Having a secondary display can go a long way in improving your productivity, both at work and at home. However, sometimes you just don’t have the time, money, or space to deal with a true dual display configuration. Make things so much easier for yourself with the Lilliput Mini USB Monitor instead.

Rather than dealing with separate power cables and extra video cards, the Lilliput Mini USB Monitor (clever Gulliver’s Travels reference, don’t you think?) does everything through a simple USB connection. That handles both the power and the video output. Better still, the Mini USB Monitor is compatible with a range of Windows versions, including Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, as well as a range of Apple OS X versions, including Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.

The seven-inch display can be used in your choice of portrait or landscape mode, the former of which might be better for IM conversations, while the latter could be good for watching videos or web apps. It has a contrast ratio of 400:1, a brightness rating of 350 cd/m2, and a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. And all it takes is a USB cable.

Find the Lilliput Mini USB Monitor for $99.99 through ThinkGeek. This could be fantastic as a travel companion for your notebook PC!

Most people would agree that having some natural greenery around you is a good thing. The plants add life to another dead space, not to mention bringing in fresh oxygen and making for less of a sterile environment. But you don’t have to go outside to get that experience, necessarily.

With some assistance from the folks at Horticulture Help, you can bring that kind of greenery inside too. Located in Astoria, Horticulture Help is New York City’s foremost professional indoor platn service. They work with both commercial applications, as well as residential clients.

Plants in the office can be visually attractive, providing color and enhancing the working environment. Horticulture Help can also provide guidance related to why you have a plant pest problem or why your plants are deteriorating. They’re the experts!

Do you use BlueFur to host your websites? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website URL, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

Your WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s. You can customize it to suit your particular audience and your particular preferences. One theme that you might want to consider is Ribbons Free.

The layout is robust, yet simple and clean enough to offer a positive user experience. Using the jQuery Cycle Plugin, you get to feature a series of posts toward the top of the page. Visitors can cycle through them with the previous and next buttons just below that.

Underneath that, you find the usual reverse chronological blog orientation, but the theme has been preconfigured to show a thumbnail image and an excerpt. This way, the design is consistent and clean. There’s also a 468×60 banner next to the header, as well as integration with social media via the buttons toward the top-right.

Make your way over to WP Explorer to check out the live preview of Ribbons Free. The link for the free download can be found on the same page, as Ribbons Free is distributed with a GPL license.

There’s a little bit of everything in this bouillabaisse of a blog post collection. Dig in.

Simon Mackie starts with a quick tip on how to paste images into Gmail messages using Chrome. Yes, it really is that easy for you to share pictures and other images with your friends and colleagues. In fact, this works great for images that are already online rather than ones on your desktop.

Shane Mac has a guest post on Neil Patel’s blog, describing how he want from a notebook to launching a startup company. Not all startups happen quickly, so Shane has 10 major lessons that any burgeoning entrepreneur should take to heart.

Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant and direct response copywriter, so he knows a thing or two about that world. So, he’s busting some myths. The whole idea of pushing a magic button and miraculously making money is just that: magic. Not real.

Joseph Planta wraps his head around the upcoming federal election in Canada by chatting with Warren Kinsella. He is a well respected political commentator and consultant, so what Kinsella has to say certainly holds a lot of weight. Which way are you going to vote?

Joel Sawyer gets us ready for the weekend with his review of Rango. The animated film featuring the voice talents of Johnny Depp is certainly an interesting looking movie with plenty of comedy to go around. Joel liked it so much that he gave it a very solid four out of five stars, saying that “this one is just different enough that it may surprise you.”

Marketing takes on all forms. The Blendtec people have done very well with their viral YouTube videos. Starbucks positively engages with the Twitter community each day. And then there are more conventional TV commercials and newspaper ads.

Another strategy that you might want to consider is something called education-based marketing. The critical distinction here is that this method of marketing doesn’t involve selling anything, at least not directly. The idea is to educate the public on topics related to your niche, establishing you as an expert in your field.

For instance, a real estate agent can passively engage with potential clients by offering a website or newsletter with perspectives and news on the local real estate market. These don’t “sell” the services of the realtor directly, but they do help to keep his or her name at the forefront when it comes to buying and selling homes.

Similarly, financial advisors and mortgage brokers can do quite well by offering informational seminars in a variety of locations. Assure the attendees that they will not be “sold” anything during the presentation, but know that there is an opportunity to gain contacts and gain their trust. Have you tried education-based marketing? Has it worked for you?

A picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s unlikely that you want to spend a thousand dollars on every picture you use on your blog. Using your own photos and pictures is best, but sometimes that just not a viable solution.

So, you might want to check out the Clip Art Illustration plugin for WordPress. It integrates directly into the pages and post areas, allowing you to search and insert through the library of clip art images from Clip Art Illustration. These images are all free to use, both for personal and commercial purposes.

As with every other image that you might want to insert in your blog posts and blog pages, the images pulled by this plugin will allow you to choose your alignment. You can enter your own search terms and sift through the paginated results.

Check out the official page for this plugin at ClipArtIllustration.com, where you can download the plugin for free. Alternatively, the official directory has a download link as well.