Thought Box

So, I’ve continued messing around with the blog because I love getting involved on mini-tech projects.  This time I installed about a dozen plugins and went to town making sure they work exactly how I want them to.  Most of them are “under the hood” type stuff, but there are a couple that you’ll notice and possibly take advantage of.

RosenBlog for Gamers
So, I don’t officially call my blog the RosenBlog, but I very well might in the near future…  The point, however, is that you can now view my blog in an optimized format on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable (PSP), or the Apple iPhone.  Each browser displays a tiny bit differently, and now I’m set to optimize for each of those browser configurations.

(Sorry, I don’t have screenshots…)

Greet Box
The Greet Box is kind of fun and new. Depending on how you get to the blog, you may find a semi-personalized message for you as you access a specific post. For Example, when coming from a Facebook.com link you might see the following:

These messages are pretty discreet and are easily closeable.  I think it’s kind of a fun way to encourage spreading the word…  This also works for those who come in from Digg, Reddit, or all by themselves (displays a recommendation to add an RSS feed).  Nothing too huge, but kind of fun.

Sociable
Sociable is a simple sharing tool that gives a reader quick access to the correct link in order to share a specific post with the rest of the world. You should see the following buttons beneath every post if you visit the actual post page (not just the main page with multiple posts listed).

Facebook Connect
Now my readers can post comments with their Facebook ID which does a couple different things… One, it makes them a “user” more or less that can have their comments tracked on the site (I think – pretty sure). The other is that it allows users to post directly to their Facebook Feed that they have visited my site and commented on one of the posts.

You’ll notice below (if you’re on the single post page, not the main feed homepage) that you now see the Facebook Connect button:

(Note that I hate the way it is currently formatted and I will be modifying it as soon as I can find the right code… The padding and the text above the button are hidden away in some .php file within the plugin, and I’m not finding it.)

Once logged in, you’ll see this fun addition to the corner of your browser window:

Once you’re logged in and setup you just jump down to the comments box, input your text and it will post your information while your credentials come from Facebook.

You’ll have the standard Facebook stuff pop up and ask you a couple questions (like if you want to post a note in your profile feed or not) and then your comment will be up for moderation. Nothing super amazingly spectacular, but I’m all about providing options to people, and I think this one is kind of cool.

Statpress
Ok, so this one isn’t one that the rest of you can see, but I think it’s cool enough to share… I installed Statpress to do some simple analytics work for me. Nothing super spectacular (though I can install a couple other plugins that would work in coordination with this one to provide a LOT of info), but I think it is pretty cool to get some basic information from my users in terms of how they got to the blog and what they’re checking out. I don’t get tons of traffic, nor do I care all that much, but I like to feed my curiosity every once in a while.

(click on the image to embiggen and actually see the text)

That’s about it! Just thought I’d share some things. Nothing huge to update in the personal life other than that I’m enjoying the summer and my friends. Definitely looking forward to Travis and Annie visiting (likely) around Thanksgiving, and I’m pumped for Tony’s wedding in September. Also, I turn OLD on July 6th… Weird…

The other day I was floating through some links on a friend’s blog and noticed my buddy Andy Wheatley’s website. The funny thing about that is that his page looks EXACTLY like mine. I actually thought I had hit the wrong link or perchance hit the “Back” button on my mouse, but nope! Check his page out here.

Anyway, I used this as an excuse to update the main page. I’m thinking of ways to modify it a bit more than I have, but I had about 15 minutes at work to play with something new, so this is what I went with:

click the image to enbiggen

Let me know what your thoughts are – I think I like the general “landing page” look to it. I’ll most likely change the image, but the guitar certainly works for the time being.

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Quick Update:

I’ve modified the look a little…. :-D

Click the Image to Enbiggen

Jason, Travis and I are looking at starting a company. We have a pretty sweet idea and we’ve got a lot of skills, but this whole starting a business thing isn’t an easy undertaking. More than anything, I’m intimidated as hell at the proposition of doing all of the stuff we’ve outlined as key steps to developing the business.

Basically, without giving a whole lot away, we’re trying to carve ourselves into an internet marketing niche that can serve a huge community with content that is interesting and fun while yet providing a great forum for coporations to get their propoganda to the masses.

This is something that I can definitely see as a success down the road, but the basic implementation needed to get us started and into everyone’s bookmarks is a little daunting to think about. Not only do we need to develop a great looking site, but there is some functionality that we’ll need implemented right away (such as a database and dynamic pages) that I’ve definitely never developed before or had to work with. Aside from that you have the constant issue of defining a revenue model, setting goals and acquiring enough content from corporate marketing departments to make your site sufficiently sticky. Needless to say, this is all incredibly new to me.

I’ll be searching through some internet documentation to see what I can find in regards to starting an internet only business. Hopefully I will find enough quality information specific to our online marketing idea to help smooth out some of the wrinkles I already see in our business plan that could potentially become problems. I mean, what’s the best way to develop something that needs a scalable infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, processing power, and storage? There are options like Amazon’s web services, but those can tend to be somewhat expensive – especially when you’re in beta!

Anyway, if anyone is seriously interested in joining our little team, let me know. The three of us would really like to dive through the first few steps in the development of our plan by ourselves, but I have a feeling we’ll need some quality web developers and the like once we get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be successful and can walk away with some serious money in the future, but I am sure it will be a great learning experience no matter what happens.