Going Paperless and Digitizing Documents that Take up Space

I have decided I needed a side project along side my bedroom artwork project, so I decided I will get organized. I will use my new Neat Receipts for Mac by Neat Co. to scan all our documents and make them easy to search through and eventually export to our gmail account so we can view the database from anywhere!


I spent 6 hours yesterday scanning and getting to know how I want to use this software! But once I got on a roll there was no stopping me! I got all our taxes and related items from 2007 to 2009 imputed and organized. The software is easy to use and it appears from online comments that they have made updates to fix issues.


I had no clue anyone else was as interested in this until my post on facebook yesterday which triggered my post today...

mrs. onion: Just got a neat receipt scanner for mac and am loving it! Think I am going to sit on the deck all day and scan our precious documents, gotta love going digital. After everything is in and organized we can upload it to google docs so when we are at work we can still search and view our documents that there is no way we would find even if we were at home!
caller number 1: Is it just for receipts? One of the best purchases I made recently was a business card scanner. I got rid of about 300-400 cards lying around my office in a matter of hours.
mrs. onion: No it recognizes business cards, and anything smaller than 8.5 width or smaller! It is super rad! I made a folder called taxes and I scanned all our forms, w2s and the h&r blocks business card! So u have 3 categories contact, receipt and document, you can choose what field u want and don't want. It is searchable and color coded to the type of category!
caller number 1: Interesting. BTW, do you really get that many paper receipts? Seems like most billing companies are going paperless these days.
mrs. onion: I am using it mostly for our house documents, taxes, car title that sort of thing, stuff that if the house burned down we may need! Most if not all our billing is done paperless and automatically paid out which is super nice! I think we write 4 checks a year and that is to the water company!
caller number 2: I still haven't figured out how this darn thing downloads to Quicken without having to save a file as an intermediate step. If you figure that one out, please let me know. Otherwise I pretty much agree with you.
mrs. onion: it pretty much scans the document and allows you to pull info from it to populate fields that then can be exported out various ways

Woah how the time fly's

I spent the previous six weeks getting the house in tip top shape and ready to sell! Started back up at my contract job and am actually enjoying sitting on my butt all day with a walk at lunch! Hopefully I can get caught up on some much needed rest, the body is a wreck having fallen a couple of months ago and cleaning and moving stuff!

Anyway I am spending the morning relaxing in my super clean well organized house doing nothing for the first time in months. But since I have been extremely intent on organizing and always moving around doing something, I still feel like I should be doing something while relaxing...So I decided to work on getting my inbox cleaned out as it has a ridiculous amount of data in it. Using gmail has been super helpful, being able to batch label and the different filters have allowed me to half the amount of emails I have in my account. If you don't have a gmail account you really should have a gmail account!

Interesting Phone Ap's

There are some really interesting phone aps out there right now. There is this really neat ap for the iphone for any musician out there! It plays the song while the sheet music is scrolling to show you where you are in the score. If only they had had that when I was a kid I would have been able to learn so many more songs. To check out the ap go here.

For other musicians tools go here.

Facebook Flash Games are Addicting

I don't know about you but there are some really addicting games on facebook my favorite ones are by Playfish games especially the Restaurant City, I can hardly tare myself away I suggest you check it out if you have a facebook account because it can make your work day go so much faster!

Daily Dose of Inspiration-East Coast Part 3

Aaron Rutledge has a great tech blog for everything a geek would want to check out.

Whats Next Blog is a great resource for marketing and SEO information.

Jeffery Zeldman is everything web designer and more with a new look too!

Daily Dose of Inspiration-East Coast Style Part 2

Debonair Mag is a really interesting site that has found a niche with men's fashion and technology and has so far has a nice site and hopefully more content to come.

Bill Mahoney of Willy the Jackass has a great site with food pictures gallour but of course I am biased he is my husband and I have actually eaten most of the food you see there and it is damn good.

Maryann Devine from smArts has a niche blog on marketing the arts that has some great information.

Daily Dose of Inspiration-East Coast Style

Among Many a great technology blog.
Bryan Brinkman has some great cartoons and vidoes.
Feedest is a great site to find great feeds, you can add your feeds as well.
Greg Verdino inspiration for marketing, media, technology and trends.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball

Computer needs to go to the doctor so...

So my computer is totally borked, if my husband can't fix it then it is time to bring to the genius. Lets just hope that I don't lose everything on my harddrive. So today I will post a link to my page on facebook so come and become a fan. Another thing I would like to promote today is Blip an awesome site where you can share and find different music so swing on by and check it out.

10 Fantastically Green Sites

Here are a few green oriented sites that I think are worth checking out, in no particular order...



Modern Eco Homes has everything you could ever want for the home and the best part is they feature eco deals of the day.


Mod Green Pod is a green home store offering 100% organic cotton.



Eco Geek has the best information on everything green relating to technology there is even a story on an air quality index reading wrist monitor.


Green Upgrader has information on how easy it is to live a green lifestyle.


The Green Office which is exactly as it sounds allows us to have an easy way of accessing eco friendly furniture and supplies for the office.

Groovy Green has the most random cool green stories out there, if you are looking for something new and interesting to read about, this is where it's at.


Home & Planet has some of the neatest recycled home accessories, made out of some really interesting materials.


Wedvert provides solutions for greener weddings and other big events in a very elegant manner and great at keeping the green in your pocket.


Ideal Bite is an easy guide to almost everything green from clothing to transportation and reads easily, always a bonus.


Eco Street is the place to get your eco news and see what is going on in the world of greenery from eating green to green technology.

Poll: How Much Time Do You Spend On Twitter Each Day?

Poll: How Much Time Do You Spend On Twitter Each Day?

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GyPSii: all-in-one social networking for the iPhone

GyPSii: all-in-one social networking for the iPhone

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Twitter's New Search Might Just Change Everything

Big changes are in the works for Twitter and their realtime search features, says new Twitter VP of Operations Santosh Jayaram, changes that may spell the end of the status quo both for the microblogging platform in particular and the entire concept of organic searching in general.

Jayaram, who previously worked on Google's search quality team, spoke two weeks ago at a TIEcon 2009 preview conference about the changes Twitter is planning to implement to their search features, providing attendees with a compelling look at how the microblogging platform may rise up to challenge even Google in terms of indexing Web 2.0 content.

The most major change Jayaram spoke about concerns how Twitter indexes content. Until now, Twitter's realtime search feature has been limited to Tweets themselves; the content of each Tweet is indexed and searchable through Twitter's search engine. That, Jayaram says, is going to change - at an unspecified point in the near future, Twitter will begin crawling and indexing content linked from Tweets, not just the tweets themselves anymore.

Look out, Google - Twitter's got your number. The change to Twitter's search feature is huge, and it all boils down to analytical data, and the immense value that such information carries with it. Twitter's ability to track realtime trends already puts Google's to shame - and taking that ability off the twitter.com domain means that the microblogging platform is poised to become the internet's premiere Web 2.0 content index. Even the brief delay of a few hours in Google's search engine results represents eons in the hyperspeed context of the modern internet. Twitter can fill in that gap, and Jayaram provided us with some juicy details about how they're going to be doing that.

One of the ways that Twitter is going to increase the relevancy of its search engine is by introducing a Twitter "reputation" ranking system, says Jayaram. Currently, when searching a popular trending topic, or clicking its link on the Twitter sidebar, users are usually overwhelmed with a wealth of "hollow content" like retweets, comments, and so on. Twitter's reputation ranking system will change that by providing users with an authoritative view of trending topics and keywords on Twitter, instead of just flinging users into a chronological timeline.

That change alone will improve Twitter's search by leaps and bounds. I can't wait to find out more about when we can expect to see these changes implemented, and how Twitter plans to show users the data that it collects about off-site content.

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Paper-Energy and Emissions-What does it all mean?

When you think about buying paper something else to think about is whether or not it is being produced using renewable energy. Most paper mills are claiming the use of "renewable energy", but what is that? Well, there are a couple of ways that companies can claim this, one is by purchasing green power directly from a renewable energy power plant and secondly by purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (REC) and lastly by generating their own renewable energy on site.

When companies directly purchase the renewable energy it is directly fed by green-power plants and if on the same grid, they can purchase directly from their utility. Most of these suppliers offer either a percentage of electricity usage or more commonly a fixed number of units or blocks of kilowatt-hours.

Renewable Energy Certificates are the most common way paper mills achieve the claim of green power. These certificates provide a subsidy to designated renewable energy sources, such as, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and biomass power plants and by doing this it will make them more competitive in the energy market and allow them to sell this energy at a more reasonable rate closer to local market rates. This encourages the use of renewable energy versus a less expensive fossil fuel or nuclear based power source that can be used as a long-term method of growing the renewable energy infrastructure.

There are a handful of paper mills that actually produce their own renewable energy on site, in most cases by hydroelectric generators. They use low-impact hydroelectric operations that preserve the flow of the river which allows continued fish migration due to maintaining the oxygen levels. This type of renewable energy is called on-site generation and the best part is it lowers the demand on the power grid.

Most companies are also reducing atmospheric carbon emissions by becoming carbon neutral. To achieve this you can lower carbon emission directly by lowering consumption and by promoting activities that aid the natural process of carbon reduction. Paper mills have been working toward preserving the wilderness near and around their plants to achieve carbon neutrality.

As you can see we as consumers demand a lot from our paper companies and they have risen to the top and continue to work towards a better cleaner future.

Saving Swatches to Use throughout Creative Suite

Color is such an important element in design and when printing you need to be pretty specific to match previously run pieces. We have certain color pallets for quarterly reports that are very specific and need to match from quarter to quarter. We have struggled with consistency but then I found the way to save swatches from you document and you can use them across creative suite.

First thing you want to do is make sure all unused/unwanted color swatches are deleted from your pallet. In Indesign you will pull down the menu on the swatch pallet and you want to save swatches (hi-lighted in yellow) then it allows you to add to a swatch folder or what I do is I put with this clients resources so it is all in the same place. This will save as an ASE file to use in a new indesign file go ahead and use the pull down menu again and this time you want to load swatchs.While working in illustrator you go to the same pull down menu but this time you will select save swatch library to ASE and to load you will open Swatch Libarary and add your swatches that way.


These ASE files work accross all of creative suite and helps keep colors consistent.

I am using this swatch saving method to create coated and uncoated swatch pallets for all of my clients there for it is super easy when you go to so a job for them you can just open up a file set up specs, grab your color pallet and then get designing and you will know that these are the right swatches right off the bat.

Awesome Programs for the Google Android Phone

I know that everyone and there brother has an iPhone but I have t-mobile so I have the awesome google android phone. I love it and what I really love about it is that most of the programs are free unlike the competitor. Last night I ran across a facebook sync application that syncs your facebook account to your contacts on your phone. You log on and it finds your friends photos and attaches them directly to your contacts list on your phone. I think this was a great application that saved me a lot of time "pimpin'" out my phone. So if you have the android go ahead and check out the market place it's free.

DAM, I mean Digital Asset Management-1 of many

In this economy those of us who still have a job are trying to work a bit smarter not necessarily harder. With that being said I have had the opportunity to attend a few DAM webinars hosted by extensis, which have been very good. This is a subject that is hard to find info about, mostly you just see ratings for various software programs but these webinar sessions have really encompassed the whole thing. If you don't have the need for a hardcore DAM program there are some easy ways to set up your own system using metadata. Here are somethings to consider when starting your own digital asset management system.

-Define your work flow and find out what your weakness-for instance we often take old files and update them but do we know if the image in it is the final or updated image?
-What is it that you want to accomplish?-for us it was making sure that everyone is using the most current image or logo
-Since metadata is the drive for digital asset management you need to figure out the framework or structure so a list of fields that you think are crucial, the one you that would like to have and the ones that you don't necessarily need but may come in handy.
-The next step is figuring out if you want the data to be controlled vocabulary, rigid, consistent and may be hard to add but easier to search or if you want a loser structure where it is more collaborative classification, flexible, inconsistent and easier to add but difficult to search. You may want to do something in between.

After you figure this out, start small and note that the metadata should be applied as soon as possible. I apply my metadata through my adobe CS3 products which is great because you can run your searches through bridge. Some of the fields that I find most useful are
-keywords-for obvious reasons.
-copyright-usually images that we get from our photography vendors already have this field populated which is very helpful in future uses.
-copyright info url-this is a great field that is also auto-populated by stock houses so you know where they came from, they also usually add a description which isn't all that useful I don't think
-camera data-very interesting for photographers, your camera will usually populate this meta data section which is helpful when trying to find out what camera you used for that particular shot, there is a bunch more info in there that will pull from your camera and other fields you may find come in handy.
These are just a few hi-lights but you can make your own metadata fields that may cater to your specific needs. Next DAM article will touch base on how this can be beneficial to your clients.