One of my favorite courses in San Diego is Torrey Pines. Torrey Pines is a beautiful golf course on the shores of La Jolla that has been host to many PGA tournaments over the years, including where Tiger Woods won the 2008 U.S. Open with his broken knee. I’m lucky to have played Torrey Pines in 1999, where I had my first-ever birdie on the 8th hole.

Las Vegas Golf

Las Vegas is another one of the top golf destinations in the southwest. There are many amazing Las Vegas golf courses thanks to its dry climate, excellent weather and the incredible amount of tourists. Some of the most well-known Las Vegas golf courses include Bali Hai Golf Club, Royal Links Golf Club and Desert Pines Golf Club.

The Bali Hai Golf Club is a South Pacific-themed course that sits directly on the Las Vegas Strip. It features spectacular scenery and a challenging layout for golfers of all skill levels.

Arizona Golf

Another popular southwest golf destination is Arizona. I played Troon Golf Club with my dad about two years ago, when Matt, Josh and I lived in North Scottsdale. It was one of the most fun and challenging courses I’ve ever played.

Tucson is also famous for some of the best golf courses in the southwest. While there are many Tucson golf courses, the one of the nicest is the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club at Dove Mountain. It was designed by Jack Nicklaus and built in January of 2009. Dove Mountain features three distinct 9-hole courses that all golfers will appreciate.

If you are a golfer and ever get the chance to visit the southwest, I highly recommend checking out the courses in Las Vegas and Tucson. Not only will you experience immaculate scenery, you will get the chance to play some of the most challenging (and rewarding) golf in the entire U.S!

5. Sushi Wave

Sushi Wave is a little sushi restaurant on 2nd and Broadway. Despite it being significantly less expensive than trendier spots such as Umi or Shiro’s, it is much better tasting. I always go for their spicy tuna rolls and spicy chicken teriyaki. Not to mention, the miso soup is by far, the best I’ve had in Seattle. The decor may not be as nice as Umi, but Sushi Wave makes up for it in price, taste and friendly staff.

4. Red Mill Burgers

Next to Dick’s Burgers, Red Mill is probably the most popular burger spot in Seattle. GQ voted Red Mill as one of the top 20 burgers you must eat before you die. So, enough said. There always seems to be a long line outside of Red Mill during lunchtime. Everything about Red Mill is awesome – the burgers, fries, and shakes. Red Mill, located right off Phinney Ridge in Greek Lake, has been voted the best burger in Seattle for 10 years in a row.

3. Petra Mediterranean Bistro

Every time I frequent Petra Mediterranean Bistro, it is completely packed – a good sign when choosing a restaurant. Combining the flavors of Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, Turkey and Northern Africa, Petra has some of the best tasting Mediterranean food I’ve ever eaten, especially the Baba ghanoush, hummus, garlic cheese fries, and garlic lemon chicken. Petra has 106 reviews on Yelp with a 4.5 star average. You can’t go wrong with anything on their menu!

2. Primo Pizzeria

Everyone loves pizza and there are a ton of great pizza spits in Seattle. However, one stands out more than the others – Primo Pizzeria. The Brutus pizza – sausage, onions, and pepperoncini, is ridiculously tasty and spicy. Combine that with a chicken caesar salad and booyah – awesome dinner, lunch or breakfast! Their prices are a little high, but the service is excellent and they have never disappointed. Free delivery to First Hill, Capitol Hill, Belltown, Downtown and Madison Valley when you order online.

1. Zeitoon Cafe

What do I love most about Zeitoon Cafe? Taste, price, and convenience. Not only is Zeitoon a two-minute walk from my place in Belltown, the grilled chicken panino, caesar salad salad and rosemary potatoes is the perfect lunch or dinner. For $10, it will completely satisfy your hunger with some of the tastiest flavors in all of Seattle. Zeitoon, located on 4th and Wall, also has awesome happy hour specials – from 3-7pm, $3 specials for hummus, dolmades, falafel, baba ganoush and $6 pizzas.

Bonus – Bang Bang Cafe

For the best breakfast food, check out Bang Bang Cafe. I first heard about them from my business partner, Josh. Bang Bang is famous for their out-of-this-world breakfast burritos. I prefer the original “Bang Bang” breakfast burrito – eggs, potatoes, beans, verde sauce, wrapped in a tortilla. Damn, I’m hungry now! Not to mention, they have 133 reviews on their Google Places Page with a 4.5 star average.

That’s it for my favorite Seattle restaurants. To all my fellow Seattle-ites, what are your favorite restaurants in the Emerald City?

• We successfully completed the TechStars seed incubator program with Highlighter
• Matt, Josh and I moved to Belltown in February to be closer to booming tech scene that is Seattle
• We raised $300,000 as part of our seed round for Highlighter (more on that here)

All of this would not have been possible without TechStars, a program that provides funding and mentorship for startups. Though we had nearly four years of previous business experience and a handful of connections from Unique Blog Designs, it was through our work with TechStars that allowed us to build enough momentum to raise the seed round required to get this new (and much more exciting!) business off the ground.

That said, a lot of hard work, dedication and persistence were also required. Even though the Seattle TechStars program started out with ten (10) companies, only eight (8) of those companies are still in operation – proving that even with great mentorship, hard work, and guidance, there are many difficulties that need to be overcome when starting a new business in the technology space.

Finally, I would like to give a shoutout to the Seattle TechStars companies still in operation, including:

• Deal Co-Op, the best white label software for group buying
• GoMiles, the best way to manage your frequent flyer miles
• ThinkFuse, a startup that is simplifying weekly status reports
• Kinizi, an apartment deal finder
• Giant ThinkWell, a social gaming company focusing on celebrities
• RewardsForce, a startup disrupting the customer loyalty arena
• The Shared Web, a site that allows you to discover the best content based on your friends and interests
• And of course, us – Highlighter

Even though I haven’t had too much time for blogging over the past few months, it is something I definitely want to get back into as it is a good way to keep track of all of the changes and happenings. I’ve found myself reading over old posts just to see what I was up to a few years ago…If anything, a blog is simply a great personal journal for keeping track of one’s life!

Highlighter is a WordPress plugin that allows authors to actively engage their audience. They can direct readers attention to any part of the post by ‘highlighting’ any word, sentence or image.

Although we are starting with a WordPress plugin, Highlighter will eventually unify what you highlight, comment, and share across all content, platforms and devices, to create a dynamic relationship between publishers and readers.

That means whether you are reading a blog post from your computer or an eBook/PDF on your iPad, the interaction with content will remain the same.

Highlighter will keep those highlights, comments and notes in a centralized location that you can share with others and/or review at a later time.

Readers can now highlight, comment and share any word, sentence, paragraph or image on a blog post as well, giving the audience unprecedented ability to interact with content.

This means that conversations are no longer limited to the just “comments” of the page – now visitor interaction can take place anywhere within the content. Visitors can also share any sentence or piece of text just by highlighting and clicking!

Sound confusing? It’s not. Check this video out to see how it works.

Collect more emails

The rules of “Internet Marketing 101″ say that an email list is the foundation of all internet marketing efforts. Highlighter has built-in email collection tools that will allow you to integrate with Aweber, Mailchimp or GetResponse. This means that you can capture commentor’s email addresses that before would have been lost.

Anyone who knows anything about online marketing knows that emails convert better than Twitter and Facebook combined.

Increased traffic

Highlighter makes sharing remarkably easy. All a reader has to do is highlight any word, sentence, or image and with one click, readers can share via twitter, facebook, or email. This means that instead of just sharing article titles, your audience will now be able to share the specific elements that they find interesting.

The easier it is to share, the more your visitors will do it.

Commenters will also be notified when someone else responds to the conversation, which also increases pageviews.

How does it work?

If you want to comment on something, just highlight it and click the comment button. Highlighter allows the publisher to moderate inline comments just like regular comments. Therefore unless the author has changed the default setting, comments will need to be moderated before they appear.

Once you have made your comment, a little bubble will show up letting all other readers know that someone has made a comment.

You will find that on any previously commented line of text, the text has a slightly grey dashed underline followed by a little comment bubble. Upon hovering over this text, you will see the comment bubble enlarges with a number in it. This is the number of times this text has been commented upon.

What about blogs with mountains of comments?

The guys at Highlighter were aware that with any significant amount of conversation around a topic, it would be less convenient to read via the bubble.

That is why they created the Highlight Box, which displays all of the inline comments in one place for readers to view. However, with the Highlight Box, each comment or conversation is in context to a highlighted word, sentence, paragraph or image on the blog, making the conversations on the blog much more valuable.

Why would readers want to comment inline? Often with a highly commented blog post, the context the comment can be lost after XX number of comments. Highlighter makes it much easier to retain the context of conversations.

Highlighter is also ideal for longer, more in-depth posts.

Inline commenting

For some verticals, there can be many uses for inline commenting, such as:

• To reference a particular word or term in the medical or legal fields
• To provide peer review/feedback in an academic or enterprise setting
• To display a relevant affiliate link or advertisement within any kind of review/promotional blog post (links and images can be easily embedded within inline comments)

A more social web

Imagine how much more ‘social’ web pages will become when ANYTHING within the content can be attached to a specific, in-context conversation or shared with just one-click!

Of course, giving the publisher fully-moderated control over what is and isn’t displayed is paramount. The last thing anyone wants is for a web page to be graffitied up with spam or other nonsense.

Thankfully, Highlighter gives the publisher full moderation control and fights spam using WordPress’s built-in spam tool, Akismet.

Try Highlighter on your blog

Highlighter is still in development. The guys developing it, Matt, Nate and Josh are running a few case studies and wanted feedback from me, you and my readers!

If you are interested in running Highlighter on your blog, you can download it now. Highlighter is currently just a WordPress plugin, but the guys have plans to expand it to all blogging platforms via a Javascript snippet soon.

What do you think of this new way to interact with content? Let me know in the comments, or better yet, comment on any word, sentence, paragraph or image in this blog post!

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Please support these guys on their big launch today at www.dealcoop.com/bradfeld

Everything on IMCoach.com is completely free – there is nothing to purchase. We created this blog as a “thank you” to our customers and to give back to the Internet marketing community.

The writing/managing team includes professional bloggers and online marketers such as John Chow, Zac Johnson and Michael Kwan.

You can go there right now and read a ton of cool articles, including some very useful blog posts, such as: 

• 5 Optimizing Tips for Your Sales Pages
• How to Launch a Product
• Customizing Your AWeber Opt-In Form
• How to Effectively Network Online
• Creating Effective Marketing Videos
• and many more!

IMCoach.com is so brand new that it doesn’t even have any comments yet! You are literally one of the first people to learn about this new site.

In the coming months, IMCoach.com will become a major hub for online marketers and those who want to learn to become better marketers. We have a ton of cool stuff planned, including the first launch contest (details below)…

IMCoach.com Launch Contest: WIN a $100 Best Buy Gift Card

We are having an IMCoach Launch contest and you can win a $100 Best Buy Gift Card! Here’s how…

1. Go checkout IMCoach.com
2. Leave a comment on any of the posts
3. You will will automatically be entered to win!
4. OPTIONAL: For an additional entry, re-tweet one of the posts using the
   hashtag #imcoach
5. OPTIONAL: For another additional entry, “like” our Facebook page

The contest runs for the next two weeks – until Friday, August 6th. Check out IMCoach.com and let me know what you think!

If you are looking for strategic internet marketing, take a look at The College Startup where you can get some of the best tips and tricks on how to leverage your business, such as how to rock Google+ and get more conversions from your social media.

Blog Profit Camp is a 12-week interactive course that will show you step by step how to make big money with blogging. John started blogging in December 2005 and within two years, took his blog from making zero to making over $40,000 per month!

Today, he run one of the biggest and most profitable blogs in the world, with over 100,000 RSS readers and over 56,000
people following me on Twitter.

Squeeze Theme, Sales Page Theme and Squeeze Camp are being integrated into the top two packages to make it even easier for novices to both learn and pursue an Internet marketing strategy with all of the tools they need.

You can learn more here (no affiliate link): http://www.blogprofitcamp.com

Congratulations to John for launching this incredible new program!

Also, does anyone believe the human brain can actually hold 1-10 terabytes? That would seem immeasurable.

What do you think is the weirdest or most hard to believe fact?

Via: Medical Coding Certification

If any of you personally know me, you know that I moved down to Arizona in 2006 to begin my business/Internet moneymaking journey. That ended up going quite well when I started this blog in January 2007 and then Unique Blog Designs in August 2007.

Connecting with my blogging mentor, John Chow

I started quit my job, quit school and started my personal blog in January of 2007, a few months after first discovering how blogs can generate revenue. Within a year, my blog had 1000 daily RSS subscribers, enough for me to be making a substantial amount of income from 1-2 hours per day of work.

It was also through my personal blog, that my original blogging mentor, John Chow, discovered who I was. I first started reading John’s blog in November of 2006 when he was making about $1,000/month from his blog.

Today, nearly four year later, John is grossing over $50,000/month from his blog and is about to launch Blog Profit Camp – a 12-week course that will show you exactly how John went from 0-$50,000 per month.

Despite the income that blogging generated for me with relatively little effort, that was not the only benefit… It was also with the redesign of JohnChow.com that my business partners (Matt, Josh) and I were able to launch Unique Blog Designs in August of 2007.

Since then, UBD has worked with over 500 individual clients as well as sold products (WordPress themes) to tens of thousands of customers. We have also exhibited at numerous blogging conferences including Blog World Expo, IZEA Fest and Elite Retreat.

To put it lightly, starting and running UBD changed my life.

UBD is still in operation today, although the majority of business we do is for our two products, Squeeze Theme and Affiliate Theme.

Being back in Seattle

In April of 2009, my business partners and I moved back up to Seattle to be closer to our families (who all live in Gig Harbor) and the many business friends we have here, including John Chow and Neil Patel.

Even though I miss the warm weather of Arizona, having been back in Seattle for over a year now, I can happily say it was the best decision for us both personally and business-wise.

We also recently applied to the Seattle TechStars competition for a new, unannounced product that we are developing.

More details on the new product coming soon…

Back to blogging?

It is no secret I haven’t been a very consistent blogger over the past few years. Between running UBD, serving our customers and developing new products, there is not much time in the day afterward to spend time blogging.

That being said, I am going to try to keep this blog more up to date if for nothing more than to chronicle my entrepreneurial journey for myself, as well as anyone else that cares to read.

Thank you again if you are still reading this! Your comments are appreciated, as well!

Affiliate Theme
My last post was announcing Affiliate Theme. Well, Affiliate Theme received a ton of awesome exposure and a TON of people are using it to more easily set up affiliate marketing websites. We have a lot of cool new features and additions planned which we will be adding in the upcoming weeks.

Moved back to Seattle, from Arizona
I moved to Arizona from Seattle almost 3 years ago for school. School didn’t last long (I dropped out) and eventually started this blog and building online businesses. Six months later, UBD started and since then we have been running and growing the business.

Many of you who follow me on Twitter know UBD recently moved back to Seattle from Arizona. This was due primarily for business reasons as we have many more business connections and opportunities in Seattle. Not only that, but all of our families still live here and it is a definite plus to be able to say hello to the family more often.

What’s next?
We have some really cool projects we have been working on lately which are going to change the blog design industry. I am excited to announce some cool stuff in the coming months.

As I get more caught up with work, I definitely will be blogging more. I need to start doing video – it is so much easier!

Why? Ease of use, familiarity, and more uses than Grandpa’s Swiss army knife.

We have worked closely with and picked the brains of some of the top names in blogging and affiliate marketing, including:

• John Chow
• Jeremy Schoemaker
• Yaro Starak
• Zac Johnson
• Paul Bourque
• Jonathan Volk
• Jim Kukral
• Gobala Krishnan
• John Reese

They have all told us the one thing they wish they had was a WordPress theme optimized for affiliate marketing websites. Well, now the wait is over…

Affiliate Theme is an innovative new WordPress theme built exclusively for affiliate marketers and make money online bloggers who build landing page, review sites, and other mini-sites for niche products and offers.

Watch how Affiliate Theme works

How is Affiliate Theme different from other WordPress themes?

Unlike ALL other WordPress themes, this is not a WordPress theme built only for bloggers.

This is the first WordPress theme built exclusively for affiliate marketers and those who build mini-sites, review sites and landing pages.

While you can easily use Affiliate Theme as a blog theme, its true value lies in the fact that you can build multiple variations of your affiliate marketing landing pages/review sites and track the conversion rate of your changes.

We give YOU options!

An innovative Theme Options panel allows you to change virtually everything about your theme – from layout, colors and fonts, to logo, header graphics, and even the wording on your call to action buttons! Save time and money! No longer will you have to re-input all of your offers each time to make a major change to your landing page or review site.

Why use WordPress to build affiliate marketing websites?

There are a few distinct advantages when using a CMS to build your websites. Just like you can change the look of your site without having to recreate all of your content, you can now build multiple variations of your affiliate marketing web pages without having to re-input all of your affiliate offers. This means you save time from the tedium of creating multiple variations of pages. Of course, this means you can spend less time building and more time testing and making money!

Who should use Affiliate Theme?

Both new and veteran affiliate marketers will appreciate Affiliate Theme’s ease of use and the time they will save when it comes to building affiliate marketing sites. New affiliate marketers who are generally unfamiliar with creating effective affiliate marketing websites will be able to easily create, test and track the effectiveness of landing pages.

Not just for code monkeys

You don’t need to be an expert web developer to use and customize Affiliate Theme. Affiliate Theme features one of the most customizable Theme Options panels a WordPress theme has ever seen. This means you can customize the look of your landing pages to suit any niche or vertical.

What else?

• Create affiliate websites using the best content management system! The first affiliate website creation tool built for the best content management system in the world – WordPress.
• Whatever kind of site you want! Six (6) unique layout options means you can easily split test and find the highest converting layout, which means more money for you.
• Perfect for any vertical! Photoshop-like color picker allows you to easily change the colors of your page background, headlines, navigation, call-to-action buttons.
• Brand your Affiliate Theme easily! Choose from a variety of header options – including integrating your logo, full header graphic, a pre-made UBD Niche Header Graphic, or plain text.
• Gorgeous affiliate websites, ready for your use! Forget about having to upload custom artwork. You can automatically choose from dozens of professional, pre-made header and background graphics, all for popular affiliate niches.
• Customize the heck out of your Affiliate Theme! Take your CSS-level modification to the next level by enabling and utilizing the custom stylesheet.
• Get featured! Add a “Featured” offer box to any layout, giving you, in effect, twice as many layouts!
• Insane typography options! Select the font, font-size, and font color for your headlines, post captions and main body font.
• Improve conversion with simpler navigation! Remove the navigation from your Affiliate Theme to make it more like a landing page. Otherwise, select between displaying the categories and pages in the navigation.
• Less coding for you! Integrate header and footer tracking scripts without touching a single line of code.
• Get more clicks! Customize the call-to-action buttons for all of your offers! Choose font, background color, size and rollover changes as well.
• Affiliate blogging made easy! Easily enable/disable RSS feed, author name, date, post headline, comments and trackbacks

Incredible Support – vast knowledge base and video screencasts show you how to do everything!

Affiliate Theme is not just any WordPress theme. With your purchase of Affiliate Theme, you get access to our incredible Affiliate Theme Resource Center.

We have put together a wide array of video tutorials (screen casts) and knowledge base articles you can access to make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts.

Not only that, but with your purchase of Affiliate Theme, you get access to the helpful Support forum where you can post your questions and see how other members are using Affiliate Theme most effectively.

Get access to exclusive super affiliate podcasts

UBD goes the extra mile by giving you access to podcasts with super affiliates such as Jonathan Volk, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, John Chow, Ryan Wade and Yaro Starak.

So, what are you waiting for? Get Affiliate Theme now and create affiliate sites faster than ever!

I have been to several professional basketball games in the past, including three separate Michael Jordan games (another story for another time), but no games since the late 90′s, and nothing as star-studded as an All Star Game. w00t!

The NBA has changed a tremendous amount in the past 15 years with the dominant players being Lebron, Kobe, and still Shaq, who is now on Twitter. Anyone who follows Shaq knows how much of a goofy, fun guy he is. During his intro, Shaq put on one of the funniest dances I have ever seen.

I won’t even try to describe it. Just watch…

You can see the TwitPics I took from the game: NBA All Star 2009 Twitpics

I also took a bunch of video with my Flip Mino HD which I will be posting shortly. What an incredibly fun experience!

UPDATE: Video I took with my Flip Mino HD of awesome SHAQ DUNK!!!!!

If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, he is the author of many popular business books and a speaker with appearances at Google, TED and a number of charities. Godin popularized the topic of permission marketing.

What advice do you have for online businesses and other startups in this down economy?

I have been Twittering now for quite a while – since November of 2007. In my 1583 tweets (at this time), I have learned a lot about how to use and how not to use Twitter. It has taken me a while to get accustomed to the flow of Twitter – it definitely requires a different communication style than chat, email, or IM, even though it is a combination of the three.

Here are my top 5 ways NOT to use Twitter:

5. Don’t complain/whine about personal matters – Complaining 140 characters at a time is not going to make anyone want to follow you. Instead, reframe your frustration and use it as an opportunity to poke fun of yourself/the situation, or better, tweet something inspiring/positive for people who may be in a similar place as you.

For example, Zappos CEO, Tony, recently locked himself outside of his hotel room in Mexico – on his porch, no less. Instead of tweeting about the situation in a negative way, he tweeted about it in a neutral/fun way and it ended up being an enjoyable conversation with his followers, while he waited 45 minutes for someone to rescue him.

Tony says that Twitter can make otherwise frustrating situations actually enjoyable. According to Tony:

I now almost looked forward to situations that would normally be frustrating, because I’ve learned that almost any situation can be reframed to be funny as a tweet, which then makes the situation in real life funny as well.

(original article)

4. Don’t use Twitter to endlessly self-promote.. Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool for getting your “brand” out to the world, but it is equally important that you engage other people and not just promote your agenda.

For example, by asking questions and posting links to interesting articles, you are taking the “me” out of Twitter and instead using it as a conversation-generating tool, which will be far more valuable to your followers. I always try to tweet or re-tweet interesting articles or topics that I believe people will have an opinion about. As a result, people respond to my tweets, thereby creating an ongoing conversation about a wide variety of interesting topics.

3. Don’t constantly tell the world what you are doing. As funny as this sounds since it is the default question Twitter asks of us, no one is interested in constantly hearing about the mundane activities of your life. I understand how a random tweet about what you are doing is innocent and can be fun, but Twitter is much more valuable for engaging an audience/starting conversations than for telling people about the otherwise boring activities we all partake in.

Instead of just telling people what you are doing, SHOW them. You can do this by using a service such as TwitPic to post pics from your camera phone. You will notice on my blog’s sidebar that I have a widget which automatically displays my most recent TwitPics. These are pics I took from my phone and uploaded directly to Twitter. Pictures tend to receive a lot of click-throughs, as people rather look at something than read about it.

2. Don’t use Auto-DM’s and Auto-replies. This is just as bad as spam. Auto-DM’s and Auto-replies are so common now that they are simply annoying. If you want anyone to take you seriously on Twitter, turn these functions off and manually engage your followers via replies or direct messages.

1. Don’t use Twitter to massively follow and unfollow people. I understand that people run auto-follow scripts on hundreds of people at a time in order to gain new followers themselves, but if you are going to do this, don’t automatically unfollow those people the next day; that looks disingenuous. If you are going to follow someone and they mutually follow you, it is kind of sleazy to automatically unfollow them the next day. Where is the appreciation for their reciprocal follow?

So, there you have it. Those are the ways I recommend using and NOT using Twitter. If you enjoyed this article, please consider re-tweeting this post by clicking here.

Do you have any tips about how NOT to use Twitter? Share them in the comments!

This was my second time going to the annual Barrett Jackson Auto Auction and Car Show, which plays host to 250,000 people every year. It is a week long event that features some of the most amazing classic cars, modern day super cars, and even vintage and new race cars. Truly an epic event for anyone who is a car nut like me.

There is a new class of super-ultra-cars that are incredibly light weight, high in horsepower, and well, insanely fast. Those are usually my favorite cars to hang around, so I took most of my pics/video of these rare, exotic monsters.

I took my Flip Mino HD and digital camera to the event grab some footage/pics. Some of the most epic vehicles:

Koenigsegg CCX
4.7 L twin-supercharged V8
806 hp and 782 ft-lb of torque
Price: $1.2 million

Gumpert Apollo
640hp Audi V8 Engine.
Weight: 2400lbs
0-60 in 3.0 seconds.
Price: $425,000

Cadillac LMP-02
600 hp Twin Turbocharged V8
1984lbs (it’s a damn racecar)
Price: Auctioned off for only $145,000. This is the deal of a century. Some day this car may be worth MILLLLLLLLIONS of dollars!

Better start saving up!

More awesome videos coming soon!

Yep, this goal of this trip will be exclusively to network, hang out, and party with our dot com mogul friends. I am especially excited to sit down with a certain dot com mogul to talk about possibly starting a new venture that will take over. I can’t say anymore now, but you will definitely be hearing about it in the next few months.

I am going to take a lot of pictures and video as I just got a new Flip Mino HD which takes outstanding video. I plan on doing mini interviews with the likes of ShoeMoney, Shawn Collins (founder of Affiliate Summit), Jim Kukral, and hopefully even Gary Vaynerchuk.

If you are gonna be in Vegas this weekend, make sure to hit me up! There is no limit to the size of our group, so feel free to tag along if you want to meet some cool people!

Yep, it’s gonna be fun times! I will definitely keep you updated!

Here they are:

Rescue Time

Over the past two months, I have been using an online tracking program called RescueTime which has allowed me to track how long I am working and how productive my work has been. Rescue Time allows you to assign numerical productivity values to different tasks, so it has ben useful to see how efficient my time spent on the computer has been.

You can use this to keep track of how often you are slacking off, or how long you are spending on a particular project.

Coda

Coda is a text editor + file transfer + svn + css editor + terminal + resource center. It is by a software company called Panic and it is only for Mac. Why do I use Coda?

It is extremely easy to manage and work on multiple projects with its visual CSS editor and built in file transfer. Combined with Apple Mail and Photoshop, Coda is my MOST used application. You can check it out how awesome Coda is here.

Twitter

Twitter is great for getting new ideas. I follow a wide variety of other talented web developers, so it is always interesting when they tweet what tools they are using to make their jobs easier. Many of the tools on this list I found only through following people on Twitter. You will see Twitter go mainstream in 2009, meaning it will receive significant press coverage and more non-tech savvy people will start using it. Don’t forget to follow me and UBD on Twitter!

1Password

If you are a developer that works with clients, you know the pain of having to keep track of hundreds if not thousands of passwords. 1Password is the solution for managing A LOT of passwords. Again, if you are not a Mac user, you are out of luck.

1Password is also universal across all the browsers on your system, so if you use FireFox and Safari, you have will have access to the same passwords in both browsers.

MAMP

The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X! If you setup lots of client sites, you will appreciate the speed of being able to test files on your own system.

Since installing MAMP, I have saved a lot of time from having to upload to various test servers.

Those are my top 5 web development tools from 2008. What tools do you use that makes your job as a web developer easier?

Make sure you follow UBD on Twitter to stay up to date on all of the cool things happening.

We have a lot of exciting things planned for 2009 that will definitely surprise you! In Q1 2009, we have something very special to show you and we will be announcing it first on Twitter.

Check out this video which explains how cool WP 2.7 actually is:

Most people are not comfortable with making big upgrades to their blogs, but I have been testing WP 2.7 pretty extensively with all of our WP Themes including Citrus Theme and the UBD Moneymaker Theme, and it has been working perfectly.

Download WordPress 2.7 Here

If you are using WordPress 2.7 now, what is your favorite new feature? Run into any weirdness? Tell us about your experience.

I follow John and Frank on Twitter, and earlier today, Frank tweeted a link to a 6-hour podcast he and John recorded back in 2003.

Now, I know what you are thinking… isn’t Internet marketing advice from 2003 outdated? That is exactly what I was expecting, but you will be surprised at how many fundamental truths Frank and John cover in this podcast, which are all true today.

I know 6-hour is a long time to listen to discussion, but if you are into Internet marketing and making money online, I highly recommend you check this out – especially because it is free and there is no opt-in required.

Let me know what you think.

• Check out the podcast here
• Follow John Reese on Twitter
• Follow Frank Kern on Twitter

Everyone’s favorite wild man, and CEO of IZEA, Ted Murphy, loves cereal so much that he is giving away 52 boxes (enough to fill a bath tub) of it in his first “super promotional happiness giveaway.”

How to Enter

Each person can enter up to 2 times, once via their blog and once via twitter.

Enter with your blog. To enter with your blog simply write a short post including one of the promotional images or video below and link back to this post. Please make sure you drop the URL of your post in the comments.

This is a great opportunity to win a lot of cereal and donate the boxes to a local food bank, which is what a lot of the contest entrants are promising to do.

You can learn more about the contest here.

Win a Bathtub Full of Cereal from Ted Murphy on Vimeo.

With the recent election of Barack Obama, there is going to a new Presidential precedence in using the Interwebz to communicate with the US citizens.

There was no question Obama’s Internet marketing was top notch. He and his team had the most effective marketing of anyone who ever ran for office.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr – Barack Obama’s team has and is participating in all of these new mediums.

Even though he will likely have to give up his Blackberry when he gets to the Oval Office, Obama will still be the first president to use a laptop at his desk.

Add to that, Obama will now be giving a weekly address via YouTube. This is obviously a HUGE step in the right direction – not since JFK using TV has a president involved himself in new channels of communication.

With regards to his technology policy, perhaps what is best about the election of Obama is that he is a strong proponent of Net Neutrality, the purposed laws and measures which will keep the Internet open and free for a long time to come.

Obama will even be appointing the first Chief Technology Officer of the US. Hello, change.

Check out this video of Arianna Huffington (Editor in Chief of Huffington Post) interviewing Google CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt about the underlying potential of the new Internet Presidency.

Hopefully, the US government will be able to be as increasingly transparent as businesses/corporations have become through the use of social media.

Whether you agree with the rest of his policies or not, with Barack Obama in the White House, the Internet wins.

What do you think?

In September, my biz partners and I spent three weekends of the month at blog and Internet conferences. One of the conferences we attended was IZEA Fest in Orlando, Florida, where my biz partner, Matt Blancarte, gave a speech on blog design for the Blog Design Makeover panel.

Needless to say, IZEA Fest and the Blog Design Makeover panel were incredibly successful for both UBD and IZEA. Matt and the other panelists did an excellent job at discussing the blog designs they made over. You can watch the full video presentation here.

Win A Blog Design Makeover From UBD

At the recent Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA, mentioned the idea of doing a monthly promotion to for bloggers to win a free blog design makeover. Of course, we thought it was a great izea, I mean idea!

We are huge IZEA fans and we are proud to partner with them for this opportunity. Even cooler, the first Blog Design Makeover promotion is now launching.

Entering this monthly contest is super easy! Read more details here »

Thanks to IZEA for their promotion and support!