This week has been a busy, busy week. Not just at work though, it seems the blogosphere has been hard at work producing some excellent content for everyone (and not just on this design blog). It seems that design blogs everywhere are hard at work producing web design, CSS and inspirational design articles for everyone. I had to cut this list down a bit to get some great articles I wanted to share out. (more…)

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It looks like the popular user published news site, Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC. The site which launched in March of 2006 and now receives millions of page views a month. Currently the Newsvine team consists of 6 people. Newsvine had raised $1.5 million in capitol before it had been bought out. The figures of exactly how much the purchase price were haven’t been released, some speculate that it was as high as $54 million. This news is groundbreaking as of yesterday. The deal, however, was finalized on Friday, October 5th 2007. Mike Davidson the co-founder of the news service has detailed the release of this information on his blog.

Apparently it has been in the works for a few months now and the deal was finally at the point to make it public. You can find out more over at Mike Industries, on Newsvine , TechCrunchor even on the MSNBC web site about it.

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I found a great article today from Molly Holzschlag about split brain theory and the day-to-day lives of web designers. I found another gem at David Airey’s blog about following logo design trends. He asks his readers whether they follow any trends in logo design. I of course believe it is impossible to ignore any design trends.

I found a great article on blogging from ProBlogger and their guest speaker Kelly Phillips Erb, who talks about tax deductions that bloggers overlook at tax time. This article can be helpful for anyone that counts blogging as part of their business.

My last article that I want to spread for this week comes from SEOMoz about the importance in understanding that a link is just a link when it comes to SEO. Summarized, the article stresses the importance that one bad link isn’t going to kill you.

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It looks like the New York Times finally realized that charging for content is an out dated practice. They recently have opened up their archived news articles to the public. It has taken them awhile but I’m glad to see they have finally come to their senses on the matter.

I know this doesn’t seem like much news to those of you that don’t read the NY Times but it is a sign of the times. As some of the old media sites start to completely move to advertising based models you have to ask yourself what the next step is going to be.

There is always the fear that advertising is going to go further then it already is as far as intrusiveness goes. It is not that I am against advertising at all. It is quite the opposite, just curious to see the next phase in advertising that is going to keep all of the old and new media sites making money.

At any rate, I’ve got 100 years worth of back-dated stories to read.

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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.

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It has been a long week of adjusting after the labor day weekend. You get into the mode where you are just not used to working and coming back Tuesday morning you are totally unprepared for the week ahead of you. But here I am on Friday picking right back up to bring some great stuff to everyone. It looks like Bitbox has a great set of Web 2.0 layer styles that can help save you time if you are making a lot of Web 2.0 layouts for applications. (more…)

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It’s been a hectic week for me, I’m sure the lack of articles portrays that pretty good. I am just glad that I have rearranged things so I can find time to focus on things like this. At any rate, I have a great collection of links from around the web today. First off I read a great article from Sitepoint this week about Microformats and getting meaning out of your markup. From the article,

Microformats are all about representing semantic information encoded within a web page, allowing that information to be leveraged in ways that were possibly never conceived by the original publisher.

All in all a great article and something that I am definitely an advocate for standards and semantics in design they are impossibly important. (more…)

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I went to Galveston Island in Texas over the weekend for a little weekend retreat to the beach. It was great. So I missed the link roundup for last week and I’m coming close to missing the CSS trick / hack for the week. But I won’t miss them and I’m here now to provide everyone with some quality links. (more…)

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One of the coolest links this past week was from Smashing Magazine and they give you another one of their great lists, this time it is the list of code beautifiers and formatters from across the web. Another great link from this past week was from Bitbox who is now notorious for giving away various vector elements, this time they are giving away some cool new Vector Foliage images. For a good laugh I came across this post from downloadsquad on digg about how the web looked in 1994, which is pretty hilarious in comparison. It brings back some good ‘ole memories… ok maybe they weren’t that great. (more…)

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Check out FreelanceSwitch and take their Freelance survey. They are offering some cool prizes that will be awarded randomly. They intend on using the results to formulate a basic idea of the freelance community as a whole. They will provide the results publicly to everyone once they have commenced the survey.

I took it, it is quick and easy nothing too complicated to answer. I had some trouble with the how much profit I have at the end of the year thing. Which is just because I consider profit money left over after I buy all the cool things I want. Which was 0.

Take the freelance survey, it is easy and productive.

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