Welcome to Smuggle Me

I wrote about what I did for my Last Minute Valentine’s Gift for my wife over on Spoil On. I thought it was pretty creative and I’m pretty sure when she sees it tomorrow she’s going to be very happy. Hopefully it will help her relax and have a great Valentine’s Day. We decided to not do much else, but on Friday we’re going to the temple and we’re going to get tickets to go to Phantom of the Opera also. So, it should be a nice little Valentine’s day.

Now that my gift is done I’m going to go eat something for dinner.

So, you don’t know how to market your blog or you’re not sure what to do to drive traffic to your blog. Well, don’t say I didn’t point you in the right direction. I haven’t looked at too many details of this list, but just looking at the volume and the categorization I’m sure there’s a lot of information in it that could be used. In fact, probably too much. The key will be to take this list and find things that match your interests, blog and skills well.

I’ve always had an interest in streaming video. Probably because I’m too cheap to pay for it myself. That’s why I found the news that CBS will be streaming All the NCAA tournament games online for free to be great news.

I’m pretty sure it will all be easily available from the CBS website. I’ll be looking forward to this. TVU Player worked well for streaming the NCAA tournament last year, but unlimited access to games will be so much better. In fact, now that I think about it, CBS streamed the games last year, but they had some filters applied depending on where you lived. This year should be much better.

Some may consider the idea of widgets on your tv crazy, but I would absolutely love this. Considering the way TV sizes are growing there’s no reason part of the TV couldn’t be widgets pulling from the internet. I know I’m often found holding my laptopAsus eee while watching TV or running into the other room during commercials to do something on the internet.

The top of my list of things that I’d like on my TV is:
Email Updates (You’ve got mail!!)
Twitter Updates
Google Adsense or other stat reports

Heck, while we’re at it, might as well build in a nice RSS feed reader for me so that I never have to get off the couch. Who needs the Amazon Kindle when I could just read the RSS feeds on my TV?

Today I decided to do my first official install of bbPress. I’ve worked with it on Greedy or Needy and a few other places, but the is the first install that I’ll be using in production. I’m planning to use it to support my first attempt at a simplified version of my marketing mob idea. Should be interesting to see how it works out. I debated whether to use a forum like bbPress or a wiki and I decided to try the forum first.

I also have an ulterior motive in that I’ll use this experience setting up bbPress to make sure that I’m well versed in it before installing it for the website Crowdsource This. Should be a pretty cool site that you should all check out once it’s up and running.

Now that I have the base bbPress forum installed, I’m going to have to start looking through all the various themes and plugins and see if any of them are must have items. I don’t really want to develop my own theme and so I’m pretty sure I’ll just use one of the ones listed on bbPress Themes or bbPress Showcase. In the end, I don’t care as much about look for this one as I do function. So, the theme might actually be easier to decide than the list of bbPress plugins.

Either way, I find this pretty exciting and interesting stuff. bbPress has been almost exactly the same install as Wordpress and so it’s been a walk in the park so far. I’ll have to see how the integration with Wordpress works. It looks like there’s a few options. I’ll have to decide which one is best.

Also, if anyone reading this is interested in participating in this round of the marketing mob, let me know and I’ll fill you in on how it’s going to work.

I must admit that over the past couple days I’d read references to Redeye VC’s post about Microsoft and Yahoo employees leaving. I thought it was an interesting experiment, but like he said it wasn’t scientific at all. It definitely classified solely as the interesting test and nothing more.

Well, it turns out that the experiment turned out to be very useful, but not for its intended purpose. Instead, it teaches a cruel lesson about how various online endeavors in this connected web 2.0 world can go terribly wrong. Take a look at the unintended consequences of what happened.

We’ll have to all keep our eyes open for times when unintended consequences affect someone else on the web. It’s a feature of a connected world and there’s really no turning back in many cases. All we can do is be open and honest about what happened and then move forward.

I just went to log into Google Adsense since I’m an addict and I like to know exactly how much money I’m making. I like to follow trends and I love stats. Ok, so that’s beside the point.

The point is that when I logged into Google Adsense, it prompted me that they were going to start using Google Accounts to access Google Adsense. Then, it proceeded to let me change my Google Adsense login (which was one email address) and change it to my google account (which was another email address). Halalula, Praise the Lord!!

Now if they can just do this for my Google Analytics, Google Webmaster, Google Groups and Google Docs accounts I’ll be happy. Yes, in some of those cases Google will need to provide me with a tool to transfer the info from one Google Account to another. Please do Google. One account is enough. Plus, promise to continue using Google Accounts for all your new products and I won’t have any more problems. I’m tired of logging out of one Google Account and into the other.

While you’re at it, how about you make it easy for my wife and I to switch between Google Accounts too. I hate when she logs in and I have to just log her out. That’s all!

UPDATE: This post was completely tongue and cheek about someone who is non-technical and shouldn’t know how to do these technical things. See my comments below for further explanation on my intentions with the post.

My friend from Cambrian House decided to step into the blogging world with his blog Web Fugitive. I think he’ll actually be a really good blogger with his knowledge and writing skill. I guess time will tell.

However, his tech skills and implementation of Wordpress sucks. Sorry Web Fugitive, but there’s a reason you shouldn’t expose yourself. I’d be embarrassed to admit who I was if I’d committed so many mistakes. Here’s a few helpful hints to get you started.

1. Turn on permalinks. If you don’t know what that is, then find out. It’s easy and Google likes permalinks. Don’t be lame and link to a page with ?p=12
2. Turn comments on on all of your posts. I was about to comment on a post and comments was turned off. How lame is that. Well, I guess maybe it was a good strategy, because it motivated me to blog about you. Otherwise, I think it sucks. I bet it was just an accident, but fix it already. Comments are what makes blogs interesting.
3. Get rid of the “Uncategorized” category. Choose a topic like Web 2.0 which will encompass all your posts and then make it the default. Uncategorized just makes you look lazy and uneducated in the art of blogging. Not to mention good categorizing is liked by Google bots too.
4. I already told you this so do it already. That lame hostmonster favicon not only makes you look lame for using hostmonster, but it shows you don’t care about your website.
5. I can’t tell this for sure, but I bet you don’t even have the Wordpress stats plugin turned on and maybe not even akismet. I’d even settle for Google Analytics, but I’m confident you don’t have that. Get some stats already.

Ok, I will give you one prop. At least you have the latest version of Wordpress installed. Of course, you don’t have to listen to anything I say, but I’m sure you will since you know better than to not listen.

Welcome to blogging. It’s addicting!!

Today Digg had an article about the Asus eee. I don’t agree with everything that’s said, but overall he sums up the asus eee experience quite well. I love the little machine. I couldn’t use it the other day and so I pulled out my laptop. That’s when I realized how wonderful the little asus eee is. It’s so small, lightweight and effective. Very few things I haven’t been able to do with it. The next version will be even better, but I’m very happy with my Christmas gift.

I’ve been working for a while on a Facebook application that I think will be pretty neat. Today I came across Widgetbox and their DevShare program. An interesting idea on creating facebook apps without all the hassle. I guess the question just remains whether they have the feature set needed to create some of the advanced ideas I have for my facebook application. I think I’ll continue on with my app since it’s almost done, but I must admit that it’s very tempting to try to do it with Widgetbox. If only I had the time to play with it and see how it went.