Normally when you want to produce a bespoke design for your eBook cover you usually have two choices available to you. One you outsource, or two you use Photoshop with one of the handful of addon programmes designed specifically for this task. As a lot of you know Photoshop is a gargantuan programme and is not the easiest programme to learn to use with any degree of proficiency.

I do use Photoshop myself for a lot of my artwork, but I also have a small programme available to me so that if I need to produce a slick looking eBook cover on the fly with the least amount of work this is the one I choose. The name of this programme is Trueboxshot, and the beauty of the  programe is that you can use it in conjunction with any or all of the other free graphics programmes.

This little beauty is simplicity itself, once you have produced your basic artwork on, for arguments sake, the free graphics software from paint.net, you import your artwork into Trueboxshot. You establish your design perameters based on whether you are producing a CD, DVD cover, a box, a book, or even a membership card. After establishing these parameters, all you do then is click ´render´ and immediately you are presented with a great looking cover.

A prime example is the eBook cover for ´My Journey So Far´ which took me no more than around 15 minutes from start to finish to accomplish. You can download a trial copy of this by clicking on Trueboxshot.

With most products available on the market today they normally have a free version. More often than not the freebie does not have all the bells and whistles that the paid version does. I have tried quite a few different screen capture tools of late with varying degrees of success. Just recently I downloaded a screen capture tool from Wisdom-soft by the name of Screen Hunter. This particular product does have a paid version but to be honest I don´t see how they can better the free version.

The product interface is very simple. To capture an image all you do is position the cursor near the image that you want to capture, hold down your left mouse key and drag over the image. Once you let go of the left mouse key the programme immediately deposits a jpeg of the image you have just captured directly to your desktop. Now what could be easier than that ? You can download this product from Wisdom-soft totally free of charge.

Also on offer at their site there is a video capture tool, again totally free of charge.

Happy capturing !

I for one love all things Tech, and one of my passions is video. I have been using a great service just lately by a company called Animoto.

The system they have in place allows you to upload photos to a very simple interface where you have the opportunity to add a soundtrack, be that one of your own, or one of the many music tracks they already have available for you to freely use. You will need to open up a free account with them, and after you do this away you go.

After you input your photos and soundtrack all that remains to be done is to press the button marked create video. The system will then produce a very professional looking product. If for any reason you are not quite happy with the end result just click remix and you will end up with a completely different looking video.

The free version of Animoto allows you to produce unlimited videos of up to 30 seconds each.  If however you decide to upgrade to the paid option then you can just let your imagination run riot !

I think the video below will prove to you what a great product this is

If you decide to go for the paid version, you can claim a $5 dollar discount from the all access pass by using this code dehczutn

This is a cautionary tale for anyone upgrading to Wordpress 2.7. Yesterday I was on Dean Hollands site and was reading about the fact that some of the information in his book about Worpress installation was out of date. Anyway after reading this it prompted me to upgrade my own blog, this is where my nightmare begins..

I went to my C-panel and pressed the big smiley face of Fantastico, so far so good. The system then informed me that an upgrade had been performed and that all the folders held within my blog had been saved, brilliant I thought. At this point I refreshed the page only to be greeted by every website owners worst nightmare, the dreaded ¨Fatal Error¨ message !

Blind panic set in at this point, I felt physically sick..

After trying to rationalize what the problem could be, in desperation I contacted the tech department at Hostgator . I opened a live chat browser and started to describe the problem but all the time being in such a panic my typing skills flew out of the window! I was greeted with a very cool, calm and collected guy from the Tech department who after deciphering my ramblings, immediately flew into action.

He prompted me for a few answers to very basic questions he posed, then disappeared for a few minutes. All the time I was waiting for him to reappear I was refreshing the page on my other computer. After the third attempt my site reappeared intact with no obvious problems. Upon questioning the Hostgator technician as to what the problem had been, it transpired that it was all down to an out of date plugin.

He advised me that for future upgrades of Wordpress, and I must stress here that it is crucially important to make sure that all your plugins are upgraded to the point that you can use them safely with the most recent upgraded version of Wordpress.

I cannot begin to describe to you how relieved I was to find my site intact. At the end of our live chat I was given the opportunity to rate his help. The five stars that were available to me didn´t even come close to my degree of satisfaction with this technical expertise and the cool, calm manner in which he dealt with me and my problem.

My advice to anyone who uses Wordpress is to have all your files backed up somewhere safely !