I’ll let you all in on a little about myself – I have a wanderlust streak!  I love to experience new places, and being a freelancer has definitely helped this process of “wandering” in life.  Wherever there is an internet connection, I can do my work as a web designer, so living various places and taking a few extended stays a year to places I crave is no big deal.   I bet many of you don’t know that sometimes I’m working from places such as Madison, WI; Minneapolis, MN; Duluth, MN; or places in Iowa where my family lives.  My goal is to someday take an extended stay in Costa Rica, and simply work with my clients just as I normally do.  Maybe I’ll let you all know I’m there – or maybe I’ll keep it my secret!

However, since 1996, this is now the FOURTH time I’ve moved back to Minneapolis, and I am thinking that I’m now here to stay!  I definitely have found a great location.  I now live in the Loring Park neighborhood, just south of downtown Minneapolis.  I can walk to Loring Park with my dog, Junebug, bike to wherever I wish, and I feel I have every amenity nearby.  It’s a welcome change that seems to have given me a great new focus and renewed sense of motivation!

Many thanks to my friends and clients from Duluth, MN for giving me a wonderfully fulfilling experience in life!  Come visit me in the Twin Cities any time!

WordPress 3.0 is what so many of us have been waiting for!  I’ll let you all take a peek at what’s new in WordPress 3.0 with the video below!

I’ve recently had just an amazing time designing the website for LinkedMinnesota.com!  We of course went with a WordPress solution, so that the other staff and volunteers could easily blog, edit pages, and collaborate on the project.

LinkedMinnesota.com is a website for the LinkedMinnesota networking group on LinkedIn.  Through this new site, LinkedMinnesota will have guest bloggers, LinkedIn tips and tricks, and advertisements and announcements for their LinkedIn Lunches, Social Hours, and events like their Summer Extravaganza.

If you aren’t yet a LinkedIn member, I highly recommend it!  LinkedIn is the premier social networking environment for professionals.  You can engage in discussions, join groups with similar interests, create polls, post jobs, recommend other professionals for their work, and post your own profile or resumé!  Best of all, LinkedIn is FREE!

Maybe I’ll see you all at the Summer Extravaganza!

Enter in the new issues with the Internet Explorer browser.

The new beta versions of IE 8 were originally heralded as a “more standards compliant” web browser.  However, even as it was released, over 2400 popular sites were incompatible with the new browser – including Google.com and even Microsoft.com!

As a web designer, new versions of IE seem to always spell trouble.  So many of us web designers and webmasters can tell a mountain’s worth of horror stories on IE’s rampant incompatibility with established web standards over the years (and the extra time it costs OUR CLIENTS for us to design workarounds for IE).

So here are my tips for working around the new IE 8 issues:

• CHANGE YOUR WEB BROWSER!  There are now more browsers to choose from that are made for Mac, Windows, and even Unix/Linux.  Some of my suggestions are Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome.
• If you are a Windows 7 and IE 8 user, change your settings to force Compatibility:In order to enable and turn on Compatibility View mode for all web pages and websites, click on Tools menu, and select Compatibility View Settings. In the “Compatibility View Settings” dialog, tick the check box for Display all websites in Compatibility View option. Click on Close button when done.
  
• If you insist on IE8 compatibility with your own web site, ask your web master to apply this meta tag in your web site’s header:<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

I will be adding that meta tag to sites a lot I’m guessing!

Also, if you need to keep IE 8 as your default browser, Call That Girl! Computer Repair has posted a video on how to reconfigure IE8 to address this issue and others.

I thought I’d share this fun video about probably one of the coolest iPhone apps in development right now. (Even though I don’t even own an iPhone!)

Going to abroad anytime soon?

Use your iPhone to speak French phrases in a flawless accent.

You can choose from over 400 phrases, ranging from asking
directions in the airport to buying an all-in-one ski suit.

Take a picture of your mouth, then choose one of the phrases stored on the app. When you play the phrase in French, German, or Arabic, your onscreen mouth will move in synch, as if you were saying it yourself.

For more information, visit the Emirates iLingual application page!

For those of you not familiar with the show, The Secret Garden is the story of young Mary Lennox, whose parents die of the cholera in India around the turn of the 20th century.  She comes to live with her uncle in England, where she encounters ghosts from everyone’s past, and a “Secret Garden”  that helps to provide healing and reconciliation for almost all characters in the show (living or dead!).

I was cast as Albert Lennox, Mary’s father, who comes back as a supportive “ghost” character.  The role for me was a lot of fun, and and was a great fit for me as a singer too.  I will forever cherish the memories of this show, the cast and crew, and the opportunity to come back to the theatre at age 40.

Here are more photos from the show, courtesy of Randy Stern.

Plus, all of your maintenance and edits are now tracked on your unique and secure Client Portal Page.  If you’ve purchased maintenance blocks in the past, you may not have heard, but now your maintenance is tracked in a password protected area, where you can easily see the time tracked, what was edited, and how much pre-purchased time you have remaining.

Some advantages to purchasing a 4-hour maintenance block include:

• Priority 24-48 hour turnaround time for edit requests taking under one hour.
• Priority correction of errors or malicious attacks on your web site.
• Not having to be billed for every edit on an hourly basis.
• Pre-paid 4-hour blocks are discounted (4 hours for the price of 3!)
• You can use this time whenever you like.  Send many edits at a time, or just a few edits throughout the month or even the year.  Your maintenance time remains with you until you choose to use it!
• You have the option of allowing us to monitor your WordPress installation for you – for updates to core files or plugins!
• Maintenance and editing time can be used to assist with other social media sites, facebook, linkedin, etc., or to maintain and assist with email marketing campaigns through iContact.

Most web sites require some kind of ongoing maintenance.  Often times the way we do business changes, WordPress installations and plugins need upgrading, photos and content become outdated, or new content needs to be integrated.  Sometimes we all need simple assistance in learning new ways to integrate social media.  Even clients who are the most seasoned at editing their sites with WordPress, at times will need assistance with more technical aspects of templates, stylesheet editing, or finding and implementing the right solution for what they need.

4-hour maintenance blocks of time are currently $150, with discounts for solo businesses and organizations without employees ($120).  Feel free to contact us at any time in setting up your Client Portal Page, and your next maintenance block of time!

*24-48 hour turnaround time applicable to requests made during business hours Monday-Friday, in the order of received requests.  Client must have available time remaining from pre-paid maintenance.

Yes, they’ve been at it again with my clients.  GoDaddy.  I’m really REALLY beginning to despise them.  If I haven’t said it enough, I will say it again…

All hosting plans are not created equal!

Here are some things that GoDaddy has done to me and clients of mine, in the not so distant past:

• They’ve scared clients into renewing services they don’t need like “Certified Domains” and “Protected Registration” – I still don’t see the value in paying MORE money for your domain to be “GoDaddy Certified” – and when a client of mine sincerely wanted to transfer her domain name and cancel her “Protected Registration” she was forced to fax very sensitive documents to GoDaddy – her Driver’s License, her business license or certificate of assumed name, tax ID number, etc.  All of which are never a requirement for domain name registration, and frankly, an invasion of her privacy.  “Protected Registration” is only to “protect GoDaddy” in my opinion.
• They charge for EVERYTHING – Want 5 email address?  Sure!  But you’ll have to pay $30 or more for 2 years for that.  Want to renew your domain name?  Sure!  Just pay us!  Everything is “piece-meal” and has a charge.  Why should you have to pay for these things when there are hosting providers that give you all of these things FOR FREE with your hosting account?
• Good luck getting ANY refunds! – So, you’ve paid for 2, maybe 3 years of domain name registration FEES with GoDaddy, and you find out – “Oh!  Tigertech.net gives me my domain name FREE with hosting.”  You can TRY to transfer your hosting, and if it isn’t in “Protected”-land with them, they might allow the transfer, but I have yet to see any of my clients receive any of their money back.
• Poor Customer Service, and BAD Hosting Practices – From a webmaster’s standpoint, GoDaddy makes things incredibly difficult.  I once reinstalled a new client’s site TWICE for them because of errors that kept popping up with permalink settings, only to find out that my client’s htaccess files were only updated ONCE per HOUR.  I found this out from doing a web search to find that many folks had the same issue – and GoDaddy was the culprit.  I’ve had clients’ GoDaddy admin screens all look different, and couldn’t navigate them easily at all.  Even one of the techs at Tigertech had to “dig” to find the right screens on one client’s GoDaddy domain management page – JUST TO CHANGE DNS or Transfer a Domain Name.  Plus, the only way I’ve gotten any kind of support from GoDaddy is with a direct phone call, and never less than 30 minutes of my time (meaning my client’s money).  Setting up and configuring a mySQL database requires about twice the time as Tigertech.net, and THEN I have to log in to PHPMyAdmin JUST TO FIND OUT WHAT SERVER NAME TO USE to point to the database.  Lots of extra steps, and lots of time wasters. (Apologies if this is too techy-jargon for some of you – just some things I do daily that they just get wrong).

So, why do I LOVE tigertech.net and why do I want to make it my mission in life to have all of my clients moved to their hosting plans?

Here are reasons to switch to Tigertech.net

• FREE domain name registration with your hosting account
• FREE renewals of your domain name with your hosting account
• 50 email boxes and 250 forwarding addresses FREE with the basic hosting account
• UNLIMITED bandwidth with ALL of their hosting accounts
• 10 MySQL databases FREE (that’s TEN!) with the basic hosting account
• If you’ve paid them for a year, but want to leave in the middle of that year THEY WILL REFUND YOUR UNUSED MONEY!
• The EASIEST and most THOROUGH support documentation you could imagine!  Want to set up your email account on your iPhone, just go to http://support.tigertech.net/iphone – enter your email address, and the document gives you step by step instructions, pictures, and YOUR email address information filled in.
• BUILT IN FREE WEB STATISTICS with all hosting plans

And in my opinion, THE BEST support you can get with a hosting company.  Send them an email with any question, and I dare you to stump them!  They have even created custom mail routing for one of my clients who needed a customized email solution using forwarding and an external exchange server.  THEY’VE NEVER LET ME DOWN, and that’s why I NEVER BILL FOR TIME in working with them.

So please!  PLEASE! NO Daddy! Transfer your domains to Tigertech.net.  I’ll help any of my clients do this FOR FREE!

As if their hosting plans weren’t good enough – now when you sign up for a hosting account with TigerTech.net, you receive at least 10GB of space and UNLIMITED bandwidth! This is a new podcaster’s dream come true! For an additional $1 per month, you can double your storage space to 20GB!

This is making me re-think my need to send folks to podcast host services like Hipcast or LibSyn to host their podcast media.

And, as always, because I trust them impecably, if you are a client of mine and host your site with TigerTech.net, you never pay me for any support interactions with them on your behalf. Yes you heard that – NEVER. Feel free to contact me if you are still hosting with someone else and need to make the switch to TigerTech.net!

I recently added Feedburner email subscription sidebar widgets to ElizaOne, Inc. and Call That Girl‘s websites.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a way for your customers to receive your blog posts in an RSS Reader application (along with all the other blog posts from blogs which they subscribe). But, as a blogger and Social Media Marketer of your business, maybe you want to see how your RSS is doing, or have your RSS feed really WORK for you.

Enter Feedburner!

Now owned by Google, Feedburner lets you take control of your RSS feed. Through Feedburner, you can see detailed statistics for your feeds, know how many folks are subscribed, subscribe folks to have blog posts sent to them via email, find out who’s clicking through links on your blog (and how often), etc.

They even have a great primer on the basics of RSS.

If you’re a client of mine or a blogger who’s interested in Feedburner, feel free to contact me about integrating Feedburner’s features into your WordPress site!