Every writer on the blogosphere has their very own motives for blogging, some people write to become famous, others write to get across a message, many write to make money. I was the latter. I say “was” because I haven’t written a blog post in several weeks now. I have lost my motivation, my mojo if you will.

Blogging for money is dangerous. If you are becoming a blogger for money beware because it can ruin your hobbies. I took blogging to the next level for a few months with this site. It went from a laid back place to find some free stuff and get a few decent articles to a factory that pumped out generic competitions and daily articles whether they were good or bad. This site was becoming a well oiled machine but it was losing it’s soul in the process. Feed reader stats were going up, bounce rates where going down and simply stated revenues where beginning to take off. I am certain you are saying what is the problem.

The problem is that I no longer enjoyed writing for the blog. It was my hobby, but instead of writing when I felt like writing I was creating a giant research project for myself. I went from writing articles about things that I wanted to 1 or 2 times a week to regularly researching and reading and sweating over what to write about next so that I could see that simple increase in feed readers and the extra .25 cents in clicks. I took the heart out of what I was doing and turned it into another job.

I don’t need another job. I have enough stress and responsibility at work, so from now on look for this site to be more of a journal and less of a machine. I am not going to remove the ads from my site so don’t get your hopes too high, because if I can make money blogging without stressing about it I am sure as hell going to try.

So until next time.

Adam

Bookkeeping can be an awfully daunting task, and yet it is imperative to the success of your business because you will be held accountable for what your books reflect. It doesn’t matter if you are a part time blogger, a full time web entrepreneur, or a brick and mortar business owner you will need to track your revenues, expenses, clients, invoices, estimates, and basically everything that might matter to you or the IRS.

On that note I want to let you know about Quickbooks Simple Start 2008. You may have heard of Quickbooks before it is an extremely popular accounting software that allows for great flexibility and tracking of your revenues and expenses. But you may not have heard of Simple Start before. Simple start is a FREE version of Quickbooks that is available for download from their site. Go here to check it out.

I have recently downloaded this myself and have fallen in love with it. I can easily add clients and contacts, create services with a description and price, add vendors, create custom estimates, create custom invoices, track payments, make deposits, register a bank account, accept credit card payments, track expenses, and all sorts of other great features.

If you aren’t keeping your books up to date I would strongly suggest getting to it and Quickbooks Simple Start is a great software to do it with.

Especially when you win for multiple reasons.

Today is the day that I divide up the prizes for my charity contest.  I would like to start by again thanking all of you that were willing or able to donate to the March For Babies fundraiser held by the March of Dimes.  Because of these donations your are already all winners, however that isn’t the only thing that you won.

With the small audience that I have I didn’t expect great numbers, but when you , my readers, came through and donated $80.00 to the cause I was amazed and delighted to know that people from all over the country where willing to help myself and my fiance fight for this charity.  So thank you all very much.

Now on to the prizes.

I used list randomizer to sort the order in which the prizes were to be distributed and to whom they should be given.  So without futher ado here is what you won.

1. Custom Wordpress Theme Created by Theme Cannon — Meaghan
2. Optin Comments Wordpress Plugin — Gino Orlandi
3. Review on theuniversitykid.com — Jason Carpentier

Congratulations to all of you.  You Deserve your prizes and more.   Please contact me to arrage for acquiring your prize.  Any Prizes that are not claimed within 30 days of this post will be retained by me and will be given out in some other fashion in the future.

This was a great contest with great results and I hope to do more for both you my readers and this charity organization in the future.

 Thanks

Adam

You know the commercials, in fact whether you are a Mac fan or not you probably like the commercials. They are funny, but are they true? Are PC users stuffy overweight dorks while the Apple user is a hip youngsters with a sharp wit? Well Popular Mechanics put the issue to the test. Not only did they test the performance of the machines but they tested what type of people preferred what type of machine as well.

The results of the test may shock you a little as PC held it’s own weight when it came to the which system was preferred by users. The user ratings came back with Mac only scoring a half a star higher than the PC. Mac’s “famously friendly” user interface ended edging out Microsoft’s Vista in the end but all users found both operating systems to be easy to use and enjoyed them as well. Oh and it wasn’t only stuffy fatties that liked the PC while not all of the hipsters preferred the Mac. So maybe the commercials don’t exactly reflect the truth.

The results of the speed tests, well those are a different story, Mac crushed Vista in the important categories such as startup and shutdown and launching the browsers. Vista did alright on installation times and program launching by keeping up and even beating Mac in a few categories. But when again it came time to test the heavy duty stuff Mac pulled ahead by taking about half the time to launch CS3 with a high stress level on the processors.

So I guess Macs can be considered the better computer. The results of both speed and user performance came back favoring the Mac. If you would like to see the exact stats go grab yourself the May 2008 copy of Poplular Mechanics. They also have the benchmarking software available for download on their site so if you want to perform the test yourself go out and grab the software.

In the meantime tell me what you prefer and why. Because I am a PC guy and Mac users often rub me the wrong way. Pretentious is generally what comes to mind. However it seems like that stereotype may be just as wrong as the commercials.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed. If you like emails subscribe via email. Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

Chances are you (The Creadiv Reader) knows what you are doing when operating a computer.  You know the basic functions, the advanced techinques, the tricks of the trade.  However I also assume that most of you work with somebody that doesn’t.

My “real job”  the one that pays the bills is at my dad’s medical billing company where I am a computer programmer, tech support, network coordinator, maintenance man, and 100 other titles.  We are a medium sized company of about 50 employees and I find myself today creating tutorials for the employees in our office on topics which they should already know how to do.  

To me this is very frustrating.  I am spending my day creating tutorials on how to backup outlook’s personal folders.  How to create spam filters and use shortcut keys.  All are tasks that I feel the “computer literate” employee should have a relativley strong grasp of, yet here I am doing it anway.

So how do you deal with the less than computer savy co-worker?  Is it right to be frustrated or grumpy about what you feel is a waste of time or do you need to be patient and willing to help them learn?  Please take some time to share you feelings and some of the ways you deal with people that are computer illiterate.

The weekend is generally not the best time of the week statistically for me so I thought I would take this time to make the site a little more relaxed.  From now on I am going to take Saturdays as a personal day. 

My life is relatively busy, but always great.  This weekend is proving to be a good one.  Last night we went out to celebrate a friends birthday and had a few cocktails. Today I got up and continued working on my porch.   I am transforming it from a 1980’s wood panel eye sore into a new freshly drywalled beauty. 

I don’t have many pictures of the porch I wish I would have tracked my progress a little better, but I will definitely try to post some up later.

In a few minutes the real fun of the weekend begins.  My son (step-son) is turning 4 on the 8th and today we are going to lunch, seeing Horton Hears a Who, and then doing some bowling in order to celebrate.  Not enough fun for him?  Well then I should mention that he is going to Disney Land with his dad next week. 

Let me know how you are spending your weekends and lets get a general fun conversation going on.  There is only one rule.  No Work!  Take some time to relax because when you have to get back to work you will be relieved of so much stress.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

Pixel art was an art form that I never really new much about. Until earlier this week when I made a post about pixel art in which I showed you my first effort at drawing in the new style. Well as the week has gone on I have progressively added more and more to my drawing, which you can see above. Since I am having so much fun with this project I thought it would only be appropriate to show you some of the great uses of pixel art in the past and present.

The first of which I bring you is from Eboy. Eboy is the most popular maybe even most well versed group of people that design in pixel art and their blog and designs are simply amazing and I suggest checking it out. After looking through their awesome designs which their are tons of and browsing their site I found this awesome little ditty, which is not little and comes in poster form click to see the full version. It is a complete internet city if you look close enough you are likely to find every hot site on the net in this image. A concept that is outstanding and developed better than I could even imagine.

If you like social networking and I know that you do I would check out citypixel.com. City Pixel is an all new social networking site that has turn pixel art into an amazing form of social networking. You can live in Pixel York find yourself a job, watch videos, advertise all in pixel format. One of the cool features of citypixel is that you can advertise on the building of Pixel York. citypixel is really taking pixel art and social networking to the next level. I will most likely be signing up for this as I think it could be really fun. If you sign up make sure you let me know and we can hang out in pixel york.

Pixel Art is partly based from the art form used in creating video games back in the day. However that doesn’t slow designers such as insert name here form creating new games using pixel arts. If you click this picture it will take you to insert name heres site where you will find many examples of pixel art including 5 different games all design in the pixel art style. Be careful when browsing the site at work though you may find an image or two on the site that are not safe for work. Even pixel penis shouldn’t be seen in the work place.

Well that is it for now, I have run out of great uses of pixel art for the time being.  I am going to keep looking around so look for this post to be updated periodically.  If you know of any great pieces of pixel art please link me to them.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

This post is a free review of dormwise.com.  Meaghan earned this review for herself by generously donating to the March For Babies walkathon through the contest I am holding here. 

College is a fun time, whether you go away or stay home there are opportunities for you to accomplish many goals and have a great time doing it.  In my experience, which was about a year longer than it should have been, I lived in a dorm, at home, and in apartments so I guess you could say that I gained alot of life experience along the way by adjusting to many new situations. 

One thing I didn’t have in my college experience was Dormwise.  Dormwise is a one stop shop (not really a shop but a resource) for all things dorm and college related. Dormwise offers college students everywhere to make the most of their time at school by preparing them for what they might encounter, what they can do, how they can study, where to go, and what to eat.

The Content 

Home Page:

Dormwise is still in the early stages of development and as the site makes progress in design and development they frequently update the home page with content describing what they are doing.  This is a benefit because it keeps their readers informed, it lets them know what is going on and invites members of the community to voice their opinion about what is happening.  However if my ( a reader’s ) goal is to get a good story about what to do for finals week and instead I get an article about a newsletter update I might be a little dissapointed. 

My Suggestions -  make your homepage’s primary focus on the content your readers are coming to your site for and keep news and developments off to the side.

Dorm Transform Page:

This page was my favorite. It contained some great articles on how to make your dorm room your own by utilizing cheap and unique design.  Wow! Who would have thought I would like a section about design?  Besides customizing your room to fit who you are the dorm tranform page had a very good article about keeping up on your laundry and tips for doing so.

My Suggestions -  All you need is some more content.  This section I feel will really take care of itself.  Students are always looking for ways to improve their dorm rooms.  I might even add a diy (do it yourself) section in here with tutorials on how to build small furnishings and accessories.

Food & Drink Page:

Face it dorm room food sucks.  More often than not you are eating pizza or a cup of noodles.  The page at dormwise about food has some great easy to make recipes if you have the right materials available to you.  Keep an eye on this section because you are going to get tired of jimmy john’s sandwiches eventually, and if you don’t you will surely run out of cash.

My Suggestions - We need more entres.  So far the section is covered in sweets and side dishes.  Be creative in suggesting ways to create meals and not just individual dishes.

The Design

The design of dormwise isn’t terrible, but it isn’t warm and welcoming either.  The site’s content is well placed, easy to read, and easy to navigate, but after that I was kinda bored.  The images used are generic and I think could better suit the target market by being more fun and fashionable.  The logo in my opinion is a no go.  College students have ADD and unless you really draw there attention in you are not going to keep them coming back. 

Your Turn

Goto www.dormwise.com and see for yourself what is available to you.  I think it is a pretty good site with the capabilites to be a great site.  With a few design modifications and the continuous addition of great content dormwise can provide college students with a great resource.  So if you are in college or have attended college go check out the site and tell me what you think it needs.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

As you know from reading this site I am a member of Kontera. Kontera is a contextual based ad system in which keywords in your content are found and magically turned into advertisements. I am a huge believer in this style of advertising because it is not bulky and you don’t have random ads distributed throughout your content. By this I mean that the ads are relevant and generally unobtrusive unlike a big google ad block. However as I speak with more and more bloggers/readers I find that people have a general dislike for contextual ads because they feel it junks up your content even more so that I simple google ad block.

So with my blog in a still relatively small and new state I want your opinion because I am going to be looking into changing my advertising schema in order to generate a higher level of income. Are contextual ads good or bad? What are the pros and cons. Why do you like them and why do you hate them. Like I said I personally like them because I feel it allows for the greatest number of ads to be displayed on my site without interrupting to much of the readers progress. Generally speaking you would think the more ads you had the higher your income would be, but I am not experiencing this. My payouts are higher from Google Adsense each month with simply a small ad block in the sidebar than they are from Kontera.

With that I put my potential in your hands, would you prefer I kept the contextual ads, or would you prefer a Google ad block at the beginning of each post? I will take your comments in to deep consideration as I am planning on testing several different ad layouts within the coming months.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

As a graphic designer I am always pushing myself to design in new styles. So for my newest project, a web design for a top quality web host, I wanted to do just that. I decided that in order to make the site for my (themecannon.com’s) client to stand out I was going to make a banner in isometric pixel art.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what isometric pixel art is well then look at the image above this post to see the little bit of my first effort at designing in it. But to better understand and learn how to draw in this style you really need to check out The Complete Guide To Isometric Pixel Art.

According to the complete guide to isometric pixel art (the site that is teaching me how to draw). Isometric Pixel art is…

“Isometric Pixel Art (IPA) is a modern form of digital art that only recently has been accepted as a new art form. I’m sure most of us have seen this typical type of artwork in old games such as ‘X-Com’ or the relatively old ‘Ultima Online’. The 2-Dimentional (2D) representation of a 3-Dimentional (3D) object is fascinating to many people. This is possibly because of the simplicity and amount of small details that can fit into a single IPA piece. It doesn’t need that much brain power to figure out, yet it is pleasing to the eye. IPA can be compared to cartoons in many ways, as people like to look (watch) and accept the 2D art form as it is very simplistic and easy to follow. The main purpose of any art work is that it draws your attention. In many ways IPA is set out to achieve this, that is, to represent something that looks like it could come from the real world, yet you know it’s just a computer generated image (CGI).

Each separate IPA image is always going too made up of single computer generated blocks, known as pixels. Each pixel is the same size as any other pixel, but it can be any colour you can think of and it can fit together with other pixels, any way you can think of. You can think of a pixel-based image as you can a mosaic in real life that is made up of tiles to form an overall picture. To see an example of a single pixel take a look at this letter ‘i’, the single pixel is the small dot you see above the long vertical line. In fact the whole letter is made up of single pixels that have been joined together to appear as one long stoke or line. The pixel will be explained further along in this reading when we look into tools used to create IPA.”

So sharpen up those graphic design skills of yours and check out their tutorials.  Pixel art is a fun and exciting way to create new design works in an exciting style. Give it a try and link me to your pixel art projects.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.