A very simple way to make your website more user-friendly is to add a search feature. Google Search makes that easy: just Create a Custom Search Engine by filling out a form, and then paste the resulting code wherever you want into your web page. (If you want it to search only on your website, then enter your URL only under the "Select some sites" portion of the form.)

After you have completed the form, it will take you to a page that has a link to the Control Panel for your new custom search. Click that, and then click "code." This is what you will copy and paste into your home page.

Here’s what that code looks like when it’s pasted into your HTML page:

But what if you don’t like the default look? No problem: there are several ways to change the look and feel of the search bar, and also the search results page that comes up afterwards. Just click the "look and feel" link and you will be presented with several options, including the option to choose your own text colors, and add your own logo to the custom search results page. (Note: you can also choose where that search results page is hosted: either on your own site, or on google. That option is under the "code" link.)

And that’s it– your own custom search in minutes!

It’s now been 3 weeks since I was forced to buy a laptop to replace my Sony Vaio.  I ended up going with a Mac because of the superior hardware specs and the option to run OSX while still keeping XP on the same machine. Was it a good decision? I am still trying to decide.

It took me at least 2 weeks of INTENSE frustration to get used to some of the things that are different/worse. My fingers had a hard time getting used to all the new keystrokes, and I spent forever just trying to find stuff or match the functionality of my old Sony. When I used XP on it, the keyboard and trackpad was so  incredibly annoying that I resorted to a bluetooth keyboard just to be able to get anything done. And the multi-touch trackpad works like ass in Bootcamp (there are, as yet, no drivers that Apple has put out for XP. You can’t double-tap, and when you click, the cursor jumps.)

Plus, I have hundreds of dollars worth of Type 1 fonts that won’t work on the Mac. Although Adobe will crossgrade software from Windows to Mac at no charge, they won’t upgrade your Type 1 fonts to cross-platform Opentype. So I’m stuck with some of my best fonts that will only work in XP.

So here’s my partial list of pros and cons, in no particular order:

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A couple of days ago, Google released a new open-source browser called Google Chrome. (The name "chrome" comes from the developer’s term for the graphics that go around the window of a browser). Their goal was to totally rethink the way people interact with the web, stripping the browser down to its barest essence with a minimum of tools and options. I am particularly fond of the "omnibar" as they call it: rather than having a separate address bar and search tool, it’s all combined into one. This will make my mother happy, who often types URLs in a search box and then wonders why it doesn’t take her to the website. (This will hopefully keep me from reverting to my annoyed adolescent voice: "Because you have to use the ADDRESS BAR, Mom! Duh!")

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Great news for those of you who hate having to visit a website all the time just to see if they’ve added any new content: I’ve just discovered Page2RSS, a cool tool that will create an RSS feed for a website that doesn’t have one built in. It will check the site every day for new content, and send the updates to your news aggregator.

I’m LOVING this… now I can keep an eye on all my clients’ corporate sites, and see all the updates in a single place: Google Reader, my news aggregate of choice. No more clicking on a bunch of different bookmarks just to find out if something has been updated!

There are a couple of other tools out there that also do the same thing. Want to know more about RSS and how to use it? Check out this article about great RSS tools.

ChaCha is one of the most fun and useful things for my cell phone I’ve found in a while. It’s kind of like a human Google: simply send a text message from your phone to 242242 (chacha), and within minutes, a live human texts back the answer. No registration required, and it’s free (except for whatever your cell phone provider might charge you for text messages)! It’s easier than googling because you don’t have to worry about putting in the perfect search query, or wading through bunches of possible matches. And texting is much faster than using a browser on your cell phone.

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Okay, ready to have some fun, kids? Just download Artrage Starter Edition (free!), pick up your Wacom Bamboo (or a mouse), and let your inner child out to play in the street!

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Evernote is one of my favorite freeware apps EVER. Do you spend a lot of time searching for that business card someone gave you, hunting down login information for your website, shuffling through papers to find those meeting notes from two weeks ago, rummaging around your desk to find an important number you wrote on the back of an envelope, or scouring the web to find a site that you forgot to bookmark? Then you need Evernote.

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You can log onto your Wordpress admin screen in your browser to create a blog post, but by far the slickest and easiest way for a Windows user to create and edit their blog posts is with Microsoft’s free and amazingly awesome Windows Live Writer.

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