Leah’s Cafe

We have two HP printers, one is the all-in-one printer that can be used as scanner, copier and facsimile machine and the other one is a monochrome laser printer. We bought the all-in-one machine first, thought we can use it as facsimile machine.

However, we never did use it as a facsimile machine because the ink cartridges cost a bomb, even with cheap HP ink that we bought! It was not cost effective use this machine for printing or faxing because one ink cartridge can only print less than 100 pages before it went out.

We then bought the monochrome laser printer, though the toner cartridges are equally expensive, but at least it lasts, it usually can print up to 2000 pages before it needs replacement. So, we found the monochrome laser printer to be more cost effective for our printing needs (which seldom requires color printing) and some more it gives better printing quality.

So we wanted to sell the all-in-one printer now. We try to put it on Ebay. We used to get some computer parts from Ebay. They are people who sell all sort of used computer parts or accessories and used cisco too. We hope they are people who are looking for this kind of used all-in-one printer !

Have you ever own a Mac? I mean Macintosh Apple computer, not McDonald hamburger.:-)

We have decided that we are going to leave behind the desktop and the very archaic laptop, no way we are going to lug them to IL. We would probably give away the 3 years old desktop to my father. Maybe my little brother whose last computer died on him recently would want it? My ex-colleague has been looking for an archaic laptop for his experiment, I would probably let him has it.

We plan to get a new computer when we are in IL. I have never own a Mac and naturally my choice will be a PC that I am more familiar with. But, the big boy had a chance to play with his father’s Mac  recently, he thinks it’s a cool machine to have. If you own a Mac currently or in the past , what do you think?

This site and in fact all my blogs hosted on Wordpress have been experiencing CPU overload issues recently. Did you get the error page that tells you the blog is experiencing a high loading issues when you tried to access my blogs in the last few days?

It’s a pain in the butt, still in the midst of troubleshooting the cause(s). The support staff of the host company said it may be due to poor execution of the plugins or high traffics. So it’s deduced that it’s the plugin issues, because no way my blogs will have overloading problems due to high traffics. :-)

I turned off every plugin on every blog ( 5 of the blogs are hosted on the same hosting plan) and activated them one by one, the process is tedious and it takes time! Still haven’t figured out which plugin is the culprit, but haven’t seen the error page since this morning, so the plugins turned on so far passed the tests!

Many of us started out blogging at the free platforms like blogger and wordpress. But, eventually most of the serious bloggers bought their own domain name and web hosting from a web hosting provider. As a beginner or moderate bloggers, you might not be able to rent a dedicated server to host your own blog. I believe most of the average bloggers or website owners host our blog in shared hosting like me.

Do you know that you do not have to pay an arm and a leg for your hosting plan? You can always start with a plan that offers coupon code to reduce the cost! If you considering moving out of your free hosting blogging sites or it’s time to renew your current hosting contract, why not take advantage of the Dreamhost Promo that going on right now.

This Dreamhost Coupon will gives you $50 discount on the yearly plans. For example, if you sign up for the starter plan, which is $5.95 per month, you only have to pay $21.40 for the first year hosting. It comes with 500 G storage and 5 Tera bandwidth. Also, they will give you FREE Domain. That’s a steal !

Having your own site will give you a lot of flexibility, allow you to upload or download through FTP and can access to your robot.txt, which you do not enjoy with many free hosting sites. The most important thing is this will increase your chances of getting reviews as advertisers prefer self hosted blogs. Go check out the Dreamhost Promo for yourself.

Have you heard of Spock.com - The Best Way to Search People ?

Spock is site that allows you to search for information about people. You can find information and links to more information about your favorite authors, celebrities, authors, musicians, places, or countries or a whole lot of things for you can think of, by just simply creating a search.

On the Spock.com homepage, you can just type in the name of a person to start the search, then you might continue the search for more information by clicking on the “tag” that might have been placed on the listed information. A tag could be the type of industry the person works in, the event he was involved with and so on.

Really the best way to tell you about Spock is to show you how it works. I signed up at Spock in order to access the sites full features. Did I mention that Spock is completely free to use?

If you have been reading this blog, you know we don’t have a TV at home and I enjoy reading more than watching TV. My all time favorite authors are Mark Twain and Earnest Hemingway. I like most of the books they wrote equally, but I decided to just do a search for Earnest Hemingway.

Earnest Hemingway came out the first on the first page of results, mostly were individual listings for people who had the word “Hemingway” associated with them. For example, I found Mariel Hemingway came out third on the list, apparently she is Earnest Hemingway’s granddaughter and is an actress.

I decided to narrow down my search by clicking on the tag within the listing for Hemingway. I clicked on the tag “from Oak Park, IL”. This gave me one page of results with 5 more listings for Earnest Hemingway. Ha, I didn’t know he was born in Oak Park, IL, may be we can visit his old home when I am moving to IL next spring!

Beside this listing there’s a series of tags that have been left by other Spock members. Some of the tags lead to other writers, poets, world world I, American expatriate in Paris and “The lost generation“.

If you knew something that suited the listing, you can easily add a tag of your own by clicking on the “add tag” link underneath each listings tag area. Site members can click on the little arrow beside each search result tag in order to vote yes or no as to whether the tag is appropriate for the listing.

You will see a short description beside each search result, as well as links for the full tag listing, photos, related people and news. Below that you’ll find links to web pages or Wiki pages that have information about each search result. Well, a simple search could lead you to a journey of exploring on Spock or send you into the Web for more relevant information or set you into “Information overload” mode, ha, ha.

What else can you do with the search result? Well, you can email the results to yourself or to someone else who might be interested in the information that you found, or you can click on the word “text” and convert the listed result into a simple list that only includes a link to the information page for each search result on Spock. That’s a useful research tool!

There is one thing that you might want to try if you’d like to share the information that you found on your blogs. You can create a widget in order to show you search results within a blog post. When you click on Widget you’ll be taken to a page where you can get the code for a flash or a javascript widget.

What do you look for when choosing a web host? Do you examine a variety of criteria, look for reviews and personal recommendations, and even scrutinize in great detail the features offered by the prospective web hosts?

What to look for when selecting a web host? Most wed host featured prominently in their list of plans on the amount of disk space and bandwidth your site is allowed. You would want to make sure the host offers a generous allowance of disk space and bandwidth so that a surge of heavy traffic will still cause a CPU and RAM usage spike and hit that limit.

If you are looking for ecommerce hosting, obviously it would have different needs and specific criteria. You would want to test drive the shopping cart software to make sure it’s simple, user friendly and easy to customize but sophisticated enough to accommodate all your needs. Some shopping cart softwares may even have built in feature that allows you to add multiple storefronts and automatic SEO (search engine optimization).

When you plan your website, always look at it in the long term. If your site rarely changes and only has a set number of pages, which is typical if you are only selling a particular product or a service, it may be better off as a static site. As static sites run into the resource limits slower than dynamically created sites.

Branding is important part of any business and successful branding starts with the right logo. As an owner of a small business, I would say Logo Design is not cheap, it’s expensive to hire someone professional to create one that’s memorable and adaptable to all your sales tools. The translation of your ideas and the outcome don’t alway match, and the editing process can be both frustrating to the designer and the business owner.

We usually think we need design experience and knowledge of special software to create logo ourselves. Not until I learn about this site that lets you create your own professional-quality logo online in minutes without all the above. Most importantly, the process is fast, easy and affordable. You can create a logo from selecting your favorite symbol within a database of 20,000 symbols. All you have to do is to paste the symbol ID during the logo creation process. How I wished I know this Do It Yourself Logo Design site that allow me to Design a Logo Myself years ago.

If you order the business card package, you shall receive 3 custom business card designs created to match your logo. You just have to select one and you shall receive a high resolution PDF file for you to print the business cards.

To order the Tri-Fold brochure, you order this package, fill up a short form. The creative team will create the brochure based on your input, within 5 days, you should receive the designs for the Tri-Fold brochure tailored to your logo, image and industry. If any revisions needed, you are allow to do 2 rounds of revisions. After that, the brochure will be delivered in high resolution PDF format for you to print.

It’s easy and hassle free, isn’t it?

Even though it’s the trend to go dot com and every business is trying to claim a piece of real estate in the Cyber world, not every business has the right budget to make its online presence beyond existence. As an owner of a small business myself, I know too well the constraint of limited resources and budget that often put us into a disadvantaged position.

If you are running a small business and has limited allocation for web hosting, you can always look for more economical shared hosting plans. Most web hosting providers have very affordable hosting plans tailored for small businesses.

Concentric Business Solutions, a leading provider of shared web hosting for small businesses even offers free domain name when you sign up for a hosting account. The package also include domain name registration services and email hosting. You can also opt for private domain registration with a small fee. If you are interested, do check out the link provided above.