Well, we have a new theme up and running.  Guess you could call this a test drive to see if it feels right after a few miles or articles or what have you.  Its not as wide as I would prefer, but it has several other things going for it.  Finding the right theme for a website is a lot like house hunting.  You have to look a lot, get a good real estate agent to show you around, and at the end of the day practical, form and function are important but it has to feel right too.

Here are some of the other themes that were considered.

Several of these were good, but I already use them on other sites.

This one had a nice news feel, but it left justified everything and with wide screens today, that looks a little weird

This last one looks a little plain on the outside but it did have width going for it.  I might just reconsider this one in the future, if I can not customize this current theme to be a little wider.           

Page Popularity for Site: 25% [?]

Tonight, before dawn I will be getting rid of the current Maven Mapper’s Information theme.  I really liked it when I first found it over a year ago, mostly because the background image could be changed.  However, it has not proved to be terribly practical for many reasons, especially as it involves posting images and videos.

I snapped a quick picture of the old theme for anyone that missed it.

Now, its time to clean things up, sit the blog theme down on a some shower chairs and reboot the site.

Page Popularity for Site: 24% [?]

The first thing that I realized when I cranked open my computer today is that three tools I rely on very heavily are sadly behind the times.

1. Outlook - Email
2. Task Manager
3. Popup blockers

The first is Outlook.  I have been stumbling along thinking about converting from Outlook to Thunderbird (Gmail is not a useful option, and frankly I do not trust Google with my correspondence given their actions lately.)  However, Thunderbird seems to be a viable alternative and Outlook is getting to be so flaky that its probably time for the switch.

The second thing is the Task Manager in XP.  I do not know if this program exists in Vista, but the program today is really junk.  All the file names are gibberish and therefore make the program mostly useless.  If I have a program that needs to be shut down or shouldn’t be there, I might as well be reading binary code or randomly generating prime numbers to determine which program needs to be shut down or blocked.

The third program is popup blockers.  I use several layers of popup blockers from the blockers that come built in to Firefox to third party applications.  The problem is that they sometimes block things that should not be blocked.  Getting those things to reque correctly so that you can see what you missed is not always possible and that can result in the loss of information.  Plus, I find software program subscriptions for tools like popup blockers to be very annoying.  I realize that they have to keep the library’s up to date, but I’d rather just upgrade every 18 months. 

That’s the end of my little rant.  Its something I have meant to mention a few times.  If anyone has a good solution or suggestion esepcially in the task manager area, I’d love to hear it.

Page Popularity for Site: 25% [?]

I have a weird and slightly lazy dream to some day sit in my favorite recliner and productively work my tail off in comfort.  A couple months back, I even did a little experiment.  I positioned my portable projector from the office at the ceiling of my house and reclined a recliner back.  I set up my laptop keyboard on an inclined keyboard holder and typed away while laying back and looking straight ahead at the ceiling.

I’ll admit that it worked but not as well as I would have liked.  I was very comfortable, but the distance was a little to short to get the projected image large enough to be comfortable. 

Canon does have some new projectors that have an amazing capacity to make very large images from a short distance.  You can even look at a mindmap at like 20% zoom and see the individual topics extremely clearly but I digress.

Anyway, my idea or day dream was slightly reinforced about a week and a half back while I was attending CES in Las Vegas.  I came across the i-FI chair that I would describe as a recliner with the sound system built into it. 

Now, I have never been terribly impressed with the concepts of investing in home theater furniture such that you feel like you have a miniature movie theater in your house.  I’ll take a great couch or recliner any day.  I do not need something that feels like a goofy theater seat chair.

Plus, I have three kids under 10 and its not too hard for them to regularly recreate that spilled sticky ambience on any given surface in the house!

Amazing Voice Clarity in the Sound

Now, as I test drove this chair at CES, I rapidly learned what almost everyone there learned.  The sound quality is not only great, but for very loud movies engineered for surround sound, you can understand what people are saying as if there is not a lot of surround sound background noise. 

I’m sure you’ve probably watched a movie at home where you had to turn the sound up to 40 to hear the words and then when the action picks up, all the trim in your house is vibrated away to dust.  This chair seems to eliminate that catch 22.  Plus, it has a very cool built in ability to create a sound vibration in the chair without cranking up a sub woofer that can be felt in the ground from 10 miles away like listening to a freight train through a rail road track.

(video of the LA Times here, I’m standing in the background in some of the frames, but the LA times video is kind of rough, they are writers and not film types I guess)

 

All in all, I’m not crazy about the name that the i-Fi Company has come up with but in all fairness this is not only a chair for to work with your home entertainment system, but it is also an iPod accessory that enables you to dock your iPod.  So they seem to have the obligatory ‘i’ in the name.  That said, I can’t think of a better name to counter my critical view of their name, so I guess I should just leave it there.  Its priced at about the level you could expect for a high end comfortable leather recliner.

Page Popularity for Site: 37% [?]

I do not write about this concept too much on Maven Mapper’s Information these days, however there is a very good and slightly old fashioned way to network with other bloggers across the blogosphere.  Its called a blog surfing exchange. 

How Blog Surfing Exchanges Work

A blogger or a non-blogger signs up (works better if you have a blog).  You then surf through the directory of blogs that they offer, they tend to display a new blog one after the next in categories that you pick.  You control the speed and you can rate blogs as you go if you want to do that type of thing.  You can also block or favorite blogs as you go.

For each blog you visit, you earn some credits.  You can then use these credits to list your own blog in the exchange and other bloggers will then see your site in the que.

This is a good way to find other bloggers, see what they are doing, how they are doing it and network or share or develop ideas. 

This is not a good way to market your website or products or ebooks.  If you are into that type of thing, you should probably look elsewhere.

This is primarily for bloggers to connect with other bloggers and generally communicate blog to blog.

As I mentioned this concept has been around for a long time.  I am a long time member in BlogExplosion and BlogMad.  These are two of the largest surfing exchanges.  BlogExplosion is the oldest I believe and BlogMad seems to have recently eclipsed it as the largest.

To my knowledge if you have more than one blog, there is no limit on the number of blogs allowed at BlogExplosion.  That said, they are slow at approvals and very picky.  You can expect to be rejected a few times.  Try and take it in stride as it can pay off later. 

I do not agree with their philosophy, but it is their club.

BlogMad is much easier, but they limit you to 3 and then later 6 blogs.  Essentially you have to work your way up the levels to get more benefits such as the ability to list more blogs.

I’m just about to hit the ‘Mad’ level for example, I was hoping to win a Technomarine watch, but will settle for the ability to add more blogs.  Sounds goofy, but hey its about as mature as Facebook.

Big Picture Purpose for Building Subscribers

This isn’t a good place to go strictly to get traffic for your website, however as you network there and as people see and possibly like your site, they will essentially be able to use that introduction as a means to coming back and maybe subscribing to your syndicated delivery via rss or email.

Page Popularity for Site: 33% [?]