Some different blogging platforms:

If you want to set up your own on your own server or server space that you lease (hosting account):

• Wordpress
  This is my personal favorite (and what this blog is running on). Very easy to install and customize. Take about 5 minute go from no blog to blogging. A very large support community with tons of plugins and themes. Requires PHP and MySQL.
• Serendipity
  Another great opensource blog. I used this one in it’s early days. Pretty easy to install and use. I have a buddy that uses it on his blog and he really likes it. Looks like the Serendipity Community is also growing a bit.
• LifeType
  Now I have not uses LifeType in a long while. The project use to be called pLog and it had to change because of now trademark problem or something. It has seen some recent development but the user community is not that large. Still worth looking into though.

Hosted:

• Wordpress.com
  Allows you to start your own Wordpress Weblog. Free to sign up for and very easy to use.
• Blogger
  If you are technically challenged or you are just looking at getting started blogging then check out Blogger. My daughter has her blog here and she has fun with it. It is also very easy to use.
• There are hundreds more. Just do a search for free blogging.

Found this little jewel over here. Great step by step instructions to get Microsoft’s new Vista OS up and running in just a matter of minutes.

Hope you (enjoyed it) learned something.

Western Digital WDXMS1200TN
120 GB Passport USB 2.0 Hard Drive

I was looking for something to securely backup data from my laptop. I had been using a USB drive, which was 1 GB, and it worked fine but it was only 1 GB. I found this 120GB Passport USB Drive from Western Digital.

This little USB Harddrive is a great deal for the price and if you are looking for something with a little more storage (or maybe even a little less) there are others available. The 120GB was just what I needed and the price was right.

One of the things I like most about it is that it give me the ability to work on documents on the drive on another computer and then sync them up on my laptop. I don’t have to lug my laptop everywhere (even though I usually do).

One draw back is the encryption and syncronization software (WD Sync) that comes preinstalled on the drive only works with Windows.

The drive is USB powered so there is no power supply or special power cable to deal with and it comes with a USB cable.

I liked the one that I was using on my laptop so much I bought a second one to hang off my server to just drop things onto for safe keeping.

Western Digital WDXMS1200TN 120 GB Passport USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Click Here to Buy from Amazon.com

From the Western Digital:

“High-performance portable storage for your Mac and PC. Light and rugged, it’s easy to carry and no external power adapter is needed. Comes with sync & encryption and Google software.

Pack up your office files and take them home. Carry thousands of songs or pictures. These drives are simple to use, light and easy to carry, and require no power adapter–they are powered directly through the USB cable.”

If you are looking for a portable and secure alternative to a USB Thumb Drive this gadget is worth a look.

Buy the Western Digital 120 GB Passport USB Hard Drive from Amazon.com

Most of the website design and editing I do, I do by hand using a text editor such as vim or notepad even but occassionally, especially if I am trying to lay out tables, CSS, or image maps (I hardly ever mess with image maps but sometimes) HTML Kit is an excellent tool to help with these tasks.

HTML Kit Screenshot

HTML Kit allows you to preview the output of your code as you edit. It is also very useful in planning site layout. There are a ton of plugins available for HTML Kit to automate just about any coding tasks.

The built in validation tools are also nice. (Probably should use them more often).

From the authors site:
HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor designed to help HTML, XHTML and XML authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Despite its name and the light download size, HTML-Kit is a multi-purpose tool that has support for several scripting and programming languages.

Again if you are looking for a great FREE web development tool download HTML Kit and give it a try: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

Just wanted to post a note about what you can expect to find here. I am a Network/Systems Administrator for a nationwide communicactions company. In my day to day work I come across cool hardware, software, and gadgets all the time.

I am pretty big on opensource software and I use it whenever I can.

After work and on the weekends I run a couple of websites, including an online retail site, there are a lot of things that I come across that help me out alot in the day to day operation of these site so I will be sharing them here.

I am going to try and post here a few times a week, or whenever I come across something new. I have a huge list of things I am going to be posting about so check back in the next day or so to see what is up.

Been doing some work on optimizing my spamassassin rules to help cut down on the amount of junk mail I get on a day to day basis. Ever since I installed spamassassin and started training the baysien filter on a week to week basis the amount of junk that ends up in my inbox has decreased dramatically.

Here is are a couple of great resources for spamassassin rules:

http://www.rulesemporium.com/ - SARE - Spamassassin Rules Emporium

Spamassassin Wiki - Custom Rule Sets

sa-update - Automatically update SARE Rules

Hopefully you will find these resources useful.

Ran across this site this morning - Biker Worlds. Pretty neat place. It is pretty much a MySpace just for bikers. Even though I have heard a lot about it, I just set up a MySpace Profile yesterday and I just set up a BikerWorlds Profile this morning. Stop by and check them out.

ChopperStickers MySpace Profile

My BikerWorlds Profile

Take Care - Ride FREE

I use this utility all the time to convert Microsoft Word and Publisher documents to pdf.

http://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp

It supports multiple file formats, is very easy to use, and it is FREE.

Just upload the document you want to convert, enter your email address, and in a few minutes you will receive an email with the converted document.

Very handy free tool.

http://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp

I have a lot of things that I want to do to several of my websites. So I am going to list some of them here, mainly just for my reference.

1. Redesign http://www.ridinggearonline.com/
   This site actually gets some decent traffic and I do make a few affiliate sales off of it every month. Nothing to get rally excited about but there is some potential there. I had originially set it up as a review site but there has been no participation in it so I think it is about time for a redesign.Not really sure what direction I am going to go with it but it does need to be done.
2. Clean up index and ads at http://www.vabiker.net/ads/
   Now here is where I get a lot of traffic and the splash pages do well. I do really good with commissions from this index. Problem is that several of the pages link to affiliate programs that are not active anymore, a few of them are just thrown together, I really need to get this area cleaned up.
3. Figure out what to do with http://www.customchopperbuilding.com/ and http://www.custombikebuilding.com/
   Currently both of these point to http://www.custommotorcyclebuilding.com/ need to actually create seperate sites for them. Not sure what I am going to do yet but I will figure it out.
4. Clean up Meta Tags on http://www.vabiker.com/ and set up search engine friendly URLs.
   I get A LOT of traffic to this site but no conversions. Going to do some fooling around with the design and clean some things up.
5. Need to clean up my database a bit, there are a few databases in there that I am no longer used. Just need to clean things up.

There is more on the list but I think that is enough for now. Not sure when I am going to find time to work on this stuff. Think I might start with #2 actually. This area needs the most work. I reckon I will get around to it sometime, hopefully soon.

Just installed a mod to the X-Cart Shopping Cart at ChopperStickers.com.

The mod is the DSEFU (Dynamic Search Engine Friendly URL) mod from SafetyNetWeb. Basically is what this does is takes the dynamic URLs for the categories and products and makes them a little more search engine friendly.

Here is an example the old url for the All Helmet Stickers Category was http://www.chopperstickers.com/home.php?cat=1

The new DSEFU is
http://www.chopperstickers.com/All-Helmet-Stickers-c-1.html

Notice that the new DSEFU contains the category name All Helmet Stickers, this should help a bit with keyword density and search engine indexing.

The module took about 30 minutes to install. There is a lot of manual changes to the x-cart core php files and templates but it was not to bad. Right now SafetyNetWeb the company that developed the DSEFU mod is offer free installation with the purchase.

I wanted to do the install myself for several reasons the main one being if it gets hosed up there is no one to blame but myself. The other reason is I manage this site on a day to day basis and it is just better know exactly what has changed when.

The mod is installed and everything is running smooth. Check it out at ChopperStickers.com. You can purchase the DSEFU Mod here.