Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

GridMove is a program that aims at making windows management easier. It helps you with this task by defining a visual grid on your desktop, to which you can easily snap windows. This program comes bundled with some predefined grid templates, that can be easily swaped, but also has ways of creating custom grids or sharing grids made by others.

GridMove really helps keep your desktop organized.  After playing with it a few days, I have found just about the perfect setup for myself and I can tell my workflow has increased a lot.  Some of the additional features include:

• 3 different interaction methods to suit everyone’s likes
• Several pre-made grid templates that can be easily swapped
• Ability to set windows on top and maximize them vertically or horizontally
• Full keyboard support, which can organize windows with one hotkey press
• MultiMonitor Support
• Customizable hotkeys
• Customizable interface
• Possibility to create dynamic custom grids

Want to give it a shot? Go download it for free (for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) from the official GridMove website.

The interface of this music player is very familiar if you have used iTunes or anything similar to that in the last few years.  You have your tracks listed in the main window, different folders and collections in the far left pane and you can also use it to listen to internet radio too.  Internet radio providers Last.fm, SomaFM, Magnatune, Icecast and Jamendo are all supported.

Clemintine has a lot of great features, here are a few worth mentioning:

• Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• CUE sheet support.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Lyrics and artist biographies and photos.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Fetch missing tags from MusicBrainz.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.

If you are looking for a new way to listen to your music and your current music organizing program is giving you the blues, be sure to give the Clementine Music Player a download. It has a familiar interface and is really easy to use.

It might sound a little strange to say it out loud, but I like to see pictures of other people’s desks.  Thankfully though, this is the Internet – where people have other odd traits like odd obsessions with furry anime characters – so when you stop and think about it, checking out other people’s desk setups might not be that odd.  Deskography is a website dedicated to showing the world where you work and has tons of interesting desktop setups that might even inspire you to change your own corner nook around a little ‘bit.

At Deskography, you have two options.  You can either upload a photo of your own desk setup or you can browse through all the photos already submitted.  I like to organize things so seeing how others have set up their own desks makes me think, "Oh, maybe I could move X, Y and Z around to look a little better?".

Go check out this guilty pleasure of mine (desktop peeping?) over at Deskography.org.

Now, you might say, "Why do I need to change the colors of my folders?".  Well, by color coding your folders or folders inside of folders, you can more easily find the things you are looking for and create a more organized desktop environment.

Here is a little more about using Rainbow Folders from the developer:

When you’re exploring a directory which contains lots of subdirectories in Windows Explorer you can easily commit a mistake, e.g. by clicking the folder’s icon which has a similar name to the one you really wanted to go to. With the folders marked with the colors of your choosing, you won´t make any mistake and after some time you’ll be clicking the right folders by impulse.

This has to be one of my favorite desktop downloads, because I really love to organize things.  I hope you get some good use out of it too.  You can pick it up over at aionel.net.

ManageWP is something I have needed for a long time.  It takes your site details for each WordPress powered website you manage, and lets you take care of simple tasks for multiple blogs in one location.  This saves you time as you no longer have to log into each blog.  You can take care of things all at one.

Getting set up is easy, all you need to do is sign up, download the ManageWP Worker plugin and then install the ManageWP worker on your blogs. Once set up you can:

• Manage posts and pages
• Install new plugins and themes
• Manage your categories and tags
• Manage your comments
• Do one-click updates to WordPress and plugins

The only thing that keeps me away from using ManageWP full time would be the fact that I feel a little nervous about handing my login details to a third party like this.  However, there should be a self-hosted version of ManageWP in the works soon – so once that is out there, this is going to be something I’ll use for sure.

You can go sign up and try the remote version of the service at ManageWP.com.

Looking for an easy way to turn your WordPress powered blog into a book? Anthologize is a plugin for WordPress that will turn WordPress into a platform for publishing electronic text.  Anthologize gives you all the tools you need to publish your work in a new and exciting way.

Once you have this plugin installed, you can grab your own posts, import feeds for other websites or create new content within Anthologize.  Then all you need to do is edit your work, put it in a basic outline format and then publish.  You can export your masterpiece as a PDF, ePUB, or TEI based file.

If you have ever dreamed of publishing some of your blog posts together, in an easy to download format, Anthologize gives you all the basic tools to get the job done.

As somebody who did this the hard way with Word and a few select plugins and work arounds, I wish I had Anthologize handy when putting together my Everyone is a Marketer eBook.  It probably would have saved me a lot of time. I will definitely be giving Anthologize a closer look when it comes to any future publishing I might do.

You can pick up Anthologize for free and start turning your blog into a book today.

Now that our marketing month here on Mitchelaneous is close to an end, I bet you are wondering, "How am I suppose to remember when to do all of this stuff?".  Well, I think the best route you should take is to create yourself a marketing to-do list calendar – so that this way you can always know what to do today to improve your blog, your brand or your business.

Now first, we have to find you a calendar.  You could use a traditional paper calendar, and just jot your notes down on it.  Then again, we live in a digital age, so let us turn towards some of the online calendar services.

Online Calendar Suggestions

Here are two of my personal favorites:

• Google Calendar
• 30 Boxes

Both of these great online applications will let you setup reminders and notes for yourself, so that you know what to do on each day of the month. Now, how do you break down the things you need to do? You can get as complex as needed, but here are a few guidelines to help you get started.

Daily Marketing Goals

Look at simple things you can do to help improve the big picture.  This might be as simple as contacting a new partner to see if you can get a deal going, or maybe spell checking one page a day.

Weekly Marketing Goals

For your weekly goals, look at tasks that might take longer to get done.  Mark down events that could take two or three days, such as a new website launch or a possible landing page redesign.  Set a goal for yourself here, but remember to keep it as flexible as you need.

Monthly Marketing Goals

Your monthly goals should be more in sync with "big picture" goals.  Did you sell more or less things that you did the month before?  What about comparing your stats this month to your stats a year ago to see how you stack up.  Give yourself a big monthly goal to work towards – that can be made up of your daily and weekly goals.

It might take a few months to work out, but once you find the right marketing schedule for yourself – you will find you are becoming more productive because you have that list of things to check off for the day, the week and the month ahead. 

As I develop and learn more about promoting my own Facebook Fan Page, I want to share what I find and learn about with all of you.  One thing I have been most often is that many fan pages are taking advantage of having a larger profile picture, to keep your brand front and center.  So, today – I’ll be walking you through the process I took when it came to giving mine the same sort of facelift on Facebook.

Getting Started With the New Logo

First, let us take a look at my logo thus far:

Pretty simple and to the point.  It is a quick logo I came up with, and I also let you know what my projects are – just in case somebody stumbled across this page, before they checked out any of my projects.  I think I can do better.  One thing to remember when creating these images is that they can be up to 200×600 pixels in size.

Picking the Right Colors for the Job

For the color choices, I decided to go with shades of blue – mainly because in psychological terms, blue is most often associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. These are all traits I want you to associate with me.  (Well, maybe not so much seriousness – but you get my point)

Putting the Logo in Place

Next, I want to place my logo across the top again, and this time I am using white for the logo so it is easier to read.

Giving Details About My Projects

Now, in my older version of my logo above, you can see I just named off my projects.  While this is ok, I think it would be better to visually show them the websites.  This way, a visitor of the Facebook Fan Page will know, “Hey, this guy writes and maintains some awesome looking websites!” or something to that effect.  Also, they will see the layout is similar between the layouts – so if they like Firefox Facts, then they might be interested in checking out the Web Hosting Show, because it is presented in much the same way.

Finishing Touches on the Facebook Fan Page

We have a new background for the image, we have put the logo in place and we have given more details on what exactly my projects are.  So, now we are ready for the finishing touches.  I added a 1 pixel border around the image, uploaded it to Facebook and here is the final result:

I am not claiming that it is the perfect Facebook Fan Page profile image, but it is an evolution over my last.

• Come join the fun on Mitch’s Projects Facebook Fan Page!

Once I come up with a good enough reason to do another redesign, I might even detail the steps here again.  You should always look for ways to better any project you work on, and this guide gives you a step by step reasoning behind how and why I changed up my own Facebook Fan Page profile image.

Makes you really wonder, why did nobody think of this before?

Now, if that was not enough awesomeness for your desktop, or you want a more “real world” look to things, how about this desktop setup?

Yes, that is the painting of Vigo from Ghostbusters 2.  I really like them both, so hard to pick which one is my favorite.  I really hope to stumble across even more wallpaper like this soon.

• Download the Black and White Shelf Wallpaper
• Download the Modernized Vigo Shelf Wallpaper

Not sure who the original artist is for the Vigo version, but if anybody knows – please share the name in the comments.  Would love to give credit where credit is due.

Have any other creative ways to organize your desktop?

Want a more productive menu bar in Windows?

For the past few months now, I’ve gone with the extra thick menu bar at the bottom of my computer.  Since my screen size is so big now (1920×1200), I figured I could spare the extra space.  Here is how I created mine, just in case you might want to try the same.

To get the extra tall menu bar in the first place, you need to right-click on the menu bar down there and unlock it.  Next, just grab the edge of it with your mouse and stretch it up till it is the size you want.

Little Recycle Bin

Next, create a shortcut of your Recycle Bin on your desktop (right-click, create shortcut) and then cut and paste that into your Quick Launch toolbar.

Customized Toolbars

To setup the categorized shortcut icons, you just need to right-click on the menu bar, select “Toolbars” and then “New Toolbar”. Then, select a place you want to hide your toolbar shortcuts (I have mine in My Documents > Toolbars) and create a new folder in that location.

Now you have the toolbar there, but it is empty.  You can either drag and drop items down there, or navigate to the folder’s location and create your shortcuts there.  Here is the inside of my “apps” toolbar folder in Windows.

That’s it.  Now you can choose to customize from this point on to meet your own needs.  You might even mix in a few internet shortcuts (like to Gmail or Google Calendar) to give yourself quicker access to them.

Hope this comes in handy for those of you looking for more productive ways to organize your Windows menu bar/toolbar layout.