John The Geek Tech Tips E-Letter #001
Welcome to John The Geek’s
Tech Tips e-letter. I’m looking forward to helping you work
better, faster, and smarter with your web site or other
computer-related project.
We’re going to start by examining why you’d want to learn about the
technical aspects of running a web site, or just working with your
computer. Not everybody wants to be a computer geek, which is good
for people like me who dig that stuff and can make a good living
doing it for people who have other things they’d rather be doing.
As the saying goes, knowledge is power, and the more you know about
something, the better you can work with it. It’s also helpful to
have some idea what’s going on when you’re contracting with people
to do web site administration, or programming, or some other
technical job for you.
You don’t need to know everything there is to know about it, just
have a good grasp of the concepts at a high level so you can talk
intelligently to technical types and know when you’re receiving
what you’ve contracted for.
Unfortunately, there are those out there, as in any profession, who
think that being paid by the hour entitles them to make the job
last as long as possible. If you have an idea of what’s involved
in the project, you’ll know if you’re being snowed or if the
“technical difficulty” that’s being blamed for the project being
weeks late is at least plausible.
You don’t have to be a programmer, or a network specialist, or a
database administrator, you just need to know the high level
concepts behind them. I’ll help you gain that knowledge through
this e-letter.
One of the first things you need to know is that there are a ton of
freebies out there on the Net that will save you a boatload of
money. A good example is the Google suite of online applications.
Google provides free web-based email, calendar, word processing and
spreadsheet applications. If you can’t afford a few hundred bucks
for Microsoft Office Google’s online apps will do the same jobs as
Outlook, Word, and Excel for free.
Aside from being free, these applications are all web-based. Why
is that a good thing? Because you can access your mail, documents,
and spreadsheets from any computer anywhere that can connect to the
Internet. Even cooler, you can let others with Google accounts
collaborate with you on designated documents or spreadsheets, thus
eliminating the need to forward copies around by email or worse.
If you happen to have Word or Excel on your machine, you can
download Google documents to your machine in formats that Word and
Excel can read. So, if you get an idea, you can create the
document online, then when you’re finished with it, download it to
your machine and pretty it up in Word to send to the boss.
To get started with Google’s online apps, you’ll need a GMail
account. If you already have one, you should be seeing links to
Google Calendar and Google Docs & Spreadsheets in your mail page.
If you need a GMail account, they’re free and available at:
Simply sign up for GMail and access the rest of the apps from
within your GMail account. You can even use the same login for
GMail, Calendar and Docs & Spreadsheets as well as other Google
apps that we’ll cover another time.
Next week we’ll talk about GMail, specifically, and cover the many
things you can do with GMail to make your life much easier.
Recommended!
