I am currently working with a customer who wants to set up a store. They had a spreadsheet of the items that they want to sell. There are over 3,000 of them. Creating a database if items for a shopping cart is not that unusual, but in this case the item images were in the spreadsheet as a URL on the vendors website.

I didn’t want to hot link the images because there can be all sort of problems with that, so I needed to download and shrink most of them to a usable size. So for 3,100 images and thumbnails for each I was looking at over 6,200 images. No small task.

I did quite a bit of research and tried out several of each kind and I discovered two programs that I want to recommend here today.

First Free Download Manager, as the name says is free (and open source another plus) and designed to do much more than what I needed it to do. Free Download Manager allows you to: adjust traffic usage; to organize and schedule downloads; download video from video sites; download whole web sites with HTML Spider; operate the program remotely, via the internet, and more! It allowed me do save over 6,200 images in under two hours.

Next I needed to resize these images to fit in the cart so they wouldn’t crowd out the description or force things off the page. BIMP Lite came to my rescue. BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. BIMP is not open source, but it’s 100% FREE and contains no spyware, adware or nagware. It also does much more than resize, you can add many other image and file name operations.

A couple of great programs that I highly recommend.

One of the reasons I bought the Android Phone was that I knew that with an open source operating system, anything that I wanted that it was missing would soon be available along with more. Great stuff open source.

The Android version 1.5 is now available and I could get it myself, but I’ll just wait for T-Mobile to push it up to my phone in May. So far it looks like everything that I was hoping for.

Release features – Android 1.5

I recently got in touch with a high school classmate of mine. Barb Girson is an International Direct Selling expert, trainer and coach who recently set sail with her own business called mysalestactics.com. We had a few emails back and forth and an interesting conversation about where we have been and what works in promoting out businesses.

I mentioned to her that Craigslist has been one of the best tools that I use to find new customers. Barb asked me about how I get it to work for me and also asked me an interesting question, “Would you consider this a networking strategy?”

My first thought that no it was not, but after pondering the question for a while I have decided that it is. I’ve met new people through the use of it and have used my networking rule of trying to offer something of value (free information) without expecting anything in return, so I guess it could be called networking.

Her next request was for me to describe the process that I used for this. I decided to write this post about it because I believe what Scott Ginsberg says “Writing is the key to all wealth“.

There are two methods that I use to promote my business on Craigslist:

First, I have written a series of advertisements that I rotate through several cities in my region in the “computer services” section. It is important to follow Craiglist’s rules by not posting too often and only posting these ads in the appropriate section.

I have seen many ads for different services posted in the “web design jobs” or “computer gigs” sections. Since these sections are for people looking to buy web services these ads usually get flagged and removed pretty quickly, but more importantly they are not read by the people who are actually in the market for their services. I know that personally I would never hire someone who didn’t understand or care that this was not the correct section to post their ads.

Second,  the “web design jobs” and “computer gigs” sections are the ones that I need to be reading to find people advertising jobs that I can do. To read those I use RSS. Every Craigslist page has it’s own RSS feed and I can subscribe to those just like any blog and get these ads almost as soon as they appear in my feedreader. For that I use Thunderbird another great free Open Source tool. Not only do I get my email, Thunderbird brings all of my RSS feeds into it as well and I can read them just like my regular email.

Even though there is quite a bit of Spam on Craigslist using Thunderbird I can still monitor many Craigslist cities, have all the post sent to one folder and go through 30 or 40 posts in a couple of minutes. I currently subscribe to two feeds in well over 30 Craigslist cities and still only spend about ten to fifteen minutes a day working on it. I probably actually answer five to six ads a day and I have a general outline that I use for this. I try to personalize each reply to the individual city and request, but here’s the basic outline:

Hello,
My name is Jim Lillicotch and I am replying to your Craigslist ad.
I live in Pittsburgh PA and have customers in (local city) and many other areas that are very satisfied.

For information about my business, I invite you to tour my blog:

• seo
• promotion
• email
• viral
• management
• security
• do it yourself

Feel free to comment on any posts that strike your interest and contact me with any questions

Thank you for your consideration.

Jim Lillicotch
Lillicotch.com

I have found that people posting these jobs on Craigslist tend to be bombarded with responses to their ads, but if I get a reply I try to find out exactly what their job entails and offer to be as helpful as I can. I have foud several customers this way and also a few good friends.

In addition to designing websites, I am getting requests lately to just manage data for clients.
For example, shopping cart databases, Google or Open Office Documents. Some password protected and some not.

• I have found that the simplest solution is probably the best one.
• The htaccess file is simple to use and has good security.
• Of course, the level of security depends on how good of a password that you choose.

Because I like to also host my customers sites I know where to go to manage these files
I use cPanel which is free and open source. They make it pretty easy to do.

Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

I bought myself a new phone for Christmas. It’s a G1 with Google’s new operating system called Android. You probably already know that I’m an Open Source kind of guy. I think that even though the iPhone has a big headstart and outsells the Android phone by a large margin, there is much more potential for the Android Phone(s) with the Open Source community helping out with things like updates and new applications. I really love the phone. The only thing that I wasn’t happy with was the battery life.

The coolest thing about the phone is the Android Market. I wasn’t happy with the battery life so I went to the market on my phone found a free power management application, downloaded and installed it with just a couple of clicks. Now I’m much happier with the battery life on my phone.

Over the last couple of months I have found several applications that I like and all were free (Google just recently started allowing developers to charge for their work). The latest one that I really like is from StumbleUpon and is called StumbleVideo. Stumble provides random video from the web or you can also select a random video by category. After you have seen the video the user gets to vote on whether they like the video or not and it moves up or down the play list accordingly.

I have had some fun watching video that I probably never would seen otherwise, so I highly recommend StumbleVideo for some great time wasting on a Friday (or any day). You can also download StumbleVideo from the Android Market.

Visit StumbleVideo

The economy today is making all of the news. There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about how businesses are saving money by spending on updating both their hardware and software.

While it never bad to look at your programs with an eye toward improving their efficiency, it continues to blow me away that companies are spending so much money, time and resources on many different software products when there are so many open source alternatives available that are almost as good, as good as or even better than what they are currently using. Not all of them are free, but many are.

Take for example Open Office. It’s a wonderful FREE tool that I have been using for years and in all that time I have only reverted to my old version of Office once for a particular mail merge thing. While I learned everything that I needed to do on my own and I think most current MS Office users could as well, if a company still had to invert in training I can’t imagine it would be anywhere near the cost of just one MS Office upgrade (or new install).

There are also appearing several online versions of Office Applications. I can understand how many companies would not trust any website with their sensitive data (including Google) many others do not do much more with their programs than typing letters and could benefit from this method.

This was just one example off the top of my head, I’m sure there are many more. Here are some others.

Read Smart Ways to Cut Costs

I was speaking with a customer the other day about ways that he could use email marketing to promote his business. He was belt tightening like most businesses today and he finally realized the possible value and low cost of this kind of promotion.

When I first built his site he asked for and I installed a free open source email newsletter management system called PHPList. There have been several visitors sign up and other than the initial welcome email there hasn’t been anything else sent. I explained that since it may have been several months since some of his visitors had signed up, his first email should be an explanation of why he had not written sooner. It’s possible some of his subscribers may have forgotten that they actually signed up and accuse him of spamming them.

My next chore was to talk him out of buying or renting a list of names to send to. It’s always a great temptation to collect a zillion names any way that you can and start sending email “Blasts”. I even hate the term “email blast”. While this method may have once worked very well for any business (and probably still does for some spammers), for most legitimate businesses the costs in terms of loss of your reputation and bad will from your recipients far outweigh any benefit. I have written before of the value of using your own list of names and email addresses.

Finally I mentioned that before he sent anything out that I would like to have a look at it. What I got was just a giant picture that only promoted his business. No text just pictures and nothing that I would call an special offer.

The first thing that I mentioned was that many email clients (Yahoo, Google, etc.) now block images by default, so those folks won’t see anything but a blank page. I also told him that he needed to send something that his recipients would consider valuable. An unadvertised special or a special tip (a trick of the trade) that would benefit his readers. I advised him to look at his email from his customers point of view and ask himself this question if he wanted to grow his subscriber list and business. Is this email something that I would consider passing on to one of my friends or family?

Here’s an interesting follow up article by Loren McDonald on the email Insider called

Are Your Emails ‘Shareworthy’?

One of my potential customers is a group who have concerns about how I write my sites. They were worried that because I write my sites from scratch that they wouldn’t be able to edit it themselves.

I believe that the opposite is true. When you design a site from scratch by hand your code is much less cluttered than what you get with the design programs. It’s straightforward and easy to read and follow. That does several good things for you.

• It loads faster and looks the same in more browsers without having to use “hacks”. Every computer looks at a page differently and some (mostly IE) can really change the look of how you want your page to look.
• It makes it easy for the search engines to read it and follow your links. That helps get your pages indexed more quickly. I also believe that they reward you for making it easier for them by giving you higher rankings. Your actual content and how many sites link to you count much more for that, but every little bit helps.
• Because the code is also standards compliant, straightforward and simple most any page editing program will be able to edit it. There is a very nice page editing program that is in the control panels of most web hosting accounts these days. There is also a great program that I recommend to my customers Called KompoZer. I believe it is as good as Dreamweaver for most users, but is free and open source. These programs will clutter up the code a bit, but they both work fine and still comply to all current web standards.

I believe in helping my customers learn to do as much work on their site themselves that they want. I’m not the kind of designer who likes to keep things secret. I like to share information and will teach my customers (and you) anything that you want to learn from me.

More on these subjects:

• What do you want from your site
• Is It Worth It To Give Away Information?
• I’m a one man shop
• KompoZer

Here’s a list of some really great free open source software to replace many of the Windows programs that cost big bucks to buy.

This list appeared recently on makeuseof.com. I have written about some of these tools and others before, but there are cool new ones here. It’s also nice to have a list like this with all of these great free tools in one place.

Free Open Source Counterparts of Windows Software

One of my customers who is a writer krahesnest.com asked me if I knew of any tools to help a writer organize their work. She knew that I am a big open source fan and thought that I could help her find something that would be an effective tool for a writer.

I found LyX it’s a very productive way to write books, articles, reports, slideshows, and other long documents. Word processors are optimized for easy use by untrained people. They excel at that.

LyX is a content authoring tool, LyX is NOT a word processor, and shouldn’t be used as such. It’s overkill for a 5 page school paper. It makes fine tuning of pages very difficult, which is not what you want on a flyer or short paper. LyX is not as user friendly as a word processor.

LyX is not easy because it is used to do difficult things, like lay out entire books in a consistent manner. LyX is a great tool which is free and open source.

Learn About and Try LyX