It’s no secret that I love geeky gadgety things and I love spending as little time possible doing things I don’t have to do.  So, when I stumbled across Tunglealmost a year ago (or maybe it’s been over a year!) I fell in love instantly.

If you haven’t yet seen Tungle, it’s a socially slanted automated appointment scheduling system that integrates with your existing calendar.  For me, I useGoogle Calendar to schedule all of my appointments and I needed something that integrated flawlessly with Google Calendar.  I didn’t want to have to update the third party calendaring system with my availability but rather update it right within my own calendar.  I also did not want to spend time going back and forth with prospects.

Tungle changed everything for me.  First of all, it’s free which makes the program that much sweeter but second of all, the people behind Tungle just “get it”…  They understand what we want and they understand where we’re at.  The social connection inside of Tungle is fantastic.  Let me take you on a tour of it!

Here is the Tungle.me page – the most powerful part of Tungle.  This page allows you to setup a custom place for people to come and view your availability and schedule appointments with you.  If you want to view this in real-time, you can check out my live Tungle page at http://www.tungle.me/ErinBlaskie.

As you can see, people can view my real-time availability, connect with me via my social networks, view a photo of me so they know who they are booking the appointment with as well as have access to my contact information very easily.

Once people land here, they can drag and drop their own availability in the spaces available.  They can then request a meeting with me in those time blocks that they are also free in!  If the user is also a Tungle user, the service is even neater because it automatically pairs up the two calendars to show the user’s availability as well as mine in an overlay.

Now, when I want people to schedule a meeting, they can come here and do that and the times get sent to me in an e-mail request.  The e-mail request looks like this:

Once I confirm the time I want out of the times the user has chosen, an e-mail is auto-generated to them letting them know that the meeting is confirmed.

The entire process being this streamlined has saved me a TON of time in scheduling.  I would encourage everyone I know to sign up and get your Tunglepages setup!  If you want help, my team would be happy to assist you!  Just send us an e-mail and we’ll send you a quote!

I’ve been looking for an RSS feed reader solution FOREVER…  Something that worked well, didn’t overwhelm me and showed me the latest news so that I could gain blog inspiration and keep tabs on what was happening in the social sphere.  It wasn’t until I was sitting at home one night, on the computer per usual, when I messaged my good friend Josh Schnell over at Macgasm.net to ask him: what RSS feed reader do you use?

His response was simply: Feedly with Google Reader.

So, following his lead, I setup my Google Reader account and my Feedly account.  Let me quickly take you through that in case it is new to you!

Step One: Setup Your Google Reader Account

To do this, go to http://www.google.com/reader/.  Here, you want to login with your existing Google account or setup a new Google account.  It’s a good idea to use the same login that you use for Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. if you do already use the services because it makes it a whole lot easier to remember!  Once you’ve logged in, you don’t need to do anything else inside of Google Reader.

Step Two: Go to www.feedly.com and Download the Extension for Safari

Now, this part is a little bit complex.  First, you need to make sure you are running at least Safari 5.0.  Then, you need to go to your Preferences -> Advanced tab and make sure that the “Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar” option is checked.

Once you’ve done that, click on the extension plug-in link (option #4) at http://blog.feedly.com/2010/06/10/feedly-for-safari-5/.  They have the steps outlined nicely here for you as well.

Your extension will install onto Safari and you will have to restart your browser.  Once the browser re-opens, you can navigate tohttp://www.feedly.com/home to pull up your feed center.

Step Three: Setup Feedly

Here is where the power of Feedly starts to form.  Using “pages”, you can setup mini-newspaper feeds of specific categories that you choose.  For my own reader, I’ve setup a few categories including: social media, marketing and business, clients and tech.  This will allow me to keep up-to-date with blogs in these specific categories.  To add a page, first click on “organize sources” and then click on “add a source.”  Both of these options appear at the very top of Feedly.

In the “add a source” box, you can put the URL of any blog or RSS feed that you wish to track.  Once it is added here, it will appear in the grouping of uncategorized sources.  To create a “category” or a “page”, drag and drop the source into the shaded box where it says “new page.”

Once you add a source, it will prompt you to add a name to this new page.  Go ahead and categorize your source.  Now you can click the little pen beside new sources (or existing sources inside of your account) and add them to specific categories / pages.  These new pages will appear on the right-hand side navigation.

The Beauty of Feedly

The reason that I love Feedly so far is that it creates a newspaper feel to my feeds.  Here is a screenshot of an aggregate of posts in the social media category I setup.

It also allows me to easily share content to many different platforms.

There are many, many more reasons why I am digging Feedly which I’ll explore in an upcoming blog post.  For now, I’ll leave you with the idea that you should get yourself setup this way if you aren’t already!

If you spend time on blogs, you might have noticed that some people have their own photos as their avatar next to posts and comments.  This is more apparent on WordPress based blogs and generally those that aren’t using the Disqus commenting system plug-in (those using Disqus require people to setup accounts and individuals can attach their photos in their Disqus accounts).

However, if you’ve ever seen a blog post like this (borrowing from our client, Stacy Karacostas’ The Unchained Entrepreneur – we’ve added her photo since this screenshot but grabbed it as an example before we did!) you might have noticed that your photo did not appear but rather the lovely default avatar that WordPress assigns:

To prevent your comments and posts from being tagged with the anonymous grey figure, here’s what you’ll want to do:

1. Go to Gravatar.com.
2. Sign up for a new account here using the e-mail address you use when commenting / posting on blogs.
3. Once your account is setup, upload a photo you would like to use and create your avatar.

Now, when you post on blogs around the Internet, including your own, using that e-mail address, your avatar will pop up instead of the grey anonymous one!