Mine Road

I decided to brave the evils of a dial up Internet connection and spend the night at my family farm tonight (it’s amazing what lengths you will go to in order to get home made cookies). I’d put up some pics to show you the place that inspired this domain but I left my digital cam at home and it’s being flaky anyway. It always amazes me how much productivity will increase when you are placed in the middle of nowhere for short periods. Tonight I sat down to finish a logo for a client and actually managed to not get distracted from the task at all. If you know me then you know that this is a rare feat. I generally tend to take mini breaks a good bit when I’m working. If you can’t tell there really wasn’t any point to this post. I just felt like putting some words to screen for some reason. Oh well I guess that just happens sometimes.

I was poking my head around Digg.com today and ran across a story saying they had added some new functionality to Google Sitemaps. Now considering I’m a Sitemaps advocate with all of my clients I had to go take a look and see what all the fuss was about. Upon verifying your site by FTPing a empty HTML file to your root directory you are able to access some statistics for your site. These include query stats, crawl stats, page analysis and index stats. Inside of these base options you can see how well your pages rank, what your top queries were and where Google ran into problems indexing your site. Right now the information is vague but anything helps when it comes to Google in my opinion. I hope to see expanded functionality and more detailed information in the future.

Oh on a side note you don’t actually need to have a sitemap up to use this feature. Just add your site and verify it within your account and you are good to go.

I received an Odeo invite a few days back now. I skipped over it initially and didn’t think anything about it. A day later I started seeing people comment about it variously over the net. So I went back into my email and followed the link and joined up.

It seems this was a wise decision on my part. I’ve never really gotten into the “podcast” scene but I think that Odeo has changed my ways. It’s easy to use interface coupled with high quality podcasts have made me a believer.

The Odeosyncer, which I’m told is like Ipodder, makes life easy by downloading any podcasts that you subscribe to on the site. Finding and listening to podcasts are accessible to everyone by having an elegant yet simple navigation system. Too top it off they allow you to listen to the podcasts within the site itself. Just click the play button under the image representing a various podast and you can get a taste to see if you like it.

I hope that some of you out there also get/have an invite to Odeo and decide to try it out. If not when it comes out of BETA I recommend you run out and give it a try.

I decided to move all of the music from Dante, my old mac, over to the newer PC that I have dedicated to music today. This normally wouldn’t be to problematic but Dante is what I kindly refer to a “frankenmac.” She’s an assembly of computer parts that shouldn’t be compatible and a hacked up operating system. Because of this most of her permissions are permanently messed up and it makes moving files back and forth a pain in the… well you know. So I tried the sensible and easy thing and connected to the PC from the Mac and tried to transfer them. This didn’t work well, though, and I had to resort to desperate measures. I set up and FTP server on my PC (thanks Chris) and began FTPing everything over. So far I haven’t run into too many issues but I doubt this will be done transferring until tomorrow afternoon. Thank goodness the laptop is my main computer.

The picture I posted is what my desktop looks like currently. A real mess if I do say so myself. Looks like I’ll be cleaning up my desk tomorrow or the next day at some point!

- NYC post will be up on Friday as I haven’t had time to finish writing it. -