Several years ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to customize Google News. It worked well until Google made some changes. Fortunately, an astute reader alerted me how my earlier steps no longer worked. The good news is I’ve reworked the instructions. As with most directions, there are multiple ways to create a custom news section on Google.

I don’t think I need to explain to faithful readers, I’m lazy. It’s not that I dislike work, just that I hate routine tasks. For example, there are websites I work with where it’s critical the correct page content shows. Every so often, someone makes a change that I didn’t know. It’s not that they’re keeping me out of the loop, just that they’ve moved on to their next task. I found a free intelligent agent that allows you to monitor web page changes.

Online forums and bulletin boards can be great places to find answers. The problem however is getting through all the information. Sometimes this is because users post a question or solution in the wrong topic. The other problem is many forums lack a search feature. There is a quick workaround if the forum doesn’t require a password to view the data. – Google’s Site: operator.

One lesson I relearned because of upgrading this website was that I don’t have to do it all. I could, but it would be at the expense of sacrificing something else. Rather than trying to control everything, I decided to outsource some tasks. Although difficult at first, the payoffs were immediate. To start, I became more productive. And no, you don’t need fancy project management systems, large budget or crash course in Six Sigma.

Last month I was involved in a documentation project. I thought it would end once I submitted my file minus some final edits. Instead, I was asked if I could make the Word document to a brochure. Immediately, I started thinking of layouts, orientation and tables. And then I remembered a seldom used feature of a program most of us already use.

It’s no surprise to most readers that I hate buying printer ink. I find the process wasteful and expensive even if I recycle empty ink cartridges. You can imagine my joy when I found a free utility that saves ink and paper. It does this by allowing me to select the items from a web page I wish to print. It even saves web pages as a PDF file.

One item people complain about Windows Vista is the need to run programs as an Administrator. Elevating your privileges is easy although it can confuse some people when it comes to the Vista command prompt or cmd.exe. This need happens when people run into installation problems or get the infamous internal error 2739. Fortunately, there are easy solutions.