I’ve been checking out this site on and off for a long time now - Keyword Avalanche.  Yeah, it’s a subscription site, but I’ve read from many sources, various AIS blogs, that it’s very much worth the monthly price.  I remember in the past the cost was less, but they regularly close the site to new members and when it opens the price always increases.

In browsing it today I saw that membership was about to close in 12 hours, so I decided to take the plunge!  Worst case, I can cancel my subscription after a month or two and chalk it up to experience learned.  Takes money to make money, so I think it’s worth the investment.

Check it out and sign up if you have the chance!

I’ll report my progress over the next few weeks…

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I’ve spent many long and hard hours (believe it or not) revamping Wordpress and migrating my photo galleries from CopperMine to an integrated Gallery2.  I gotta say this setup rocks!  A bit slow at times, but it due to overall server load which theres not much I can do about right now. 

I hope to get things updated much more frequently…

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This picture pretty much sums up summer so far.

My summer school semester is OVER and while I’m not at work that means I’m usually out at the field getting in some well deserved flying time. Laura snapped this nice pic of me in knife edge flight. I’d try to bring it in a little closer to the deck, but I usually like bringing home the plane whole and not in a hefty bag! =)

We’re off to Montana soon for our vacation and I CAN’T WAIT!! I’ll be sure and put the pictures in the gallery as soon as we are back.

* Speaking of the gallery - just posted some Disney pics from this past May where we got a nice 4 day weekend in.

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No posts since late April. Ouch! Well… it can be explained, but rather than write about all the details I’ll just say that since the summer semester started I’ve done nothing but study, work and sleep (very little).

Quite a lot of stuff going on but no time to post.

Stay tuned…

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Ok, I have to admit, for the longest time I refused to jump on the whole “blog” bandwagon.  Last thing I wanted to be called was a “blogger”.  I’ll seriously doubt anyone aside from myself is reading this [insert word here] and if you are… jesus, I feel for you.  Now even though it took much kicking and screaming to drag me into this, I do read quite a few blogs myself, especially ones dealing with technology, programming, web hosting and my lastest fascination, AIS sites.

What I’ve noticed lately (I’m sure it’s gone on for ages though) is people blogging about blogs in the sense their totally ripping off someone elses blogging ideas.  To make it worse, these same people are often watching each others blogs!  Joe has a blog… 4 of Joes friends have blogs… all of them watch each others blogs… Joe blogs about !@#%$!#… all 4 friends within days post nearly identical blogs about  !@#%$!#.   Do these people not think for themselves?   I don’t  get it.   I understand  blogging about something you think is cool  (regardless where you found it)  in your  own words, but I fail to see the point in  puking  out  what some else just wrote practically verbatim.

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It was bound to happen, but Microsoft has made it official. Microsoft announced yesterday that the Visual Studio Express products (Basic, C#, SQL Express, etc) will be free forever. You can tell the aim is squarely targeting the open source languages by given away rather good versions of whats admittedly one of the best programming IDE’s made.

If you haven’t done so already and are intersted in learning to program (like I am), check them out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/.

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After having done the Elements Yoga website with DotNetNuke I’ve always been interested in different CMS systems. Now while I understand why the vast majority of web developers don’t employ these (they want the recurring revenue of site updates), for me it was a great idea to hand over content control of the website to the owners. Take the money and run!!

I finally got a chance to play around with PHPnuke which is probably the father of all GPL content systems. What can I say? Pretty nice… but I’m still partial to the newer DNN for usability. If someone would fully integrate a good .NET forum into DNN (the current ones are pretty weak - no offense) it would be game-over. DNN + ASPplayground.net would be the ultimate community site. Until then, Community Server is about the second best option for Windows / SQL platforms with one of the various PHP (e.g. Joomla or Drupal) + Vbulletin for those wishing to stay platform independent.

Ah.. forgot to mention the nuke site that was just put up… Electro Alliance.

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This has got to be the best listing of utilities I’ve ever seen! There’s something for everyone here… if you can find at least a few things that make life easier for you - it ain’t gonna happen.

I can already see SlickRun becoming my new daily “go to” tool.

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I love sites that incorporate some type of AJAX. If used right and not overused or used just for the sake of it, AJAX can lend a lot to the usability of a site, especially for functions like search results. I’ve incorporated an OSC mod for AJAX search results on a few of my own sites like ElectroWax.

I’ve never gotten into the nitty gritty of learning the techniques or even the basics of it myself, but these tutorials look like a good way to jump right in.

AJAX 101 Lessions

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The much hyped “project X” cart which seemed like it was destined to be the next Oscommerce killer looks to be dead. There hasn’t been any official updates by Chemo (the developer) to either his personal blog or his forums other than to say the project is essentially nuked.

To quote another user, “This project is dead. Move on, people”.

It’s a shame too… this looked (from the hype anyway) to be the open source cart if it ever got off the ground.

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