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Do you use some tool like Photoshop or an online color picker to choose your HTML colors? We use things like #ffffcc and #454545, who knows what these are and what they are doing here eh? Well as you will see hexadecimal is not that complicated at all, let’s take a look.

I bet many more of you know RGB notation, since the name says it all, Red, Green, Blue. The three numbers in an RGB value (ranging from 0 - 255) represent the intensity of these three colors, with 255 being the most intense. For example, (0, 0, 255) would be as blue as it gets, since red and green values are set to 0, while blue is set to 255.

Actually hexadecimal notation is exactly the same, with different ranges. If you group a hex value the same way as you do with RGB, for example #00 00 ff, you would get the same result as with the RGB(0, 0, 255). As you can see, hex ranges from 0 to f, with f being the most intense.

Knowing how these colors work enable you to change colors quickly on your website because you will roughly know what it will look like. If you want to get the exact same blue but in a lighter shade, you know you need to bump up all other values as well (to get it closer to white), for example #4455ff will be a lighter shade of blue.

As a side note, you can actually obtain the number of colors that your system can display with this information. Color values can go from 0 - 255, that means 256 colors overall for one channel. If you want all the combination of colors, use a bit of math and you will come up with 256 x 256 x 256 = 16, 777,212.

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You’d be surprised at how a software essentially geared toward a game can give you a lot in productivity. Lego Digital Designer is also unique because it is fun, it can be considered a game, while it can also be an important tool for Lego fans, designers and artists.

A quick download of the application will enable you to build any Lego model you want, with more than 700 brick types to choose from I’m sure you can think of something to build.This tool could bring Lego more into the lives of today’s digital generation, no matter how great games become, Lego is still my favorite. Heck, I still play with Lego today, although nowadays I buy Technic almost exclusively, but I am aiming for some Lego creator soon!

A great feature is that you can check the price of your model, which you can subsequently order. I don’t understand why so many pieces are left out of this, you will see that when placing some elements the application will tell you that this will disable price checking. I hope they fix this soon, since I think this deters many people.

Otherwise the software is great, it allows for great accuracy and many placement combinations, with even Mindstorms designs being available you can design very advanced stuff. You can create from scratch, or you can enhance base models, the later is a great way to teach kids and to get to know the program. This is one fun piece of software!

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In many cases in my own life I find that I am either productive or comfortable. By this I don’t mean that I have to sleep on the floor after a productive day, what I mean is that many times you need to trade your personal freedom to work productively according to GTD and other task management theories.

The reason is mostly scheduling. I have three projects and I could schedule each subtask for a day next week but I won’t. The reason for this is that if I don’t complete my schedule on a given day I’ll feel bad, and the whole project will suffer overall.

If you have projects which do not have a very strict deadline I would advise against scheduling them daily because it will cause you discomfort. Writing a to-do list for the week is fine, or doing 4 day to do list is perhaps even better, this way if you don’t complete a task you can bump it to next time.

The advantage of scheduling flexibly like this is that you can make use of your personal highs and lows. When you feel you don’t want to work just don’t, take the time to relax, and when you do feel like it, you will be able to complete twice as much.

The obvious drawback is that this method is not for those who can not discipline themselves. If you are looking for a cheap way to bump your tasks and not do anything then this is not for you, you will only get set back more.

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One thing I very much hate about Firefox is the download window. Whenever I download anything an annoying window pops up. I would be ok with it if it would materialize in the background, but instead, after each link click to download it springs up in my face.

Of course I don’t really hate Firefox for this, since there had been an addon around for ages to help with this problem. Download statusbar puts all your downloads in a bar at the bottom of the browser, saving you from that nagging download screen.

All finished items can be cleared with a mouse click, but if you don’t clear them the only problem it causes is a 15 pixel bar at the bottom of the screen. It increases my productivity a bit because it removes the pop up, and also because now I don’t have to click close every time I download something. This is one of my must-have addons, after each OS reinstall it’s one of the first ones I download.

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Martin from gHacks just shared a really good tip on his site on mounting USB drives to folders, instead of assigning drive letters to them. This is great if you have a double or triple boot setup, since you are likely to have at least 4-5 partitions, all with separate drive letters.

Martin suggests creating a folder named USB for instance and then mounting all drives there. This also helps get rid of some confusion and navigation issues, since USB drives will now be more a part of your file system than before.

To read exactly how to do this, take a look at the original article on mounting USB drives to folders, I don’t want to take any of the limelight here.

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When you use WordPress you’re given the choice when publishing between doing it as a ‘post’ or as a ‘page‘. Posts go up on your blog while ‘pages’ are static pages that you can publish without it having to go up on your blog.

There’s a lot of reasons why you might choose a post over a page or a page over a post (that’s for another post) - but today I thought I’d highlight a few ‘pages’ that I have here on ProBlogger as examples of pages that bloggers might want to develop to promote their blog to different groups of people. Some are more essential in my mind than others but all have been helpful in the development of my own blogs.

1. About Page - perhaps one of the most common uses of the ‘page’ function on WP is the good old ‘about page’. Having an about page is essential in my mind as it gives new readers to your blog a snapshot of who you are and why they should subscribe to your blog. This is the page that I go to every time I hit a new blog - if they don’t have one it decreases my chances of subscribing significantly. Read more on adding an about page to your blog.

2. Contact Page - I’m amazed how many bloggers don’t have any way of contacting them on their blog. While I understand the temptation not to have one you could be missing out of wonderful opportunities by not giving readers, potential partners, press, other bloggers a way of contacting you. Read more on Why your blog’s readers should be able to contact you.

3. Press Page - I don’t promote this page heavily (although do mention it on my ‘About Page‘) but use it more when interacting with journalists and mainstream media outlets. The way I use it is to show journalists what others have written about me. I find that in providing a list of previous articles in mainstream media you gain a little credibility and give journalists a head start in finding an angle to pursue for their own potential articles about you. It’s also handy to be able to provide this page to anyone else that you’re attempting to build credibility with that may not be that ‘new media savvy’. It’s amazing how a mention in mainstream media will open doors for some.

4. Disclaimer Page - I need to update this page but for the interests of transparency have it linked to on every page on my blog to show readers what I get out of this blog - ie that I make money from it and use affiliate programs. I also use this page to dispel some of the myths and untrue assumptions that people have about me and this blog by sharing some of the ‘costs’ of this blog. I find that this balanced ‘disclaimer’ works quite well.

5. FAQ Page - this page was written with a very selfish motive - to cut down my workload. I get asked a lot of question, many of them repeatedly. As an attempt to answer some of these frequently asked questions I put together some answers for them. I still get asked the questions but being able to point to this page helps. I also have it linked to prominently from my Contact Page.

6. Subscribe Page - having a page dedicated to how people can subscribe to your blog can be very useful. I don’t link to this from my sidebar any more (like I do at DPS) but do link to it from within posts at times. I find that having a page like this can be useful as some readers don’t understand the idea of RSS or can be worried about issues of privacy or what it means to ’subscribe’. Sometimes having a page dedicated to walking people through the process can pay off.

7. Advertise with Us Page - looking to sell advertising on your blog? An ‘Advertise’ page is an important part of attracting new advertisers and a well written one can cut down a lot of work for you as it’ll help to filter out people by giving them information that helps them to know if your site is right for them. Further Reading: Finding Advertisers for Your Blog.

8. Series Page - Compilation - I’ve used ‘pages’ in two ways when it comes to series of posts. The first way is to put together a compilation page of all of the posts in a series. I don’t do this that regularly but in the example linked to put together the content from all 25 posts on my series on Battling Bloggers Block. I found that some readers really appreciated having the series all in the one place.

9. Series Page - Central Page - the other approach to managing a series of posts with a ‘page’ is to use one as a ‘central links page’ that you update with a link to each post in your series over time. This is what I did in my 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Series last August. The beauty of this approach over the ‘compilation page’ is that it can drive a lot more page views as readers are ’sneezed’ in multiple directions into your blog. It’s also good because it allows readers to be more selective about which posts in a series they want to read rather than reading the full thing.

10. Affiliate Pre-Sell Pages - having a dedicated page for an affiliate program that you’re running can be a very smart move. If you refer to a product that you’re promoting regularly in your posts - rather than linking to the affiliate program link to a ‘pre-sell’ page on your own blog. This allows you to ‘pre-sell’ the product more with a personal message. This is what I do on my AdSense page here at ProBlogger. This doesn’t work for every affiliate program but I find with AdSense that it works well as their landing page can be a little off putting to new potential users of it. It also gives me a little more flexibility with how I mention AdSense in my posts as their Referrals program doesn’t allow html linking. Further Reading: 5 Tips for Improving AdSense Referral Earnings.

11. Services Pages - If you offer services to readers then develop a dedicated sales page for yourself and link to it prominently on your blog. The example here is my Consulting page - a page I used to point to regularly. These days I don’t offer these services any more (due to workload) so have not promoted it for a while. I find that when you have a dedicated page to selling your services you can sell yourself much more expansively than just a quick mention elsewhere on your blog.

12. Key Information Pages - Do you have information that you’re constantly providing to people over and over again (whether in blog posts, via email or in other ways)? Make a page about it and keep the link handy. That’s what I did with my b5media page and have found it to help me cut down my workload in answering questions about the network. I also link to it in my navigational bar here on ProBlogger and it’s lead to some great opportunities. You could do this with any business or product that you’re associated with.

13. Landing Pages - this page is an example of one over at DPS that I used last year as a landing page for an ad campaign that I ran. If you do choose to run an ad campaign to promote your blog then it’s much wiser to link your ads to a dedicated landing page than the front page of your blog. Read more on Advertising Your Blog and on Landing Pages.

14. Sneeze Pages - one great way to propel people deep within your blog is to develop a Sneeze Page or a ‘Best of’ page that highlights some of the better articles on your blog around a particular theme. Put links to these pages on your sidebar or refer to them in posts and you’ll see your page impressions per visit statistics go up.

15. Testimonial Pages - if you’re selling something (even if it’s yourself) to have some sort of a testimonial page can be very worthwhile. People base buying decisions increasingly upon the opinions of others - so capture some of these opinions and present them.

16. Event Specific Pages - speaking at an event? Create a ‘page’ specifically for those at it and mention that you’ve done so in your presentation. This way you can tailor a specific message to those visitors, their needs, your presentation and ’sell’ something to them (whether it be subscribing to your blog, buying a product, selling your services or getting them to read certain pages on your blog. The example I’ve given is from a conference I did this time last year. I also used to have a section on that page selling a product that I mentioned in the presentation and it converted quite well.

17. 404 Page - when people arrive on your blog to a page that has been deleted, follow a dead link etc and end up on a default error page on your blog you’ve got a wasted opportunity on your hands. Customize your error pages to help readers find what they’re looking for or at least find something else that might interest them. Further Reading: How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page for Your Blog.

18. Special Projects - Last year I participated in a charity event called (Movember). Rather than letting this event completely take over my blog for the month I created a dedicated page for the event that those who were interested in could follow my updates on.

19. Guest Blogger Page - I’ve never spoken publicly about this page on ProBlogger before but it’s a page that I provide to guest bloggers of ProBlogger with some guidelines on how to write for this blog. I’ve done the same thing for DPS and have found that it’s been very useful. I get more posts that are written in a format that I can use and it’s cut down a lot of work for me.

20. Archives Page - there are numerous ways that you can present that archives of your blog. It becomes more challenging the larger your blog grows to be able to direct people back to your best previous work and a dedicated page can be helpful in that process rather than just presenting a list of categories or dates on your site bar. What I’ve attempted to do with mine is to provide a page with dated archives but also categories with some suggested starting points.

Some of the above ‘pages’ can of course be created from ‘posts’ on your blog (and there might be some good reasons for doing so) however my preference is to make them ‘pages’. In most cases this is because I prefer these pages to not be date specific. The way I have my links set up here at ProBlogger posts have dates showing and in the link structure - but pages don’t. In many of the above examples I also didn’t want to page to show up in my blog’s RSS feed or categories - but preferred them to be standalone pages.

What page types would you add to the above list?

Update: Some great suggestions in comments so far. I agree that a privacy page is a good one, as is a comments policy (I have one of these but wrote it as a post - I think it’d be more appropriate as a page though). Another one that I should have included is a ‘resource’ page - a page that lists recommended resources, books, courses etc. Lastly - I should have included a ‘blog roll’ or ‘links’ page. Thanks for everyone’s suggestions - keep them coming.

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If you haven’t bought a Mac yet just because you’re not quite convinced as to how all the features of a Mac can help you achieve your internet goals, then let me bring you one step closer by showing you how easy it is to create a great marketing tool called podcasts. For those of you who don’t know, podcasting is much like a RSS feed except that instead of syndicating text throughout the internet, you are syndicating an audio file to your users who have subscribed to your feed.

Personally, I subscribe to a handful of podcasts such as Nightly News with Brian Williams to catch up on world affairs and This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte to listen to the grumpy tech humor we know as Devorak. Much like my RSS Feeds, the latest episodes of all my shows are uploaded and synced automatically to my iPhone, so that I can listen to these shows when I want and where I want like when I used to ride the train or when I commute. I’ve always tried to maximize every minute of my day by educating myself when I can and this is a great way to fill in the usual empty pockets of time that we some times can have.

So, what’s this have to do with you? And how will it make me any kind of money? Basically, podcasts are great marketing tools. They can help compliment the content you already have on your blogs by offering a personal touch to your commentary and giving your readers another way to carry your content with them during their daily routines.

Creating a Podcast

Required for these instructions to work:

• Apple Computer - preferably a iMac or Macbook that has a built in mic.
• iLife 08 specifically the Garageband program
• Wordpress Blog

1. Open the Garageband program and you will be prompted with this window:
2. Select “Create a New Podcast Episode”
3. Save as “My First Podcast’ - The Garageband interface should now pop up for you to start using.
4. Get your show notes ready and press the record button to start saving your show. When finished, press the record button again to stop recording.
5. Edit your recording with Garageband effects
   • Add Photos
   • Segment your show into Chapters
   • Add Intro and Ending Music
6. Save as an mp3 file on your computer.
7. Publishing - Using wordpress to generate the XML Feed
   • Create a New Category in your blog called “Podcasts”
   • Create a Post with the appropriate title
   • Upload your podcast mp3 file and create a link within your post.
   • Your XML feed for your podcast is now - “http://www.yourdomain.com/category/podcast/feed“
8. Now that you have your feed nice and ready, you will want to start telling everyone about your new podcast. Here are some tips:
   • Submit your Feed URL to all the major Podcast directories, such as PodcastPickle.com and of course iTunes.
   • You also will want to create a link to your iTunes podcast so people can easily subscribe to it by copy and pasting the url iTunes has generated for you in iTunes.

After Ryan’s post about how to create, market and make money off a viral video, I decided that I should attempt to make one. I actually made this video on the day I read Ryan’s post but decided not to post it until today. I wanted to see how viral it’ll get without me doing anything.

Turns out, it did not bad. Without any help, the video received over 1,000 views and garnered five Youtube honors, including being ranked #8 most viewed video in the Canada comedy channel yesterday (it’s #12 today). Whether or not people pick up the video and make it viral remains to be seen. If you like the video, then please pass it around. If you don’t like it, then tough shit.

*Warning - the video contains not safe for work language.

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Hello! If you can read this post, that means you’re on our brand new sponsored server. If you can’t…well just don’t waste your time on leaving comments because you’ll be the only one reading them As you might recall, a few days ago we did a sponsored review of TopHostingCenter.com and we found out what a great bunch of boys and girls they really are. Like we said before, we found the tech support department extremely helpfull and Eric, the CEO, is a friendly and down to earth guy who knows what he’s doing.

The timing on this whole sponsor swap was excellent as we started to run into more and more trouble with our old sponsor. At one stage they completely took the server offline because someone in the sales department thought it was weird that our monthly bills were $0! Took us hours to convince them that they needed to boot the server back up. No need to say that we were pretty pissed off with that. Besides the uptime issues, we were looking for some extra options which they just didn’t have. We’d still like to thank them for 6 months of free hosting and we hope they’ll get back on the right track.

Anyway, enough with the old, lets talk about the new! Top Hosting Center has very generously given us a rack mountable pizzabox server to milk. Here’s the specs for the geeks:

• 4x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz Processor #1 speed: 2128.541 MHz
• Memory: 2072252k/2096000k
• 2x SCSI device sda: 488395120 512-byte hdwr sectors (250058 MB)
• 3Ware Raid Controller (2×250GB in RAID1 config)
• 100mbps pipe

This is quite a bump in hardware specs. We used to run off a Core Duo 2 @ 1.86 Mhz, 2GB Ram, 2×160GB Raid1 and a 10mbps pipe. Besides the hardware upgrade, we decided to crank up the old PHP/MySQL and Apache versions too. Coming from MySQL4.1, PHP4 and Apache 1.3 we’re now moo-ing on MySQL5, PHP5 and Apache 2.2. Was a bit scary when we transferred the blog and the rest of our websites, but so far no significant problems have occurred. We haven’t tweaked anything yet in MySQL or Apache like we did on the old server, mainly because we think that all the upgrades should have a huge positive impact on the speed of the site. Of course, the 100mbps won’t hurt the performance either. Enough with the geek talk already! You guys might not need a dedicated server persee, but you should really check out the great budgethosting plans THC has for bloggers.If you find a bug, please drop us an email.

So that’s what we’ve been busy with most part of last night. We’d like to give a big shout-out to our new sponsors, the team at Top Hosting Center! Thanks for the server and your help! (And for the awesome prize you’re sponsoring for an upcoming contest for the JohnCow dot Com readers sometime this week )

We’re gonna have a proper Saturday now - hanging on the couch, drinking beer milk and playing xbox (Gamertag “JohnCowdotCom” if your up for a game).

Errr…we just saw this rather disturbing video of our hero, the reason why we blog, the epiphany of the blogging underworld, Mr John Chow. We’re not exactly sure what to think of it. Its a pretty crap video and he’s basically talking a lot of shit. He’s saying this is an attempt at a viral video, but that’s just bullshit if you ask us - he’s been sniffing glue for sure. Lets face it, if he had one, we wouldn’t recommend the Big Beef to give up the dayjob to start a career in standup comedy. And who is this Gary that shit his pants he keeps talking about?

*This was a sponsored review