As many of you know I lost both my father and his youngest brother in a period of 5 days. Both passed away after long health battles and the last month has been so stressful and trying on my family.

The last month I have not done much besides help in my Dad’s care in his declining health. It has been hard and trying at times. So hard that a put most other things on hold. Now I am trying to get going and re-look at what I have to do.

One of the things I am working on is launching 3 new blogs in areas of interest of mine that are not technology based. I was hoping to have them launched by now but the first one will be launched on Friday morning and the other 2 after that.

I am busy working on trying to get my new business going and I am going to strive hard to make this a success. Their is no substitute for hard work.

I will be updating my Twitter page, parts of my blog and more as time goes on. I have made a decision that I need to get my head wrapped around Linkedin. This will become a project sooner then later.

My Ebook on Backup Strategies has gone on hold my I am about to go back at that as well. I have most of the work roughed out, now just to work on the content.

I will be returning to my regular Sunday morning this week in review video cast. Stay tuned for Sunday’s

In this all, my family is and always will be number one. I will support them and help in anyway I can. They mean the world to me.

Rob

I use at home what I called the Open Source/Cloud/Paid Software Mix. You might ask what this is? What this is a mix between open source/Free software, Cloud computing strategies and paid software strategy. The big reasons for going this route are cost, support, usability and flexibility.

Besides my Hardware I have fully licensed versions of Windows 7 Home Premium and Office 2007. The only reason I am using Office 2007 is I had a license but I am starting to transition away from it. The reality is Office is starting to become bloat ware. I do prefer Windows over Linux and in past I have run both. It recognizes drivers easily and most of my clients are running a Windows environment. That all said I also have a Linux box at home.

Now you night ask what applications to I use open source/free software for? The answer to that is pretty much everything besides my primary operating system. Why would I put all the critical tasks I do in the hands of open source/free applications. The reasons are as follows:

1. Cost.
2. Support – Open source and free software often have better support then paid applications.
3. Usability – typically these applications are made for the end user by end user.
4. Acceptance – Many open source/free applications are better accepted then commercial ones.
5. Quality – Some open source/free applications are tops in their class. WordPress and FileZilla come to mind.
6. Versatility – most open source/free applications are the same look and feel regardless of which operating system they are run on.
7. Updates – These applications are updated more often then their commercial counterparts.

How does cloud computing fall into this mix you might ask? The answer is real easy – versatility and portability. My data can be accessed wherever I am via any common web browser. That makes my life much better since I am always on the go. I even use Jungle Disk to back up my data to the Cloud. Applications like Drop Box and even Evernote I could not see myself ever doing without. They are such a part of my day to day computing life.

If you use a combination of open source/free software, cloud computing and paid software your day to day software experience will be much better. What do you use?

I hope everyone is having a great week. As you may have noticed I have changed my blog around and the format a bit. I have some more features I will be adding and hopefully I will have time to do these this weekend.

I wanted to let everyone know that I have not quit blogging. I am just really slowed down due to my Dad being back in the hospital. I have been spending time in the hospital trying to help and take the stress off my mom. I want to thank all my friends for their kind words of support and their prayers. They have meant so much to mu family and I can not even put it into words.

I will be posting my video review on the Kodak digital video camera I purchased this weekend as well I have a new blog site that is being launched on July 15th. Please watch for it and I hope you enjoy it.

Rob

A lot of people have asked me lately what I use when I blog and why do I choose to use certain blogging tools. I thought I would take some time and explain which tools I use to make my blog and site what it really is.

The best blogging software is open source and free. Their is no question that WordPress is the best blogging software on the market and it is free. When WordPress says their install takes five minutes they mean it.

For a long time I used many free themes to define the look and style of my blog. About six months ago I decided to use a great premium theme called Headway. Headway is an amazing theme that really makes the design of your blog look crisp.

I am purchased a new Headway skin called the Workplace skin. Over the next week you will start to see layout changes to my blog.

I really do not like the way WordPress manages comments for blogs. As a result I use a third party comment system called Disqus
. Disqus does a great job helping manage comment and avoiding spam.

A couple of pluggins I really like is the Tweet Me retweet button and the addthis bar. Tweet Me puts a re tweet button on your blog so you can re tweet posts. Add this allows to cross post the b log post to any number of other services including Facebook, Tumblr and more.

I use other services like Picasa online, Vimio and You Tube to store my content for my blog. These services allow me to make pictures and video readily available.

What do you use when you blog?

Many of you know that I run the Headway theme on my blog. When I tried to update to Version 1.6 I experiences many issues with my WordPress Control Panel on both my personal blog and this blog; my professional site. I have attributed the issues to database corruption.

I have backups of my database going back 6 months. Unfortunately I do believe the corruption goes further back then that. So the problem is I can not upgrade my theme or certain plug ins without risking corrupting my database more. A a result I am currently moving my new blogs off to a new database. While I am doing the moving of data I will continue to run my existing blogs.

The only way I can move the data is the cut and paste method. This is a long drawn out process since I have over 400 posts between the 2 blogs. The process should take 2 to 3 weeks as I do have a full time job and other commitments.

I am going to use this as an opportunity. My professional blog will have a new logo and a new look and feel when it is done. In the end it will be well worth it.

I thought it was necessary to add a disclosure page to my blog. I do have financial or personal interest in several companies/organizations and do feel it is necessary to disclose these to be honest and upfront with my readers. I will never put any advertising on my web site for a company/organization which I would not use myself and would not support their product.

Plans already completed for blog in 2010:

1. I have purchased a premium theme. I am currently using the Headway Theme.

2. I have managed to write 3 times a week on a regular basis. I have changed the days around but I have managed to be more consistent. This is really important to me since consistency will bring back readers.

Plans to complete in the next couple of months:

1. I am working on trying to monetize my blog more and more.

2. I am trying to increase my traffic to my blog more. The increased traffic will help with the monetization.

3. Before the end of March, I am looking to add a 5 minute weekly Video Blog. Stay tuned for this change!

4. I am in the process of changing the layout of my blog around. This should be completed in the next month.

What would you like to see?

First off I would like to apologize for the lack of articles I have written over the last month. As many of you may or may not know my Dad has had some health issues which included a week long hospital stay over Christmas. Things are somewhat better now and as a result I now have more time to devote to writing. I would like to take the time to wish you and your family a Very Happy Holidays and all the best for 2010.

I have started the past month to reshape my blog. I have updated my theme to one that I really like as well as retiring my the-techshop web site and moving my blog here. For those of you who forget that I have moved my blog, the old site will redirect to the new one for a period of close to a year.

The question now is where do I go from here. I have decided that witting every day is not practical in my case but having a set schedule is. As a result I have decided that I am going to try and write at least 3 times a week on my blog with my schedule looking like the following:

1. Monday’s – I am going to write a weekly article on Technology on the go. How people with busy lifestyle’s use technology to help enhance their lifestyle.

2. Wednesday’s – I am going to use for an open topic. By an open topic I mean that I will write about anything that is interesting in the world of social media or technology.

3. Saturday I will do a review of a product or a web site.

I truly do believe that posting regular articles is the best approach:)

This past week I decided to make a bit of a change for me. Those of you who read my blogs will notice that I have moved my blog to my RobertBCairns.com domain. This decision was an easy one to make for many reasons.

When I started blogging, I did it to help people out. Originally I used my The-Techshop.com domain to write my technical blog. A year after that I created my professional services page at RobertBCairns.com . I figured using my name would be better for branding then The-Techshop.com which does not mean anything to most people except me. It was just another blog.

This past week I decided for branding and to save myself from updating 2 WordPress sites I would move my blog from The-Techshop.com domain to my RobertBCairns.com domain. This was completed last night when I merged the two domains. I now have my blog and professional services all on one WordPress site. I have forward my The-Techshop.com to RobertBCairns.com and will maintain that forwarding for at least a year to transition people over to the new site.

Last week at my full time job, a respected colleague asked me a question which provided food for thought. His questions was “Why Do You Blog?”. It was a thought provoking question which I actually had to think about. I do believe I have the answer which I will share but I also thought I would give some back ground on how I got their.

7 years ago I used to change Internet Service Provider’s a lot. I could not find one provider that was consistent on how they provided service. DSL providers would be good for a few months then their service would get bad and I would switch. Every time I switched providers I would have to change email addresses. For a while I used a Yahoo email account to get around this problem of the ever changing email account. Then one day my email account was hacked and I was never able to get it back.

I then did what I always do, some research. After some research I determined the best way to handle these issues was to sign up with a web hosting provider and register my own domain domain. I did a lot of searching and signed up with 1and1.com. At the time they had the best flexibility of packages for what I was looking for. They were also the most reasonable for cost. When I signed up the Cairns-clan.com domain was born. I now had a domain where I could park my email addresses and any addresses that my family wanted as well.

Out of registering the domain, I had also purchased web space. It came with the package. My Uncle Ian was the family historian who was working on updating the Genealogy of the family. The Cairns family history is very interesting. I suggested to my Uncle Ian that we put our history on the web. Out of these discussions the Cairns-clan web site was born.

Around the same time I started to think how I could answer the same IT questions from my friends and family without having to keep answering them over and over. I also wanted to created a set of resource that I could say go here and they would all be on the Internet for them to browse at their leisure. Out of this the-techshop.com web site was born.

The original was website was primitive in comparison to how it is today. The entire site was HTML coded and the information on it was very static. I did not get around to updating the information as much as I should have since it took some time to do. Updates would happen month’s apart. Despite the infrequent updates, I had my resource site. I had links to all the information which my friends and family needed.

After some time, a couple of years ago 1.and1 offered hosted WordPress. For those of you who do not know, WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet. I had found my solution. The solution which has shaped where I am today. I transformed my web site from a static HTML site to a hosted WordPress Blog. I finally was in business.

WordPress made my life so much easier but the hosted version of WordPress lacked some of the flexibility which I was looking for. Earlier this spring I made the move from hosted WordPress to self hosted WordPress. Self hosted WordPress means I have control over the database, the plugins, more flexibility and most of all more control.

That is where I am today. I am really happy with my choice. I have moved all my web sites to be WordPress based.

Now that I have gone over the technical back ground on how I got here, the questions still remains “Why Do I Blog?”. One of the biggest reasons is blogging give me a forum to share information with other people. One thing I have also enjoyed is staying up to date in my friend and sharing my knowledge with others. Blogging provides me with the platform to share information.

I like to give back. Sharing information helps other enjoy and understand technology. I love to see other people getting excited about technology. Their is no better way to share then to write about it.

Blogging also gives me flexibility and allows me to keep my site more current. WordPress is an easy content management system (cms) to maintain. It does not take a lot of work to update my WordPress blog or add to it.

Most of all I am part of a community. Blogging helps me to network with other people and has helped me to meet many great people.

As of today I have switched the comment system on my blog to Disqus. I have managed to import all older comments from the WordPress comment system but Disqus has dropped the avatar picture of everyone who had previously comment. My apologizes.