Tips For Planning A Website

Ben Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This is true in most aspects of life, but when it comes to design, it’s the one truth to rule them all. When designing a web page, if you don’t take the time to prepare first, your design will almost always come out faulty. To avoid a faulty design, grab a pencil and paper and do a few things before you begin typing in your HTML.

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Why I will wait to use my Google Voice Account

I have been one of the lucky few to be able to get a coveted Google Voice Account from Google. It is an amazing and powerful free thingamajiger for doing all sorts of stuff with phones.

I can use an app called gv dialer on my blackberry storm to seamless integrate my Google voice number to call from my phone. The one problem is that texting is not seamlessly integrated into my phone and I have to use the Google voice mobile website from my phone to text. Or get each of my contacts 409 numbers which if you don’t what what those numbers are thats a whole another story.

So untill Google Voice seamlessly integrates texting onto my phone, I will hold my account until then. But once they do I can not wait because it will be happily using my Google Voice account. Untill then lets hope Google Moves fast.

Scour

A New search engine. Well not really its a search engine that gives you results from Google, MSN and Yahoo all built into one. So why am I blogging about Scour? Scour claism they will pay you to search…..

Scour works on a point system, youget points for searching, voting and  commentign on search results. IF you acumulate 6,500 points then you can get a $25 visa gift card…. seems pretty good to me.

I am tetsign this out hopefully I can accumulate enough points to report and let you guys know if I get anything. Not really afraid to test this one because its not really wastign my time, because I search all the tiem anywho, and they have a plugin for firefox so I can always search. Hopefully Scour works out well!

Spiral Frog Free Unlimited Music

If you never have heard of Spiral Frog, it is a website for downloading free music from real famous artists. Before I go into any more details let me first say Spiral Frog is unfortunately incompatible with the two best operating systems, Linux and Mac……So if you do not have xp or the dreaded Vista then stop reading because you may become envious….

Back to Spiral Frog. Like I said its a website for downloading music. Its kind of like Itunes but you don’t have to pay….Well I won’t go that far to say its like Itunes because I should say before I give you all its pluses that there are some restrictions. It is free unlimited music with a catch.

There are a couple of catches actually but if you can deal with them, Spiral Frog will be the next best thing for you since sliced bread. I would say since Linux but hey Linux users cant use this…… Basically all the music downloaded from Spiral frog is paid for through advertising on the Spiral frog Website, so the Goal of Spiral Frog is to get you to visit there website as much as possible, them more traffic the more money they can pay to artists is the name of the game. So one way to get you to keep coming back is that you have to keep your membership active by “renewing” it. Basicaly two numbers are important to Spiral Frog users and those are 30 and 60. After 30 days of not renewing your membership you will not be aloud to download anymore music, and after 60 days your music that you have downloaded will no longer play. Basically to renew you have to go back and click a button it seem, so that snot all that bad. All you got to do is check a website about once a month for free music….I don’t know about you but I got no problem with that!

Another catch is that you can only download one song at a time, which isn’t to horrible, but the real pain is that if you are downloading multiple songs. You can not just make a list of songs for it to automatically download. After each song downloads you have to go back to the website and click, “Download Next Song”. This I guess is another attempt to keep you going back to their website.

Lastly Spiral Frog obviously doesn’t have every song ever created for you to download, which is a little disappointing…I have a pretty broad musical taste and it seems for me that its a coin flip weather they have a particular artist I want to download, so I take it as it comes.

I personally Do not have any major problems with the limitations on the music because you know what I doubt there will ever be a time where I am offline for 60 straight days…. Spiral frog I feel is going to becoem my new best freind, I am populating my computer with music as I type this,

Fav.or.it Planning Somethign Big?

I have been lucky enough to be one of the beta testers of Fav.or.it the rss reader whos video on youtube swept a storm through the internet:

I personaly thought it was a little more hyped up then it should be and ended up using my trusty Google Reader instead of Fav.or.it. But I think this is because Fav.or.it is more of a new portal from blogs then a personal feed reader.

Anywho if anyoen has tried gettign onto Fav.or.it the last week plus, then you may have noticed it has been down for an upgrade….. It says on the homepage:

Something BIG is coming….

Here at fav.or.it we love to create new and exciting things, and this time we have a whopper of a new feature for you

We will be back up with the new changes soon, in the meantime check out our blog for more interesting things.

I am going to guess they are coming out of closed beta when they come back, and maybe have some new features?

Predict November web 2.0 election style!

Predict November is a new website for predicting the outcome in November for the upcoming election. To make your own predictions on how weather the Democrats, Republicans, or Independents will win each state you simply go to your map and click states once to turn them red (Republican) twice to turn them blue (Democrat) and three times to turn them yellow (Independent). As you click each states the electoral results will be displayed above your map.

One of the nifty things about Predict November is that once you have created your your predictions on your map you can then, embed the map on your site or blog. Political blogs have been on the rise, and this is a great tool for political bloggers to use as the election comes closer and closer. For fun here is my map:

Here is an extra credit question for you blog readers. I will even through in an invite to a closed beta site if you get the answer right. Looking at my map, what would happen?

If you happen to have a lot of Political friends Predict November also has a Facebook application you can use to put your map on your Facebook page, and to see your friends predictions.

Not only can you make your own predictions and view and share your friends predictions for the elections but you can also see the results of past elections on maps too. For the political junky, these maps are very interesting to analyze and can also help you when creating your own map.

It looks like the upcoming election will be between Obama and McCain, who knows why Hilary is still there…Anywho Predict November is going to be a great asset for Political Blogger sin the upcoming months. To have a little fun, anyone who posts a a link to there predictions in November, and has the closest match to what actually happens in November will win some invites to closed beta website from me.

Lance Armstrong going Web 2.0?

It seems even the famed tour de France winner but more importantly cancer survivor Lance Armstong, is building his own web 2.0 website. The website is centered around health, fitness, and goal setting/tracking.

The website has a goal tracker, groups to talk and discuss in and even member Q and A’s. The article aslo has lots of great articles on, Getting Healthy, Being Active, Eating Well, Finding Balance in your life, and stayign young. Not only are there articles in each of those categories but there are also videos. The information in these articles and videos is very good info that I found extremely informative.

The website is currently in closed beta, but you can go to the homepage and request in when it opens here.

While were on the Lance Armstrong topic, check out Livestrong.org which is the Live strong cancer foundation for helping cancer patients.

Orgoo Email

Orgoo is another new web based email client. It has been in private beta for a long, time now. But I managed to finally get in! The first thing I liked about Orgoo is the pleasant color scheme although the Orgoo team say we will be able to customize it soon.

Orgoo also has a nice built in chat client which supports all the major chatting protocols. The chats open up in tabs above your email inbox. Not only can you chat with all your friends via the internet, but you can also send text messages with orgoo. Also orgoo has built in video chat, so it seems anyway you want to talk or chat Orgoo has it covered.

Lastly they seem to be implementing a calendar feature, the button is there just when I click it, it says coming soon.

Lastly I have an invite to give away, and I was thinking I would trade it for a flickr pro gift? And maybe some free advertising on this blog.

Anywho let me know in the comments if your interested.

Joomeo Online Photo Storage

Here is yet another online place to store your photos. Un-like flickr I would compare Joomeo to a advanced version of Iphoto but online. The Joomeo interface reminds me a lot of what Iphoto looks like on the mac.

Joomeo is free and lets you upload an unlimited amount of photos but up to 150 megabytes a month. I have and 8 mega pixel camera and I am surprised how many photos I have been able to upload with my free account to Joomeo.

Joomeo also offers subscription accounts. A 500mb per month cap for 16 euros a year, a 1 gigabyte for 30 euros a year, and finally an unlimited for 120 euros a year.

Now the neat thing abotu Joomeo is it also allows you to upload movies to! Joomeo seems to be more centered around a place for you to store and organize photos and to share with your contacts. It is not as social as Flickr would be.

I may have to try and get used to this since I can;t seem to get myself a flickr pro account. I think flickr is better for my own needs…

Zenbe Quick Move

I just found something I never noticed before in Zenbe. Instead of clicking the check box on an email and clicking the buttons at the top,to mark as spam, archive, or delete there is another way to do this.

If you click the check box then go to the left bar where you would click on spam, archives, or deleted to go to those sections, hidden buttons pop up! When you hover over those icons with an email checked another button appears next to each of those and If you click them it will either, mark it as spam, archive it or delete it. Depending on which one you choose. I created  a quick video to show it to you all: