Many professionals already working in the field of internet hosting and web design don’t need to go back to school for credit programs, but they do want to stay current on new trends, concepts and software options. Using open courseware classes is a terrific option since they are free, are designed for self-study and can be accessed literally 24/7 from any computer with internet access.

There are many different courses to choose from but for those already working as web designers or those just getting started the following 10 courses will be of particular interest.

1. Software Applications for Web Applications – this program, offered through ArsDigita University allows the students to actually develop an interactive website based on a real world client’s specifications. The site will include a database, cookies, SQL as well as scripting language and HTML.

2. Open Web Mapping – students will learn how to incorporate open source standard software code to add interactive maps to website designs. Mapping servers and parameters of programs will be examined as well as how to customize these programs to meet individual website requirements. This program is offered through Penn State, College of EMS.

3. Database, Internet and Systems Integration Technologies – this MIT practical applications course is designed to allow students to understand how different technologies can be incorporated into website design. The course will cover http, html, XML, SOAP, security as well as data networking protocols and system integration.

4. Communicating in Cyberspace – this course encourages students to think about how different forms of visual communication online are effective and influence the web. This program is offered through MIT OpenCourseWare and is designed to represent a broader view of online communication.

5. WebAIM: Web Accessibility In Mind – developing websites that are accessible for people with different abilities and disabilities is the core component of this program. Offered through NAGT Cutting Edge (SERC) students explore how different technologies or applications enhance website design for a wider audience.

6. UNU Media Studio Blog – this study reflects the unique and multidisciplinary approach to developing open source documentaries and interactive content for the world wide web. The information on the site is tagged and categories for ease of searching and reading.

7. Blogs, Wikis and New Media For Learning – a very current look at the Web 2.0 user generated materials now popular as aspects of webpages and sites. This course is designed to address how blogging, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, photo sharing, podcasts and video sharing have influenced web design in an interactive website design. This course is offered through Utah State University OpenCourseWare. 

8. Designing Sociable Media – an MIT OpenCourseWare program, this course looks at how social websites have influenced and changed both online interactions as well as in-person communication. This understanding can help web designs in developing sites for specific types of target audiences as well as for the general public.

9. International Politics In The New Century – another MIT OpenCourseWare program, this reflective course takes a look at how online gaming with a political focus has changed how opinions are formed and modified. This information can be very useful to web designers with clients that wish to share specific political or organizational opinions.

10. An Introduction to E-Commerce and Distributed Applications – offered through The Open University OpenLearn, this course focuses in on different e-commerce options and applications for sales websites. The course will allow web designers to learn the pros and cons of different online sales programs as well as security issues.

Stephane has a blog called Follow Steph and is the owner and creator of Landlord Max which apparently is the easiest property management software available. I am actually a landlord as well,  so I can relate to Stephane on a couple of fronts.

In Blog Blazers Stephane profiles 40 top bloggers. He gets them to share their secrets to creating high-profile, high-traffic and high-profit, blogs by asking each blogger a series of 23 questions.

What I found interesting about this, was how so many of the bloggers, had the same answers for certain questions. For instance; “Which websites do you recommend for any new bloggers starting to blog?”, the overwhelming response for this question was Darren Rowse of Problogger.net.

There were other similarities between the bloggers answers as well. One of the things I enjoyed about this list is the list of bloggers themselves. Many of these blogs I have read and have even been subscribed to at one point or another.

But some of them, were blogs that I hadn’t heard of, so I got an opportunity to check out a new blog, plus get a little background information on the blogger themselves.

One of the blogs featured in the book which I had heard of, but had actually never visited, was Manolo’s Shoe Blog.  After reading the entertaining and quirky responses of Manolo of the Shoe Blogger.

I was pleasantly surprised and had to check out the site. It is fun and entertaining, and might teach you a little about fashion. One of the features I found especially entertaining was the Gallery Of Horrors.

I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about fashion, and I am still a bit confused on this point. But, I believe that Manolo The Shoeblogger and Manolo The Designer are two different people. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

 Never the less, these two individuals have more in common than Italian Accents, they are both creative and interesting individuals who are publicly sharing their gift.

Many of the other bloggers featured in Blog Blazers were people whose blogs I have been subscribed to at one time or another. Although, I’ve been trying to ditch my feed reader for a long time. Since, I need to do more work and less reading for pleasure.

 A recent move to a new computer has enabled me to start fresh with a feed reader with close to zero subscribers and I plan on keeping it that way.

If you are a blogger, and you need inspiration and insight, Blog Blazers is the perfect resource. It will not only give you ideas, but you can learn the views and tips from the pros.

Learning from example can be a lot faster then learning on your own. If you are not a blogger you may even get more out of this book. It will be a nice introduction to several successful blogs and the inside scoop on how the creators think.

This is review #5 in my free book review series. I enjoy personal development books and websites. I like it when I’m encouraged to think and look at things in a different way. So when I had an opportunity to review “A Life Worth Living”, by William F. Giruzzi, I seized it.

This is a rather short book at 114 pages, that revolves around the main theme of our thoughts creating our situations.  Therefore my review will be somewhat short as well. The beginning of the book starts with an example asking us to draw a line between two points on a piece of paper. Most everyone draws a straight line. Even though the pathways between the two points are actually unlimited, everyone draws the same path.

So why were we limited to this one path, when so many exist? These limitations seem to exist in our minds. These same limitations in our minds limit the way in which we choose to live our lives.  This concept, I enjoyed, because I do believe, that how we think, affects our actions, and our actions are what create our circumstances. So far, I’m in agreement.

Then it gets even better and talks about how people spend 30 or 40 years working in jobs that they say they hate. They complain at work, and complain about going to work, and dream about, quitting time, weekends, and vacation time. Then the author asks, “why people continue doing something they don’t really enjoy for such a long periods of time”? Why would they choose this? Then a light bulb goes off, they must of thought they had no choice at all.

Which makes a nice point about how the choices we choose create our way of life. Each chapter builds with examples, from illustrations to short stories that emphasize new points and concepts along this line. There are also exercises and questions at the end of each chapter to help the reader discover their own thought processes.

Then things get a little more complicated when the concept of a creating a new paradigm is introduced. Saying that what we are experiencing now is our life in this design. This design of life that was created by our thought processes and those before us.

I love the concept of our decisions creating the life we currently have, and changing our thoughts can change our lives, or even better, we can use our thoughts to create the life we want. But, I get a little lost when Giruzzi starts speaking of creating a new paradigm. A paradigm, so that our way of life is designed so that good things happen naturally for people.

From the middle on this is the main point of the book. And that all sounds well and good. But I almost feel like I’m missing a concept. Good things happening naturally for people sounds great. Giruzzi emphasizes this new paradigm several times.  I almost feel like I am missing part of the puzzle, or he is intentionally leaving out part of where he is going with this.

Over all this book poses some thought provoking questions and creates some nice points that I agree with. The good things happening naturally for people plan sounds nice but didn’t quite resonate with me for some reason. But it’s a quick read, and getting people to think differently and open their minds is a good thing. It’s possible that my life experience is so different than Giruzzi’s that his new paradigm doesn’t work for me, or maybe I’m just reading too much into it.

If you read the book you can decide for yourself. You can find out more about William F. Giruzzi and A Life Worth Living at his at A Life Worth Living Now.

Mike In The Bushes

I recently had to put down a very amazing cat who I had the pleasure of living with for over a decade. Many years ago I had a downtown apartment, and there was this really cool black and white cat who would always meow at the people in the complex next to mine.

My balcony had a view of their porch. Occasionally I would run into this cat outside and he would never let me touch him. But I would see this one little girl who lived in the complex next to mine sitting outside petting him.

Eventually these people moved and I didn’t think anything of it. Until I was emptying my trash and was startled by a cat flying out of the dumpster as I threw my bag in. If I was outside working or washing my car this cat would come and hang around with me. He still wouldn’t let me touch him but he liked being talked to.

He was skinny and dehydrated so I started leaving food out for him on my porch. One day I heard my neighbor across from me yell, “GET OUT OF HERE”, and then I heard his girlfriend saying, “you didn’t have to do that”. I’m not sure what he did. But I rushed outside and chewed my neighbor out, and said that was my cat, and he better not ever touch him again.

Then I let the cat in my house. He ate some more food and then hopped onto the arm of the chair I was sitting in, and then put his head on my leg. It was so sweet, I decided that he was my cat. I made an appointment for him at the vet. He got a clean bill of health, and within a month this skinny dehydrated cat, was a big beautiful smart and loving cat.

The cool thing about him was he was really brave and always held his ground. I’ve seen him have face offs with dogs and people. He also liked to watch people work. Whenever I had a repairman or someone working outside they would usually comment on, what a cool cat he was. I guess, he was kind of a man’s man of cats. Because a lot of guys don’t care for cats but something about his tough little attitude made him really appealing.

I don’t think Mike ever regretted adopting me. The first few years of his life were a mystery to me. But I know the last decade he had a very good life. Below are some pictures of Mike and my very first You Tube video. The video is really me just playing around with my camera, but it ended up being the last pictures I have of him and his much younger sister, who I still have.

Young Mike

I'll brush my teeth later.

Mike Sleeping

Mike watching me work.

Mike and Bianca

Mike Systems Administrator

The Keyword Academy consists of 10 videos along with the accompanying text. The Keyword research and link building videos are especially informative. But they also go into how to set up mini sites with WordPress and configuring properly.

This program has recently been selling for 600$ and now you can get it for 1$. The site has been changed to a membership site. The first month is a dollar, and then a premium membership is 33$ a month after that. But you can cancel at anytime. You can watch all of the videos and information for 1$ and then decide to cancel or decide to pay the monthly fee.

They have also added a forum, and they have live webinars as well, plus they are expanding their content from focusing on AdSense to Affiliate Marketing. If you have time to go through the material than this is a no brainer.

The prize is your custom design on a FlipNote. If anyone is interested in more details check out the contest post.

Hopefully we will be able to assist you in finding freelance online writing jobs. If you are looking for writers for your web projects, feel free to use the contact form on the writing jobs page, to get your listing posted.

[poll id="2"]

 Update: I took the writing job page down. Because all jobs are currently filled.

I have been researching this a lot and have moved some smaller blogs, so I think it will go smoothly. But just in case I wanted to give everyone a head’s up, in case we experience some downtime.

Another thing I’ve been wanting to talk about are comments. As most of you know I was a do follow blog. But unfortunately, someone, put me on some lists of do follow blogs with PR, and I have been inundated with spam.

If there is something good, stupid people have to mess it up. I would actually allow anchored text, especially if it was a clever, witty, or relevant comment. But instead, I was getting those idiotic comments that didn’t even apply, and were absolutely inane. You know the ones where people read one sentence or just the title, and say something that is totally opposite from what you were writing about.

So I had no choice but to remove the do follow plug in. Anyway I hope all goes well and I’ll talk to you guys soon. If not, see you in a couple of days.

In order to choose the winners I put everyone’s name in the List Randomizer at Random.org. The first person on the random list won the 50$ and the second won the 2 FlipNotes.

The 50$ winner is Mireille, she runs a blog about Kids in Lawrence Kansas.

The winner of the 2 FlipNotes is bebemiqui she has a Young Mom blog.

Congratulations to the winners, I’ll be contacting you by email. And thank-you to everyone who took the time to enter.

Everyone, who meets this criteria, will be entered in a drawing using random.org. The first winner will get 50$ through PayPal and the second winner will get two FlipNotes if you are not familiar with FlipNotes check out my previous FlipNote post.

The contest starts today and will end on Sunday, Feb 22nd. The winner will be announced on Monday, Feb 23rd. So feel free to start commenting, and just to get things started here is a sample comment:

I tried to hide my rancor but I could not disguise the horripilation on my face and neck as I saw my worst enemy leaning against the balustrade. As if this wasn’t bad enough she was arm in arm with my first love. I suddenly got a strong urge to leave town. I think it is time to finally indulge my wanderlust.

That was tough. I think I chose difficult words. Good Luck Everyone!