Lately I have been running into a giant brick wall when trying to write blogs. It has been terrible! I planned to blog at least once per day and that has become more of an impossible task than I imagined. Of course I could just login and post bleh bleh bleh, but thats not what I want to do.

I want to post something people WANT to read! I’m usually pretty good at getting past those kind of road blocks but it’s been a task that has really challenged me.

Today, I gave in to the nature within myself and got my lazy rear-end out of my apt. and visited the outside world just as I should have done long before now.

Here is a good read about 7 keys to invigorate body, mind and soul, plus here are some of my tips to get the Tiger within yourself fired up and roaring once again!

1. Break up the mundane. Part of the problem is turning things into “I have to“. Once you do that you try to force yourself to sit down and get something cranked out. That doesn’t work for me. I want to have soul in what I offer to my visitors. A little piece of myself so to speak.

So don’t let yourself get to that point. Go outside and do something out of the norm. Run down the street yelling “I’m invincible!” or “I love my wife/girlfriend!”. Find some new music (pandora.com). Go workout or go for a brisk jog in the early morning hours. Visit the beach (Sven’s World). Just get out of your box and invigorate the Tiger within! Rawr!

2. Get fresh! When you’re trying to blog every day you can run out of things to blog about pretty quick. What I tend to do when that happens is stumble around the internet until I get inspired by something.

What I failed to see is that I just had no drive to have an opinion about the things of the world. Inspire yourself to speak what’s in your mind, not spew a rewritten post of something that’s already on the internet. Get your passion and fresh-ness back!

How do you do that? Sleep in late Saturday (or your day off) if you need rest. Forcing yourself to work while tired isn’t going to help you at all. Once you’re rested, go treat yourself to something special. For me, that’s going outside and getting some fresh air and a good workout, maybe a movie.

Maybe even take a day off work and spend the day how you really want to. Don’t just go hide in your hibernation cave at home. Check out Fun Things to Do

3. Introduce a new passion into your life. Seriously, this is amazing! You know what makes you happy (well maybe not but try this), but do you know what you’re missing in life? A LOT! Go try new food, meet new people, compliment a girl you like (assuming you’re single), take your girlfriend/wife somewhere extra unordinary. You never know what you’ll find!

4. Share with the world. I think this is a big one because it’s exciting to share a part of you with the rest of the world. Take a camera with you and if you don’t have one go buy a disposable. Take pictures of your adventures, yourself, friends and things that make you happy or that are interesting.

Tell your story and enjoy what others have to say about you! Don’t worry, most people are nice and the ones that aren’t will get it back sooner or later. If you have a way to take a video of your adventure, share that. People love videos!

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I guess what this comes down to is get away from the computer, the cubicle, the office, your house/apt and experience what the rest of the world has to offer! You’ll freshen your mind, body and soul!

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One thing that drives me crazy is the way so many of the blogs I come across on a daily basis are designed. I’m not a design or usability expert but I am an internet user, who happens to use A LOT (sounds like I have an internet addiction problem ).

Do your research people, find out what makes a good website actually good! That brings me to….

10 Principals of Effective Web Design

Smashing Magazine had a really nice post on effective web design (link above) that bloggers should really thoroughly check out before designing a website/blog to make sure they’re doing things right. I disagree with a few things there but I won’t argue with them.

Here are a few things that I try to keep in mind while doing my work:

1. Visitors scan pages, they don’t really read them through. That would just be a giant waste of time since they are usually there for something specific. How do visitors scan pages? By anchor points throughout the page. Anchor points either draw their eyes there or is relevant to what they are searching for.

That means blogs/websites need to guide visitors’ eyes through the page. It drives me crazy when I see pages that have no flow or direction.

2. Presentable eye flow (from the anchor points) gives websites or blogs a comfortable and easy feel to the page as well as making navigation and browsing easier. Good eye flow goes along with the way we read. From left to right, then down a little farther in the page, left to right again and so on. What that results in is “Z” eye flow.

It’s a good idea to setup your site to use a “Z” eye flow but if you don’t, at least guide your visitor’s eyes to where you want them to go. The easier it is for your visitors to browse your page, the longer the will likely stay.

3. Give your visitors a reason to stay, and do it fast. If you don’t give your visitor’s a reason to stay at your site pretty much right off the bat, they will leave pretty much right off the bat. I can’t even begin to count the number of websites I have seen that the article or permanent information was just spewn on the page. I only stayed long enough to see the site wasn’t going to help me accomplish my goal (maybe 5 seconds).

4. Make what you have to offer easy to use. If the majority of your site isn’t easy to use, visitors aren’t going to stay. They are going to go find a website that is easy. Blogs don’t have to work about that too much but if it’s hard for people (in any way) to subscribe to your rss, you’re loosing out on readers.

5. Make your posts easy to read. So many blogs just have a title and text….lots of text. That makes me feel like my eyes are going to explode.

Why would I read that? Break up the monotony by using bold or italics, images, smilies, etc. Bolding and italicizing important words, phrases or sentences will help visitors find what they’re looking for faster.

Keep your paragraphs shorter. Even the one above is a little long but because it’s broken up a little with different styling, it’s acceptable. Big blocks of text will be skipped right over. If the important information was there, then you just failed your visitors.

There is a lot of information on the internet on design and usability for websites, so don’t just throw something up and hope everyone is going to flock to your website to read it. I would really love to see some of the blogs I stumble across revamp their sites. I bet they would gain and retain more visitors.

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A recent comment moved me to help out a fellow blogger. He’s a young gun and has a lot to learn but with the right motivation and dedication, who knows, he could really go somewhere.

FailureBlogger, I didn’t see a way to contact you on your blog so if you’re reading this, use the Contact page and get ahold of me. There are two things I would like to offer you.

First off, if you want to develop a successful blog you’ll need to develop your branding. You’ve got a start with “FailureBlogger” but I just don’t think having your blog hosted on blogger.com will make the cut. You need your own domain name! What better domain than www.failureblogger.com

Secondly, if you’re going to have a custom domain for your blog you’ll need to have it hosted somewhere. Luckily I can host it for you!

So here’s the deal. I have registered failureblogger.com and once it is active I will setup an account for you on my server. I will setup WordPress (since that’s really the best way to go) and work with you on getting a good theme up and running.

Ah, ah, ah!! Not so fast Mr. My requirements are as follows. You have to try your darndest! I think you have great potential, but trying to make money from blogging is no easy task. It will take hard work, persistence, dedication and lots of learning.

Thanks for the comment FailureBlogger!

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By day I work as a graphic designer. By night I work as a nerd, blogger, web developer and movie enthusiast. Every now and then I’m asked what software people should use to mess around with their photos.

Of course, being a graphic designer, I choose Photoshop. Unfortunately for those people, Photoshop is generally out of their league. They are looking for something that is setup for basic image editing/adjustments.

The next question that follows is, “How do I get it?”. This one always cracks me up because if you don’t even know how to get Photoshop, you’re surely not going to know what to do with it.

ENTER web based image editing! With today’s modern web applications, there are some sweet web apps available online built to do exactly what the majority of these people want. They’re built with all these social networking, blogging, online photo album technologies (which is ever so popular these days) as well as the abilities to make simple photo edits and adjustments.

The most recent addition to this group is Adobe Photoshop Express (beta). It’s available for free, boasts 2 gigabytes of photo storage, easily allows you to share your photos with the world and offers a handful of features for simple/quick image touch-ups. This one has my pick.

Then there’s FotoFlexer. Some say FotoFlexer is the next best thing to Photoshop Express but I personally like Photoshop Express much more. FotoFlexer offers lots of nice filters and tools for your photo touchup needs but doesn’t quite fit the shoes of Photoshop Express.

Then we have Picnik. As with the other two photo editors, this offers a nice variety of tools to make the edits and adjustments you’re looking for (for beginners). It’s free just like the other two but has a Premium option for $24.95 per year.

Just as I’m writing this blog I ran across Flauntr.com which has tons of predefined templates and effects you can apply to your photos. Not quite the Photoshop abilities you might be looking for but certainly something you might enjoy.

All 4 of these web applications have 3 things in common. They’re all free, make photo editing easy for anyone and involve the social networking world to share yourself with all your friends (and even strangers ).

Plus, if you’re a blogger and happen to be away from your regular computer, these web apps could just save your hind end when you need to make some quick edits and don’t have the real Photoshop around.

Overall, I’d have to say nothing online could ever replace my precious Photoshop CS3. This is a big sign that as web applications become more advanced and more capable and it’s very possible desktop applications like Photoshop begin merging and even being overtaken by web applications. It’s just a matter of time. Know of any other cool online photo web applications? Post a comment and share with the rest of us!

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I’m a little brain dead right now so I’m stumbling around the internet and I ran across a list of 11 places to get a cartoon character of yourself.

I happened to find a cool character on stockxpert.com that resembled myself (as seen in the header) but there are lots of different cartoon styles. I’ve had a few people ask where I got the picture (people that know me) but it really was a stroke of luck type thing.

One of the sites on the list was CartoonMe.com which I liked more than the others on the list but it costs a few bucks to have it done….thats because someone is drawing the character from an image of you!

I think thats pretty cool because all those automated web apps that you use to design the cartoon of yourself kinda suck. Well, when you’re looking for a cartoon closer to what you really look like.  :smile:

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If you’re new to WordPress and you’ve just setup a fresh WordPress install, you might be wondering if you should do anything else. The answer is yes. WordPress is an amazing piece of software but without plugins and other changes in settings, it’s not quite all there.

So, first thing’s first. Here are 5 things I would do right after getting WordPress installed.

1. Change the default theme (you can find tons at themes.wordpress.net and how to use/install them here)
2. Change the default permalink structure to something like “Date and name based”
3. Setup WordPress with a statistics tracker like Google Analytics - Use a plugin or install the code yourself by putting the block of code provided by Google Analytics into your footer.php file.
   
4. Make sure you have a good setup for your feeds (I use FeedBurner - Plugin provided below)
5. Make sure your ping settings are setup right (I use PingShot with FeedBurner)

Ok, so you have WordPress installed and the basics configured. You might want to add a few plugins to WordPress for added functionality. Here are the plugins I use and would recommend:

• Akismet Comment Spam Blocker - Pre-installed, just activate. (Some prefer other plugins instead of Akismet but it works for me and newbies)
• Install FeedBurner FeedSmith to redirect/manage all your feeds at FeedBurner
  
• Setup Google XML Sitemaps
• I use the All in One SEO Pack but it’s probably not a really important one if you aren’t concerned about traffic.
• Setup a way for people to share your blog posts with others. I use AddThis.com but will probably be switching to ShareThis.com which includes an option in the button to email as a way of sharing.

These are additional plugins I use but aren’t necessary unless you need them or want them on your blog.

• CformsII - Makes it easy to add a way for people to contact you through your blog.
• Commentluv - I especially like this one because I like it when other people have it on blogs I comment on. It adds a link to the last blog post the commenter had in their comment.
• Subscribe to comments - keeps you informed of comments posted after yours.
  
• WP AJAX Edit Comments - makes it quick and easy to edit comments should that ever be necessary.
• WP Grins - Now this one I love! It adds the little smiley faces to your blog which I think are great.
• WP Super Cache - this one will save you lots of bandwidth and help pages load faster.
• XHTML Video Embed - this makes it easy to embed videos into your blog.

Thats all the plugins i’m using right now but I have a few other in mind that I might be adding soon. If you’re new to WordPress these plugins can really help bring some added functionality to your blog but beware, they can also slow things down a bit if you are using far too many!

It’s a good idea to get all the little bits of your blog setup and configured before you start posting away. It could save you from having to do much more work in the future and you’ll have a better functioning website/blog.

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