A short time ago I wrote a post on how much I love white boards or dry erase boards. Well Julia the founder of Kleen Slate got in touch with me to tell me about some products she has created for white boards / dry erase boards.

Julia saw a need and filled it with her revolutionary idea of having erasers attached right on the dry / erase marker. No more having to hunt around for the eraser when you make a bumble while writing, or worse yet using your fingers to wipe off the writing.

 Now before you go telling me that it is just easier to use your finger let me relate this anecdote to you. While attending a conference the presenter was making extensive use of the dry / erase board to explain some formulae. Well he occasionally made a blunder and would wipe it quickly off with his finger. However one time after doing this he wiped his face and left a green mark across his face. Well no one in attendance told him and he went the rest of the day with a green mark on his face. I am sure this made him lose some credibility in the eyes of his audience.

 The first product I want to discuss is the KwikChek II. This is essentially a paddle with a plain dry / erase side and a lined dry / erase side. My wife who works in a nursing home immediately saw the advantage of this when she saw it. She told me it would be an excellent tool for communicating with her patients who are hard of hearing or have difficulty speaking.

  I think it is really well designed for many applications. It is one of those items that once you have it in your hand you can think up endless possibilities for it. A few are listed on Kleen Slate’s web site. I do like the fact the it has a holder for the marker, this way you can always have the two together.

Other possible uses that I can think of right now are:

• To relay time information to runners / bikers in a race.
• To display the channel information for R/C enthusiasts.

 The erasers on the small markers are incorporated to the cap. This makes them extremely versatile. Once you remove the cap and place it on the end you have both your writing end and erasing end. Much like a pencil. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase eraser I have used. They remove all the ink with no trace leaving a clean dry erase surface. As for odour from the dry / erase markers they are not any worse or any better than those already on the market.

 The big markers do not have the erasers attached to the caps. A feature I would of really liked to have seen as I tend to be a little bit absent minded and can fore see myself misplacing a cap from one of the markers. This can be an advantage as you will be able to easily reuse the erasers from these markers with new markers. Again the erasers perform exceptionally well and are very nice to use. The odour again is much like other dry / erase markers out there.

 All things considered if you regularly make use of white boards (dry / erase boards ) I would recommend using these products. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase erasers I have ever used. I will make sure that all my dry /erase markers in the future are equipped with these erasers.

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 If you have ever had one of your posts Stumbled Upon or Dugg you know how much traffic a social networking site can bring you. If you are a stats fanatic like me then you have seen first hand the results Stumble Upon can have on your posts. My photoshop tutorial on peeling an image away to reveal another image was Stumbled Upon and the traffic soared. A few other posts of mine have been linked by other social networking sites. You can definitely see the traffic increase from this. So of course you want your readers to use social networking sites to mark your posts. But how do we make it easy for our users/ readers to do this?

Well in steps Joost de Valk. I am really starting to like this guy, I would like to call him a friend but I have never met him. However he has breathed new life into the Sociable WordPress plug in. You can see it in action at the bottom of this post.

 The plug in is great and offers a huge selection of social networking sites to display icons for. Your users/readers can just click on the icon of their favorite social networking site and voila just like that add your post. Go ahead try it out with this post and your favorite social networking site. If your favorite social networking site is not displayed leave me a comment and I will make sure it is.

 Thanks again Mr. de Valk for another great plug in. By the way I am kind of weird because before I install a plug in I always look at the code. Mr. de Valk does an excellent job with his code.

Note: If you wonder why there are two equal signs in the title, let me tell you now that it is not a mistake. Other programmers will know what I mean.

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 Lets’ face it just about everyone who runs a web site likes to keep track of what their visitors do on the site. There are many great tools out there that do this for us. Google Analytics is probably one of the more popular ones that people use. What these tools don’t really tell you is how your users actually interact with your site.

 That is why you should give Robot Replay try. Now don’t worry I am not trying to sell you something. Robot Replay is currently free and super easy to use.It as simple as installing a bit of java code into your pages header to use Robot Replay.

  Robot Replay tracks how your users interact with your site. Then you can view actual sessions and follow the users mouse pointer as they go through your site. This allows you to see where your user may encounter pit falls while interacting with your site. Plus for those of you who advertise on your site this can also tell you where your users are looking. Research has shown that a users eyes follow their mouse cursor 60% of the time. Robot Replay is a fantastic tool to have in your arsenal when improving your sites design.

 Well if a picture is worth a thousand words than a video must be worth at least a million. So give this video a view to see just how you can use Robot Replay to enhance your users experience with your site.

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 While I was surfing through numerous Word Press sites today I notice a bunch had this nifty Comment Luv Plug in. When you leave a comment at a site running this plug in it will automatically retrieve the commenter’s last post and place a link to it with their comment.

 What a great way to not only encourage comments but help send some traffic to your fellow bloggers. I am pleased to announce that Tenacious Creations now has this plug in enabled. Comments are still moderated so you can not simply post spam in order to get links. But if you leave a comment related to the post be it good or bad it is almost always approved. If you have left a comment that has not been approved it may of got caught in my spam filters. Feel free to use the contact form on the about page to ask me why your comment was not approved.

 I also noticed in my surfing that a lot of sites have a large number of links to other sites on them. This is something that Tenacious Creations is lacking. If you would like me to place a link from my site to yours please leave me a comment here. All I ask is for you to link to my site.

 Plus if you are running Word Press and Adsense or TTZ ads consider signing up to beta test my new ads optimizer plug in. On that note, I had a found a few bugs in it today so the beta won’t be available till early next week.

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Subscribe in a reader

 After reading Nicoles blog on feeds this morning I thought I should check into whats happening with mine. I haven’t updated my Feed Burner preferences in a long time. In fact I haven’t given much thought to feeds on Tenacious Creations at all.

 This is kind of ironic because I use Google Reader to manage the feeds from the blogs and sites I follow. It never occurred to me that I should add my own site to my feeds so I could track if my feeds were being published.

  So today I went in and updated my feed burner settings, and subscribed to my feed in Google Reader. I also set Feed Burner up to burn a feed of the comments on my post. There may be a few problems in the transition with the new settings. So I would suggest you use the button at the top of this feed to resubscribe if you currently subscribe to my feeds.

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 The other day I was asked if I could recommend any good plug ins to use with Word Press. Well to be honest I only use about 15 plug ins. So I decided I would provide a list of the plug ins I use and the reasons I use them. If you have know of a great useful plug in that I have missed on this list please let me know. I would love to give it a try.

1. Adsense Deluxe This is the plug in I use for controlling the advertising from Google. It is pretty simplistic and I know there are others out there. But what I like about this one is it allows me to precisely control where the ads are in my posts.
2. Akismet This is my spam guard for the comments and I highly recommend you use this plug in on your blog. It is pretty accurate, and has only let a wee little bit of spam through, and so far has never identified a legit comment as spam.
3. Get Recent Comments Well this does just what it says, it gets the recent comments from your posts and displays them as a widget. I initially installed this so that people could follow their comments on the posts simply by going to the main page. That was of course before I installed the subscribe to comments plug in.
4. Maintenace Mode This is a very useful plug in if you are updating your Word Press blog. It displays an under maintenance page to your readers while you perform site critical updates and changes. It allows you to display how long your site will be down. Not only is it a courtesy for your readers it prevents new readers from thinking your page doesn’t exists anymore. Of course you still want to keep your down time to as little as possible.
5. Php Markdown When I came across this plug in in my plug in directories I actually had to read up on what it does. That’s the sign of good software it runs in the background doing its job. Basically this converts your non html formatting to html so you don’t have to remember things like & nbsp;.
6. Related Posts This plug in puts links for posts relating to a post based on the tags you use. It is a real nice feature to allow your readers to keep reading on a particular topic that you have blogged on.
7. SEO Siloing This plug in basically optimizes your site for a search engine optimization technique called Siloing. To explain SEO siloing would take a post in itself.







8. Stumbleupon it This is a great little plug in that puts a link at the bottom of your posts so your users can add it Stumbleupon it.
9. Subscribe to Comments This is a great plug in, it allows your readers to follow the chain of comments for a post. When I comment on a blog that does not have this I tend never to return to see if any one commented on my comment. Well this handy plug in solves that.
10. Word Press Stats This plug in provides a free service to track the stats of your blog. It tells you which posts were more popular, what links your readers clicked off your site etc.. It is not nearly as good as Google Analytics or other free trackers but it is a nice feature in your admin dash board.
11. Word Press Data Base Back Up You have all heard the mantra – back up back up back up. Well this plug in allows you to do just that, just in case something happens you can rest well knowing you have to your database backed up. That means all that hard work you put into writing those posts is saved. It is also really useful when moving to a new server.
12. Word Press Cache This plug in speeds up your site and reduces load on your server by caching word press pages and storing them in a static file for future use. This would be real handy for an extremely heavily trafficked site, but even on a low traffic site you can see improvements in load speeds.
13. Contact Form This is a real simple plug in that makes it a breeze to put a contact form on your blog. It even has some rudimentary defenses against spammers.
14. All in One SEO Pack This plug is set up help you make your posts search engine optimised. Now of course no software can do it all, you still need some knowledge of SEO practices but this does make it easier.

 Now I am sure there are a lot more awesome plug ins out there. If you know of some post them in the comments.

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  If your site is powered by WordPress and you have not yet updated, now is the time to do so. The update fixes an exploit that allowed people to view post before they were posted.

 The update is very simple and is just matter of uploading the new files to your server. I suggest that before you update you install this plug in. While you are updating your site may become inaccessible to your visitors. However with this plug in you notify your visitors that your site is in maintenance mode and will be back shortly. Actually if allows you to set a specified time when your site will be back while still providing administration access.

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