the next few years we will see dramatic changes in the way we use and access software and data.

I think our data and software will “follow” us anywhere we go, literally. Shifts in the way we think about how these things should be used and accessed and also continual advances in technology makes for very interesting things to look forward to! Finally, if this long article didn’t get your inner-geek excited, this video surely will!

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First, what is a mindmap?
From WikiPedia:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used togenerate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

Mindmaps are great. Have you ever been frustrated with taking notes  in a regular matter, you know like one note per line, then later you found yourself having to link 2 notes together and then make sub notes and then change the order of the notes because one of them now belongs above the other one. You started with the intention of taking clean notes but it’s now a jumbled mess of crossed-out words, bent arrows and ink fingerprints :p

There’s a reason for that and why this line by line method of taking notes doesn’t work very well – our brain doesn’t think and links things and ideas one per line. Take a look at a hand-drawn mindmap and you’d be closer to seeing a graphical illustration of how the mind “takes notes”.

I’ve personally been using mindmaps for several years. If you’re like me and constantly have a barrage of ideas popping into your head and then find yourself day-dreaming and mentally-expanding on those ideas you know how it can detract your focus from what you should really be doing at that moment. It’s hard to focus with your mind going in a thousand different directions.

Putting these ideas as the come into a mindmap, frees your mind to think of what you should be thinking because you’ve stored that idea. For myself discovering this was like  weight lifted from my shoulders because before I didn’t know how to stay focused on what I should because these were all good ideas that deserved attention – just not at that very moment

For me, my mindmaps are like a second brain – a storage brain where I can store ideas, concepts, things learned, anything and then refer back to those later either to refresh my memory or to expand on those ideas when the time is right.

At first I started by doing them just on paper then realized that it would become a mess and couldn’t really grow them indefinitely so I started looking at software and finally decided to use one called MindMapper. It’s a great program, gets the job done but it was missing something for my use, I wanted to be able to share mindmaps when I needed to. I played around with other software. There was another cool one I tried called Systemizer but I found it a bit limiting and not intuitive enough for my taste. For example I want to be able to quickly create new “branches” (or nodes) in my mind map but this software required me to right-click and add a new node every time or click a separate button whereas most other softwares allow you to create a child node by just hitting the “enter” or “tab” keys making the process much quicker.

The other thing is that the sharing of the mindmaps were still not up to par to what I was really looking for. It’s still a good software, don’t get me wrong but I use mindmaps so much that if I can find one that does everything I need, I’m going to use it.

The other issue was portability. I have a great setup on my computers that allows me sync all my files and program files across all my computers and to portable disk to easily plug into other machines if need be (perhaps something for another post )… but still, the future of applications is moving more and more towards being fully on the web and not programs you install on machines anymore. With mobile web access growing with no slowing down in sight, having programs 100% web accessible is a step in the right direction. So having an online mindmapping software would be ideal (if it’s good) – it means I could access it on the go from my iPhone

I had been looking at online mindmapping programs for a while but in the past they were still very new and none really stood out, they all seemed to lack features I needed so up until last week I was still using MindMapper but then I decided to take a look at online apps once again, mainly because I wanted a better way to be able to share mindmaps as needed, on this site namely. Take a look at the last mindmap I shared in this post, it was a pain to do that, I had to export the mindmap as a picture and then edit it in photoshop to reduce the size.

I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the online mindmapping apps have matured nicely! I compared a few ones and finally decided on Mindmeister – it has amazing features and best of all it’s completely free to start using and I could import my mindmaps from mindmapper (i just had to saved my mindmapper maps as .txt files first). It also allows you to embed maps in your blog and website – exactly what I needed!

Here’s an example of an embedded map:

It’s awesome! You can make maps private or public and even add people to your team and share maps within your team. You can also browse public maps here and I gotta say, there’s some amazing maps in there. Free knowledge! It’s like tapping into the minds of people Check out this great map about online communities. All I can say is wow! I’ll be using that map myself, what a great resource!

I give this online app my 2 thumbs up and I’ll be using it myself on daily basis. I recommend you create a free account and start using it too!

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For those who don’t know who John Chow is, you need to know.  The guy is my role model for monetizing a blog. In some ways, he’s my inspiration, not for starting this blog but for monetizing it the way I am. I’ve been studying what the guy does because anyone who can make 40K+ per month from spending 2 hours per day on a blog is worth studying and listening to.

Similar to John Chow, I didn’t really start this blog with the idea of turning it into a type of income (I just started this site as a test for Quansite and thought I could post some stuff I know and some personal ramblings / rants ) but after seeing how he did just that starting by a case study using his own blog to prove how it was possible to make a living blogging…

It motivated me to see how far I could take a blog from scratch in a similar fashion. I’ve just pretty much recently started posting more frequently to this blog after putting what I know about monetizing a blog in place. I’m excited to see how far I can take this blog, it might not be as far as John Chow, but then again, we’ll see

Most of that knowledge comes from years of experience in other online ventures but John Chow pretty much sums it up in the video below.

If you want to know how to really make money from your blog, you need to grab a cup of coffee / tea / whatever your favorite beverage is and sit down and watch this video from beginning to end and take notes! I have taken notes myself, you can see them in this mindmap graphic below.

Click To Enlarge

He’s also come up with a FREE ebook that covers pretty much everything in this video and then some extra content not in there. It contains a bunch of great resources and tools too, I highly recommend you download it, it’s free

Click here to get John Chow’s New E-book for free.

Remember to download John Chow’s Latest e-book where he goes into these strategies in more details. It’s free and it’s no the same ebook that you get for signing up to his list on his site, this one is new and related specifically to the strategies he discusses in this video.

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Before we look at the actual e-commerce platform, one thing you’ll absolutely need is a way of accepting money to your e-commerce site. The easiest and most popular way is PayPal. If you don’t have an account or even if you have one but it’s a personal account, you’ll need a Business account. It’s free to create, so go do that right now, just click this link to be taken directly to the proper section and come back to this email once that’s done.

Now, now that you have a way (or soon will) to accept payments, you need the e-commerce actual platform to start selling items…

Self-hosted e-commerce solutions

These e-commerce systems are a bit more work to get installed and maintain (because you’re installing, hosting and maintaining it yourself or paying someone to). But the upside is that you retain full control. Many online business experts agree that you should always build your brand with self-hosted solutions however there are some very good hosted solutions out there now that, in my opinion, are perfectly acceptable, allow you to get started quicker and allows you to focus on growing your business instead of dealing with issues that arrise with your self-hosted platform (we’ll look at those shortly).

If you want to go with the self-hosted solutions, you could download an open source (and free ) software like OsCommerce or Magento and install it yourself on your hosting account ( If you don’t already have a hosting account HostGator is a good choice and if you use coupon code
” francoscoupon ”  …
you get your first month for 0.01 Can’t go wrong with that! ).

Now you’ll either need to install the software yourself if you know how or hire someone to do it for you. You can either go with a web development company like the one I own ( shameless plug ) e4WebSolutions or you could post the project on a freelancing site like Scriptlance (this is probably the cheapest option as you’ll get many starting programmers eager to earn feedback who will do this for cheap).

Even better, if you followed my HostGator suggestion, they offer a 1-click installation of OsCommerce! (As well as many other scritps)

You can also go with a paid self hosted script. You still have to isntall it etc but most of the time, they offer an installation service as well because it’s a paid system, you can expect a level of support that is better. With open source software, the support is usually done via forums users help each other. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but sometimes business owners prefer to have someone they can pick up the phone and talk to and hold accountable for the product they trust their business with! Here’s a few recommendations:

- Shop-Script. Click here and then on “shop-script”, input the coupon code ” 441318  ” and get 5% off
- XCart – Great e-commerce software.
- Shopplugin – E-commerce plugin for Wordpress.
- WP-Ecommerce – Another plugin for Wordpress.

Now, you might still need a programmer to help you configure it or a designer to help you integrate the design seemlessly with your site, don’t forget you can post a project on a site like Scriptlance and get programmers to bid on your project.

Hosted Solutions

You’ll save a ton of time and technical headaches by going with the hosted solutions. If you’re looking for the quickest way to get started, I recommed you choose this option.

I highly recommend you compare all the providers that I list below. Although I’d like to say I recommend a particular one over the others, the truth is that they each have their stenghts and unique features that might suit one person and another solution might suit another person better. The best way is to compare them all and decide which one suits YOUR needs better. Many offers free trials, which is a good thing, signup to the free trials and try them all and decide for yourself. The best way to see which one you like best is to try them!

ProStores - One month free trial
I put this recommendation first because if you’re like me like to keep dealing with one company wherever possible to minimize the contacts you have to deal with, then you might want to consider ProStores which is owned by Ebay (by the way, eBay also owns PayPal that I recommeded you create a business account for earlier).

Shopify - 30 days free trial
This solution has me really excited. Ok, I now I said that I didn’t want to recommend one over another but if I had to, I’d be this one. I mean look over at the site and better yet, try the trial and see for yourself how awesome this system is.

3D Cart - 15 days free trial
This is such a competitive field! Another awesome system. They also offer a trial so just go check out the features and try the trial and see for yourself which solution you prefer

BIG Commerce - 15 days free trial
Another great solution. All these features really have my inner business geek all excited and if you’re like me, your head will be spinning too after comparing all these great ones.

Again, as you can see there’s free trials for each one so I think the best solution is to try them all! You can only see so much from the features chart, the only way to really know is to try it out.

Now if you need products to sell in your new e-commerce store, you might want to look into using drop shipping.

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I’m very excited about this one! My web development team have been working with Wordpress for the past few years but mainly for private clients. Lately we’ve decided to create plugins that would be released more publicly and not just for exclusively for single private clients anymore.

This is the first free Wordpress public plugin that we release – so I’m looking forward to the feedback – even if it means it’s bad feedback so we can improve on the next ones we release .  Check it out here.

Basically this plugin will save you time and effort by allowing you to quickly and easily insert screenshots into your blog posts / pages and also give you a cool feature of being able to give your visitors a preview of webpages (internal or external) before they click on a link!

This plugin uses a web service that I own called ThumbnailsPro.com – the only thing that I regret not being able to do with this plugin is give the ability to everyone to use it absolutely free in an unlimited fashion – unfortunately we don’t have the resources to be able to offer that yet- there are bills to be paid

HOWEVER – I talked with the system admins and programmers before we finalized this plugin and decided we could safely increase the limit of the free accounts from 1,000 monthly hits to 10,000 hits (10x increase!). – So i’m also VERY excited about this too because it means that everyone can start using this plugin completely free and the 10,000 hits will even suit the needs of most Wordpress users!

Here are the features:

• Automatically insert screenshots into blog posts and pages with various ThumbnailsPro api functions built-in
• Ability to show web page preview popups on links.
• Ability to choose from 2 styles of preview popups (preview one of the style by putting your cursor over any links in this blog post)
• Ability to choose where to display popups (page / posts only or site-wide or none at all)
• Ability to choose which link to show the popup for (external links only, internal links only or both)

Screenshots:

Settings page:

New button added for the inserting screenshot thumbnails to blog posts:

Here’s a video that gives an intro and overview of the features:

Here’s a video that show it being used live:

>>Get it here<<

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Drop shipping is a method of retail sales that allows the retailer to sell items without having to physically hold any inventory.

The retailer has an agreement with either a manufacturer, wholesaler or distributor to have items drop-shipped directly to their clients.

Here’s a simple example transaction to illustrate how it works.

1) Bob is a retailer, he sells painting supplies. 2) Acme Painting Supplies, Inc. agrees to drop-ship items directly to Bob’s clients. 3) Bob lists some items for sale.  4) Jane buys a paintbrush from Bob for $20.00. 5) Bob, turns around and buys the paint brush from Acme Painting Supplies, Inc. for $17.00.  6) Acme Painting Supplies, Inc. ships the paintbrush directly to Jane. 7) Bob made a profit of $3 without having to buy and hold any inventory or having to ship any items.

Here’s a diagram showing visually what a transaction looks like:

Drop shipping has existed for a long time. Many physical retailers used drop shipping for example when they ran out of stock at the physical location, they’d take the order from the customer and told them they’d get the item shipping to them directly.

It increased in popularity with the increase in e-commerce. Drop shipping became more attractive as a core business strategy for doing e-commerce online.  All that was needed was a picture and description of the item and a drop shipper ready to ship the items for them and anyone could instantly start selling without the huge overhead of having to purchase and store inventory (having cash tied up before it actually sold and risking not selling all the inventory) and the logistic headaches of handling shipping. Not to mention returns.

You can quickly see how attractive the model is. You can literally be selling thousands of items overnight without any up-front costs. You only buy once you’ve actually sold something and receive the payment from the customer.

Returns are usually handled by the retailer obtaining a return authorization # from the supplier, which is passed to the consumer along with the return address to ship to. Once the return is received and the retailer refunded (as applicable), then the consumer gets refunded. Once again, the retailer here avoids having to use any of his funds before he gets the funds first. This is a huge cash-flow advantage.

So the advantages of drop shipping should be pretty clear; no handling of inventory, no shipping, big cash flow benefits, access to a wide range of products quickly, no physical handling of items or returns.

What about the flip side of the coin though? There are disadvantages to drop shipping that you have to consider before embarking on:

1) Lack of control. You have no control over shipping delays, inventory discrepancy (if your drop shipper says there is inventory left and you sell the item and you find out they can’t fulfill because of an error in inventory, you’re left dealing with a frustrated customer who’s wondering why you sold him an item you didn’t have in your possession).

You also have no control over how descriptions / pictures might differ from actual items shipped or how much care goes into the packing and shipping.

2) Market Saturation. Because it’s so easy to use this model, markets quickly become saturated with many retailers competing with each other to sell items from drop shippers. To succeed you need an edge. You need to separate and differentiate yourself from competitors by having unique offerings.

Better service, unique incentives, different sales channels than your competitors, combining items together to make it more convenient for buyers. Anything that you can do that will allow you to differentiate yourself will help your chances of success when using drop shipping as part of your business model.

If you let price be the differentiator,  you’re setting yourself up for disappointed – you’ll be left competing  on the same playing field with all the other sellers. Price is not the only factor buyers consider when shopping for an item and you need to leverage the other factors to your advantage as much as possible to gain an edge using this model.

Market saturation is especially problematic if you decide to compete in the most price-competitive marketplace there is – eBay. I suggest you look at other channels to sell your items (at least in addition to eBay. Relying on eBay alone, you’re again setting yourself up for a difficult battle with other sellers using the same drop shippers you are).

Tips to make drop shipping work for you.

Tip 1) Research and choose a niche. You should find a niche where there is a demand, yet the competition from others sellers is low enough that you know you can squeeze in and sell items.

Tip 2) Research different drop shippers. If you can find a drop shipper that others have seemed to miss and they carry items that other drop shippers don’t really carry (or at least don’t carry at better prices)… then you have an edge over your competitors. This requires a lot of deep researching however as the most popular drop shippers are obviously more visible wherever you’ll make your research so you’ll need to go where others might have missed.

Tip 3) As mentioned before, create other differentiators for you business. Better service, better expertise, better trust. Why should buyers buy from you instead of your competitors if price is not a factor? This will help you eventually diminish the importance of price when buyers compare you to competitors.

Tip 4) Keep a close eye on inventory levels and even have back-up suppliers for items you carry as possible. Selling items that you can’t fulfill could hurt your reputation as a seller so making sure you can fulfill your sales is an important aspect of drop shipping success.

So Can you make money with drop shipping? Of course you can but like anything else in life, it’ll take time, research and effort. I’m always disapointed when I hear stories like “I signed up to this drop shipper and put stuff up for sale on eBay that is selling like crazy, like this popular widget that is all the craze but I’m not selling any. Plus, the price at the drop shipper is higher than what some sellers on eBay are selling it for!”

It’s obvious there was a lack of research here. First, if it’s such a popular widget, then you can bet the competition will be fierce and you might be competing directly with some distributors selling directly on eBay! Research a niche, don’t just go the lazy route and go for what super “hot” as you’ll get hot competition too. Do some real research and find a niche where there is room for you to compete in. Don’t just simply look at eBay alone and give it some time, put some effort into it. It’s no get rich quick scheme.

More? I’m working on a Drop Shipping ebook that will go in much more details but I wanted to give an introduction to drop shipping in this post for now, I will share it here when I’m done with it ( if you’d like to get a free copy, make sure to get on my insiders list, the opt-in form should be somewhere in the right-hand sidebar here —>

My background in drop shipping is extensive. That’s something for another posts, perhaps a posts that describes my story and myself in more details – but for now, i can tell you that I’m not a newbie to drop shipping, I’ve been on  all sides of drop shipping (as a retailer, then as a drop shipper and distributor and even as an e-commerce platform hosting retailers that used drop shipping as a model – dealing with the inventory, shipping, order automation logistics, etc for them).

I’ll also create more posts about drop shipping, for example on how & where to find drop shippers so keep an eye out for those posts but for those that want to get started right away, you can check out Doba (14 days trial), Shopster (free account, no credit card required to start), Salehoo (extensive list of  wholesalers and drop shippers), WebDropshipper (free drop shippers directory & search engine) and UsDropshippers (free showcases of US dropshippers)

As always if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post them in the comments below.

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If you’re like me and finding yourself having to test web apps on a regular basis or having to create multiple accounts for anything else, then you’ve certainly found yourself scratching your head as to what you’re going to do when you run out of email address to use Sure if you have your own domain name, you can create a “catch-all” mailbox that forwards anything@domain.ext   to any email you want… but that takes a bit to setup and well it’s been found to be a huge spam magnets as many spammers email anythingandeverything@domain.ext in the hope of reaching someone who will open that email. So if you’ve use catch-all mailboxes before, you know what I mean with the spam bombarding.

A while ago I came across this little tip that I have been using almost daily now so it’s really useful and a time saver for me – I hope it will be for you too.

It’s really simple to use, all you do is add +anything to the email just before the @ symbol. For example my email  franco@francofrenette.com can become multiple emails but all emails still get received to my franco@francofrenette.com account. So another use for this that I’ve found is if you run multiple sites like I do but are too lazy to create different mailboxes for each, in the meantime you can just create different “virtual” email using your single email like this and so when you receive emails there, you’ll know where it came from. Let me illustrate with an example:

Lets say I create a website about cars called carsbyfranco.com and I don’t want to create a separate mailbox for it, I could just use franco+carsbyfranco@francofrenette.com and I’ll receive emails to franco@francofrenette.com, the “+carsbyfranco” is irrelavent to most email systems so it ignores it but still delivers the email and when you receive it, you see it was sent to franco+carsbyfranco@francofrenette.com so you know that the email came from someone on your site.

So if you get an email that would be otherwise impossible to know where it came from without a separate mailbox, for example you get an email like “I’d like to advertise on your site, please send me the prices”. Well if you’re like me and have numerous websites, you don’t know what website they’re inquiring about unless you have a separate mailbox for it or you’re using this trick.

This trick works with most email systems but may not work with all. It works for Gmail which is what I use and highly recommend to anyone (their spam filtering is amazing and their search can’t be beat).

You have any tricks like that that you use online to save time and trouble? Please share them in the comments below. All the little tricks we can find that can save precious minutes compound and make our life online much more efficient.

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There have been different discussions and plugin to address this topic on how to turn your Wordpress blog into a mobile-friendly site. Some only did general mobile-friendly version, some only did Iphone. Some were complex to implement. The simplest I’ve found is MobilePress. You just install the plugin as any other plugin and activate. There’s an iPhone version and a mobile version.

Features:

-Ability to specify a custom title & description when viewing the mobile versions

-Ability to have your own themes

-Ability to enable analytics and ads via Aduity which seems to be in testing stages for now, so you can’t use that feature just yet.

-Ability to view full version for those that don’t like the mobile version. I personally love this for the iPhone, i hate when i’m forced to view the mobile version and i want to view the full version because something is not available in the mobile version.

Here’s what the settings page looks like:

Here’s what the iPhone version looks like for this site:

Why I like it: It’s easy to install and still gives some cool control / customizing options specially with the option of having your own themes. I also really like the feature that allows you to view the full version and not be stuck with the mobile-only version.

What I’d like to see: More customization options, for example more layout styles, perhaps let people choose a custom colors and layout types. I’d also like them to support other advertising methods, specially since we can’t begin to use Aduity now. I’d like a way to preview the mobile version that doesn’t set a cookie / session that you have to revert to see the normal version again. Right now if you preview the mobile version, you have to click another link to revert otherwise you’re stuck viewing the mobile version.

>>>Get it here<<<

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The thing with a Wordpress blog is that they can sometimes just seem like…well… a blog. I think it’s important in some cases to make it more like a website that has a blog component. But how do you do that when everything looks the same.

Sure there are some themes that offers specific page templates, which allows you for example to remove the sidebars and have a page the full width of your theme but still, the urls still gives it away that it’s just a regular ol’ Wordpress.

Sometimes it would be cool to add .html to Wordpress pages so that it looks more like custom website that has a blog component. Sure, there’s permalinks you could do to have everything have .html appended but if you want to keep the blog posts looking like blog posts and the pages looking like separate static pages, then you’ll find this plugin useful.

Click here to go to the download page and download it. To use the plugin, it’s pretty simple actually, you just upload the plugin as you would any others and activate it

For the tweakers out there, I’ve successfully modified this plugin myself to append something else than .html to pages (.php for example) or whatever else you want to append to make it look custom and distinguished from other Wordpress blogs out there. So if you want to tweak it, you can do that easily, open the file and it’ll be obvious where to change the appended extension.

>> Get it here <<

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