I wanted to mention again that this weekend, I will be speaking at the Birmingham WordCamp hosted by Andre Natta of The Terminal.

WindowsLiveWriter – Blogging with any Blogging Software Has Never Been Easier

I will be covering how to use WindowsLiveWriter to manage multiple blogs and how to use it with WordPress (among other blogging tools).

Whether you write for 1 blog or 10, Whether you use WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type or Type pad or many others, Windows LIve Writer can speed up your work, polish your presentation and much more.

Image via Wikipedia

Should be a great event and I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t been to Birmingham in about 17 years or so, and I’m packing lots of equipment including cameras, tripods, a projector and more cords, cables and Cat5e patch cables than you can shake a stick at, just to be prepared.

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• Softduit Media’s Founder Featured on CBS 42 covering Birmingham, WordCamp

This week has been hands down crazy, and I just wanted to share a little bit of it with you to help explain why that little bit behind writing on this column and posting some new videos and tutorials. 

First, I had to make an unplanned trip to Georgia, after my alarm system for my fire alarm started triggering a false alarm. I had to head to the house where I keep the alarm turned off while I waited for two days for the repair person to show up and replace the sensor. While I was there, I did a great deal of work on my laptop using my air card, while I frequently took breaks to literally clean the cobwebs out of the house which has been shut up for about a year now.

Meanwhile I am trying to repair a trip to Las Vegas for BlogWorldExpo 2008.  This will be my second year attending, and I am working on a promotion whereby I will be running a Dragon NaturallySpeaking demonstration at a booth at the show. I’ll have more details on that soon I hope, because I’m still racking up the fine points of that particular deal.

On top of that, I had to chop down a few trees in the yard, and backup a few last items that were lingering in the house to ship back to North Carolina.

But that was not all that I was doing, I spent a good deal of time catching up with some old friends, neighbors, partners and clients. Plus I was working on the presentation that I will be giving at the Birmingham WordCamp coming up at the end of the month in September, one week after BlogWorld.

Not to mention all the time that I spent driving back and forth from North Carolina to Atlanta this week, and listening to a very long-winded audio book along the way.

On top of all that, I’m still shopping for a good podcasting microphone, a good video smartphone (likely going to be the Nokia N95), which I hope will help me save some money keeping me away from the purchase of a new digital camera.  (I try and save the big digital camera purchases for my wife, a real photographer unlike myself.  She can get a lot more out of a new camera than I can, and I’ve kind of been eyeballing the Nikon D90 for her).

Anyway, I was able to get a chip into Fry’s while I was away, and I’ll submitted by Guitar Center to look at microphones.  I saw the microphone I’m probably going to purchase, but I didn’t pick it up at the time because I thought it a better deal online. I’m looking at the Rode NT1A, a very solid microphone, which will probably be a little bit more than what I need, but I totally don’t want to buy less than what I need and have to repeat purchase for something better later on down the road. This seems like a nice safe choice of metal, even though it’s probably about $50-$60 out of my comfort zone for this particular piece of electronics.

I almost forgot. When I rebooted Softduit, I noticed that some of my Google Ads got a little weird.  I kept seeing ads for Fox News and Match.com showing up.

I’m not getting rid of advertising from the site, that’s how the site earns money.

But I am working very hard to get the non-relevant and slightly stupid ads removed from the site.  Since I go through Google as an aggregator for ads basically, I have little control over what shows up, but I can exclude ads, which I do regularly.

Plus, I have learned a great deal more this week about using a new feature in WordPress.  WordPress Templates are now enabling me to individually code or group a number of pages and that is going to help me both target the ads better and remove ads entirely from pages where they just don’t belong at all.

Hopefully that will get rid of the Fox News ads and tactical gear stuff on pages that talk about MindManager, Dragon Naturally Speaking or the business models around social media content creations.

I mentioned that the Softduit Site is mostly rebooted, well there are a few big things that I still need to do.  This checklist is probably as much for me as it is just to keep everyone informed. 

• I still need to build and add lots of great new video.  This time, I’m going to host the video on ScreenCast.com and start utilizing full screen video feeds at high quality.
• I have a technical glitch I’m working on.  On pages where I have flash navigation (image created with MindManager, converted to flash image with hover over hyperlinks), I run into a problem when someone hovers over the css menu above it.  The css menu appears to drop down behind the flash image, where it can not be clicked on. 
• 
• I also need to make an update to my wordpress theme.  It does not have the ability to create numbered lists.  Its not my own original design (it came this way) but I need to update it so that I can see actual numbers on numbered bullet lists.
• Plus, I’m still working out a few kinks with the main menu, wrapping a bit on small computer or laptop screens.

That’s the majority of it, once I have that done, then I can kick back in a hammock chair, sipping a cold drink and dictating my articles into my little Sony Voice Recorder.  Looking forward to the easy life again!

OK, I’m kidding, I always work hard, but I do have fun working!

This week, I raced like crazy to get the main Softduit.com site rebooted.  After making a major break through in some coding areas that were holding me back, specifically, creating dynamic css menus driven off of a WordPress MySQL database, I then had to actually get the content transitioned to the new site.

I had all of the content transferred by Thursday, with the primary transfer finished on Tuesday (the really important stuff).

Then Friday I spent much of the day setting up 301 redirects in my .htaccess file so that the search engines and anyone that has linked to various pages on my site over the years will not get lost.

That was a whole lot of work!

Now, I’m going through the process of updating the site with a number of graphic elements to reinforce the message on the site.  I’m primarily focusing on the use of MindManager mixed with SnagIt to generate a mindmap image and then convert that image into a flash image with hover over buttons for navigation.

The two programs don’t really work terribly well together (they don’t fight, but they don’t cooperate either).  So anytime I make an update in the mindmap I have to completely start over again in Snagit with the hotspot links. 

That means that I have to have my mindmap as perfect as possible before I start the hotspot linking process in snagit.  In the meantime, my metabolism has dropped down almost next to nothing, because I’ve been working around the clock and not getting enough exercise (not running or doing ellipticals, but I have gotten a little swimming in since I work on a dock and only have to jump off to cool off).

For the last 2 – 3 months I have been working on the design of the new Softduit website.  The heavy part of the work has been in organizing the content and filling in the gaps on the one hand, and building up the navigational structure on the site to rapidly get to that content on the other.

I experienced a bit of a break through this week when I finally figured out through many many experiments and trials and errors how to build a dynamic menu system that would work with many changing pages run on a WordPress content management system.

At various times, I’ve had to start completely over and over again, throwing out the kitchen sink followed by the showers and shower faucets and every scrap of material on the site, only to rebuild and reform it several times.

I’ve been stuck more times in the last few months than I have been in the state of forward progress and motion, but after the break through this week, its all motion going forward. 

Now, I can dive into content organizing mindmaps, fill in the gaps with text and images and start to finish the videos that will accompany most pages.  The fun and the hard work starts now and I am definitely looking forward to wrapping up the new site!

My work recoding the primary Softduit website has been slightly stalled for over a week.  The work initially stalled as I took on several important customer projects, was extended as I worked to finish up some personal projects for my wife’s new business, and then extended yet again as I wrapped up new customer projects this week.

Yet, I am hopeful that I will be able to reinitiate my work with the site and finish the new site before too much more time passes.  I have actually had several good weeks back-to-back so my spirits are high due to the progress I have made for others, but somewhat dampened in that I have not made progress for myself.

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction as the work I am doing is for the customers of my business.  However, the subtlety here lies in the fact that once I finish the site upgrade, I will be able to support more customers and support all of them more effectively.  So essentially, much of the work I am doing today is being done with more difficulty than would be needed had I finished my upgrade.

That sense of continued inefficiency is the aspect of this situation that troubles me a bit even when other things are going so well.  To put it into a bad analogy, it would be like a doctor prescribing Phentermine weight loss pills to a weight loss patient a week before providing liposuction surgery.

I ran into a set back in the Website Upgrade about a week ago.  I was working to include a dynamic css menu system that would automatically update every time I added a page into my content management system.

I compared several different tools and pulled the trigger on CSS Menu Writer a Dreamweaver extension.

To make a long story short, the software did not do what I expected nor did it do much of anything the way I expected it to do it!

That said after essentially walking through one user issue after the next all week long, by the end of the week, I had figured out how the tool actually works, and I had conceived a way to achieve my goal anyway, even though the software isn’t actually designed to make things such as I wanted, easy.

Fortunately, I have some strengths in working with content management systems and databases, and so I was able to compensate for the software programs shortcomings and still use some of its capability to achieve the same result.  So now, I am back off to the races to work to finish migrating the site over into the new system and make up for the week I lost with the wisdom that I gained.

One of my primary goals is to have the new site up and tuned heavily before August when I will fly out to LA and Vegas for back to back conventions.  By the time those events come around, I want to insure that my website is reliable and make the least of my worries be the search for some good hotel deals.

This is probably starting to sound like a broken record, as it feels that way to me.  But I am still working on the new Softduit site.  I am making a lot of progress on the site and I’m mapping out everything I build, while I build it.

I’m finding this to be an extremely useful way of identifying gaps in content, classes, tutorials, tips and tools along the way.  Plus, I’m using a number of the ‘good idea’ maps that I’ve built over the last couple years to fill in some of those gaps.

There is definitely something positive about finally turning potential good ideas into kinetic published content for people to actually use kind of like a travel guide to navigating the internet and building an internet based business..

I’m still working to transform the rest of the Softduit website.  Plans and templates are pretty much wrapped up at this point.  Now, I need to convert the existing text on the site into the new system and weed out the text that is outdate or no longer applies.

There’s a lot of good information on the site, but there is some information that is now a bit dated from the days when Softduit focused on selling software and providing direct Business Development services.

The software sales business could not continue when we could no longer offer the best buy on software with MindManager products.  We were priced out of that market.  Fortunately, in the Business Development area we evolved very quickly and specialized in a number of areas that rapidly filled the void.

It was fun working with MindManager as a trainer when development was still speeding along with the product, but as its evolution has slowed down, the need for training on the products seems to have decreased.