In the meantime, enjoy the webinar recording. I covered five great (and free!) graphics tools: Picnik, GIMP, FotoFlexer, Aviary and SignGenerator.org.

The goal of these webinars is to cover a handful of tools in 30 minutes or less. Next month’s topic coming soon!

In the year 2000, people sent about 12 million daily emails. In 2010, the number of emails per day is 247 billion — an increase of about 20,000%! If you want your email to be noticed in all that mess, you have to do something different.

Give Paperless Post a try. Sign up for an account and you get 25 free “stamps” that allow you to send a cool, attention-getting email as an invitation, announcement or thank you. Your recipient receives an elegant email with an envelope they click to open. The invitations themselves are fun to open, and they have tons of templates and realistic-looking textured papers that look as handsome as something you get in the mail.

Paperless Post is not free, and there are several things about the system and the pricing that have made me hesitate to recommend it for business use. First, it’s a clumsy way to manage contacts and responses. Second, all their little extras (like envelope liners and your logo) can really add up. But I just had a great response when I sent a promotion about my speaking services to my professional association contacts, so I thought I’d share.

Watch this quick video to see how it works:

Online Invitations, Stationery, Announcements, and Save the Dates by Paperless Post

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Drum roll, please! The OFFICIAL name of the upcoming book is:

Upgrade to Free

The Guide to the Best Free (and Low-Cost) Tools and Apps

The jacket design is next, and we have three finalists. More updates coming soon!

For the commitment phobic, finding a time to meet with others just doesn’t get any easier. Just visit Doodle.com and click on “Schedule event.” Without having to register or give any personal information, you can quickly set up an event or meeting with alternative times. Then just send the link to members of your team, and each person (again, without registering), can indicate availability.

Here’s a little video about how to set it up:

Doodle’s best features are free, though you can sign up for a premium account with more features for less than $30 a year. Doodle also integrates with lots of other scheduling tools such as Google Calendar and now has an iPhone app.

Doodle: easy scheduling.

Next week I’m doing a presentation on the best free and low-cost online tools to help run a small-staff office. It’s part of a multi-day series of webinars called the 24/7 Small-Staff Association Online Conference for American Society of Association Executives.

My session is Wednesday, July 14 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. EST. I’ll be presenting for an hour, then we’ll open the phone lines for an energetic discussion of favorite tools.

Here’s a brief description of the session:

Free and Low-Cost Tools You Can’t Live Without
Join us for an entertaining, lightning-fast tour of tools, gadgets and services you never thought you could afford!

Identify your fave five during the session, and leave with the full list to share with your colleagues. As a closet
computer geek and veteran cheapskate, Speaker Beth Ziesenis of Avenue Z Writing Solutions has been
collecting resources for many years, and her presentation will open your eyes to new ideas and thrifty time
savers.

Registration is still open! Check out the full series here….

(PS — Want to share the free tools presentation with your group? Contact me for availability or read more about Speaking Services here!)

One of the most popular categories of free and low-cost online tools is online document collaboration. TypeWith.me is one of the easiest, fastest solutions to share documents with colleagues. You simply visit their URL, click to create a new document, and you’re on a new site that you can share right away.

You can upload your own Word, text or HTML document to work on, or you can start with a blank document. When you invite collaborators, each reviewer has his own colors. I like that you can export straight to PDF or keep it in the original format. Another cool feature allows you to watch a quick movie of all the changes that were made and by whom.

TypeWith.me doesn’t require any type of registration, and it’s free, free, free.

NEW! The Cheapskate Freelancer is going multimedia. Watch this 61-second video for more details about TypeWith.me, and favorite the new Cheapskate Freelancer YouTube Channel for more videos (coming soon!):

TypeWith.me: Live Text Document Collaboration!

Because of horrible, malicious virus writers who spend their days trying to figure out clever ways to take over our computers, our bank accounts and the universe, we are warned again and again to never click on anything that we don’t recognize. I used to tell students in my computer courses, “Even if your grandmother sends you a link, be suspicious. Make sure you know where you’re going before you click.”

This is great advice, or it was until a couple of years ago, when Twitter’s 140-character limits meant that we would be 11 characters over just by pasting a link such as http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/2010/03/pdfescape-the-pdf-editor-ive-been-dreaming-ofe-online-pdf-reader-editor-form-filler-form-designer-solution/.

With Twitter and other services, brevity was imperative. So they started creating URL shortening services that let you convert a long URL into a teeny, tiny one.

Now back to the security issue. If your grandmother sends you a long link like the one above, you’d probably trust it. But what if the link she sends is http://z.pe/56lG? You may think your grandmother has become a hacker and try to block her.

Some people have an inherent (and justified) fear of shortened URLs since you can’t see what you’re clicking on. But I have good news. A 2010 study by Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, looked for malicious content in 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks. Just 773 of those links – 0.06 percent – were malicious. The rest were just grandmothers and regular users like you and me sharing information and resources with others.

Here are just a few URL shorteners that I use:

• A.gd (http://a.gd): Cool options like password protection, link tagging and expiration dates, plus traffic tracking.
• Bit.ly (http://bit.ly): Twitter’s built-in shortener.
• BudURL (http://budurl.com): It’s a long link, but BudURL offers all kinds of tracking information to help with your marketing.
• Is.gd (http://is.gd): I love this little guy. It has no bells or whistles, but it stands for “is good.” That makes me happy.
• Threely (http://3.ly): Lets your viewers preview the link before they click (so you can verify your grandmother is still a good person), and allows custom URLs, such as http://3.ly/Cheapskate (goes to www.cheapskatefreelancer.com, of course).
• TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com): The first service I discovered that would shrink a long link into a short one. They’re still around, but now the URL seems impossibly long.
• Unhid (www.unhid.co.cc/): This site will convert a shortened URL to its actual link so you can take a peek before clicking.

(PS — this post is a preview excerpt from the Cheapskate Freelancer book, available in October!)

A running buddy of mine who, like me, raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through Team in Training and wanted to make a collage of pictures from our last running season. I’m going to send her to Photovisi, a cool site that makes collages in a flash.

Without registering, you can choose a template, upload photos, then save your collage and download. I bet putting together a great collage of our pictures from the season would take her about 15 minutes. Way cool.

Photovisi is 100 percent free. Way cool as well.

Photovisi – Collage photo effects.

PS — want to see some of my (slightly humiliating) running pictures from Team in Training seasons? You need to click here. Oh, and if you’ve ever saved money from a tool on this blog, I’d appreciate a small contribution! Or a big contribution!

Do you spend too much time at your computer, sometimes working at first light and again at midnight? The harsh glare of a computer screen may make your eyes tired and mess up your brain’s view of day and night.

F.lux is a tiny little download that helps change the glow of your computer based on the time of day. Just install the executable, put in your time zone and let F.lux do its thing. It will help your screen mimic the light in the room you’re in, thus relieving your tired eyes. My fabulous assistant, Claire, loves it.

F.lux: control your screen brightness settings automatically.

Want more ergonomic aid? Check out this tool that takes you through a 15-minute ergonomic questionnaire.

If you’re like me, a character with an accent mark or that “n” with the little hook at the end is a show stopper when I’m typing. I have to first remember where to look for the special characters key, and then I have to spend 5 minutes trying to get it right. And if it’s a foreign character? Fuhgettaboutit.

TypeIt.org helps you quickly type phonetic symbols to cut and paste into emails, documents and more.

Now if I could only remember which way the accent goes in voila.

See other font helpers here, such as Identifont, which helps you identify a mystery font.

TypeIt: IPA phonetic symbols and online keyboard

When it comes to free and low-cost photo editing software and webware, Picnik is my sentimental favorite, and GIMP is the industry standard. But somewhere along the way I stumbled across FotoFlexer, and I may be in love.

FotoFlexer has the ease of Picnik and some of the advanced features of GIMP. FotoFlexer lets you add special effects, plus it can create layers, merge photos, erase ex-boyfriends from family photos, etc.  The best thing is that the interface (while not as cool as Picnik’s) is certainly much easier to understand than GIMP’s. That makes it easy for word people like me to edit and create graphics to be proud of.

Just this morning I was working on a client’s blog and transformed this…

Into this avatar…

I was able to take out the unneeded text and close up the square… without the need of a cupcake to handle the stress. It took about 5 minutes. Makes me feel like a pro.

FotoFlexer – The worlds most advanced online photo editor.

Most of us surf the web solo, navigating between things we’re supposed to be researching and things we shouldn’t be doing at work (like I just shopped for bubble wrap for a gift for my 3-year-old nephew — that’s what he loves most about my gifts!).

Twiddla made it into my book as a great way to collaborate on your web surfing. My running buddy Andy wrote me about it last night, and I realized I needed to write it up for Cheapskate Freelancer.

You can literally be on the same home pages and mark up the content as a team. As Andy says, “You can also browse to a site and make fun of it by drawing mustaches and stuff on it. And it’s free!”

Looking for more collaboration tools? Check out the Collaboration Category.

Twiddla – Painless Team Collaboration for the Web.

My new best friend, bestselling author Dan Pink, shared his favorite free tool, Readability, for the book (due out this fall!). (Well, perhaps he’s not my *best* friend, but he did write me back.)

Readability is a simple bookmarklet you add to your browser. When you want to read an article on a website with too much crapola (ads, banners, overwhelming pictures, etc), you simply click the button, and poof — the page is clean and easy to read.

Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment.

Ever need to dash off a quick text to someone while you’re at your desk? You have to get up, hunt down your phone, press all those dang buttons…. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just do it from your computer?

Ta dah! Joopz can help. Joopz lets you send an receive text messages from your computer. You can create groups of up to 10 people, so you can text several at once. You can schedule reminders and program it to send texts at a certain time. Cool stuff.

The free version gives you 50 outgoing messages a month. For $19.95 a year, the unlimited version has plug-ins for your desktop and Outlook.

Joopz – Web Texting.

I spent the last week on a writing retreat as I finished up the book on free and low-cost tools (coming this fall!). While I was writing away, I ran across this favorite of mine, and I realized I hadn’t shared it yet. Xpenser lets you text, call or email in your expenses while you’re on the road.

When you set up your account, you can set up the ways you want to be able to submit expenses. I can send them in via Jott, Twitter, email and more. You just send something like “Taxi 30 to airport” or something, and your expenses will be entered into your online account.  Then you can download them in a number of formats to complete your expense reports. You can also take pictures of your receipts and email them to your Xpenser account for safe keeping.

This service is in beta, which means it’s still free. It won’t be for long.

Xpenser – Mobile Expense Tracking and Management.

I love these types of environmentally beneficial services (I consider it a Beth Favorite). Signing up with My Junk Tree should put an end to quite a bit of the paper junk mail that fills up your mailbox.

It’s twenty bucks for three years, and they promise to cut down on junk mail and even stop delivery of the phone books that collect dust under the coffee table. Who uses those anymore anyway?

My Junk Tree.

Have you seen these two other green resources?

Microsoft Word lets you compare two documents easily, but Compare My Docs goes several steps further. You can upload version after version (up to seven) and have the differences color coded in one document. Then you can choose which versions you want to compare (maybe yours and your boss’, but not your intern’s), and figure out which ones you want to keep.

Cool, easy and free. Three of my favorite things.

Compare My Docs.

My email system had a hitch in its git-a-long for the last couple of days, and the Contact Us form was shooting your valuable comments into cyberspace. It’s working now, so please feel free to contact me here or send me an email through scr.im (another cool free tool!): http://scr.im/bethz.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

I’m having way too much fun discovering new tools for the Cheapskate Computing book. A couple of people have recommended BeFunky, and I finally checked out their site last week.

I’m so impressed. Just upload a graphic and click around on the filters. Within minutes you can create an interesting graphic to spice up your website, your newsletters or your Facebook profile. Here’s what I did with a picture of me after the Seattle Marathon last summer. It took about 20 seconds to create. Cool, huh? BeFunky is an instant Beth Favorite. Their basic level is free (you can do what I did with the basic level), and the nice folks at BeFunky upgraded my account for six months (the next tier up is about 50 bucks a year) so I can investigate their premium tools.

BeFunky.

Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.

But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.

This find is definitely my favorite of 2010.

PDFescape – Free PDF Editor & PDF Form Filler – Your Free Online PDF Reader, Editor, Form Filler, Form Designer, Solution.

WhatTheFont is a lot like one of my favorites, Identifont. This little free service allows you to upload a graphic that contains words, and the system does its best to identify your font.

I tried it with a few logos I’ve developed where I knew what the font was. It hit about 50 percent of the time, but the misses were darn close. I could have easily used one of the fonts they came up with as a close match to the look and feel.

WhatTheFont is a tool brought to you by MyFonts, which looks to be a pretty inexpensive way to purchase interesting fonts. Of course, I still prefer dafont, which is free. I’m funny like that.

WhatTheFont! « MyFonts.

We’ll I’ll be… here I thought Dimdim (review coming soon!) was going to be my new favorite online collaboration tool, and then I find ShowDocument. ShowDocument lets you share a document, whiteboard, YouTube video — all kinds of stuff — with a very, very, very quick touch of a button. You can have up to 50 attendees.

Oh, did I mention it was completely free?

The only drawback is that it doesn’t integrate audio and video unless you use the professional version, which lists its pricing as “a flat monthly rate” and asks you to fill out a form to be contacted by sales. Not a good sign for a free or low-cost tool.

But the free version is wonderful.

Web Meeting, Document Sharing | ShowDocument.

Clever, clever Best Buy folks set up@Twelpforce, a Twitter account that gives free tech answers just for asking. Great public relations idea, and a fantastic free resource.

Also, check out CrossLoop, another great resource for help with your computer.

Twelpforce twelpforce on Twitter.

Many people are using wonderful free tools such as Jing (my favorite tool ever!) to create online presentations. Cueprompter is a quick and easy way to script your presentation so your “ums” and “wells” go away.

Free teleprompter/autocue service. Cueprompter – The online prompter..