The following post is inspired by the request at problogger.net for articles surounding the theme, “Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers.” There are many many more quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright that could be applied to this topic — care to share?

Utility: The quality or condition of being useful.

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Consider: your blog is your building. You are the architect. The ensemble of rooms (pages and content) should be carefully considered that comfort and utility (ease of use and usefulness) go hand in hand with beauty (style).

Make your site easy to use, beautiful, and above all useful. Anyone can reprint others ideas, words, and pictures (link blogs), only architects can create original content.

Mr Wright said some other inspiring things for effective bloggers: » Read the rest of the entry..

Update June 25, 2006: The operator of the website in question asked me to remove the text references to his site. Apparently, this page is near the top of the SERPS for the company name. I don’t want to needless hurt any company and the point of this article isn’t that company X did something bad. By removing the name of the comapny I have taken none of the substance from this article and have hopefully helped some honest people continue earn their livlihood.

When I get a free moment, I often look over my server logs to see whats happening and where my traffic is actually coming from. Today I found a strange spike in traffic as shown in the image below:

The thing that is odd with those stats is that the number of ‘pages’ doesn’t equal the number of ‘hits’. In fact, often its not even that close. So I visited a couple of those pages. They look like this: » Read the rest of the entry..

I don’t pretend to be an expert on SEO, but I can spot a good idea and follow up on it. The following, when done correctly, can benefit both wikipedia and you (original credit goes to the author, Dominic of DigitalPoint forums).
» Read the rest of the entry..

Lidia of Ganato left me a message informing me that she had some free icons on her website. Its true - they’re great! Checkout the screenshot below for a small sampling of the various icons available at ganato.com. All the icons are in PSD (photoshop) format and are completely free (free as in free). Also check out her snazzy buttons (over a 120 of them available).

Subscribe to MaxPower: keep up to date about free icons

Also view the compendium listing of all free icons currently catalogued for use.

An update to some newsworthy items dealing with the issues covered recently on maxpower: plagiarism, poets, and spam. The spammers are now stealing your web identification (at least in regards to the blogging world), myspace plagiarism situational irony, and the poets attack again.
» Read the rest of the entry..

Presenting Dash-Note, a plugin for WordPress.

Featuring:

• Easy installation and set-up;
• Winsome styling (optional);
• The inclusion of a list of your draft posts right into the wordpress dashboard;
• Checks for updates periodically;
• A highly advanced, feature rich, post-it note architecture, which integrates seamlessly into the wordpress dashboard and features the patent pending retro stylings of the colour “desert saffron.”

» Read the rest of the entry..

Plagiarism and content theft have really intrigued me of late. I got to thinking and came up with an idea for a very simple digital fingerprint for online content. Since content scrapers simply scrape, paste, and profit, they (ideally) wouldn’t notice a small ‘fingerprint’ (a keyword / phrase or personal googlewhack) sandwiched in with the regular text of your content. It follows that your fingerprint is uniquely yours, only those pages and posts where you placed your fingerprint should actually contain your fingerprint. A simple search via google or other search engines could confirm this on a regular basis. If your fingerprint exists on the web it is either coincidence or plagiarism. » Read the rest of the entry..