Right now we are entering our second year of operation at Postal Heaven and suddenly everything has to happen at once. I must prepare for taxes with both the business and personal, then there is an annual report due, also my lease is up in just eleven days and my landlord and I haven’t yet ventured to talk about renewal.
So in order to help me in my accounting shortcomings, both Andy (our management intern) and myself have been learning Quickbooks using an adult education online.
Up till now I’ve been putting my finances in .txt files using notepad.exe. Basically I’m on the electronic version of pen and paper notebook without an actual ledger format.
I work on three different computers which are not exactly seamlessly networked. Two at the store and one at my wife’s grandmother’s house.
I started trying to get in the habit of gathering up the important files I might use at Grandma’s and put them together in a folder for transport using a zip format and then attaching the zip file to an email. I also have tried for a seperate project using the Documents section of a Google Group. Both are somewhat tedious processes to me.
Lately I have been taking the data that I want to keep working with and copying it directly into a private blog where I can edit it at the blog website or using a text editor add-on for bloggers called ScribeFire which works inside of the Mozilla Firefox Browser.
Since I’m already a bit familiar with wordpress (I don’t host my own, I use the simpler free version that they host commonly known as wordpress.com) , I decided to use the also much commented on, Blogger.
Both WordPress and Blogger worked easily enough with ScribeFire although I haven’t had time to truly scrutinize any functional idiosyncrasies between the two as far as ScribeFire functionality.
Interestingly enough in comparison, I could not get ScribeFire to work as of yet with yahoo’s 360, livejournal, or windows live spaces, although I have been able to at least sign in to Live Spaces and see the existing posts, I haven’t been able to successfully post, even after trying to use the e-post workaround provided at Google Code in a bug and fixes forum about ScribeFire.
So anyhow, Blogger doesn’t at initial configuration do blog stats. WordPress Templates seem to have a degree of seriousness that Blogger’s doesn’t. All around, it seems that WordPress is the pro tool for blogs which are going to be seen.
However the Blogger is perfect for me as a network storage device and workspace in conjunction with ScribeFire. I can Tag the posts much as you can Tag emails in gmail. This is a very effective folder like function and then I wind up with a menu of posts that can really help me get to what I need fast and start working, then leave it behind where I can find it again. Also they have a plain templete which really works well for my generic internal documents.
Writing tedious numerical information with small changes and frequent saves during the time of handling does not seem to be efficient in my new found ScribeFire / Firefox / Blogger environment, but that’s when I cut and paste into the trusty notepad.exe and then copy it back into Blogger using ScribeFire when I’m done. So now my playing around with these up front files is going through a process using Notepad / ScribeFire / Firefox / and Blogger.
When I print these documents out they have a degree of formality that I can’t get out of Notepad but without the inefficiency of a Word Processor. Meaning nice headings, dates, and url (file location) on each page.
These tools seems to help, but because of all the changes stemming from all the learning about blogs, blog services, browser ad-ons for blogs, this business’s first tax season seems to be awfully intense to the noggin