So, what would you write about when your only audience is essentially friends and family, if that? Would you even want people to start looking at your newborn site?
Those are the questions I’m trying to tackle as I write this post.
My answer is to write about one of the things I’m known for, resourcefulness. This is a very broad topic, so I’m going to break this up into an undetermined amount of posts. I use a lot of sites and tools and I think it's worth mentioning if even just one more person can add it to their repertoire.
Let’s start with what the word means according to Merriam-Webster, which is the ability to “deal well with new or difficult situations and to find solutions to problems.”
I have to be honest in that the definition is not exactly what I thought it would be. I was thinking something more like the ability to “make the most of current resources including finding new resources.”
I think my definition is a very narrow element of the much broader definition. Nevertheless, I think it’s still worthwhile to continue with the vision I had in my head for this series of posts, which is to list the resources I use to find valuable information and perhaps even how to use them, if that’s helpful.
One of the most popular resources in anyone’s arsenal is the power of the search engine, which is Google for most of the world with Baidu dominating in China, Yandex in Russia, and Yahoo in Japan (1).
While search engines are widely used, how they are used is pretty much the same. You enter the words related to your query and scan the results. For most queries this is probably all you need, but sometimes you need more.
For a detailed rundown on the different syntax (symbols, punctuation, or search operators) you can use, click on Google’s site here. Here are 3 that I find particularly useful:
Many times I’m faced with having to learn something new or the need to refresh my memory. Using these symbols or search operators has saved me a fair amount of time and frustration over the years.
Well, as it happens I encountered 2 challenges while writing this post.
Challenge #1 – Chrome makes my mouse cursor disappear
I like to use Chrome as my internet browser and while I was using it the mouse cursor disappeared. I moved the mouse around and could see a glimpse around the edges, but couldn't click on anything. Since I have been writing my posts in Word and the mouse works there, I know it’s not a problem with the pc or mouse. I opened Firefox just to make sure the problem was limited to Chrome and the mouse worked fine. With the challenge determined to be localized to the Chrome browser I set out to search for the solution on google search.
My first search was for: mouse not working on chrome. The results were not great. Most of them focused on the click or scrolling function of the mouse, but that doesn’t help a person like me who couldn’t even see where they would be clicking or scrolling!
Time to get specific or creative with the search. Finally, success! Using: can’t see mouse cursor chrome, the very first result yielded a forum where a very helpful user by the name of bostonoski posted a potential fix. I followed his/her instructions and the mouse is working again.
Challenge #2 - preview: Is Andrew going to get sued after only his second post?
A lack of images can make a blog post simply undesirable to review. It was that thought that made me think of America’s love affair with lawsuits and its absurd ubiquity. My bio page was in dire need of some eye candy and I pulled some images of products that I love, a book and 3 movies. Is this site doomed for a cease and desist order less than a week after birth?
Look for challenge #2 in my next post. I also plan to hit Google Alerts and its unaffiliated cousin on steroids, IFTTT.
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