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.

Popularity: 7%

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.

Popularity: 6%

There are a lot of ways to get the attention of various social networks, none of which involve gaming the system. You may get a little temporary attention from some of the social networks if you try to game the system. But that is missing the point of social networking which is to spread interesting content and images of cats. Some of the ways you can create compelling content for the digestion of social networks are going to be straight forward. It is important to note these methods so if you can spin an article in a certain direction— you are going to get more attention from social networks which will significantly boost the readership of the article.
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Popularity: 11%

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%

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 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%