Newsletter 005
May 27, 2021 5:01 am
🖊️ Intro
One of our goals at Coded is to make everyone's life a little easier when it comes to computers. Almost every client we meet tells us "I'm no good at computers". This is understandable as there is a lot to learn.
We want to use this newsletter to give you tools, tricks and tips in order to gradually improve. So, over the next few newsletters we are going to use the intro as a chance to teach you a keyboard shortcut or two.
Why should you use keyboard shortcuts? They are quicker than reaching for your mouse to do common tasks. You don't need to learn every single shortcut out there, just start with one and use it every day until you don't have to think about using it but rather you just use it automatically.
I thought we could start easy with save (Ctrl + s on Windows, Command + s on Mac) but most people know that one. So, I thought I'd go with one that would give you more bang for your buck.
The app switcher shortcut. This shortcut lets you quickly switch between any of your open apps. It has always baffled me that such a useful shortcut is not widely known. Here's how to do it.
Windows
Hold down the Alt key and press the Tab key. If you need to do this with two hands to start with, that's absolutely fine. Just get comfortable with it and make it a goal to eventually do this with one hand (without looking). As long as you keep Alt pressed down, the App switcher will stay up, and you can keep tabbing through until you find the App you want.
Mac
If you are on a Mac, the same things apply, just hold down Command instead of Alt.
🗄️ Useful links
🗣️ Slack or Mattermost
These are two very similar programmes that make communicating with your team a lot easier. It's essentially a chat room for your business. You can chat, share images, GIFs, links, videos and heaps more. We have Mattermost set up on our server so that we have total control but also use Slack from occasionally (like when our server goes down).
A while back we mentioned the Brave Browser, Well, the team have built an alternative to zoom called Brave Together. We prefer this to zoom as it offers better quality video, is way quicker and a lot easier to set up. The only caveat is that you have to be using brave browser to use it. Jitsi is another nice alternative to check out.
Once again, two sides of the same coin here. These two programmes give you cloud storage for your files. This means you are able to access them from where you are as long as you have your login details. The difference between the two is Dropbox is commercial and easy to set up, Nextcloud is open source and requires a few more hoops to jump through for set up. If you're interested in NextCloud, drop us a line and we can help you out with your own hosted server.
😎 What we're up to
Have you heard of passive income? It's basically when you make money while you sleep. Sounds like a dream right? One of our goals in business is to explore all avenues of making passive income. One such avenue is building plugins. What is a plugin you ask? Without getting to deep into the weeds, it's a bunch of code that can be easily plugged in to a website to give it extra functionality. It's most commonly seen on WordPress websites.
We've built a few plugins and had a small amount of success with them. However, they aren't truly passive as there is a fair bit of support we have to provide in order to help buyers get them working on their site properly. We are alright with this as it usually gives us new ideas for improvements we can make.
We intend to build a lot more plugins and put them out into the web. This will mean that more of our income should be passive (mostly passive).
What kinds of passive income could your business generate?
🌐 Interesting stuff
💲 The Plug
Our new site is live and ever-changing. Please check it out and let us know what you like and don't like about it. Feedback is valuable and the more eyes we have on it the more we can craft it into the perfect site. You can check it out at https://coded.co.nz