An unexpected turn of events.

Friends and Neighbors, I was in the midst of putting the finishing touches upon today's review, when I began suffering several bouts of painful gastric distress. It has been very distracting and has eaten up my time this evening. The upshot is that today's review will be late as I need to get to sleep and hopefully recover from this malady. I will have the review finished and out to you as soon as I am physically able.  I am most sorry for the delay.

Happy Birthday, Nifty Tech Blog!

A year ago today, the Nifty Tech Blog launched with our first review of Delicious Library. So much has changed in a year. Since that time we've published 29 other reviews,  43 Follow Friday recommendations, and 5 editorials. In February 2010, the blog was a one man show, hosted in a corner of my .Mac account space using iWeb. Now Scott Roche has joined the staff, and we've had contributions by Odin1Eye and Philippa Ballantine, and a crossover event with Tee Morris' Bird House Rules. We moved our hosting to Blogger, and thanks to the generous contributions from our readers, we're getting ready to move to our own servers and to stand up a WordPress version of the Blog.

Help Support The Nifty Tech Blog

Have you been enjoying The Nifty Tech Blog? We certainly hope so. And we hope that you'd be willing to give something back. We want to bring you more features, more reviews, and better on site services. But we just don't have the resources to do these things on our own. We'll continue to do what we can, but there are a few things that you could do to help us bring you the reviews and features you've enjoyed up to now, and make things better for the future.

Columbus Day, Observed.

Just stopping by to let you folks know that nothing has gone wrong. Tee and I have decided to observe Columbus Day this year, so the review for this week will come out on Tuesday. I know a lot of folks don't do anything for Columbus Day, and a lot of workplaces don't even observe the holiday, but the discovery of the "new world" changed a lot of things in Europe and led to a lot of changes all over the world. Some of those have been good changes, and some bad, but on the whole I think that it has been beneficial in terms of lack of social strife and the creation of an environment where innovation in technology was necessary to survive.

Of course, the past is something we must live with and cannot be changed. So however you see the European invasion of the western hemisphere, take a few moments to count up the good and the bad, and resolve to learn from these lessons and make a better tomorrow. And that's when we'll see you. Tomorrow.

July Poll Wrapup

July's poll has come to an end, but before we look at the results, I'm afraid I've got a little administrative news to impart. I've been working to provide a special review for tomorrow, and coordinating everything is going to take a bit more time than expected. So instead of tomorrow's review showing up at 12:01 AM, it is going to be delayed until 7 AM. It shouldn't be any later than that. And hopefully, you'll enjoy what we've got in store for you.

But enough about me, let's talk about You! The subject of July's poll was You, the reader. I asked what you felt your level of expertise is. The Nifty Tech Blog is intended to be accessible to everyone, but I wanted to know if I've been successful in attracting a cross section of potential readers. Thirteen people responded to the poll, the best turnout we've had to date.

You've heard that there is one in every crowd? Well we've got our one, and this person responded "I don't read your blog, I'm just here to skew your poll results." I guess one way of looking at it is that 7% of my readership is a technical smartass. Two respondents said they know how to use a few programs, and another two said they were regular users, but wanted to learn how to use more. To those folks, I say, "Welcome!". You're the ones I most want to reach with this Blog. Technology isn't something to be intimidated by, and I hope that I'm helping you find new ways to be productive and explaining things in ways that you understand. If you've got questions, please ask! And if you have problems you'd like to find solutions to, tell me about those, too. It may take a while, but I'll do what I can to find the answers.

Four more respondents said they were power users. I hope you've learned some new tricks here, but I also hope that you'll be willing to share some of your tricks with everyone else. I love volunteer submissions from the community, be it a review, or just a suggestion of a product to review. Even tips or tricks would be welcome. The more we share, the more we all know.

The last group of four identified themselves as Tech Experts, but admitted they don't know everything. I'm glad you guys are here. I'd like to see suggestions and tips from you, too, and the occasional review. But more than that, I depend on you folk to keep me honest, spot my mistakes, and make sure the right information gets out. Nobody's perfect. I make my share of mistakes. I catch them where I can, but I'm more interested in making sure that good information is available for everyone. Thanks for the help, guys. Glad to have you along.

Tomorrow is a new review, even if it is a tad late. And I hope to have August's poll up on Tuesday. So, it is going to be a busy week. I hope you enjoy it!

A slight delay...

I hate to have to do this, but life events have managed to eat up all of my available time this past week.  While I did manage to get out the first of the Follow Friday series of posts, I did not have time to lay out this week's review.  Normally I get these laid out ahead of time and scheduled to go live at 12:01 Eastern Time on the Mondays the reviews are due.  This week, I just wasn't able to get everything together in time.  The review will be up later today.  Unfortunately, I haven't yet found the tool that will do my layouts and screenshots for me.  Those I'm still pretty much doing by hand.

Hopefully, when you see this week's article on Google Voice, you will agree that it is worth waiting for.

How The Nifty Tech Blog Works

Recently, a reader was asking me about the kind of compensation that I receive for doing The Nifty Tech Blog.  He seemed to think that companies were paying me to review their products, or were providing their products to me free of charge in exchange for a review.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  So I thought I'd add this article to the feed to clear up these kinds of misconceptions.

I receive no funds, goods, or services for producing The Nifty Tech Blog.

In fact, I'm losing money on the proposition.

Now, some of you will note that there are ads on the sidebars and on the bottom of the page.  These are an attempt to defray some of the costs of running The Nifty Tech Blog so that I can keep it running longer.  Unfortunately neither Google nor Amazon ads pay off until there have been sufficient click throughs and purchases to hit a minimum amount of activity, and I'm no where near that level of activity yet.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.  Let me go back to the beginning and explain how things work at The Nifty Tech Blog.

Currently, The Nifty Tech Blog has a staff of one.  That's me.  When I'm not working at my day job, and keeping my wife happy, I put what time I can into researching, writing, editing, and producing the Blog.  I have been lucky enough to have some friends step up and volunteer their help from time to time.  Most notably, Odin1Eye who stepped up and did a guest review a few weeks back.  And hopefully in the next month or so I'll be welcoming a new staffer as a PC expert bringing his expertise and insight from the Windows side of the world.  And nobody gets paid anything.

Each of the products reviewed in The Nifty Tech Blog are products that I, or my guest reviewers, have had personal experience with.  These products are either free, or are things that we have paid for with our own money.  And by recommending them, we're saying that we would pay for them again.  If a product isn't good enough to buy all over again, it doesn't make the Blog.  What we're trying to provide is a view into the best products available on the market.

And towards that end, The Nifty Tech Blog is completely community supported.  I rely on you the reader to suggest new products to review, in addition to the research I do on my own.  No one receives any compensation or considerations from the manufacturers.  Now there are some products out there that I want to review, but I just don't have the funds necessary to buy a review model of a product.  And there is no way I can afford to buy review models of every new product out there!  Eventually, I expect that I will have to resort to asking manufacturers to send me review models to examine.  If that happens, I will be sure to state right up front that the review is based on a piece of equipment loaned by the manufacturer.

The domain registry and hosting costs are paid by me.  And all of the layout and web work is done by me.

So, if this is a losing proposition, why do I keep doing it?

Well, for me, The Nifty Tech Blog is a labor of love.  There is so much cool stuff out there, I want to let people know about it.  And I want your help to find it so that I can play with it!  Would I like it if I could make a profit?  Yeah.  But I'll never get rich writing a blog.  If I could break even, that would be enough.  But for now, I'll keep going as long as I can.

If you'd like to help support The Nifty Tech Blog, leave a comment.  Send me e-mail.  Tell a friend about the Blog.  Suggest a new product to review.  If you really want to support the Blog financially, then check out the ads, or buy something from the store.  Or just keep coming back and reading.  That's what it is here for, after all.  For you to read.

And We're Back!

After a very busy week of work, we are proud to display the fruits of all these efforts: the New Nifty Tech Blog site!  The new site is hosted by Blogger, and provides me access to a number of widgets and tools that will make posting and maintaining the blog easier for me.  For you the reader, it provides a more robust archive page, the ability to search entries by labels, and a number of subscription options.  And a new RSS feed hosted by Feedburner.

Despite putting in a lot of work this past week, I wasn't quite able to make all the updates I wanted to.  So you may see little changes to the site in the coming days and weeks as I make little tweaks here and there.

For those of you following the OLD RSS feed, I'm afraid you're going to have to go to http://www.NiftyTechBlog.com and re-subscribe with the new RSS feed.  I'm sorry about that, but I just didn't have any good way to feed the new feed through the old one.  The old site will remain at it's underlying URL for a while, until I am confident that folks have moved to the new incarnation of the site.

All the posts and comments have already been transferred over to the new site, although I'm afraid the date-time stamps for the comments couldn't be preserved.  The comments are still there in the correct order, but the date-time stamps reflect when they were migrated rather than when they were posted.

There will be a review posted later today, but I'm afraid it will be a bit late.  But it WILL be up on Monday, February 15, 2010 in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).  Promise.  The new post will only be on the new feed.  This will be the last post that will show up on the old feed, so the time to switch over is now.

Please let me know how you like the new site, and feel free to offer constructive comments and suggestions.  I'm always happy to hear from my readers!

Maintenance

On Sunday, February 14th, 2010, readers may experience some problems accessing the blog. During this time, I'll be doing the switch over from the current site to the new Blogger hosted site. I'm not sure how long this will take, but a new review will be posted on Monday, February 15th.

Please bear with me during this transition. Hopefully all will go smoothly. I hope everyone will agree that the new site is an improvement.