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: 5%

The birthday giveaway for the Problogger site is giving away $54,000 worth of cash and prizes to readers. There are simply small tasks you have to complete to qualify for some of the prizes.

This website birthday thing seems to be growing in popularity, where a website will turn 1 or 2 and celebrate by sponsors giving away donated prizes . At any rate, check it out over at Problogger.

Popularity: 3%

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.

Popularity: 5%

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: 7%

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%

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.

Popularity: 3%

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: 8%

I know it is typical this time of the year to see blogs kind of go dead for a bit and I apologize I’m another one of those guys. But it happens, anyway… I’ve been busy at work with some big projects that we are trying to get live. Late nights, long hours the whole bit.

Hopefully I will start finding more time to add some new content and stuff up here. At any rate, I’m preparing my link round up and hopefully a nice article about CSS design structure to add to the mix.

Popularity: 2%

I have made a few alterations to the site that I thought might be nice to point out to some of the seasoned visitors. I have added a functional footer at the bottom of the page that lists the most recent comments across all articles and I have also added a popular article section. Basically the more traffic an article gets the more popular I rank it. Pretty simple and to the point, I will watch it to see how well it works. Also I may end up clearing it our weekly or monthly to ensure that a page that is super popular doesn’t just stay there forever.

Also I realized that HTML Tidy isn’t 100% acurate in xHTML validation. So I corrected some validation issues based off of the W3’s specifications. The site is back to being 100% xHTML 1.0 Strict compliant which should be a nice little treat. It is also (as always) cross-browser compatible. I just did some minor tweaks in some little things that were over looked and how things were displayed. The CSS is also validated now but I use a CSS3 specification of opacity for some internal icons that don’t validateâ�� but I don’t care. The opacity CSS identifier works on IE7, Firefox and Opera and I think that is good enough for me. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

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.

Popularity: 6%