I started out writing about technology on my first WordPress.com blog, and then shortly thereafter started writing for Labnol.org, a blog from the talented Amit Angarwal in India. I then began writing for Howtogeek.com, a Virginia based site that’s started by Lowell Heddings with contributers today from around the globe. Then, I started writing for Envato’s AppStorm.net network, which is based in Australia but is about the most global company you could imagine.

This month, I’ve been privileged to take a larger role with the AppStorm.net team, as I’m now the official editor of Web.AppStorm.net. I’ve enjoyed writing about the latest web apps there over the past months, and am very excited about the new opportunities as the editor. We’ve got an amazing team of contributors from around the world, and it’s always comical to look at my Skype list and see the multitude of time zones represented today.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed over the past weeks is writing more detailed op-ed articles to share my views on web apps and the internet, as well as polls to see what our audience is thinking and what apps and tools they use on a regular basis. These include a recent article on the Future of Online News, a poll on how many email accounts you have (shocking: most people have 5-10 accounts!), and an extensive Ask the Editor post. If you haven’t stopped by the AppStorm sites yet, please make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and Twitter or RSS feeds to keep up with everything I’m writing there.

I’ve also written extensively at the other AppStorm sites, and published a piece on the upcoming Windows.AppStorm.net site in April that featured the best designed Windows apps available today. It seems that most developers are focusing on Macs and mobile devices today, so I really enjoyed the chance to round up some examples of newer apps that can still make your PC enjoyable.

The past couple months, I’ve also been privileged to work with Sarah Hatter of 37signals fame with her new startup, CoSupport. I’m an official tech writer and support guru, there, and have gotten to work with some of the more exciting startups over the past couple months with their support and documentation. If you’re developing an app, and would like quality support and documentation, feel free to stop by; we’d love to hear from you! It’s amazing how much high quality documentation can improve a program, and I’m excited to be directly working with developers and more on this!

Perhaps the funniest thing that’s happened in the past few weeks was creating an About.me page for my CoSupport profile on the staff page. After jotting down a few things about myself, I realized that there was a link to describe everthing I do, from ministry to college to tech writing. Only 15 years ago, most people had never used the internet, and not today, seldom a day goes by that we don’t use it!

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy the content I write here at Techinch, AppStorm, and at other sites across the web. All of my new writing and jobs have taken time away from Techinch, but I’ve got a lot of great content planned for the near future. If you’d ever like to see anything covered here, feel free to let me know … I always love hearing about new tech tricks and apps!

Check out my full review at Web.AppStorm

Techinch.com is now backed up with VaultPress, and it’s so much better than other WordPress backup solutions it’s not even funny. Now with Jetpack bringing all the other Automattic addons to WordPress, and Akismet keeping spam out of our comments (including the very odd comment spam we get daily advertising Bing and the Zune…), we’re all set!

Read the rest of my VaultPress review

I’m excited to be working with the great teams at each of these sites, and have already written over a dozen articles between the two sites.  Just like I do with all of my writing, I’ve been regularly tweeting my new articles as they’re published.  If you’d like to keep up more directly with my writing at these sites, you can find my articles at the links below:

• iPhone.AppStorm: http://iphone.appstorm.net/author/matthewguay/
• Web.AppStorm: http://web.appstorm.net/author/mguay/

Additionally, sometime in 2011 I’ll be updating Techinch’s theme to include tumblog style posts.  Once that’s done, you’ll start seeing link posts to any new articles I write around the web.

I hope you find my articles interesting and helpful.  If you ever have a program, webapp, or iOS app you’d like to see reviewed, or something about tech you’d like to see explained better, feel free to contact me or leave a comment anywhere on the site.

Happy Reading!

Would you like to take your WordPress powered sites to the next level with advanced WordPress plugins?  Recently I reviewed two of my favorite pro plugins for WordPress on WPBeginner.com, a great site to help you get started with WordPress.  Here’s a quick summary of the reviews, but be sure to click through and check them out on WPBeginner.com if you haven’t already read the reviews.

Keep Your WordPress Content Safe with BackupBuddy

Most of us backup our computers, emails, and more, but if you’re just getting started with blogging and running your own site, you may have never thought about needing to backup your website.  You could always export your database and download each individual file from your site weekly, but this would be time consuming and difficult.  BackupBuddy is a great plugin from iThemes that makes it dead simple to keep your site backed up.  It’ll backup all the files and posts on your site, saving them on your server, on a remote FTP server, or in the cloud with Amazon S3.  Then, if tragedy strikes and your hosting company goes AWOL, you can quickly restore your entire site in minutes using BackupBuddy’s restore tool.  I use BackupBuddy with Amazon S3 to keep all of Techinch.com’s data secure, and highly recommend it.

Checkout the full review on WPBeginner.com

Make Your WordPress Site Mobile Friendly with WPtouch Pro

As mobile devices become more popular, more of your blog’s traffic will come from mobile devices.  Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to view full-sized sites on smaller screens, and it wouldn’t make sense to code a new app for your site just to make your content accessible on a mobile device.

That’s where WPtouch Pro comes in.  It’s a WordPress plugin that converts your site into a great iOS style interface when you visit it with a modern smartphone.  WPtouch Pro includes tons of options to let you customize the mobile site however you want, and will soon be getting updated to support iPads as well.  My WPBeginner.com article gives you a good overview of how the plugin works and how you can use it, and then check back here at Techinch soon for more customization articles about WPtouch Pro.  I’ve been switching Techinch over to WPtouch Pro, and will be sharing what I’ve done to customize it so you can put it to good use on your site!

Checkout the full review on WPBeginner.com

Doing More With WordPress

Do you have any more WordPress plugins you’d like to see reviewed?  Feel free to drop me a note and let me know!  And don’t forget … if you want to learn more about WordPress, you should definitely check out the Digging Into WordPress eBook.  It’s a great resource that will teach you how to manage your site, write new themes and plugins, keep your content secure, and more.

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!

Also, you can keep up with my writing directly from HowtoGeek.com on my Author page:

Enjoy!

Remembering information from day to day can be a strain on even the smartest.  From your license plate number to the song you heard on the radio a moment ago, we’re constantly struggling to remember and recall information.  Evernote is a very useful free tool to help your, in their words, Remember Everything.  Although there are many apps and services today designed to help you store and keep up with notes, Evernote has recently won me over with its almost perfect combination of mobile, desktop, and web apps, and flawless synchronization between them all.

I was not always sold out to Evernote as my favorite notetaking application.  I went back and forth from keeping notes, links, and more scattered around in Word documents, random browser bookmarks, jotted notes in random notebooks, and more.  I had a slightly better system of keeping up with college notes, as I kept them in OneNote and synced them with my netbook via Live Sync.  I’d given Evernote a try, but it doesn’t have as rich of formatting options as OneNote, and seemed less good at taking structured notes from college.

The one thing that kept me using Evernote from time to time was its mobile app.  I have an aging Windows Mobile phone, a non-touchscreen device with a full, blackberry-style keyboard.  Windows Mobile may not have the greatest number of apps avilable today, but it does have 3 very useful ones: Opera Mobile/Mini, Facebook, and Evernote.  Evernote is great to jot down quick thoughts anywhere: the kitchen, the car, or the dresser where I leave my phone at night.  I can sync over WiFi, and then see what I wrote from my computer or online.  I can even add pictures to Evernote, which is one of the easiest ways to upload them to my computer.  It’s simple, seamless, and made my phone keep me in touch with myself as much as with others

Then, I began using Evernote even more when I integrated it with my browser. Evernote has released a new Evernote addon for Chrome, and it is both beautiful and useful.  I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser, and suddenly now Evernote was only one click away.  It was dead simple to take a note about a site or app I came across, and since I could tag and annotate the note, and then view it later online or in Evernote on my computer, it was the ideal bookmarking solution.  I’m now using it as my primary bookmarking system, and it’s working great.  I recently reviewed the new Evernote Chrome addon at How-to Geek and showed how great it is for keeping up with websites, so check out the article for more info:

Beginner Geek: Remember Everything You See Online With Evernote for Chrome

Another recent discovery I’ve made is sometimes you don’t need rich formatting for notes.  When you want to remember something, whether a webapp or a favorite quote, what’s really important is the text itself, along with links and/or images that go along with it.  Most programs try to do too much, and they make the task more difficult.  With Evernote, the killer app is helping your remember stuff, and it works great for that!

Other Favorite Note Apps

And you know what, there may never be the perfect, all encompassing notetaking application.  Evernote is great for small, short notes, and even works quite good for longer notes.  But, there are several other note apps that I use regularly.  These include:

• Backpack

  I’m a fan of Backpack from 37signals, and use it to collaborate on shared notes with friends and colleagues and to occasionally throw together a quick webpage when I need some info online temporarily.  I also keep a list of all the things I plan to write on my blogs in Backpack, which works great along with Campfire for collaboration.  It’s one of the nicest webapps I’ve used, and I recommend it fully for the things I mentioned and more.  However, it’s still not as simple to just store all of your thoughts in Backpack; it’s more like saving info on specific web pages.

• OneNote

  Office 2010 has added OneNote to the ranks of the standard Office Applications as it is included in all Office 2010 suites along with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.  OneNote gives much richer editing capacities than most other notetaking apps, and can sync your notebooks with the new Office Web apps.  It’s also very useful as an OCR tool; Evernote lets you search text in pictures, but OneNote actually lets you copy the text out of pictures!  Still, though, for simply keeping up with all your small (and large) notes, I find Evernote much easier to use; you don’t have to configure it, it just works.

• Sticky Notes in Windows 7

  Sometimes you just need to remember something for a moment, and this is where the Stick Notes app in Windows 7 (or the Notes sidebar gadget in Vista … or the countless number of sticky notes gadgets available for other platforms) comes in handy.  In the true spirit of Post-it notes, you can just jot something down on your desktop and delete it when you’re finished with the task.  Since it’s right there in front of you, this can often be a great way to make sure you don’t forget something.  Just make sure you don’t need to remember it forever, or Evernote would be a much better option.

Conclusion

No matter what you need to keep up with, Evernote is a handy tool that can help you make sure to not forget it.  The new Chrome addon has made it much more useful for me, and I now find myself using Evernote daily.  Evernote’s CEO repeatedly says that Evernote becomes more valuable to users the longer they use it, and I’ve definitely found that to be true.  Sound off in the comments, and let us know how you use Evernote (or another notetaking application, or a string around your finger, or whatever) to remember everything.

Because sometimes, our memories aren’t good enough!

Download and Signup for Evernote today!

• Customize the Default Screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista

• Complete Guide to Symbolic Links (symlinks) on Windows or Linux

• How to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010

• Speed Up the Help Dialog in Windows and Office

• User Guide to Dropbox Shared Folders

  • If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, signup with this link … it’ll give both of us an extra 250Mb of storage for free.  Thanks!
    

    Signup for Dropbox today!

• How To Personalize the Windows Command Prompt

• Turn a Flash Drive Into a Portable Web Server

• Superpower Your Touchpad Computer with Scrybe

• Tools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress Blog

• Edit the Windows Live Writer Custom Dictionary

• View Docs and PDFs Directly in Google Chrome

• Run WordPress & Other Web Apps with Windows Web Platform

• Convert a PDF eBook to ePub Format for Your iPad, iPhone, or eReader

• Bring Office 2003 Menus Back to 2010 with UBitMenu

• Edit ePub eBooks with Your Favorite HTML Editor

• Add Free Windows Live Apps to Your Website or Blog

• Improve the Quality of ePub eBooks with Sigil

• How To Activate Your Free Office 2007 to 2010 Tech Guarantee Upgrade

• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

• Integrate Google Wave With Your Windows Workflow

• Add Free Google Apps to Your Website or Blog

• Stay on Schedule in Chrome with DayHiker

• Get Information to Your Blog with Microsoft Broadcaster

• Install WordPress on Your Own Server With Softaculous

• Screenshot Tour: Take a Look at the New Office Web Apps

• Run Portable Chrome From Your Flash Drive on Any Windows Machine

• Access Your Dropbox Quickly in Google Chrome

• Install Linux Mint on Your Windows Computer or Netbook

• How to Fix Photoshop Breaking the Escape Key in Windows

• Mount SkyDrive, S3, Google Docs, and Other Cloud Storage in Windows Explorer

• Screenshot Tour: Windows Live Essentials Beta

• Sync Files Between Computers & SkyDrive with Windows Live Sync Beta

• How To Restore the Wubi Ubuntu Bootloader

• Keep Google From Tracking Your Every Move Online

• What is moe.exe and Why is it Running?

• Integrate Social Networks with Windows Live Messenger Beta

• Edit Office Web Apps Documents Offline On Your Desktop

• Dock Windows on the Sides of Your Desktop and More With Preme for Windows 7

• Download Pictures From Your Facebook Account with Pick&Zip

• Insert Any Special Character with a Single Keystroke

• Where is My PST File and How Can I Move It Somewhere Else?

• How to Add a “Post Draft to Blog” Button to Windows Live Writer Beta

• Design a Beautiful New Theme for Your Blogger Blog

Wow, that was a lot, and covered just about every spectrum of tech . I’m going to try posting daily updates or so, but we’ll have to see. At any rate, enjoy!

Experience your music in a whole new way with Zune for PC

Tired of the standard Media Player look and feel, and want something new and innovative?  Zune for Windows offers a fresh, new way to enjoy your music, videos, pictures, and podcasts, whether or not you own a Zune device.

Increase the size of Taskbar Preview Thumbnails in Windows 7

Taskbar thumbnail previews are incredibly useful in Windows 7, but for some users they may be too small.  Here’s a tool to help you make your taskbar thumbnail previews just like you want them.

This article was even share by Microsoft on the Windows Facebook page!

Change The Windows 7 Start Orb the Easy Way

Want to make your Windows 7 PC even more unique and personalized?  Then check out this easy guide on how to change your start orb in Windows 7.

OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010

Quality OCR software can often be very expensive, but you may have one already installed on your computer that you didn’t know about.  Here’s how you can use OneNote to OCR anything on your computer.

Jolicloud is a Nifty New OS for Your Netbook

Want to breathe new life into your netbook?  Here’s a quick look at Jolicloud, a unique new Linux based OS that lets you use your netbook in a whole new way.

Experience the iPad UI On Your PC

Want to test drive iPad without heading over to an Apple store?  Here’s a way you can experience some of the iPad UI straight from your browser!

 

Perform Unit Conversions with the Windows 7 Calculator

Want to easily convert area, volume, temperature, and many other units?  With the Calculator in Windows 7, it’s easy to convert most any unit into another.

Change the Default Font Size in Word

Are you frustrated by always having to change the font size before you create a document it Word?  Here’s how you can end that frustration and set your favorite default font size for once and for all!

How to Upgrade Your Netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium

Would you like more features and flash in Windows on your netbook?  Here’s how you can easily upgrade your netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium the easy way.

This works great, by the way,…

And my Samsung N150 runs Aero great; oddly, it gets a better Experience Index on the Video Card than the processor!

Sync Your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs with Dropbox

Pidgin is definitely our favorite universal chat client, but adding all of your chat accounts to multiple computers can be frustrating.  Here’s how you can easily transfer your Pidgin settings to other computers and keep them in sync using Dropbox.

This article was featured on Lifehacker, too!

Use Dropbox to Sync Your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs

And, if you don’t aready have a Dropbox account, signup with this link … it’ll give both of us an extra 250Mb of storage for free.  Thanks!

Signup for Dropbox today!

Check back soon for more How-To Geek Goodness, including more Dropbox coverage and a new series on blogging with WordPress!