About Matthew Guay

Author Archive | Matthew Guay

Find Great Webapps for Almost Anything

By Matthew Guay on October 5, 2010 in Other Sites, Writing

Whether you’re looking for a way to make friends, find the current time anywhere on earth, create documents, entertain yourself or your kids, or almost anything else, there’s likely a webapp for it. Mobile devices and apps get most of the attention in the tech press today, but webapps are an equally exciting field. From 37signals to Google to independent developers you’ve never heard of, there are thousands of new webapps avilable online for you to try out. There’s tons of great ones, but unfortunately there’s also quite a few that aren’t very nice.

If you’d like to quickly find out about the greatest new webapps that are stylish, functional, and fun to use, then check out GreatWebApps.com. Great Web Apps is a new site from Haloweb and Techinch that showcases a new webapp each weekday. We’ve recently featured apps to help you learn to program in Ruby, read books to your kids, chat with your colleagues, login to all your online accounts easily, convert icons, and more. And it’s all presented on an easy to read page that lets you quickly scan the latest webapps and find ones that interest you.

Be sure to check out GreatWebApps.com, subscribe to its RSS feed, or follow @gr8webapps to keep up with the latest and greatest webapps. If you have a favorite webapp, be sure to submit it as well and we might feature it in a future post. And, as usual, I’ll keep writing tutorials here at Techinch to help you get the most out of these webapps and other tech tools. Enjoy!

Comments { 0 }

Get Started With WordPress.com the Easy Way

By Matthew Guay on September 29, 2010 in Techinch

Whether you’re running a small, personal blog or a major news site, WordPress is a great platform to build your website from. It currently powers over 8% of all sites across the ‘net, including Techinch.com, HowtoGeek.com, and many other sites you likely regularly read. You can run WordPress on your own server or hosting account, or get started with a free blog on WordPress.com, which is a very popular way to get started blogging. Microsoft announced recently that Windows Live Spaces is shutting down and that all Spaces blogs will be migrated over to WordPress.com. If you have a Spaces blog and are nervous about the transition, or are just wanting to start a new blog and aren’t sure where to start, here’s some articles I’ve written on HowtoGeek that should make the transition smooth and seemless for you.

- How To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPress

This article will help you get started with a new WordPress.com blog

- Customize Your WordPress Blog & Build an Audience

Themes, widgets, social media, and more … WordPress.com has lots to offer, so here’s how you can use it all to make your blog more interesting

- Add Your Own Domain to Your WordPress.com Blog

You’ll want to make sure your readers can easily find and remember your blog, and a custom domain name is one of the best ways to do this. Plus, if you ever move your blog, you can always easily move your domain name … after all, Techinch.com started out as a WordPress.com blog, and I was able to easily move my content to a new hosting account and redirect my old blog’s address here with this trick.

- Tools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress Blog

Whether you’re using WordPress.com or have WordPress installed on your own hosting account, here’s how you can easily post quality content to your blog from anywhere

- Create Your Own Twitter-style Group Blog With P2

WordPress.com doesn’t just have to be about blogs … the P2 theme (which you can use for free) lets you setup a message board or chat-style site to keep your group in touch

And if you need more help getting started with WordPress or moving your old blog, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to help. Or, if you recently moved your Spaces blog to WordPress.com, feel free to leave your blog’s address in a comment so we can check it out.

Comments { 1 }

Add Administrative Tools to Your Windows Start Menu

By Matthew Guay on September 16, 2010 in Quick Tips

Did you just notice that the Administrative Tools folder is missing from your Start Menu, or can you not find crucial tools such as Event Viewer, Performance Monitor, or the Advance Firewall quickly from your start menu search? Here’s how to add it back in 10 seconds.

This demo was done on Windows 7 Professional, but it works the exact same in all versions of Vista and Windows 7, and is almost the exact same in Windows XP.

Get your Administrative Tools

Right click on your start menu, and select Properties.

Alternately, you can click any empty area of the start menu itself, and select Properties.

Now, select the Start Menu tab, and click Customize.

Scroll down to the System administrative tools section, and choose whether you want to display it on the All Programs menu or on the front of the Start Menu as well. I personally keep it in the All Programs menu, but the choice is yours! Click Ok to save your settings.

Now, when you open the All Programs part of your Start Menu, you’ll see the Administrative Tools folder you were looking for, with all of your missing tools! You can also now quickly find anything in this folder from the Start Menu search.

Alternately, if you chose to add it to your Start Menu directly, here’s how it will look.

Now you’ve got quick access to your administrative tools back in your Start Menu where it belongs. This should be the default setting in Windows, especially in the Professional and Ultimate editions, but for some reason, it’s hidden by default. At any rate, it’s easy to get it back the way it should be. Enjoy!

Comments { 0 }

Repair Your Outlook Data PST Files

By Matthew Guay on September 15, 2010 in Quick Tips

Have you ever tried to use an Outlook plugin, and received a cryptic error message that you couldn’t resolve? Chances are, your PST file may be corrupt. Recently I was testing out Boomerang for Outlook, and couldn’t get it to work without crashing. Finally after some time of removing other addins, I was able to quickly solve the problem by just repairing my PST file. Here’s how you can do it so you can get back to Outlook quicker and keep all your data intact.

First, exit Outlook, then open the Run command (press the Windows key plus R on your keyboard) and enter the following, depending on which version of Outlook you have installed:

Outlook 2010:

32-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\scanpst.exe

64-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\scanpst.exe

Outlook 2007 and earlier:

Enter the same, substituting Office 14 with Office 12 for Outlook 2007, or Office 11 for Outlook 2003.

This will open the Microsoft Outlook Inbox Repair Tool. Make sure it has your correct Outlook file listed, then click Start.

Moments later, the tool will inform you if it found errors. If it did, click Repair to fix the file. It is likely a good idea to let it make a backup of your file first, as well.

This may take a few minutes, and the application may appear to not be responding, but just wait and it should be fine.

Once it’s finished, you’ll see a Repair complete notification. Click Ok to close it, and then run Outlook as before.

This time, Outlook should run faster and your addins should quit having errors. If they’re still having problems, now it’s time to start investigating which one of your addins has gone rouge!

Got any great Outlook tips? Share them with us below!

Comments { 1 }

Under the Hood of Techinch.com

By Matthew Guay on September 14, 2010 in Site

It’s been an exciting year for Techinch.com, going from a brand-new blog in January to having over 10,000 in a little over 8 months. We’ve outgrown our first hosting plan, tweaked the theme, joined a new ad network, and more! Here’s some of our recent changes:

New Hosting

Web hosting can be an infinitely frustrating thing to get figured out. There are thousands of hosting service, and for every one you can find reviews that say they’re the best service in the world and even more that say they’re the worst service in the world. This makes it almost impossible to find out if a hosting service will be really good.

Techinch.com experienced outages, often for several hours a week, almost ever since it was launched, so when I received an email from our old host saying that the site was using too much system resources on a shared account, I knew it was time to look for a new hosting service. I considered several, all of which were personally recommended to me by collegues and friends, including Media Temple, Rackspace, and DreamHost, as well as several hosted services such as Page.ly and Squarespace. In the end, I ended up going with DreamHost, and it has worked out great so far. Their support has been first-rate, we’ve had almost no downtime, and the site is loading faster as well. I plan to review DreamHost’s service soon, but if you’re looking for webhosting, go ahead and give them a try. During my search for a webhost, though, the support was great from many of the companies, and Media Temple especially does an awesome job at Twitter support. If I ever need a more advanced virtual server, and can afford it, I definitely would give Media Temple a try.

New Ad Network

Ever since I started Techinch.com, I wanted to be able to run ads on it that were useful, stylish, and still paid. I was inspired by The Deck ads, which I’d noticed on FeedDemon, 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog, and Daring Fireball, among other apps and sites, and wanted to do something similar on my sites.

I was thus very excited that Techinch was accepted in the Yoggrt ad network in August. You’ll notice the Yoggrt ads on the top right corner of Techinch’s sidebar … just a rectangle image ad, with a text description underneath. The ads look very nice, and are often for services and products you’ll find interesting. I find myself looking at the ads to see what new awesome products are being advertised, which is so much better than Adsense which left you wondering what old, stale junk was being advertised. We’re proud to be part of the Yoggrt ad network, and hope to grow together.

By the way, if you happen to be looking for a great way to advertise your new webapp or stylish, modern PC app, Yoggrt would be a great network to run your ads on. It currently gets over 1 million impressions per month across the entire network, which includes a variety of sites including T3chH3lp, another awesome tech site you should check out if you haven’t already.

New Site Features

Although the site itself hasn’t changed much over the past few months, I’m constantly making little tweaks to the site that should make it more fun and useful. Some of the changes include:

WordPress 3.0 … Techinch started out with WordPress 2.9.whatever, and changing over to WP 3.0 was a breeze. WordPress is still the best CMS available in my opinion, and 3.0 just made it even better.
Awesome new buttons and content boxes, with more to come, all thanks to Elegant Themes’ new Shortcodes integration. They’re easy to work with, and only another reason I think Elegant Themes is one of the best WordPress and Tumblr theme subscriptions available. You can see the buttons and content boxes in action on the Digging into WordPress 3 review.
Social media integration. You can Like or Tweet any post from the Facebook and Twitter buttons on the bottom of every post, or remember the post with Evernote. If you have a favorite social network you’d like to have a quick share button for, let me know.
Disqus comments, which is the best comment systems I’ve used. Leave a comment on this post and test it out

There’s more to come, too. Stay tuned for more awesome content, tips, reviews, and giveaways from Techinch over the upcoming months! And thanks for reading; you’re the reason this site exists, and I never forget that. If there’s anything you’d like to see reviewed more or need to learn how to use, please mail and let me know or send me a tweet or DM, and I’ll try to get it covered.

Comments { 0 }