Internet Mastery

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Great Free Tools to Build Your Business

Tools to build businessThere are three FREE tools that I regularly use in my business. I think you will find them to be very useful as well.  Check them out and let me know what you think.

OpenOffice (or LibreOffice)

OpenOffice includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation,drawing and database tools. The first three of these basically replace the standard Microsoft office suite. Its not as full features, but it gets the job done.

OpenOffice was an open source fork of the proprietary StarOffice created by Sun Microsystems. When Sun was bought by Oracle, there were some concerns about the continued availability of the product and enthusiasts created a fork called LibreOffice. Oracle discontinued StarOffice and donated the code to the Apache organization so that OpenOffice is now Apache Open Office. There is an ongoing commitment to keep it available. LibreOffice is also being actively developed as an open source application.

Download OpenOffice here, LibreOffice here.

Gimp

Gimp is a graphics manipulation program similar to Photoshop.  It is good for adjusting the color of your images and scaling, cropping and compositing  them.  You can also use it to add text and graphical elements to your images.  Gimp also has an easy to use scripting language and a lot of built in scripts to create enhanced text images.  With a bit of practice, you can use the scripting features to create workflows anYou can use it to create a workflow for creating featured images for your WordPress posts.

Download Gimp here.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a graphic design tool similar to Adobe Illustrator.  It can be used to create charts, graphs, logos, diagrams, cartoons, illustrations and more.  It creates vector designs which mean that the images are created by paths instead of pixels.  The paths are scalable so that a small image won’t loose resolution when it is scaled up.  Inkscape also has tools that are specialized for drawing in contract to Gimp, which is designed for image editing.

Download Inkscape here.

Coloring Your Blogs

When I’m searching the web or following other peoples blogs, I’m always looking for clever tricks to make my blog more interesting. One that I saw this week was a blog that had portions highlighted.

Its easy to highlight your blog. Simply switch to text mode and add some div tags that set the background color.  This group of paragraphs for example is wrapped in:

<div style=”background-color: #ffffc0; padding: 20px;”>
. . . [paragraph text here ] . . .
<div>

The color tags set the background color and the padding pushes the text in a bit with the colored section.

While you can add this kind of formatting for any section of a blog, the color will be fixed for that particular post and can’t be changed easily when you update your site.  So consider adding a few highlighting styles that you can either edit into your theme’s CSS file, or, depending on your theme, there may be a place where you can globally add items within the head.

Then, add some style code like the following (the style tags won’t be necessary if you edit it into your theme’s CSS file):

<style>
imhq-highlight-one { background-color: #ffffc0; padding: 20px;}
</style>

Later you can color sections of your post by adding div tags choosing one of the highlights you have added into your CSS by wrapping your text with the following tags.

<div class=”imhq-highlight-one”> . . . [paragraph text here ] . . .    <div>

Adding colored boxes around certain portions of your text will make your blog easier to read and more attractive.   If you later change your theme or theme colors, you can also globally change the highlighting colors by changing these few bits of CSS.

When using this technique, it’s most valuable to highlight something that needs to be called out.  For example, if you wanted to put a series of definitions that didn’t belong in the main text, using a highlighted box would separate them from the text.

 

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