Wrapp Up Chris Van Patten

In this age of Snowdens and NSA spying, you might be spending more time thinking about your privacy online. Unfortunately, public wifi—which many of us rely on every day—can be a huge opportunity for hackers and spies to grab your data and use it for nefarious purposes. That’s where Cloak comes in. Cloak is a […] The post Secure your Internet connection with the Cloak VPN – WU18 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

The late, lamented EverPix was a fantastic service for keeping a “cloud-based” backup of all your photos from all your devices. When it shut down, many users were left scrambling for alternatives. That’s where Loom, a freemium photo storage application, comes in. Loom works similarly to EverPix. You install client applications on your various devices […] The post Keep your photos safe with Loom – WU17 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

As a digital nomad and web entrepreneur, I have a lot of files floating around that I need continuous access to. Bank statements, invoices, legal documents, and more. Whenever possible, I try to be completely paperless, and Dropbox, the free online file storage app, makes it possible. By this point, Dropbox is admittedly ubiquitous, and […] The post Keep your files safe and accessible with Dropbox – WU16 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

In the past eight or nine months, Van Patten Media has grown from a one or two (and occasionally three) person operation to a group of around ten freelancers working hard to build awesome websites and web products. I attribute that largely to Elance, the online resource for anyone looking to hire freelancers and contractors. […] The post Grow your virtual/online team with Elance – WU15 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

This week on Wrapp Up I’m joined by my pal Lucas Cherkewski, a talented young designer/developer from Canada. Lucas shares Draft, a platform for writing, editing, and collaborating on words. Draft is minimalist and easy to use, and lets you write articles (using the Markdown writing format), share them with your peers, and solicit their […] The post Collaborative writing and editing is better with Draft – WU14 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners, like myself, frequently need to manage email lists and send out marketing or promotional emails to clients and potential customers. There are dozens of email marketing tools out there, but my favourite is MailChimp. MailChimp lets you easily manage and send beautifully designed, well performing marketing emails. You can generate […] The post Awesome email lists with MailChimp and Mandrill – WU13 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

This week on Wrapp Up, my pal Dennis Gaebel joins me to share his Wrapp Up pick, Frank DeLoupe. Frank DeLoupe (Frank, for short) is really nifty: it lets you easily pick out colours from anywhere on your screen, and instantly copy the colour code (hex, rgb, hsl, etc) to your clipboard. It can also […] The post Cool colour picking with Frank DeLoupe – WU12 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

A while back (in the second episode, in fact) I covered the productivity/todo list app TeuxDeux, a delightful tool that helps you manage your todo lists, with a focus on only essential features. I still love TeuxDeux, but as my team and business has grown since then, I needed to upgrade to something with more […] The post Asana: Productivity is sexy again appeared first on Chris Van Patten.