Anna over at Productivity 501 wrote Adobe Create PDF/Share Review about Adobe’s website that converts and stores various document types as PDFs. I’ve been using the current Create Adobe PDF Online website for quite a while, and did a quick comparison.

• Current Create Adobe PDF Online
• New Create Adobe PDF Online

I converted the same Word doc which contains several photos and is 6.2 MB with the current Adobe PDF Online and the new one. With the current website I was able to choose to optimize for Web, no such option in the new version. The Current conversion was much more efficient. I also saved the document as a PDF on the Mac for comparison.

Original doc size: 6.2mb
Apple PDF: 6.2mb
Current Adobe PDF Online: 164kb
New Adobe PDF Online: 3.7mb

In addition, the New site messed up some of my formatting and did not preserve web links.

Hopefully Adobe will take what they already have in the (fairly outdated, but much more functional) Create PDF Online and incorporate it into the new version.

I have uploaded the three docs (Original, New PDF site, Current PDF site) to drop.io for comparison. Note, the current Adobe PDF site only allows 5 free conversions per email address.

I use Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis, and recently installed the Twitter Facebook App, which updates my Facebook status with whatever my Twitter status is. The problem is, I don’t necessarily want to update my Facebook status as often as I want to update my Twitter status, and the Twitter Facebook App has no filtering mechanism, except for tweets that are directed at someone using @.

The obvious workaround is to put “@ ” at the beginning of any tweet that I don’t want to show up on Facebook…but that’s kind of annoying.  I also use Ping.fm which I have  written about previously.  So, I thought, how about I sync my Facebook status to one of the other services that Ping.fm posts to?  Unfortunately I couldn’t find one that had a decent Facebook app. Supposedly the Pownce app can sync, but I couldn’t get it to work.

The upside is that Ping.fm will be able to post to Facebook soon. They had the feature for a while, but with the recent Facebook upgrades the feature broke. Once it’s up and running again, I’ll be able to use the “triggers” feature to choose which services to post to post to select networks only.

All this for pretending folks want to know what I’m doing

I don’t post many photos to Facebook as I have a Flickr Pro account that I use to share with family and friends. Sometimes I do want to post photos on Facebook as well, and it’s always been a seemingly redundant process of uploading each photo to Flickr and then to Facebook.

Flickurbook is a very barebones way to transfer a Flickr album to Facebook. It’s as easy as typing in your Flickr username, authenticating with Facebook, and choosing which album(s) to import.  The import takes a few minutes (it took about 5 minutes to import a 22 photo album). The Flickr titles you have for your photos are transferred too, which saves some hassle.

What about transferring the other way, from Facebook to Flickr? You’re better off uploading the originals straight to Flickr since the resolution on Facebook photos is pretty low, but there are apps out there, including this one for the Mac. There are also quite a few Facebook apps for displaying Flickr photos on your Faceobook profile.

This is the first “money” post I’m making. I’m not trying to be Get Rich Slowly or The Simple Dollar…
those guys have got “blogging about money for a living” covered. But I would like to share some of my own personal money and purchasing experiences.  Here goes.

A-1 Appliance Parts sells parts for just about any appliance you could possibly have at home.  I personally buy water filters for my fridge from A-1.  Water filters are one of those things that you don’t think about buying until you absolutely have to replace them. I almost bought at regular retail price from the manufacturer, but a bit of Googling led me to A-1, where I saved $6/fiilter (on a $30 filter, so 20% off) and received free shipping.  Great deal.

In addition to great prices, they’ve got fast order turn-around times…I received my package within two days of ordering. I’d recommend A-1, check them out.

I recently embarked on a “personal MBA” program using The Personal MBA, which is essentially a list of 77 books. The site’s creator, Josh Kaufman, links you to each of the books through his Amazon affiliate account, which I’m sure generates him enough money to pay for hosting and then some (no skin off my nose).

“Top MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.”

The reading list is broken down into several sections, and there is no need to read in order.  It’s not all business, either. There’s a whole section on “Psychology & Communication”.

You may have already read some of the books, as I had…such as “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss. So far I’m enjoying the reading list and getting a fair amount of benefit from it, especially considering I haven’t paid a dime for the books I’m getting from the library.

The Personal MBA isn’t a substitute for an MBA program, but is more than adequate for those of us who want to get some basic MBA knowledge for our own endeavors.