I almost forgot. When I rebooted Softduit, I noticed that some of my Google Ads got a little weird.  I kept seeing ads for Fox News and Match.com showing up.

I’m not getting rid of advertising from the site, that’s how the site earns money.

But I am working very hard to get the non-relevant and slightly stupid ads removed from the site.  Since I go through Google as an aggregator for ads basically, I have little control over what shows up, but I can exclude ads, which I do regularly.

Plus, I have learned a great deal more this week about using a new feature in WordPress.  WordPress Templates are now enabling me to individually code or group a number of pages and that is going to help me both target the ads better and remove ads entirely from pages where they just don’t belong at all.

Hopefully that will get rid of the Fox News ads and tactical gear stuff on pages that talk about MindManager, Dragon Naturally Speaking or the business models around social media content creations.

Page Popularity for Site: 14% [?]

I mentioned that the Softduit Site is mostly rebooted, well there are a few big things that I still need to do.  This checklist is probably as much for me as it is just to keep everyone informed. 

• I still need to build and add lots of great new video.  This time, I’m going to host the video on ScreenCast.com and start utilizing full screen video feeds at high quality.
• I have a technical glitch I’m working on.  On pages where I have flash navigation (image created with MindManager, converted to flash image with hover over hyperlinks), I run into a problem when someone hovers over the css menu above it.  The css menu appears to drop down behind the flash image, where it can not be clicked on. 
• 
• I also need to make an update to my wordpress theme.  It does not have the ability to create numbered lists.  Its not my own original design (it came this way) but I need to update it so that I can see actual numbers on numbered bullet lists.
• Plus, I’m still working out a few kinks with the main menu, wrapping a bit on small computer or laptop screens.

That’s the majority of it, once I have that done, then I can kick back in a hammock chair, sipping a cold drink and dictating my articles into my little Sony Voice Recorder.  Looking forward to the easy life again!

OK, I’m kidding, I always work hard, but I do have fun working!

Page Popularity for Site: 15% [?]

This week, I raced like crazy to get the main Softduit.com site rebooted.  After making a major break through in some coding areas that were holding me back, specifically, creating dynamic css menus driven off of a WordPress MySQL database, I then had to actually get the content transitioned to the new site.

I had all of the content transferred by Thursday, with the primary transfer finished on Tuesday (the really important stuff).

Then Friday I spent much of the day setting up 301 redirects in my .htaccess file so that the search engines and anyone that has linked to various pages on my site over the years will not get lost.

That was a whole lot of work!

Now, I’m going through the process of updating the site with a number of graphic elements to reinforce the message on the site.  I’m primarily focusing on the use of MindManager mixed with SnagIt to generate a mindmap image and then convert that image into a flash image with hover over buttons for navigation.

The two programs don’t really work terribly well together (they don’t fight, but they don’t cooperate either).  So anytime I make an update in the mindmap I have to completely start over again in Snagit with the hotspot links. 

That means that I have to have my mindmap as perfect as possible before I start the hotspot linking process in snagit.  In the meantime, my metabolism has dropped down almost next to nothing, because I’ve been working around the clock and not getting enough exercise (not running or doing ellipticals, but I have gotten a little swimming in since I work on a dock and only have to jump off to cool off).

Page Popularity for Site: 15% [?]