There have been some great posts over this past week from all over. It really can take quite a bit of effort to sort through the articles you read and receive through email to pick out the best to share. There are always a dozen more articles that I think should be included in my weekly list but these are the ones for the week I found most interesting and applicable other web designers and web professionals.

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Popularity: 65%

I’ve been sick over the past few days and with the holidays and the new year coming up I haven’t had any time to write any articles. So expect everything to return back to normal on the 1st of the year. Everyone have a fantastic rest of the year.

Popularity: 73%

I recently found a Wordpress plugin that allows for the translation using Google translate (or babelfish) of my entire site. I know that I get quite a bit of traffic from all over the world and so I thought it may help to have a translation available in various languages. I only speak English so it is tough for me to tell how well the translator is working.  I think it is a very rough translation but probably gets the point across better then most can translate from English to their native tongue. At any rate my site is now available in Italian, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. My web design news will hopefully be better understood in all of these languages.

There should be more coming in the future I’m sure. The Wordpress plugin I have used is called Global Translater by nothing2hide.

Popularity: 23%

I have been using Clicky for my day-to-day analytics for some time now. I like that they give you an embed that you can easily use within your own site so that you can type something like dustinbrewer.com/hits/ and see what your current traffic is. They are pretty accurate and give a ton of information that is well organized. I still use Google analytics but only for the monthly view, they don’t give the options to see live statistics. Which makes me crazy. Anyway, I was checking my traffic and discovered that they are offering 50% off their premium service, which is already cheap. Thought I would pass the message on.

Popularity: 10%

FreelanceSwitch, the popular freelance blog, has finally released their long awaited “Freelance Rock Star Book” with all kinds of great chapter for web designers, writers, graphic designers and photographers. It is a fantastic resource for anyone that is in the freelance business. It is an accumulation of what they have been writing about in their blog over the past year.

I have already ordered mine so I don’t have a full review of how it will turn out yet. But I’m sure it is a great book to get or to give away for Christmas. It is the freelance source for this Christmas season (and probably 2008). Chapters are as follows:

• Getting Started
• Your Brand
• The Working Day
• Getting Your First Jobs
• Scoping and Time Frames
• Pricing Yourself
• Doing the Job
• Clients
• Getting Paid
• Marketing Yourself
• Building a Business

A great list of chapters that all sound right on topic for what most of us freelancers are looking to focus on. You can buy the book from this site.

Popularity: 12%

There are a lot of ways to create traffic for your blog, one of the best ways that I have found to generate interest and traffic is through social media. Not just digg, newsvine or reddit but through some of the smaller niche social media sites. Such as designfloat, tutorialized and dzone. All of these sites are design and development related web sites that don’t get quite as much traffic as digg and company. But it does raise the chance that your site will get noticed by the digg community once your site becomes popular on some of the more niche social media sites.
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Popularity: 8%

Ask.com has announced that they are launching a new feature to their search portal that will allow visitors to search the internet through their service anonymously. This means that your concerns for your search data and privacy safety when using Ask.com to search are gone. Not that it was a huge concern from Ask specifically but with AOL’s recent release of search data there seems to be a big concern about what can be found out from it.

There were a lot of the searchers from that release whose identity was found due to the data. Some of the people were a little less then happy what was found out about them. The AskEraser service will go live at Midnight on Tuesday. For more information about the service read their press release on the subject.

Popularity: 4%

It can be hard from time to time to come up with ideas for what my readers want to learn about or read about on the site. So, I think it would be nice to hear back from some of you what you want to see on the site. Whether it is as general as having more CSS examples and tutorials or something specific, like getting a certain exploding browser to cooperate.

I can talk about any design topic that you want to know more about or even inform everyone better on what to do and not to do when it comes to SEO.

At any rate, the more specific you are the more likely I will be to write an article about it. Also, if you would prefer note that you would like a poll instead of an open forum. I thought it would be nice to not have restrictions on ideas to really give you, the reader, control over what you read.

*Also, expect a redesign this week. I have a complete revamp coming that is going to blow this crappy design away.

Popularity: 4%

I’m leaving for Dallas tomorrow for the 2007 Webmaster Jam and thought I would just drop a note to anyone else attending and let them know that I would gladly have a drink with anyone interested in chatting. I should arrive at the Adam’s Mark Thursday sometime around 9:00-10:00PM.

It should prove to be a fun time.

Popularity: 2%

I was nominated in the Okie blog awards for the best blog layout. The Okie blog awards are a local, Oklahoma-based blog community and apparently I have got the attention of the members within it. I thank you to all who nominated me and I hope to see those same people vote me to the top in the category also. I would greatly appreciate any of the votes I receive and would like to invite any of my readers that reside within Oklahoma to vote for me as well.

Due to the nature of the Okie blog awards, only Oklahoma-based bloggers can vote for the nominees. So if that includes you, please visit the Okie blog awards page and help me and my fellow Oklahoma bloggers out. Thanks.

Popularity: 4%