Archive | November, 2007

WordPress Theme Design Contest

Nov/29 in Web Hosting

Lunarpages has just launched one heck of a cool contest that anybody can appreciate.

Lunarpages is having a WordPress Theme Contest!! All you need to do is design a unique WordPress Theme and upload it to our site for the chance to win! Just about anybody (with a few exceptions) can participate in the contest and the prizes are amazing!

What are the prizes?

First Prize is $1,000 cash and 5 years free hosting on our Basic Plan

Second Prize is 3 years free hosting + $300 cash

Third Prize is 1 year free hosting + $100 cash

Along with their logo design contest – things are really starting to get creative and fun over at Lunarpages. Oh yeah, might be worth mentioning they are one heck of a good web host too!

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Mitch Makes it into Ping! Zine

Nov/26 in Personal, Web Hosting

Ping! Zine’s newest edition is out in PDF (paperback should be coming to your mailbox in a few weeks) and you might be surprised to see who made it back into the magazine. This is my first time in a while to write up something for the magazine (mainly due to time issues) but starting next year one of my resolutions is to do my best to make more time for it.

Ping! Zine 5.6

One thing that never has gotten old yet is seeing my name in it. I really hope that doesn’t sound egotistical but I remember just being a fan of the publication and loving it – so actually being a part of the fun, it still gets me excited and hyped up. Continue Reading →

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Mitch’s New Powerhouse Pavilion Elite

Nov/23 in Personal

Mitch’s New PCI broke down and bought a new computer. After having my last PC for a good four or five years, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to lay down some cash on a new one.

Since I do all my work remote, it is something that I need to have to make an income – so why not spend a little extra? That was my internal argument before hitting the buy button for this beauty.

I ended up going with the HP Pavilion Elite and I am pretty darn happy. Of course, I had better be because the final price was a little over $2,000. Continue Reading →

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Vista, Quick Thoughts = Not That Bad!

Nov/21 in Desktop, Desktop Apps

Windows Vista, not that bad?For those of you watching my recent twittering, you probably noticed that I ordered myself a new PC. The one thing that made me really reluctant about moving from my old 3 or 4 year old previous Windows XP machine was Windows Vista. I have heard so many horror stories on the Web how could somebody not be scared?

After spending some time with it last night though I have to say it is not that bad. Sure, there is room for improvement – but think about any previous Windows version. It is never “right” when you pull it out of the box. It takes a lot of tweaking, love, tossing midgets at it and affection before you get it the way you want it to be. Continue Reading →

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Holiday Hosting Deals and Steals!

Nov/20 in Web Hosting

Every year about this time, web hosts roll out the red carpet to try to get the attention of those avid shoppers with cash burning a hole in their pockets. Courtesy of HostingHoopla.com I have some of the best hosting deals for you that have caught my eye thus far.

Host Color Offers Thanksgiving Deal
Web hosting provider Hostcolor.com announced on Friday it is offering through December 1 a special Thanksgiving promotion that offers a 20 percent discount on shared hosting plans.

Hostway Gives Away Business Makeover
Customers who purchase specific Hostway and ValueWeb products before December 14 will automatically be entered in the draw for $5000 (USD) worth of Hostway services.

Designers – Win a Xbox 360 or $400!
Lunarpages is holding a contest for our new t-shirt design, and you are all invited to submit your designs via our community forums.

AIT Offers Free iPod Nanos
Web hosting provider and domain registrar Advanced Internet Technologies, Inc. is offering free iPod nanos as part of its “Holiday Tunes Promotion”, the company announced recently.

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Mitch on the Social Web

Nov/19 in Online Apps, Personal

Here are the social tools I use thus far in the order that I use them (from least to most). I do my best to try everything, but these are some that I have actually signed up for and used.

Flickr – I really need to get back into photography, guess I can’t blame this one on Yahoo or Flickr. It is my fault I can’t find time to pick up the ol’ camera.

MyBlogLog – This used to be really active and exciting – well, until everybody wanted to be friends with everybody and I started getting messages from threatening strippers.

Pownce – * See MyBlogLog (really don’t even visit this much anymore)

LinkedIn – I am amazed I use Linkedin as much as I do. At first, it was just a kind of MySpace for “grown ups” but now it is a useful tool to get in contact with some of the movers and shakers in the hosting industry.

Twitter – I like to skim through Twitter a few times a day, and I do have to say even though I wasn’t a believer at first I really like this tool for a lot of reasons. I sipped the Kool-aid, and I like the taste.

Facebook – This is another one of those tools that I probably should spend more time playing with but I don’t. Login once a day, skim through the news feed – put I promise I’ll change, well perhaps.

MySpace – I hate MySpace to death, but since I know more people on it than anywhere else I am stuck with it. Kind of like the old girlfriend you know has done you wrong but you keep coming back because the other girls just don’t look at you the same way. Oh yeah, and the strippers on MySpace are friendlier.

Am I missing out on one? I like to get everything a shot – but with a dozen coming out daily it is hard to try them all. Maybe I should just start up a Ning! network for one of my projects and be done with it?

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Why Learning CSS is Good for You

Nov/16 in Web Development Tutorials

Everybody and their grandmother have at least seen one of those semi-anoying Apple “Why I switched” advertisements before. It usually shows some drab person standing in front of a pale background blabbering on about why PC’s sucked till they found the joy of Apple computers.Well, I recently switched, but it wasn’t from my trusty HP Pavilion to a Mac, oh no. I recently jumped into the world of Cascading Style Sheets, or better known as CSS.

Do not get me wrong, I have been working with HTML codding for the past five or six years. Doing each layout on each page manually, calling up the font colors sizes and text over and over again became tedious at best.

The bad thing about plain old HTML codding is that you end up with really large file sizes for your web pages. Larger file sizes lead to slower download times, which leads to unhappy visitors for your web site. Learning about CSS will help you reduce the clutter.

To start, lets define CSS. A Cascading Style Sheet is a string of data or code that sits internally or externally on your server that will tell your pages how to format certain parts of your website. Continue Reading →

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Why I Hate Hyphenated Domains

Nov/15 in Web Development Tutorials

There is a reason why you don’t see many hyphenated domain names out there today. Now why is that? Well there is everything from being hard to remember to just being ugly, you could pick and choose why they are a bad idea. The key thing to remember though is to stay away from them at all costs.

Think of ten of your favorite Web sites. Do any of them have hyphenated domain names? Nope.

The first reason is, is that hyphenated domain names are really hard for folks to remember. When picking a good domain name, you want to find something short, relevant, and with a few keywords. Now many Web 2.0 startups are breaking that rule left and right - but I think it is still a good rule to have.

For the rest of us, the previously mentioned rules are good ones to follow. You want people to be able to associate your domain name with your Web site quickly. hyphenated domain names just make things too difficult.

Where does the hyphen go?

Did it have one, or were you just thinking that it did?

If they the visitor types in the domain name without the hyphen, will they be taken to a competitor’s Web site? These are all things you should keep in mind. So next time you are out domain name hunting, do yourself a favor and stay away from getting a hyphenated domain name.

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Lunarpages T-Shirt Design Contest

Nov/14 in Web Hosting

The Lunarpages people have just announced a really cool contest.

Lunarpages is holding a contest for our new t-shirt design, and you are all invited to submit your designs via our community forums. Currently we have black t-shirts with a white design on the back and we would like something a bit snazzier.

Please post your entries on this forum thread as images or a link to your design, and on December 17th we will close out the contest and spend the following 11 days voting as a community on the best 5 entries.

What is the prize? The winning prize is a Xbox 360 or $400! Get more information about the contest over on the Lunarpages forums.

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Free Hosting for Facebook Developers?

Nov/14 in Web Hosting

Joyent

Need a good hosting gimmick? Well take free – and then take one of the hottest web sites out there and I think you have a good mix. The people at Joyent must have had that in mind when they decided they were going to give people working to make Facebook better.

In an article on Information Week’s web site this was said:

“Joyent is offering the “Accelerator,” as the company’s on-demand infrastructure subscription service is known, for Facebook developers in conjunction with Dell, which is supplying the server infrastructure for the program. The Dell servers run Open Solaris.”

Now I don’t think there is anything crooked here, Joyent is a great company run by great people. I think this is a real steal and deal for people working on Facebook applications and if they are looking for hosting they should stand up and take notice.

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