Get a Google Plus Profile

https://plus.google.com

If you already have a Google Plus profile, you can ignore this step.

You should only have one Google Plus account, and it’s best to use your real name. If you have a personal Gmail address, that’s the one you’ll want to use for Google Plus. If not, go ahead and sign up for one. You don’t need to start a new Gmail account to use for business listings because now you can transfer ownership and assign multiple managers (no more finding out the guy you fired has the keys to your business listing).

Create Your Google Plus Local Listing

1. In your Google Plus account, navigate to Pages (this will probably be under the More tab on the left).
2. Click the Create New Page button (top right).
3. Select Local Business or Place (very important).
4. Enter your business phone number.
5. If your business appears in the list, then you already have a Places listing, and you should follow this guide instead. If not, or if another business shows up, create a new listing by clicking Add your business to Google.
6. Add your address exactly how it appears on your website, and anywhere else online (NAP consistency is important, and you should do always do your best to maintain it).
7. Confirm the map marker location, and press OK.
8. Enter your business name and add a link to your website. NOTE: Be sure to use your “Doing Business As” name (Ex. Safeway, not Safeway Edmonton Grocery Store)
9. Once you press continue, you’ll see a mostly empty Google Plus page. Click Finish, and fill in as many of the remaining fields as possible.

Verify Your Listing

Right beside your business name, it will say Unverified. Click that. Then click the Verify now button. Verify that your address is correct and send the postcard. Then keep an eye out for it to arrive in the next week or two.

When you receive your postcard, log into your Google Plus account, visit the page, and enter the PIN.

That’s it!

The post How to Create a New Google Plus Local Listing for your Business appeared first on Nick Pierno.

So you’re all set to start taking advantage of Usenet’s wicked download speeds and clean ecosystem, but you need a Usenet index to find those glorious nzb’s. I’ve been downloading from newsgroups for a few years now and I’ve seen lots of index sites come and go.

Here I keep a curated list of my favourites. They’re all free to use, are generally reliable, and have huge selections of the files you’re looking for!

NZB7 nzb index

NZDBID nzb index

NZB club nzb index

Findnzbs nzb index

nMatrix nzb index

Feel free to let me know of any other good indexes you use in the comments!

The post Best Usenet Indexing Sites (AKA Newsgroup Search Engines) appeared first on Nick Pierno.

We love working with local businesses here at Top Draw. Online marketing can be very rewarding for local companies and we’re always interested in new tools for the job.

We’re big fans of Yoast, and have been using their flagship SEO for WordPress Plugin for a good while now, both on client sites and our own site, to make quick work of customizing meta tags, generating sitemaps, and so on. It’s awesome, and it’s free. Also, you gotta love their adorable cartoon mascots.

We were very excited to hear about the release of their new add-on to this plugin, Local SEO for WordPress. So we grabbed our copy right away and wanted to share our thoughts about it.

What it does

Simple. It marks up your contact page the way a professional SEO would, and the way search engines want to read it. The features include:

• KML File and Geo Sitemap generation
• Address output in Schema.org format
• Showing opening hours (with Schema.org output)
• Showing Google maps, including a routeplanner
• Support for multiple locations
• CSV upload for multiple locations

Putting it to use

It’s a breeze to implement, and there’s very little setup required. Install the plugin, activate your license, input your business’ information, and pop the shortcode into your contact page(s).

It will do all the markup for you, create a geositemap and KML file (especially useful with multiple locations), and even submit them to Google.

It just used our site’s existing styles, so it looked nice and shiny in action. You can see it here. The route planner is also pretty slick.

A couple tiny niggles

I had one small issue during setup, which was that the license key wasn’t working. A quick look at their support forum  was all I needed though, and I was up and running in minutes.

We also noticed that the link from our company name in the embedded map was linking to a funny url. Very minor issue, but I got a reply within 24 hrs. from Joost himself saying that they noticed the issue too and would be pushing out an update to fix it immediately.

The only other thing I wasn’t sure about was the absence of an email field. Mr. de Valk left a comment on this post and has told me he will be adding this feature in the next release!

Cost and value

This one’s not free – but it is very reasonably priced:

• Personal – Single Site – $69.00
• Professional – Up to 5 Sites – $129.00
• Agency – Unlimited – $249.00

For us, a couple hundred dollars for unlimited use on a plugin that saves us time is a no-brainer. I think for personal use on one site, 70 bucks is easily justified too. Paying anyone to do all the proper markup and implementation that this thing does would cost way more than that.

The professional price point makes sense for them to offer, but it seems like if you were going to use it on multiple sites you’d just go for the agency license and not have to worry about limitations.

No brain melting features, but all in all, a very handy plugin that does exactly what it promises without any bulk. Highly recommended for anyone with a local business, or web designers/SEOs with local clients.

The post Yoast Local SEO for WordPress Plugin Review appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Responsive

Here’s a simple, aptly named, feature-light theme you can find on WordPress.org. It doesn’t have much to it, but it’s responsive… and free.

Canvas

This one is oft recommended by me. It’s just so flexible and well made.

Modernize

Easy to customize, turn-key, responsive theme. Tons of premium goodies, and looks pretty good too.

Appply

For blogging, an online store (powered by WooCommerce) or a business website, Appply transforms itself to suit your needs.

Definition

A clean, responsive business, blogging and store theme with a featured slider.

Office

Office is the ultimate WordPress theme for any corporate business.

Scrollider

Scrollider is a clean business/portfolio/blogging theme with a unique featured slideshow.

Silicon

An attractive minimalist theme with plenty of features and ways to organize your content.

Whitelight

One of my all-time personal faves. Featuring a clean and responsive design, customized modular homepage, portfolio functionality that we all love and integrated WooCommerce goodness (child theme) for your e-commerce needs.

Smashing

Smashing is a flexible and stylish theme. It includes a parallax slider, a filterable portfolio and loads of options to make your theme stand out from the rest.

BONUS: Awesome Portfolio Theme

Heat

Heat is a Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme with a very unique layout especially suited for photographers, illustrators, graphic designers, art and creative directors, architects, luxury businesses or bloggers.

The post 10 of the Best Responsive WordPress Themes (February 2013) appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Responsive web design is something you’ll be hearing about (and seeing) lots this year. Google says it’s the recommended way to build websites from here on out, and Mashable has a detailed post on why 2013 is “the year of responsive web design”.

I find myself answering these questions more and more as awareness increases, so I thought I’d write a brief non-technical explanation on the basics of being responsive.

What is a responsive website?

Responsive web design (often abbreviated to RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

- Wikipedia

Responsive websites respond to the viewing area the user is looking at, and displays content in different ways depending on how wide the window or screen is. The general goal is to make the important content easier to get to and navigate on smaller devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.).

It’s pretty simple, but it makes even more sense when you see it. Take my site for example. Slowly resize your browser window width right now, making it narrower.

At certain points you’ll see the site “breakdown.”  You’ll notice the first change at about half the width where the sidebar relocates to the bottom. This is roughly what you’d see on a tablet.

Then, a bit narrower still, and you’ll have an idea what you’d see on a mobile phone.

So that’s what it is, a site that looks good and works well on any device. The merits of this are pretty obvious, but why not just build a mobile site?

Why responsive?

Well, because it’s better. Obviously prioritizing content and making it easier for users to find their way around on smaller devices is for the best. This used to be achieved by building a mobile site, but these presented numerous issues.

Perhaps most importantly, you had to build and manage two separate websites. This can cost a lot of extra time and money, which might explain why most sites didn’t have a mobile version.

But even if you had the budget to build and maintain consistency between two sets of code, more and more screen sizes and resolutions are hitting the market every day, making it almost impossible to accommodate everyone.

Responsive sites solve these problems, and others, handily.

With the majority of major websites out there going responsive, as well as a recommendation from straight from Google, you should probably be thinking responsive for your next website. If you’re a WordPress person, check out this article on Smashing Magazine for building responsiveness into your next theme. Or, check out this list featuring some of my favourite available responsive WordPress themes.

The post Responsive Web Design – What is it and why should you care? appeared first on Nick Pierno.

1. Put all your CSV files in one folder. For this example let’s put all CSV’s to be merged in a folder called “a” in the “Downloads” folder. (As a result the path to this folder is: C:\Users\yourusername\Downloads\a)

2. Press Windows Button+R (or click the start button and search for “run“)

3. Type in cmd and press OK

A command line window will pop up (scary DOS stuff, I know. Stay with me)

4. Now grab the path to the folder with all your CSV’s inside. To do this click on the address bar of the window and copy the text.

5. Now back to your command line and your cursor should be waiting for you right after  C:\Users\yourusername>

6. Type in the following command (you can paste the folder paths from step 5 and just type the stuff in red):

copy C:\Users\npierno\Downloads\a\*.csv C:\Users\npierno\Downloads\a\Output.csv

(The basic structure to follow is: copy <your folder path>\*.csv <desired output folder path>\desiredfilename.csv)

7. Press enter, and you’re done! Check the chosen output folder (in this case “a”) for your Output.csv file!

The post How to merge multiple CSV files (Windows) appeared first on Nick Pierno.

I was also a little surprised to find out that the local cable company (Shaw) doesn’t actually touch these wires when they come to get you set up with cable/internet. This made me think to myself:

I’m lucky I’m a bit technical and like to doing projects like this… but what if this were most anyone else? What would they do? Who do you even call to take care of something like this?

Anyway, I thought I’d detail the steps I go through to get this all running so that the next guy can do a bit less head scratching than me.

Here’s where I’m starting at

• All the Cat5 wires are connected to a wall plate in their respective rooms (office, living room, 3 bdrms, etc)
• A Cat5 wire for each plate is hanging by my electrical planel in the basement
• The cable co. installed the provided modem/wireless router unit in my office on the main level using a coaxial outlet

The tools I used

• 3 in 1 Crimping Tool with RJ45 crimper
• RJ45 (8-pin) connectors
• 5 Port Gigabit Switch
  

Steps

Crimp the wires you’ll need (in my case the one coming down from my office, where my modem and router are, and the living room where I wanted a wired connection). I used this video to guide me through crimping.

How to crimp Cat5 wired with RJ45 connectors

Cat5 wiring diagram for RJ45 connectors

If you have any trouble or need some more info on wiring patterns (there are a few variables) check this page.

Once the required wires are crimped, plug in your switch, put the one coming from your router into the LAN port and the other(s) in one of the remaining ports.

Test, and enjoy!

The post New home with Cat5/LAN roughed-in? How to add connectors, switch, router, etc. appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Big thanks to our crack designer @wendyyeung for the beautiful design!

Don’t be shy to get share-y!

The post What are Albertans Searching for? New infographic c/o Top Draw appeared first on Nick Pierno.

A new browser-based exploit for a Java vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on client systems has been spotted in the wild – and because of Oracle’s Java patch schedule, it may be some time before a fix becomes widely available.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/27/disable_java_to_block_exploit/

Do it

In Firefox: Press Firefox button -> Add-ons, go to Plugins and click the “Disable” button next to anything named “Java”.

In Chrome: Type in: “chrome://plugins/” into the address bar (no speech marks). Scroll down to Java and click disable.

In Opera: Type in “opera:plugins” into the address bar (no speech marks). Scroll down to:

• Java(TM) Platform <click on> Disable.
• Java Deployment Toolkit <click on> Disable.

In Internet Explorer: Go to Tools -> Manage add-ons -> Toolbars and Extensions. At the bottom, show: All add-ons. Find “Deployment Toolkit” and right-click -> Disable it.

Instructions c/o helpful reddit dude, WK_of_Angmar

The post Disable Java NOW – Your Browser’s Java Plugin is Currently Vulnerable Due to an Exploit appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Awhile back I wrote about the best practical apps for your Android device. Times a’change, and now, after a few months with a Galaxy Nexus in my pocket, it’s time to update my must-have practical Android apps list.

Best apps for the day-to-day/productivity

Alarm Clock Plus

This is the best alarm clock app in my experience. Good UI, all the options and features, and it’s never let me down.

Beautiful Widgets

This one returns from my original list. It just offers some awesome widgets for your home pages, my favourite being the classic Super Clock with weather and date info.

Google Drive

If you’re not using Google Drive, you should be. Google docs, cloud storage, drop box-esque syncing across devices. Win.

File Manager

The cleanest and usable-est of the Android file managers I’ve tried. Only necessary if you don’t have a native manager (Nexus devices, etc.)

Swiftkey 3

Ousting Smart Keyboard from my last list, Swiftkey is more frequently updated and has some really neat features like learning from your Gmail and Facebook lingo (if you let it). I also found this to be a bit snappier than Smart Keyboard on my Galaxy Nexus.

Screen Filter

Not sure what I’d do without this one. Dims the screen beyond the native setting of your phone. Particularly useful when you’re in the dark, perhaps right before going to sleep, when even the lowest brightness of your display is hard on your eyes.

Social media

Hoot Suite

The standard web and mobile app for posting to Twitter and/or Facebook. Keeps the keystrokes few and the sharing simple. Once they have G+ as an option my life will be complete.

Imgur for Android

Use it in combination with HootSuite and you have the perfect engine for platform-independent sharing of your dog wearing a suit, or what you ate for lunch.

Games

Field Runners

Excellent production values and top-notch gameplay make this tower defence game the best on the market. Very addictive and fast paced. Also a good buy for your laptop!

Great Big War Game

My new ultimate favourite game for Android. Civilization-style, turn-based war game. Deep gameplay, sweet design and graphics. Maybe the best game on Android to date!

X Construction

My first love on Android, back from my first list. This game just doesn’t get the hype it deserves. Simple physics-based bridge builder sim. Not exactly exciting, but addictive and smart… and addictive.

Also consider…

Reddit is fun / Bacon Reader / Reddit News / Reddit Sync

Not everyone is a redditor. But everyone who is needs a reddit app. I’ve always used Reddit is fun, but I’ve heard good things about these others as well

WhatsApp Messenger

A must-have if you want to text people long-distance, or whenever you’re travelling. Set up groups, send multimedia, and text anyone else with the app for FWEEE!

The post 10 Practical, Must-Have Android Apps for Everyone (August 2012) appeared first on Nick Pierno.