While this blog has been somewhat inactive, I thought I’d share some sites that I’ve been enjoying.

Flex Examples is a nice blog that posts daily (and sometimes multi-daily) Flex tips and examples. What I really like about this site, is that each post concisely solves a problem using Flex. Check out the archives, there is lots of really good info to be found.

Atomeo is the blog of one of my co-workers, Ron Schouten. Ron really likes Ubuntu and other open source projects, so you can expect to find some good coverage on working with Ubuntu. His latest post shows you how to use Gimp to make your photographs look like pictures of miniature models.

NullCreations is the blog of a former co-worker, Jerrett Taylor. One of his passions is Ruby (and Rails) and you’ll find some great post on Ruby, Rails, NetBeans. His other passion (I’m sure he has others too) is photography so be sure to check out his photo section.

TreeHugger - who isn’t interested/concerned about our environment? Treehugger has tonnes of daily posts that show you what other people are doing to help the state of our planet. From suggestions to tips to product reviews, this is a good start to living an eco-friendly existence.

Factory City is Chris Messina’s blog that has good coverage on a wide variety of Web 2.0ish topics. Be sure to subscribe to his feed as you’ll also get his awesome links and screen captures (I think Chris calls it a lifestream).

LifeHacker’s Mac OSX feed is also interesting to follow - lots of links to tips, tricks and software that will make your Apple experience rock!

The Blog is the New Resume - I’ve seen a few posts like this one lately, and I couldn’t agree more!  Resumes are usually simple one or two page summaries of your life experience, where a blog shows your ability to communicate, engage and reveal your passion.

In fact my last three opportunities have come directly from this blog and I was amazed at how much the potential employer/client knew about me from my blog.  If you’re looking for work or for new and exciting opportunities, I would highly recommend blogging - even if it doesn’t help you land a job, it will certainly help you build a great network and you’ll have fun doing it!

If you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you can now have the same Stats Plugin that is available at the WordPress.com hosted blogging service. Although it’s not quite as nice as Mint, it does contain the most important stats for tracking visitors to your site. Best of all, the price is free!

Are you statisfied is a really fun little script that shows you in real-time where people are visiting your blog from.  Simply add a small JavaScript snippet anywhere in your blog template and you can visually track your location based hits.  You can check out my blogs activity at http://statisfy.net/dmm.

I’ve never used Blogger in the past mainly because they never supported TLD’s. However it looks like they now allow the usage of custom domains with their service. I think I’ll stick with my WordPress install for now, but this may be a good option for those of you thinking of starting your own blog!

Half way through December and it’s time to start thinking about what your New Years resolutions might be. If one of them ends up being starting a blog, you might want to check out this article titled - 25 Steps to Launching Your Blog and Making $100+ A Month in 30 Days. Although it is probably unrealistic that you will ever make $100 a month with a new blog, the article is focused mainly on how to start a blog and it is only the last three tips that speak specifically to generating revenue.

The Lyceum Project is a stand-alone mutli-user blogging application that utilizes the WordPress blogging engine. This free open-source project enables stand-alone, multi-user blog services for small and high-volume environments.

The Art of Linkbaiting is an article that will suggest some ideas for creating posts specifically designed to attract traffic to your sites. Although the ideas mainly relate to blogging, there is value that can be applied to any website.

If you’re a blogger and use Firefox, you must download the CoLT extension from Born Geek. The extension adds three items to your contextual menu when you right-click on a link. You can choose to copy the link text, link location or even best the link text and location all wrapped up in a handy anchor tag! This has become my most used extension and has saved me much time!

Digital Media Minute is 3 years old today. It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this since June 7th 2003, but what began as way of keeping up-to-date with trends and techniques in the world of web design and development has now become somewhat of a passion!

In three years, DMM has accumulated 2138 posts! Some of the most popular are:

• Character Entity Reference
• Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
• Uploading Pictures to Flickr from Google’s Picasa
• Setup a Free SFTP Server on Windows
• Installing Ruby on Rails with Fedora Core 4, Lighttpd, and MySQL
• Better JavaScript Debugging in 15 Minutes
• New Firefox Wallpaper, and
• Viewing Browser Cache in Firefox

This blog on average has 4178 average unique page views and it’s RSS feed is consumed by over 900 readers per day. Thank-you to everyone who is a regular visitor here. It’s my pleasure to share my passion with you!