I have been busy working on projects outside of the blog lately and had to set several things on the side burner. I have created a new design for this site which is about half way styled out and should be a huge improvement once it is implemented into Wordpress. It may take a little focus away from the blog and focus a little more on my freelance web design here in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and elsewhere. However, the blog will still be the primary focus of this site.

I’m also working on developing out articles for when the new version of the site launches. I know content has been lacking recently but I have some great stuff coming out soon. I’m also working on a few projects that I may be releasing before too long. Similar to designer text, my lorem ipsum generator for designers. Which is still in beta, and I plan to never put advertisements on it— unlike many of the other solutions available. I’ll also be implementing a very customizable generator to the site soon.

At any rate, keep your dial tuned to this site. As I have said before, you can follow me on Twitter to stay up-to-date on everything.

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Just upgraded to the newest version of wordpress, the admin is a much better than before. The options are much more intuitive and seems to give you more flexibility also. Happy Cog did a great job on the design and the wordpress community including Automattic, Matt Thomas and everyone else involved in the project. I didn’t follow the betas as much as I should so a lot of the 2.5 version is completely new to me.

I’m working on several articles for next week to get back into the swing of things. Getting back from vacation and catching up on work took more effort than I had thought it would. Look for some really great content next week. Also, if you want you can keep up with me on twitter— I’m always active there.

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I’ve been on vacation in Colorado for the past week, I let most people know about this but did not post anything on the site about it. Regularly scheduled programming should return next week. I had considered writing an article while I was here but I didn’t, wireless internet was spotty at best anyway.

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A buddy of mine Amine has launched his to-do list web app for public use. It is extremely simply and similar to tada lists. I like this one better due to the simplicity of the project. It is very easy to use, no clutter or other things in the way of organizing the things you have to do.

It allows you to create multiple lists with multiple items on the list. You can easy check them off and they fade away until you delete them. It is pretty cool,  leave a comment about what you think. I’m sure he would be interested to hear them.

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I haven’t been writing as much lately and when I came across this article it really hit home. It is about what you don’t publish on your blog defines your blog. Basically, if you don’t have anything good to say or write about at the time don’t just publish some regurgitated nonsense that has been heard 1000 times on other sites. It is good to wait until you have something really worth while to say (or share).

Granted, you probably don’t want to take it too far. You have to post content to keep your blog worth reading. Expect things to get back to normal for this site next week. I’ve had two people really close to me pass on within a few days of each other so I haven’t had much time or motivation to write anything.  Next week, expect crazy good articles though.

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There are a lot of social networking sites out there that can help you network with other people on the internet. Some of them are there to share stories, images or video. LinkedIn is there to help you share yourself with other professionals. You can get endless amounts of work on LinkedIn if you simply sign up and add people that you already know to your network. Understanding the importance of LinkedIn and how LinkedIn can help you become a more networked and well-known industry professional is impossibly helpful for everyone.
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I have heard a lot of people have some trouble with locating their polling location so they could vote for Super Tuesday (and other primary election days) in the primaries and caucuses for the presidential election. I know I had a little trouble finding my polling location. To help out, Barack Obama has an awesome web app setup to help you find your polling location so you can vote in your states primary election. When you get to that page you simply click on your state and enter your address information to find out exactly where you can vote.

Super Tuesday’s primary election will have Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah voting in primaries and caucuses.

So it is going to be a busy Super Tuesday today.

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As I am sure most of you have heard, Microsoft has made an unsolicited offer to Yahoo in the sum of $44 billion.
The Sunnyvale, CA based business started in January of 1994 at Standford University by two graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The orginal website was called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” In April of that same year they renamed the company “Yahoo.”

There are a ton of news articles out there on the topic right now, it is going to be an interesting situation to watch. With Yahoo! and Microsoft struggling against Google in the search arena, anything is possible.

New York Times: An Offer Yahoo Can’t Refuse

TechCrunch: What would a combined Yahoo-Microsoft look like?

Washington Post: Microsoft Offers To Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion

Reuters: Microsoft says Yahoo would help it turn a web profit

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There are a lot of techniques that can be used in search engine optimization that can help or hurt you when it comes to SEO. Some of the big ones that can hurt is keyword stuffing and page cloaking. You want to always make sure that you are building a site for your visitors first and foremost. The robots aren’t quite as interested in your content as you think, sorry.

You can easily make your site search engine optimized by follow 10 easy steps that will make sure everything is ready for Google to go through and understand what your pages and site are about. This can help you to get more traffic from search engines by ranking well. Once you rank well, of course, you need to make sure that you are persuading the visitors to actually click on your search listing. The relevant and quality traffic is why we all have web sites and want to rank well in search engines, right?

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I consider myself one of those people that monitor 100s of RSS feeds daily and actually read a large portion of the articles I see a day. So when it comes to using a feed reader, you need it to be very good at what it does. At one point I used Opera’s built-in reader but with the amount of feeds I had it wasn’t running very fast and so I ditched it. Firefox is the same way, I can’t use their live bookmarks or feed reader extensions because I already bog it down too much with extensions.

I’ve gone through all of the RSS feed readers I can find online, I can’t use the feed readers that are local software because I need to be able to access my feeds from work, home and on the go with my Treo. It is also handy for when I am using my laptop at Coffee shops and Cafes. So using an online-based service is paramount to me when it comes to making a decision for RSS and Atom feed readers. So here is my list of my favorite online feed readers.

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