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My man Mike Seril, a renowned, award-winning Los Angeles based personal trainer, is starting his “Don’t Doubt Me!” Boot Camp, which provides a group-oriented approach to fitness training, bringing folks together to form a support structure while undergoing group training.

Mike’s a former NCSA Personal Trainer of the Year, so he knows his stuff.

If you’re still trying to get rid of 2005’s holiday pounds, Mike’s the man you want to call.

6 hours in, we have our first winner for Athena Internet’s Promo Code Sherlock promotion.

Congratulations to Kevin P. of Columbus, Ohio, tracked down JOSHUASGHOST and takes the 1st Runner Up, which is 2 years of our Premium Personal Website Hosting.

Congrats, Kevin!

For those keeping score, there’s still 2 grand prizes, as well as TONS of promotional codes good for discounts of 10-50%!

I’d like to announce two new Facebook groups I’ve created:

Web 101: [link] The idea with this group is to build a collaborative community of professional developers and businesspeople who need to learn how to adapt their business to 21st Century realities. The thought had occurred to me that too many developers don’t know how business works in the real world, and certainly, I run into a lot of clients who don’t know how business works online.

Obviously, the side benefit is networking and cross-pollination between web-oriented people and more traditional businesses. I’m very keen to see what happens when we draw the two groups together without the pressures of deadlines and deliverables!

Web Symposium: [link] This group is by invitation only, and aims to serve the professional design/development community. As with Web 101, the goal is to see what free-form ideas can be derived by taking away deadline and delivery pressures and just putting genuine professionals in the same place to talk. Folks are encouraged to apply for membership, but be prepared to supply a professional portfolio as a means of gaining admittance; subsequent members will be voted on by the membership (or by a committee; that’s still up in the air.)

So, I recently got a DVD from Netflix that wouldn’t play. Of course, I immediately flagged it as such on the Netflix website, which as everyone knows is phenomenally well-designed with a very high degree of thought placed into every widget, button, and tab. And Netflix delivered the replacement DVD just a day later. No surprises there.

I decided to hold onto the damaged DVD until the replacement came, because I like to hoard the occasional Netflix envelope as a hedge against ones that come damaged in the mail. I’m always afraid that one of them will get torn out of their little red envelopes by an unscrupulous mail handler or by sheer accident.

When I went to send the replacement and the damaged DVD back in the same red envelope, I put little Post-It notes on them describing which DVD was damaged, and which was not. And then I pretty much forgot about it.

But Netflix didn’t. Continue reading…

1.) File a frivolous action challenging the trademark request for a logo of a competitor whose annual revenues are tenths of a percent what your own are.

2.) ????

And here’s a link to the tiny David fighting the corporate Goliath, with creamy SEO goodness: Charleston, South Carolina Real Estate

One day, a survey-taker gave me a ring right around dinner time. I swear, they’ve got a call center in every time zone that they staff for only three hours a day, from 4-7pm, so they’re sure they catch you when you’re about to sink your teeth into some veal parmesan.

This survey taker started off sounding like he was going to talk politics. But the conversation quickly turned to the surreal, and it provoked my inner teenager into making an appearance.

Continue reading…

Microsoft hasn’t learned from the scandals surrounding their paying bloggers to promote the Zune. Now they’re doing it with a new corporate slogan: People-ready business.

And, I kinda thought, I know of something that fits that bill better. It’s called Joomla, and it’s the swiss-army-knife of content-driven websites.

So, I figured I’d embrace and extend Microsoft’s slogan.

My editors thought my section on banner advertisements went into too much detail. Specifically, they felt that explaining the differences between different banner ad formats, as well as different banner ad compensation schemes (CPM, CPC, and so on) ran against our concept of a quick-read oriented book. I tried to write the book explaining all the things I would’ve wanted to know when I first started as a webmaster. Accordingly, it is my pleasure to be able to publish the excised section, with a few brief paragraphs lifted directly from my manuscript, free to all, on my companion website, JoomlaWarrior.com.

The excised section runs about ten pages, which are somewhat boring and cover familiar ground for experienced webmasters, but those of us who are new to the idea of publishing a money-making website will find this information relevant and informative.

Do bear in mind that I am still (yes, still) completing final draft revisions to the book itself, so the companion website is still, as of this posting, very rough and unfinished. I’ll be turning my attention to the companion site as soon as my editors sign off on the book’s final draft, and will be adding even more excised sections, as well as limited excerpts from the actual published book pending permission from my publisher and editors.

Here’s the link to the Banner Advertisement Tutorial.

Annoying your customers is bad business.

When you’re dealing in emergency information, such as The Weather Channel does, it’s even worse.

It being springtime here in Ohio, a storm just rolled through that literally had my house swaying from the winds. Continue reading…

Linden Labs, the people behind Second Life, recently sent a letter specifically permitting parody of the burgeoning online service. [link]

The parody, called “Get a First Life”, exhorts users to “Go Outside. Membership is Free!” amongst other hilarious send-ups of the service.

This has resulted in positive coverage throughout the blogosphere, even recently rising to coverage on Slashdot and Digg.

Where this could have resulted in a PR debacle that would have damaged Linden’s reputation, it has instead resulted in a positive spread of inbound links and linkbaiting.

While this strategy would not be appropriate for all companies and all parodies, it certainly proves that it is smart business to give the funny bone a chance before calling in the lawyers.

A cheap airfare hotel deal would be an ideal deal for a vagabond. Such people prefer to travel alone, without wasting time to book flights or get reservations in hotels. Their whole life is a vacation. They are usually found on cruise vacations, enjoying their time partying away. They would not waste their time in flying or getting airline tickets, or traveling slow and economical as in cheap rental cars. All they need is their spirit and they are on their way.