In redesigning my blog, I was going to include bookmark icons for digg, reddit, del.icio.us, etc. under each blog post (I actually had them in the code at one point). Then I read an article over at 37signals that changed my mind.

What Matt has to say about these icons caused the proverbial “light bulb” to go off in my head. I’ve got a new blog and I’d love to get noticed. Write cranked content about stuff that I’m passionate about and knowledgeable on. If the content is good, like Matt says, then people will come. People will notice. My stuff will end up on digg, reddit, and all those other “news” sites out there. So why push the issue?

So I finally took it upon myself to create my own WordPress template. I’m fairly inexperienced with CSS, but with a little help and having looked at what other people have done, I don’t think I did that bad with it. Hope everyone enjoys it!

I’ve recently been trying to get some additional income by doing additional web development projects on the side. The first thing I’ve noticed is it’s tough to generate leads, especially when it’s not your full time job. I have learned that you basically just need to keep your eyes and ears open and to also stick to stuff you know and try to leverage what you already do well to your advantage. Being in the right place at the right time is usually the name of the game, especially when you’re getting started.

Secondly, I’ve learned its hard to close deals once you’ve generated a lead. A lot of people (mostly the non-web savy ones it seems) don’t appear to know what it takes to build a quality web site. Nor do they value what your talents are. In the end though, I think it maybe just has more to do with people wanting something for the least amount of money than anything else. The key will be to be fair and upfront with people and hopefully work out the details and build great applications!

One thing I’ve tried to not do is just drive leads away. I try hard to work with them on the feature set and the price. So far, nothing bad has happened. Things just don’t move quickly.

My buddy Kyle and I just got finished rolling out a new version of the YumDrop.com Lingerie site! Its super easy to navigate now and there’s lots of new product for people to look at and buy. Here are just some of the new features in this version!

• Product specific size charts
• Product specific materials
• Side-bar navigation
• Zoom images on all thumbnail images

And don’t worry, we’ll be hard at work on new features for upcoming versions!

As I said in a previous post about integrating WordPress with my Rails site, I’m a huge fan of things integrating easily. I wanted some pictures on my site and I have some on Flickr, so what would be easier than using the Flickr API to show photos on my site? So how to do this in Rails? A quick Google search turned up this!

Whoa, look at that!

Install a gem, make sure the new files are in my railties lib directory (because my application is frozen), get a Flickr API key, write four or five lines of code, and I had this! God I love ease of use and reusability.

A while back, I finally decided that I needed my own presence on the web. Something that had a nice layout and not the plain black & white sites I’d had in the past. Already having put together part of a site built in Ruby on Rails, I didn’t want to start over, though WordPress is basically a “Web Site in a Can.” So what I did was integrate WordPress with my Rails site. Wow was this easy. Not nearly as painful as it was trying to integrate Typo with a Ruby on Rails site, as I had tried a few months back.

Since my site is hosted on Dreamhost, I just had to create a new MySQL database and complete the one click install. The only “gotcha” was having to set up the .htaccess file in the blog root directory. Previously with Typo, I was stuck integrating two Ruby on Rails applications in one web root, mucking with .htaccess files and Rewrites, and that didn’t even include getting the blog posts easily accessible from the root web application. Hey, maybe I just didn’t take enough time to figure it out, but I figure these things should be easy!

WordPress and Rails integration was no big deal at all!