Microsoft has a great deal for small business with a free version of Accounting Express 2009.  It can create estimates, invoices, track customer payments, set product and service pricing and can export and import data using Microsoft Excel formats, and can export to e-mails, Microsoft Word documents, or PDF files, and even sell items on eBay.

You can compare Microsoft Accounting 2009 versions to see if you would like the professional version which includes additional report, multi-user access, and the ability to track and bill for employee time. I've found the free Accounting Express 2009 version combined with the PayPal Outlook add-in provides everything I need.  It does require Microsoft office.

I looked at Fresh Books and Blinksale, but Accounting Express 2009 provides the greatest functionality for the free cost.

Download Office Accounting Express 2009.

References

• Blinksale - 3 invoices  month free
• Fresh Books - 3 clients Free
• Simply Bill - $5 / month, 25 invoices / month
• Intuit Billing Manager - Free
• Vebio
• Web Based Invoicing
• 20 Invoicing Tools Web Designers - Six Revisions
• Online Invoicing - Alex King
• PayPal How-To: Three Accounting and Invoicing Solution Tips

Sala has an interesting application (Java Applet) that will display the tags of a specific  Website as a graph or image.  The images are generated from the tags for a specific web page. More...

On October 14, 2008, Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0, the cross-platform browser plug-in for both Macintosh and PC platforms.

Silverlight includes several Rich Internet Application (RIA) features, including:

• WPF UI Framework
• Rich Controls
• Rich  Networking Support
• Rich Base Class Library

The controls include TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, StackPanel, Grid, Panel, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, DataGrid, ListBox, and others.

Downloads are available at:

• Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK
• Expression Blend 2 SP1
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Windows)
• Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Mac)

References

• Silverlight 2 Released - Scott Guthrie
• Silverlight 2 Is Out - hanselman.com
• Silverlight 2 Released Officially - timheuer.com
• silverlight.net

BlogEngine.Net provides the ability to selectively disclose information in the blog postings based on the configuration settings.  I took Dave Burke's concept on the Flexible Post Excerpt Display and expanded it to include expansion of all categories and tags even if the ShowDescriptionInPost setting was set to true. More...

Everyone that writes content on the web should know a little HTML.  This is my cheat sheet for the most common used HTML elements I've seen that are supported in multiple browsers, tools, and CMS software. More...

Most browsers and servers have default values that provide fairly good performance with a minimum caching of static file content.  A little bit of coaxing can result in better performance with less traffic and less bandwidth.

There are two types of caching I discuss: static content  (*.JPG, *.JPEG, *.png, *.gif, *.ico) rarely updated and semi-static content (*.js, *.css) updated very infrequently.  The decision to cache page output (*.aspx, *.html, *.htm) long term is too dependent on application functionality decisions to discuss generically. More...

Windows Live Writer provides a handful of helpful image enhancement features.  It's not Photoshop by any means, but it's quick.

Drop Shadow

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Word in Microsoft Office2007 provides the ability to post entries to websites and has outstanding image manipulation features. I love image manipulation in Word the drop shadow and reflection effects are simple, and quick.

Word does make the images fuzzy and grainy.

Shadow

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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it me takes about the same time or longer to edit images as it does to type.  Snagit by TechSmith helps me a great deal. 

Snagit is not a full photo editor by any means, but it does help provide some useful embellishments to images or screen shots without requiring a lot of work.

I love Snagit for three reasons.

1. To capture  scrolling windows (for web designs)
2. To add annotation, drawing, and markup on the image
3. The quick drop shadow effect

Key features I use:

1. Edges- Drop shadow, fade, torn, wave, saw, shark tooth, beveled
2. Watermark, resize, flip
3. Image types: jpg, png, gif

Drop Shadow

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Mister Retro has a great set of Photoshop plug-in's that will save a significant amount of time and effort when manipulating files in Photoshop for creating those textured and stunning artistic effects. Prices start at $49.95.

Machine wash CD 3 - Abusive Filter:

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