There are a couple ways to improve your website. You can either pay someone to do it for you, you can learn to do it yourself, or sometimes you can get tips from the pros. Here is a link to get some really great tips. Get your Blogging Tips from Douglas Karr at The Marketing Technology Blog He has also agreed to offer a couple minutes of his time to review the layout, usability and SEO of my last few posts for putting the link in. I know I can definitely use the help.
Archive for the 'General' Category
I know this is a really really noobish thing, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to get a couple of things centered on a website I was working on. I looked all through my copy of CSS: The Missing Manual, but it didn’t describe it anywhere. So I did some searching online and found an about.com page that said the easiest way to center something is to use margin: auto; This works great for all browsers except IE6 and below. For that I just gave the same div text-align: center; and everything was great. I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out before, but it really makes sense now. It is putting the same amount of margin on either side of it.
Ok, it is time for me to put the rubber to the road. I have just over 4 months before I get out of the Navy and I need to seriously learn more about design. Luckily I just got some books in the mail. The first one I will be reading is “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird. I will post updates of some of what I learn. I am sure I will learn much more when I go to college, but I at least want to provide a good service to the clients I have while I am working my way through college.
It is time for a redesign. I have had the same look to my blog for about 2 years now. Time to change it. I am thinking of possibly going with a three column layout this time, but I haven’t really decided yet. I submitted my site to a couple placed for some reviews but I would also appreciate any readers who are willing to offer suggestions to do so as well. Just leave your tips in the comments and I will happily see what I can do about adding it to the design. Since I am currently deployed and stuck in the middle of the ocean, I have a bit of free time. A redesign/reboot is one of the things I want to accomplish before I return stateside. I submitted to Performancing.com for their professional review and I hope I get selected. I am also thinking about submitting it to UBlogMe. So we shall see how everything goes in the next couple of months. I am a little said that I missed the May, 1st blog reboot day, but at least it inspired me to move forward with my redesign.
I’ve seen many of the blogs that I read talking about a new social network called Virb. Seems like they aim to combine MySpace, YouTube and Flickr all in one place. It is very Web 2.0′y from what I can see so far. That isn’t really good or bad, but at least it’s keeping up with web style unlike MySpace. I will be messing around with it as much as I can in the next few days and will try to offer a more complete review. The thing that makes a social network good though are it’s users. At least their invites for the beta are pretty viral right now which could be good to build the network. Who knows, maybe they can pull a Gmail and keep it in private beta long enough to get an amazing user base. Speaking of the invites, I got mine from a blog and in that spirit I have 10 invites for people who leave a comment with a valid e-mail address.
If you are already a member feel free to add me as your friend when you check out my profile. I look forward to learning more about this site and seeing it develop.
Iw as just reading Guy Kawasaki’s Post about his first year of blogging and it had a link to a post that he wrote about a woman named Aziza Mohmmand. He mentioned that not many people had linked to that post even though it was his “purest story of entrepreneurship” that he covered. Well obviously I decided to read the linked post and it was quite amazing. She is an entrepreneur in Afghanistan and her company makes soccer balls. She talked about her visit to America and some of the things she has gone through as an entrepreneur in Afghanistan. She has 220 employees, all are widows and the main money earners for their families. Her main goal was to make a difference in the life of Afghani women while providing them with income and an active role in building the new infrastructure in Afganistan.
I got an interesting e-mail from a friend that contained a link to a video. It brings into question the legality of Income Tax. The thing is, this only affects people who don’t know how the tax laws work anyway. If you properly use the tax laws you can avoid paying the majority of taxes as it is. All that is required is educating yourself some on how they work. There are plenty of books and forums and help out there to learn how to get around paying taxes perfectly legally. I am worried this is going to become a Michael Moore type video. Anyone interested in watching it, the whole thing can be found at Google Video. It is about 1 hour and 45 minutes long. I also don’t like what it is called… America: Freedom to Fascism. They do present a very good argument, but there is one flaw. How many millions of people would be out of jobs if income taxes suddenly went away?
Update: I actually e-mailed the director of this movie, Aaron Russo and he brought up a good point. My argument almost makes it sound like I mean to say that Americans pay income tax just to employ accountants. I didn’t mean that. If America is doing something wrong, then by all means fix it. But a sudden change would be bad. I am just trying to point out that such a sudden and significant change could cause more upheaval and problems than the potential benefits of that change is worth. In the richest country in the world with the richest people in the world, we have to be doing something right. Anyone can become wealthy in this country, it is just up to the person as to whether or not it would be worth the effort. I also want to thank Mr. Russo for e-mailing me back so swiftly.
I have seen a lot of controversy about MacHeist, MacAppADay and other free Mac software. Some people say it is great, while many others say it is really hurting the shareware community. Personally I think it is a great boon to the entire Mac community as a whole. That is based on my experience though. I had been planning on purchasing a Mac for about the past 6 months. Then when I learned about MacHeist and started participating it pushed me over the edge and I finally bought one. I can’t be the only person that was on the fence and ended up buying one because of all of these events. Yes, maybe the shareware developers weren’t getting as much money as they could, but I think it helped create a larger market for them in the long run.
I have used flickr for a while to host a couple of pictures, but I don’t really like how they want to have all of your pictures there and no where else. Zooomr seems different. They seem to want to make it easy to store your pictures there or take it anywhere you want. I hope to learn more about APIs soon so hopefully I can integrate more pictures into my blog soon. Here is a nice little picture of the AberrantMan hosted on Zooomr.
I will be in Seattle for the Seattle Sea Fair from August 1-6 if anyone want’s to hang out just send me an e-mail. Should be good times, though I will have to see how I handle that much concentrated Navy. I will take lots of pictures and post links to my Zooomr account.