I came across a neat way to mashup an application by accident. I was looking for a live news ticker for my PC and came across one from CNN. As I started using it and setting it up, I discovered that I could add RSS feeds to it. Since I read about 40 or 50 blogs, to keep up and find out if it worked, I entered the RSS feeds into the application and it worked.

Now, when one of the blogs I follow has an update, I get a pop-up alert. That makes it soooo much easier than checking all the blogs every day or every other day.

Watch the video below to see how to do it.

Down load the ticker at

http://edition.cnn.com/services/desktopnews/

I hope you like this.

Every Internet marketer eventually comes to the conclusion that he or she is going to need Adobe Photoshop to make headers and footers, change graphics, add scribbles and a bunch of other things that I can’t think of right now. The exception of course is if everything is outsourced.

For most Internet marketers Adobe Photoshop is a very expensive product buy. It sells for $649 from Adobe. That was out of the range that I want to spend. Thanks to a course that I bought from Marlon Sanders, I came across Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Photoshop Elements sells for $99 (at Amazon.com it sells for $75 or less). I bought my copy from Adobe. That way I was able to download it right away.

When you open Photoshop Elements, you get choices of what you wanted to do. The choice you should make is “edit and enhance photos”. When you open and select it, you have virtually the same toolbar as Photoshop CS. This is the area where you can begin creating your graphics. At this point there are few differences between Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS with the exception of the ability to use action scripts.

Here’s how I overcame the action scripts problem. I found a product called Graffi_add-o-matic. For convenience I’m going to call it Graffi.

With Graffi, you can take an action script you found somewhere, drag it into Graffi, and the next time you open Photoshop Elements, it will compile the action script into Photoshop Elements. This will save you hours and hours of work.

To get to the action scripts, left click Window at the top of the Photosop window and in the drop down click Artwork and Effects, then click on the center icon Special Effects – Added Effects. There you will be able to see your action scripts such as e-book covers, DVD covers, etc.

You can get Graffi at http://www.graficalicus.com/graffishop/ [Not an affiliate link]. The price is $9.99.

So, considering that I got Photoshop Elements plus Graffi for a total cost of $108.99, I saved $540. That comes out to an 83% savings. I now have 90% or more of the functionality of Photoshop CS and probably everything I will need.

I found Marlon Sanders Design Dashboard to be very helpful. Its an excellent tutorial about how to make a nice looking header, add patterns, add gradients, make scribbles and a whole bunch of other things. Many of the tutorials have easy to follow videos. For $59.95 its well worth it. You can get it at http://www.designdashboard.com/ . [Not an affiliate link].

Max Rylski has some awesome action scripts he is giving away at – http://www.graphicsclubmonthly.com/blog/ [Not an affiliate link] for a limited time. You can’t beat action scripts for ebook covers, video covers, box covers – a veritable treasure. Anything Max does is Top Gun.

If you do eveything I recommend above you will be on your way to making just about anything and everything.

You may have come to my blog recently and found nothing there. There is a reason for this. I screwed up and with a disaster of circumstances, I lost everything.

Here’s my story:

I received an automated message from my hosting site that their software detected that I might have an insecure version of Wordpress and to please upgrade it. Wanting to be a good netizen, I decided to upgrade it right away.

My first mistake: I didn’t do a backup. I know better than that but I took a flyer.

My second mistake: I didn’t do a proper upgrade. I didn’t deactivate my plug-ins.

My third mistake: I used Fantastico to do my upgrade. If you have ever made ANY changes to your blog, it doesn’t work.

My fourth mistake: When I started getting error messages and no blog, I went to my hosting service help desk for help. After two responses from them that were wrong I went to a Wordpress blog that said I should delete a certain plug-in. That didn’t work.

Within just a few hours I got a message from my hosting service they had moved my main site to a temporary server because I was using too many cpu resources and that it had to do with a PHP application but they couldn’t tell me which one. They also told me if I didn’t fix it in seven days they would shut down my account.

Geez Louise… I knew that the only thing I had changed was my blog. Frustrated, I deleted my blog. Several months of blogging was gone.

Then I went searching and found out on forums that Wordpress version 2.5.1 had caused the same problem as me. Too high cpu resources usage. Some sites had been shut down completely by their hosting sites.

There are several lessons to be learned here but the biggest one is before I think about a change to Wordpress, I will backup everything including the database.