That I completely agree with. To me, it’s all about the second sentence: Tell people about it. And the tools are getting easier, but there are still some big challenges here. And opportunities too. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are all amazingly powerful tools. These are huge vehicles for casting the net far and wide. But integrating your content with them can still be a challenge, especially for the layman.

And notifying search engines of the pages on your site is whole other ball of wax. One of the more challenging projects I undertook at Fanzter was generating our sitemap files. As our sites grew, the number of pages in our index just got absolutely insane. A nightly job just couldn’t hack it anymore and needed to be completely rewritten. There are quite a few plugins written to tackle this problem. I haven’t done a side by side comparison or tried any of these out yet, but I’m eager to. Ultimately custom code is often needed for this sort of thing, code that exactly matches your content and your application. And that is far from easy.

The other thing that large textboxes does is eliminate other possibilities for these pages, like using the sign up form as a qualifier. Joshua Porter, the author of that article also recently gave a presentation that has really inspired me lately. Highly recommended.

I’ve found that I pay a lot more attention to Twitter trends this way. Twitter has become my go-to for what’s happening with the things I’m interested in. It’s most fun to check out during Yankees games these days – I hope that doesn’t change for a few more weeks! Go Yankees!

Also, for Twitter on the go, check out Tweetie 2, it’s awesome.

It fits the site’s namesake perfectly and adds an air of whimzy that I’d love to see a bit more of.

But now that August rolls around, it’s time to slow things down a bit. Entourage is finally back on and it won’t be long before football kicks off and playoff baseball (Go Yankees!).

It’s a good time to reflect a bit. It’s also a good time to laugh at these awesome Dos Equis ads!

While not normally something I’d listen to, the song in the trailer fits really well and is a beautifully flowing song. In case you want to know more about the song, it’s Wake Up by Arcade Fire.

In the meantime, I had to share this video of song of Nicola Conte’s new album Rituals. My copy finally arrived from Japan the other day and it’s simply a magical album. I’m a big fan of Nicola Conte and love the fact that he’s from Bari where much of my family comes from.