limcid

I've had a rather high-traffic blog on Blogger for about 7 years with no real technical problems. However, I've worked on the admin side of a Wordpress site and I really like how things work much better with a Wordpress site. The next site I do will be using Wordpress (on my own domain). Using your own domain is important, I think. I never liked the idea of being within the Blogger domain. I prefer a standard dot com site, using the Wordpress software as the back-end of the site. Blogger is great for your first website experience, though.

You know, this is a great idea, to get the ball rolling on certain projects. I can't afford to get paid hosting right now, so your idea of using free hosting just to have a place to get the site built and for testing, etc. seems like a reasonable option. You can also setup an offline server on your own computer using something like wampserver. I've done this before while building and testing a forum site, but I kind of like the idea of using a free hosting service just as well.

StumbleUpon is a very good source if your niche happens to match some of their content. The key benefit of StumbleUpon is that their sites are listed based on user feedback and ratings so the content tends to be especially relevant and of high quality. You rarely find junk in a StumbleUpon search result. I would imagine backlinking to anything that's ranking in their search engine would be beneficial. It would also be a very good resource to submit your own site to get it listed and ranked.

I'm always annoyed by any kind of autoplay video, whether it's an ad or actual relevant page content. It slows down the page loading, and I don't get a chance to settle into the page and get my bearings before I start hearing and seeing things in a video that I may not want to watch. It's just very rude and inconsiderate. TV news websites are famous for this. They think the internet is television and they assume you want to see a video playing. Some sites will even have video content on autoplay, along with a video ad in the sidebar that autoplays in competition with the main video. LOL. And finally, in addition to the problem video autoplays is HD video crammed into a small video space. So you end up trying to load a very bloated video into a small space where you can't even see the details of the HD video. What's the point? Again, TV news sites are famous for this because they don't reformat their video content for the web. Yuck.

I'm a recent convert to Linux, coming from WinXP. I really love it. I had tried Ubuntu in the past but just wasn't driven to take the plunge. Since XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, I felt the need to be on a more stable platform so I decided that now was the time to switch. It hasn't be painful at all. In fact, it's been a treat and I'm not disappointed at all. I just did a bit of a temporary install, but I've using it for the past seven months now, LOL. I've only popped into XP a handul of times since the switch. I'm sold. My next plan is to use a 350GB hard drive as my Linux drive. Right now, I'm just using a 40GB partition on the XP drive. So, I'll be doing a proper install soon with a setup that will allow me to experiment with different versions without disturbing my data files. I'll keep XP for any software compatibility issues and software dev/testing, though.

This is a nice tool for quick title designs. I think that tools like this are great for minor logo or title designs. I would use it for article titles or other secondary things that I may want to be more than just a plain font. I wouldn't use it for a brand logo or anything more permanent because of the lack of customization features. It's a great tool to have in the toolbelt, though. Thanks for sharing!

I like both video services for different reasons. I like Youtube the most because it has an incredible variety of content that simply can't be beat. I like Vimeo because its content is more "professional" in presentation and a lot of it is independent artist and developer content, and educational content as well. I think it's because they have a very different set of criteria for the type of content they allow on their site.

I'm not new to programming, but my skills are a bit dated. I've got some significant programs developed in VB6 (way beyond drag/drop controls) that I would like to finally finish and graduate them into the 21st century. But, I want them to be functional across as many platforms as possible, including on the web. Which programming language should I focus on learning? My guess is that it's going to be java-something, but I'm not sure. I don't have time to learn anything C-ish. I need pixel-level control of graphics and printing for high-res musical notation, as well as midi playback ability. Any suggestions? Thanks!