I got my Mr Wong email update this morning. Not normally something I read but today I thought I would throw caution to the wind and click on the enticing subject line, diving in to expose me to all sorts of Wongness.

Today I did discover something new and remotely interesting. A new Beta service called PixelPipe which announces it can post your content to nearly any network or blog online. What caught my eye initially was that they tout alot of networks, including such big hitters as Facebook, Flickr and my personal favourite, Drupal.

There are only about two designs in this list I would possibly consider designing but if you need a hand getting your buttons right, or just need some inspiration, then this is a cool list to start with. These are Photoshop design tutorials but can be applied to Fireworks. Just not as well as Photoshop is better at this button stuff than Fireworks.

http://www.designvitality.com/blog/2007/10/photoshop-button-tutorials/

I have been waiting for the new Mac Mini to launch for so long it's been like waiting for the bathroom after Dinner service on a Boeing 737 to Hong Kong. The Mac Mini is a personal favourite of mine from the Apple Mac computers family. Sadly it seems the new Mac Mini announced by Apple has not come out with anything very exciting.

You can read more on the new Mac Mini here.

It seems to be the season of silly things for me. Today I did a bulk node import from an old blog into this blog. But what I failed to do was turn off the Twitter update status option in the twitter module for Drupal. So, be warned. Unless you want to repeat my stupidity remember to turn off the Drupal twitter Module update option when bulk importing nodes.

To those who received all 192 gratuitous updates in twitter, my humble, humble apologies.

As any informed blogger or SEO guru will tell you, having unique content on your website is more than just a little important these days. Ensuring Google (and other search engines, lest we forget) see you as a credible and unique source of information for the content you write is one of the last things on the web worth really protecting. After spending quality time writing and optimising your content it gives you the wookies if people steal it.

NB: There are a lot of ways people can get your content and use it for evil. One is the simple copy and paste. Two is using a scrapper to 'scrape' your information from your site automagically. Three is taking RSS feeds and importing them as posts on their own sites without including a link to original. And there are a few more no doubt.

There is no doubt in my mind that times are tough for a lot of people. And in many ways that could easily be me, in fact, it should be me based on the style of businesses I run. However, it isn't. I am beginning work on a new eCommerce project tomorrow which could be one of the most promising start ups I have worked on personally. I will talk more of this as time goes on as it will be a great case study of building and marketing a website in a small marketplace using very common products, far from niche.

Additionally traffic on my other primary site hit quite a decent January high yesterday. Last weekend it hit quite a low and panic set in but it has bounced back nicely.

I did something stupid last night. I don't often do stupid things, only when I am tired and sick, which I am both right now. Anyway I moved markparrott.com to new servers and forgot something important; That is to set up the mail accounts on the new server.

So if you emailed me today (date of post) I didn't get it. Sorry if you thought I was rude.

Finally, after a lot of thought markparrott.com has received it's long awaited upgrade to Drupal 6.10. I figure it's time to build some more interesting thoughts into the site so the theme face lift will be next and then some insights into the SEO work I have been doing lately.

I experimented with quite a few off-line blogging tools before I decided that ecto was a good choice. When you select a tool like this It is hard to know if the maintainer will continue to upgrade and improve it. I have been using ecto about six months and think I have had a least two updates during this time which is good.

To use any off-line blogging tool with Drupal you need to enable the Blog API. This can be found on the modules page, in the Core-optional section. If you're using ecto and it is the latest version then Drupal it's available in the list when you click in new account. In actual fact the software uses the settings for the movable type blog which must use the same blogger API, so worst-case select movable type as your blog type.

It's not often I have good ideas but this is a cracker. It thinks like this...

Imagine you are about to go on a weekend City travel break or a holiday to different cities. The first thing you want to do is get local tips on the best restaurants, the best sightseeing activities, the best shopping spots etc etc. You can buy a travel guide but what if you could be sure that it was the coolest place.