There are tons of software packages out there that allow you to monitor and control your kids’ internet usage, but I have found none as complete and easy to use as OnlineFamily by Norton. It allows you to not only monitor what web sites your kids are visiting, but also limit their total computer time, restrict where they can go, supervise their social web site activities, and even protect their personal information. And the best part is that the interface is dead easy to use (even if you are technically challenged). If you sign-up now, you can get the service for free until January of 2010.

To get started, click here to sign up and download the software. After registering, you will be asked for the names and ages of each child you want to monitor.

Once you have setup the kids, you can download the software and install it on each of the machines you wish to monitor (don’t forget laptops). They provide both a Windows and a Mac version.

Installing it on the kids’ PC is quick and easy. If you have not already setup a separate user account for each kid and they all use the same machine, do this before you install the software. Unless they separate accounts, you will not be able to determine who did what.

When you install the software, it will ask you to specify how each family member logs in. If your kids all use the same PC, then you can use an Administrator account to install the software and select not to monitor that account. Each kid would then have a standard account and each of those will be monitored separately.

Once it is all setup, you can login to the service and start monitoring and managing your childrens’ activities. Keep in mind that there is a 5 to 10 minute delay between the time a web site is browsed on the kids PC and the activity shows up in your browser window. This one got me when I was testing to make sure it worked.

If you want, you can just use the default house rules, which seemed pretty good to me. Alternatively, you can use the Settings menu to define all sorts of rules specific to your situation. For example, you can specify who allowed to instant message your children. You can also monitor whether your child exposes sensitive information on social networking sites. And most importantly, you can choose the activities in which you want to be notified (by phone or email).

Norton provides a pretty thorough and useful help file which you can access online. This includes a nice video that you might want to check out, it may be found on the sign-up page.

Let us know if you tried Norton’s OnlineFamily and tell us what you think. Or let us know if you think any other online software tools are better.

Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive

This list of fun and very simple experiments should quickly bring back fond memories from your childhood. The experminents involve simple items that you can find around your house and they should not take too long to setup. My personal favoriites are the Baking Soda Volcano and Soda Geyser.

Evil Mad Scientist

This web sites motto is, “Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a Time”, and each week they feature a new do it yourself project. These projects are a bit more advanced then the ones from the previous web site and you may have to go out and purchase some things to create your own project, but the ideas are way cool. Since I am a robot nut, I was partial to the Bristlebot, which was a tiny vibrating robot made from the head of a toothbrush.

Joey Green’s Mad Scientist Experiments

These fun and easy experiments involve common materials you will find around the house. Joey Green presents hundreds of little-known uses for well-known products, but his science experiment section is a true treasure.

Mad Scientist Party

Why not get some of your friends together and host a mad scientist party? This site will tell you all you need to know about hosting such a party, including invitations, games, and even an evil eye cake.

PBS Zoom Science

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) hosts a very popular kids show called Zoom science. Not only does the associated web site include fun experiments seen on the show, but you can even send in the results from your own wacky science experiment and they may feature it on the show.

Steve Spangler Science Experiments

Steve Spangler performs science experiments for a weekly local television show, but his web site features some really fun and simple science experiments you can do at home. Steve tries really hard to make science fun.

Know of some other resources for wacky and fun science expermiments? Let us know about them.

With just a little time and a printer you can create a truly special Easter that should be a big hit with the kids.

Personalized letter from the Easter Bunny

Just provide a few simple pieces of information, such as the kids name, gender, and hometown and you are on your way to creating a personalized letter from the Easter bunny himself. You can choose between a short and simple version, a longer version, baby’s first Easter, religious theme, or going to school.

Customizable Easter Certificates

With one of several customizable templates, you can quickly create a special certificate to honor your little Easter egg hunter(s). The website also provides printable Easter bookmarks, cards, teacher worksheets, and sticker sheets.

Bunny Feet

Print and cut out pairs of bunny feet and place them around your house on Easter. You could even use them to make a trail to the kids Easter basket.

Easter Wallpaper

This web site includes over a dozen really cute Easter wallpapers in a wide variety of sizes. The site also includes Easter screensavers and a printable maze.

Coloring Pages

Select from one of several printable color page images. Bind them all together and make a special Easter coloring book.

Know of any other great quick and creative Easter ideas? Let us know about them.

I also do not have time to attend scrapbooking parties (yeah, they have these), and I sure do not have the time to visit hobby stores searching through racks and racks of scrapbooking templates trying to decide which one looks best. Phew, it tires me out just thinking about it.

No, I am an internet geek, so what better way to try my hand at scrapbooking than with a digital scrapbook. I looked around at all the free products and free template sites, but none of them impressed me until I found Scrapblog. I recently used Scrapblog to put together a beautiful and custom scrapbook of my son’s school career and I wanted to share with you how insanely easy it was to do.

I began by signing up for the service to open my free account. From there you just click “Create a new scrapbook” and you are on your way. You have the choice of starting with a theme or starting with a blank page. I, of course, elected to start with a theme.

Scrapblog offers hundreds of templates and dozens of categories, such as weddings, school, holidays, sports, and even military. I selected the school theme and this loaded up the Scrapbook builder with ten scrapbook pages that I could customize.

Even though it was better than anything I could have created from scratch, there were certain things about the first kindergarden page I did not like. No problem. I was able to use the very intuitive editor to move around the page elements and then add my own photos. The result (below) took me only a few minutes to create.

Once I had completed all the pages, I was able to publish the scrapbook with one click. This created a URL that I can share with family and friends. I can even print the pages and paste them into my own physical scrapbook.

All in all, it was very easy and I think the results are fantastic.

Why not try it yourself and let us know in the comments what you think.   Maybe you also know some other scrapbooking websites or apps that you would like to recommend?

Some might argue that reading about people who have it worse can make you feel better about yourself, but I really do not think that is true.

I recently spent one work week (5 days) forcing myself to only get my news from positive news network sites. Believe it or not, there are lots of them out there. Instead of performing my morning work ritual of “catching up” with the world by looking at the big media news outlets, each day I would challenge myself to find a positive news website that “inspired me”.

By the end of the week, I was noticeably brighter and more optimistic. My family and a few friends remarked on it. They were curious to know what I might be taking.

I would like to share with you the top 5 websites that I found that week. Check them out and if you feel particularly inspired, try swapping one out with your usual online new source.

HappyNews

Started in 2005 by a man from Texas, this website tries to balance out the “disproportionate amount of negative news” from traditional media sites. The stories they feature are real and they often come from mainstream news sources, such as The Associated Press, it is just that they are only positive stories.

SouthAfrica – The Good News

Talk about a place that needs to focus on good news. These days, South Africa is inundated with violence and turmoil. If any place needs to focus on the positive, they do. And they are. This inspirational web site offers legitimate positive news stories that focus on the good stuff coming out of South Africa.

OptimistWorld

This website is run by a group of optimists from the United Kingdom. In addition to the daily news feed, they offer a version of the web site in Italian and Spanish (with German and French to come later).

GoodNewsNetwork

This outstanding website features legitimate news stories from around the world. I really like their free weekly newsletter which gives you the top 10 good news items for the week. At the very least, you should sign up for this.

Gimundo

I saved the best for last. In addition to the daily good news and positive stories, they have some great videos. Be sure to check out the “Babies Eating Lemons” one. There is no way you could watch that and not smile.

Like the idea of positive news sites? Know of any others that are inspiring to you? Let us know about them.

But honestly, I think the best reason to do it, besides the fact that it is free and easy to do, is just that it is way cool. It can help to differentiate your web blog from all the millions of other web blogs out there.

So how do you do it? The easiest way I have found is to use a new product called webReader. webReader offers various subscription services that can be used on commercial web sites, but they also offer a free version for personal websites and blogs. The only downside is that the free service includes an advertisement that is read at the beginning of every post. But the ad is very short and I think the benefits of having the service far outweigh this one minor annoyance.

Getting started is easy. Just go to the following link to sign up for the free version. When signing up, you will need to select a language (they offer American English, Swedish, British English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) and a voice type (male or female). You will receive a confirmation email before the service is activated but that is very standard these days.

Once activated and logged in, you can go to the Implement webReader link under Profile. Here you will find links that bring you to specific instructions for how to implement webReader on your blog.

The free version offers plug-ins for WordPress 2x and Joomla-based web sites. They also offer widgets for Blogger, Typepad and Ning. You can also manually embed scripting code within your personal website or blog.

I decided to give it a try and implement webReader on my site. All I had to do was copy the scripting code provided in the instructions and paste it into an empty textbox in my site sidebar.

Just to give you an example of how easy it is to implement for my website, I just went to the Manage tab and clicked Features. I then dragged a new text Box onto the layout and saved the results.

I then went to the main tab and clicked Edit for the new Text Box I added. I pasted in the code that I copied from the webReader web site and clicked Save.

And that is it. The whole thing was super easy and it took me less than 10 minutes to get it all working properly. When complete, you should see a Listen icon next to each post in your blog.

I would love to hear from others that implement webReader on their personal web sites. Drop us a comment and let us know how it went and what you think of it.

For those of you not familiar with Microsoft.NET technologies, they represent a platform and set of tools that computer programmers can use to build very rich, interactive applications for the Windows desktop, the Internet, or even hand-held mobile devices. Chances are strong that one of your favorite websites was built using Microsoft ASP.NET.

1. CodeProject

I cannot count the number of times I have downloaded code from this site over the years. The quick and helpful articles always include a code download and are written by real world developers who give you straight to the point help for a particular coding problem.

Developers who submit articles to the website are not paid, but instead submit the article and code to get approval of the site’s community. The site covers more than just .NET and the Windows platform, so it is a good resource for developers that need to go outside of their normal skill sets.

2. DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke is an open source framework that developers can download and use to build their own web applications using Microsoft ASP.NET. If you are a .NET developer and you have not at least downloaded the code to look at it, then you really need to immediately.

The software has been through several iterations over the years and demonstrates some of the most efficient coding practices around. Even though the site includes a professional edition for purchase, there is a community edition which is free to download and very much worth registering free with the site to access.

3. 4GuysFromRolla

If you are a web developer, which let’s face it, most .NET developers are, then this is a must visit site. It includes articles that cover everything you need to know about ASP.NET and even includes a lot of information for ASP developers (because, believe it or not, there are still developers out there using ASP).

Over the years, I have had numerous problems resolved by looking at posts on their forum or learned how to incorporate some slick new feature using one of the frequently posted articles.

4. DevSource

As you can see from the image, this online development magazine is sponsored by Microsoft, but don’t hold that against them.  I strongly suggest subscribing to their free weekly newsletter, since it will keep you up to date on all the latest rumblings coming out of Microsoft.

You also should check out the DevLife column, which includes regular posts by the experienced and very down to earth, Julia Lerman.

5. DevX

Another online development magazine, this one is not solely focused on Microsoft technologies and tends to profile some really interesting and niche technologies.

I have personally written several articles for them since they are one of the only web sites that wants articles about robotics and speech technologies. Their near daily stream of articles cover everything from traditional .NET development to VB classic (yeah, because there are still some people doing that still).

6. MSDN Magazine

MSDN Magazine is for the development world what the Nature Journal is for scientists. It includes standards that every developer should be following. They are VERY strict on what content gets into this journal. An article in MSDN magazine is typically much longer and more in depth than articles in any of the online resources I have previously mentioned. But you can feel assured that the articles were scoured and well picked though before making it to print.

7. Channel9

This Microsoft resource is a must see for anyone that loves to watch videos about really cool technologies. The Channel 9 team goes around the Microsoft campus interviewing various teams and often offers a sneak peek of up and coming software and technology.

In addition to interviewing the folks at Microsoft, Channel 9 also talks to industry gurus outside of Microsoft.

8. ScottGu’s Blog

Scott Guthrie is the Corporate Vice President for the Developer Division at Microsoft and his regularly updated blog often features announcements not seen any where else.

Scott covers everything from .NET base class libraries to Silverlight. If you want to impress your developer friends with your seemingly inside track to Microsoft, this is the site to visit.

If you are a .NET developer and you know of some really helpful sites, drop us a note and let us know about them. There are tons of resources out there for .NET developers. These are just a few of my all time favorites, so we would love to hear of others that you like.