Just a quick video updating you all on everything that has been going on the past few weeks. There is lots about Webmaster Jam Session 2008.

After a long search, I have found the perfect external hard drive for a laptop only owner. With that being said, I would like to introduce you to the Newer Technology Mini Stack v3 External hard drive. This little external hard drive offers plenty of additional features beyond just being an external hard drive.

Specifications

Hard Drive: 750GB Bootable, 7200 RPM, 32MB Cache
Dimensions: 6.5″ x 6.5″ x 1.5″
Bridge Chipset: Oxford OXUF924DSb
Interface Ports: 1 x eSATA, 2 x Firewire 800, 1 x Firewire 400, 3 x USB 2.0/1.0

Thoughts

The Mini Stack v3 is an external hard drive with a built in powered USB/Firewire hub. It offers 3 USB 2.0/1.0, 1 Firewire 400, 2 Firewire 800, and 1 eSATA ports. I searched on google for over a week looking for a external hard drive solution that has a built in powered hub. When I stumbled upon this bad boy, I was so happy to see that not only did it have a USB hub built in, but it also had firewire and eSATA ports built in.

I just ordered a new external hard drive from an online store. My order shipped out with a UPS tracking number. When I received the email with the tracking number I went straight to UPS.com to see what the expected delivery date was. The item shipped on Thursday and was expected to arrive Monday. This was what I was expecting as a decent shipping time. Well, Friday afternoon I decided to check it again, and to my surprise, it was already at my UPS sorting center (DORAVILLE, GA) here in Atlanta, GA. I was thinking great, if it is there Friday, I will be out for delivery on Saturday, a few days earlier then expected.

Well, Saturday came, and no package so I decided to check the tracking again. What is this, it was sent to another sorting facility (ATLANTA, GA). This surprised me because most of my packages are delivered out of the Doraville sorting center which is closer to my house then the Atlanta one. I thought this was strange, but I was not to worried, I figured it would be delivered out of the Atlanta facility, no big deal.

I know UPS doesn’t deliver on Sundays, so I was like “oh well, it will be here Monday as schedules.” Well, I checked the tracking on Sunday when I was bored, and “WHAT THE F**K???” the package was shipped back to the sorting facility it had already been to (DORAVILLE, GA).

Was UPS delaying my shipment because I didn’t pay extra for the 2 day shipping? It took exactly 24 hours for my package to go from Illinois to Doraville, GA, but it took 4 days for my package to make it from Doraville, GA to my house in Atlanta, GA which is only 10 miles away? That is really strange!

I am guessing UPS is just to quick for themselves, so they intentionally delay packages that arrive early, to convinse people to purchase the quicker shipping next time they use UPS.

Has anyone ever had this happen?

Christina Warren of The Unofficial Apple Web log is reporting that she received an anonymous email from an Apple reseller who says they received a request from Apple to remove all Apple TV displays.

We just got an e-mail from an anonymous Apple reseller, stating that they received an e-mail from Apple with instructions to remove all Apple TV displays and literature and to destroy them (which I assume means throw away the literature, send back the Apple TVs) by September 30, 2008 at 5 PM. Additionally, the e-mail says that there will be a webcast “kick off” on September 30.

~ TUAW

This is exciting news, many people have been waiting for an update to the Mac Mini, and it is rumored that this update, could bring a hybrid version of the Apple TV and the Mac Mini. The anonymous email flags September 30th, 2008 as the possible date for the update, and that just happens to fall on a Tuesday which is the day of the week Apple always does updates.

Is this “The Brick” everyone has been rumoring about for a few weeks?

It was just announced that Digg.com has generated an additional $28.7 Million in VC funding. Digg is saying that this funding is going to be used for a large expansion plan over the next few months. Rumor is that Digg plans to almost double its staff to 150 as well as move to a bigger and better space in San Fransisco. I do believe this is all true, but what I am wondering is why?

The expansion represents the largest initiative in the company’s history and will include:

• Hiring the staff needed to accelerate Digg product and feature rollouts, including more ways to consume the over 16,000 stories and other content submitted to Digg everyday, deeper category and topic content views, and additional ways to discover and customize content;
• More than doubling the Digg staff within the next 12 months – from 75 today to over 150 by December 2009;
• Kicking off Digg’s international growth strategy and plans to expand Digg into other languages;
• Moving to a new larger corporate headquarters in San Francisco in early 2009 that more than triples the existing Digg headquarters space;
• Investing in brand and market development programs;
• Investing in publisher analytics and more sophisticated tools for publishers;

~ Yahoo News: Digg Announces Significant Expansion Plans Fueled by $28.7 Million Series C Round of Funding

In an attempt to better establish myself as a professional blogger and web developer and not just another kid attempting to get rich quick online, I decided to design some business cards for myself. In a few weeks I will be attending the Webmaster Jam Session 2008, so I wanted to make sure I had something in print that I can use for networking at the event.

So, I did some research on the subject and came across a post on my friend Paul Stamatiou’s blog, and took his advice. I looked into a few options of where to have the cards printed. The 2 places I narrowed it down to was Moo.com and OvernightPrints.com. After looking at the 2 different sites in detail, I decided to go with Overnight Prints because it was cheaper, and provided quicker turn around.

I used a template I found floating around the net as the template for my design. When having something printed off site, it is important that you follow a template to make sure your design bleeds well, and your logo or content don’t get cut off.

Overnight Prints PSD

I uploaded the design as a high quality JPG to the Overnight Prints website, picked my glossy or matte finsh, approved my final design, and submitted my order. The next day I recieved a email from quality control at Overnight Prints saying that there was a misprint found in my design. What had happend is the image didn’t upload correctly and it resulted in one sides of my card was printing blank. They quickly haulted the printing, and notified me. At that time, I reuploaded my design and the continued witht he printing at no additional charge to me.

I am very happy with the prints, but I opted for a glossy front and matte black, after seeing the glossy finish in person, I am thinking my next order I will get matte on both sides. The glossy was to shiny, and showed finger prints.

What are your thoughts? Do you like my design? Do you have your own self designed business cards?

Over the years, I have blogged, designed, and developed for many websites, and I have developed a very good knowledge of marketing on the internet. Being a blogger myself, I know how hard it is for present day bloggers to get noticed in the overly populated blogging industry of 2008.

On that note, I would like to present my methods of marketing a blog in 2008. There are hundreds of ways to market a blog these days and I am going to address a few of my favorites.

Create a Brand

Darren(link) of ProBlogger(link) recently posted an article and video about this topic. In his video he discussed how important it is to present yourself and you blog in a consistent way. Many bloggers these days think design is everything, and redesign every few months trying to keep their site new and fresh, while this can help, I feel it hurts more.

Your blog needs to be a brand, that is consistent with its topics, design, and marketing. I am currently in the process of developing a brand for this site. I have recently ordered business cards with the same logo and color scheme as the site, when it comes time to change the design of the site, I will not flip the design overnight, I will take small steps and transition my readers into the new design. Having a solid brand will help people to associate your content with a reliable source which will lead to more return viewers and increase viewership.

Technorati

Technorati.com is an excellent source for new blogs trying to break into the mainstream. A large amount of my sites traffic comes from Technorati, and its directory services. One of the first things any blogger should do when marketing a new blog is to claim it on Technorati and fill out the blogs profile completely with keyword rich descriptions, and associate it with a lot of different but targeted tags. Technorati is a great way to spread the word on your new blog, and it is totally free and mostly automated once you complete the sites setup.

Digg

Digg.com can be an amazing source for new bloggers, Digg can bring hundreds of thousands of hits to your site in a matter of a day if you have “great content.” While most bloggers already know about Digg and utilize it, many of them make the mistake of spamming Digg which will do nothing but hurt you when you really have an article that is front-page worthy. Don’t post every story on your blog to Digg, post the ones that you feel people will really enjoy reading. If your story is Digg worthy, let your readers Digg it and submit it, don’t force it on them. Submitting a story to Digg then shouting it out to your thousands of Digg friends will not get you on the front-page. Put a dig button at the bottom of your post and let your readers determine if it is Digg worthy.

Well, as I am writing this post I am in the process of doing  Time Machine restore. When I originally bought my Macbook Pro, I setup time machine purely because I had an extra 500GB external hard drive laying round, and I wanted to be able to brag to people about how cool time machine looks when you use it. Well, I have had my Macbook Pro for over 4 months now, and today is the 3rd time Time Machine has saved my ass!

I was at work earlier today running software updates on OS X when my machine asked me if i wanted to restart after it installed an update, and with out thinking, I clicked OK. When my machine came back up it occurred to me that I had my Windows XP Pro VMware Fusion partition running, and had not properly suspended it or shut it down. I quickly opened up VMware Fusion to see if it was still OK. Well it wasn’t, I found that it was frozen on the loading screen when trying to load up the Windows XP Pro install from where it left off. So yea, at this point I am worried.

I use Windows XP Pro on VMware Fusion as my primary work computer so when this would not load, I freaked. I had a 50GB partition of my hard drive filled with important work stuff and it would not load.

With in a few minutes I realized I had a Time Machine backup of that data on my home external backup drive. I opened up Time Machine, browsed to the Virtual Machines folder and clicked restore from my update last night. What a relief!!

Time Machine is probably the most unused program that comes on a Mac, but I would recommend you run it in the background all the time. When you happen to need it, it is great! Now if I could just get 50GB of data to restore in less than 1 hour I might actually get some work done today!

As promised, Apple has released the iPhone 2.1 firmware update this Friday. Installation took about 20 minutes including a slow download period probably associated with the high number of people trying to download the update.

List of Fixes

- decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
- significantly improve battery life for most users
- dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
- improve email reliability, notable fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
- faster installation of 3rd party applications
- fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
- improved performance of text messaging
- faster loading and searching of contacts
- improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
- repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
- option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
- Genius playlist creation

First Thoughts

The first thing I noticed is the major improvement in over all speed. When scrolling the different home screens, and the contacts list, lag is virtually gone. The backing up process that use to take upwards of 30 to 45 minutes is down to about 5 or 10 minutes.

I will start by saying that I am a huge supporter of Pandora. When I heard about this Pandora like service being built into iTunes, I am stoked because Pandora is looking like it might go out of business. I was very hopeful that iTunes 8 would fill the void in my life that is going to be created when/if Pandora disappears.

I have been playing with iTunes 8 and the new Genius functionality, and I am not very impressed. I like the new viewing options available in iTunes 8, and the new visualizations are stunning, but iTunes Genius is a different story.

iTunes Genius goes through and analyzes your music collection when you first install iTunes 8. From there, it allows you to click the Genius button when you select a song, and it will auto create a playlist filling with a preset number of songs that iTunes believe are along the same style of music. Well, it doesn’t work. I am going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, that this service will improve once more people experiment with it, but for now, it is no good. Let me give you and example:

As you can see I created a iTunes Genius playlist based on the song I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry, and what is this, Disturbed showed up in the results? Those songs could not be more opposite.

What are your thoughts on iTunes 8 and the new Genius integration? Have you had any strange results appear when using the Genius playlist creator?