We’ll be celebrating our 5th year anniversary in style tomorrow, August 31st, from 3 pm to 8 pm at the Slamdot Store in downtown Knoxville at 108 S. Gay Street.

Since our initial announcement about the 5-year anniversary party, we have scheduled Phil Williams from Newstalk 98.7 FM to come out and do a live remote broadcast here at the Slamdot Store from 3 to 6 pm, so come out and listen live in person!

We’ve also partnered with one of our good customers, Bread of Heaven Catering, to bring a smoker and provide some of the best BBQ in East TN right here at the store! They’re one of the best kept secrets in town, and if you’ve had their food, you know why you need to be here. If you haven’t, don’t blame us for any regrets about not showing up…

In addition to the great food and live Phil Williams broadcast, we’ll be giving out tons of door prizes, including gift certificates and goodies from Elegant Essentials, The Shrimp Dock, Angela Floyd Schools, The Irish Times, ECO Clean Carpet Solutions, Spirit Driven Coaching, Coffee and Chocolate, Tea at the Gallery, Meadow View Greenhouse, and the Knoxville Opera!

There will also be beer, wine, some great music, and of course, like always, some tasty Italian Ice from Rita’s Ice. Please come join us as we show our support to all of our customers and friends who have helped Slamdot hit the 5-year milestone.

Josh Ault with WATE 6 came by the Slamdot Store today to interview Elaine Frank about the 100 Block Party details, happening on October 1st at 5:30pm.

Josh also spoke to Daniel Monday about the 100 Block opening up to pedestrians and traffic and how we’ve been impacted so far.

Look for it tonight at 11:00pm on WATE 6.

Slamdot turned 5 years old today (Happy Birthday to us!), which is amazing. We have done a lot and come a long way in 5 short years, and we’re already looking forward to the next 5 years ahead of us. This fall we have a lot of new things going on, and we are very excited about everything that is happening, especially with the Slamdot Store. We have received numerous positive comments about it, with overwhelming support from our local community of Knoxville, TN. Business continues to get better and better by the day, and more people are realizing how easy and accessible it is working with us in the retail format.

We’d like to thank our awesome customers, and our close friends and colleagues, who have been with us all of these years and understood our vision for the future. We hope to continue improving our services even further, and offering many more options to our clients.

Since starting out working remotely from home, to the handful of smaller offices we’ve called home in between, and opening the first Slamdot Store earlier this year, we have loved every minute of the journey and can’t wait for more. We hope those who are available to join us in Knoxville on August 31st will come by the Slamdot Store to hang out from 3 pm to 8 pm, as we gather in celebration.

Thanks for 5 great years, from the entire Slamdot Team!

Elaine Frank brought some Buffalo hot dogs back with her from New York, so we had a cookout. We always refer to Elaine as Frank around here, so the humor is in Frank grilling Franks.

We had the opportunity to attend the official ribbon cutting to celebrate the opening of the new 100 Block of Gay Street in downtown Knoxville this morning, which has undergone a major renovation over the past 17 months with the entire street being closed to vehicular traffic. The “Streetscapes Project” was done to fix the old infrastructure of the street, sidewalks, utilities and other aspects of the block, while beautifying the block even further and adding more character.

As you can tell from Elaine jumping high into the air, we’re beyond thrilled about the re-opening of our block, where we’ve called home for the last couple of years. Right now it’s only open to pedestrian traffic, but the entire street will be open to vehicular traffic on August 15, in a few short weeks, which comes just after our 5-year anniversary on August 5. The timing is perfect.

Mayor Bill Haslam came out to address the crowd and lead the ribbon cutting.

There is a fake email floating around that claims to be from us asking for your account information. This is a phishing scam and should be disregarded.

For your reference, here is what the email looks like.

New secret questions were added to your slamdot.com account.

To ensure that your account information remains accurate and secure we notify
you whenever this information changes.

This change request was made on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:17:44 +0300

If the changes described above are accurate, no further action is needed. If
anything doesn’t look right, follow the link below to
make changes:

https://edit.slamdot.com/forgot?stage=fe100&src=&intl=us&done=&partner=reg

Regards,
slamdot.com Account Services
————————-
Please do not reply to this message. Mail sent to this address cannot be
answered.

The Slamdot Store was featured today on Office Snapshots. We’re excited to be among other great workspaces such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and more. Thanks to Shawn Poynter for the great photos. Some of the shots include the retail setting up front, the conference room and the loft. Let us know what you think!

It’s almost time again for our annual Farragut/West Knox Chamber networking event! We had a blast last year, with almost 100 people who stopped by to network with one another. We’re anticipating a huge crowd again this year. If you received an invitation, or you’re part of the Farragut Chamber, please stop by, and you’re welcome to bring a guest or two along with you.

We’ll have Rita’s Ice on hand to fight any heat that may be lurking, and some other refreshments. There will also be a few door prizes, which are donated by some of our awesome customers, who always provide the best giveaways.

Let us know if you plan on dropping into the Store on June 17 to say hello, meet some new folks and catch up with those you know. Please RSVP to rsvp@slamdot.com and let us know how many guests you have coming.

See you in a few weeks.

Just when you think you’re Googling the same old way, Google switches it up. They recently rolled out the new SERP look and feel, which really just adds more tools and functionality to the search engine results area without your permission. These tools were accessible before, but only if you wanted them. Now they take up space and really clutter up the results page. This wasn’t necessarily a good move for Google, as it makes them more like Yahoo! and Bing. It definitely gets away from their clean look and simple focus on search. The irony is that they made a change a couple months ago where none of the other links or information showed up when you first loaded Google, but if you moved your mouse around everything would fade in.

It appears others are not that thrilled either. If they had a “classic” version, that would probably get a warm welcome. Or at least the ability to hide the left-side navigation.

In case you didn’t hear last week, Steve Jobs told Adobe what’s up. Flash was a necessary evil, back in the day, to make interactive websites possible. The downside has always been that you have to install a third-party browser plugin in order for the Flash content to display. For entire Flash websites, this means that you can’t view anything unless you have the plugin.

Search engines can’t even index the content on a Flash website very well, if at all. With HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, any modern web browser natively supports most of the interactivity that used to require a special Flash interface. Animations and other cool effects can be done with JavaScript. Even video streaming doesn’t require Flash any more.

Flash was essentially a way for developers to do things that web browsers weren’t ready for yet. It was a hack, for the time being. The big difference is that now content doesn’t have to be encoded into a movie file that only a proprietary plugin can play. Web content should adhere to open standards, making it available to any platform, and that’s the point that Steve Jobs is making.

Basically, Flash is obsolete.