I purchased my personal copy last week and have already made a few recipes from it. It’s small, but full of many great recipes and good information for detoxing your body and eating healthy.

And check it out – I even got a photo credit!

To find out more about the book, visit the Amazon store.

To find out more about my client, visit MyHealthKick. (Redesign in the works…)

YazminMedia Website

Finally! YazminMedia has been redesigned! I’ve been wanting (for a long time now) to redesign the business website, but ongoing maintenance work and new clients have stopped me from redesigning for a while now.

It’s still not quite complete. I do have additional items I’d like to update (a new logo, translation of the site, maybe moving it to a framework), but for now this is definitely a start. This website will always be a work in progress. Such is the life of a developer… working on other’s projects before their own.

What do you think of the new design?

I found myself bouncing around the tracks. A lot of my time was spent in “developer” sessions covering topics like best practices for designing and creating plugins, implementing the plugin signup experience and mastering custom post types (a session given by Atlanta local Mike Schinkel). Although I have to give major props to the “HTML5 – Hell Yea!” session conducted by another local, J. Cornelius. All in all it was just fantastic.

The camp left me inspired and re-energized.

With my head full of WordCamp and WordPress related thoughts, it’s pretty clear my website, in its current state, is not living up to its potential. It’s failing as an example of what a good WordPress website can look like. It’s failing in its job of showcasing my work portfolio. It’s failing as a tool that should be encouraging me to blog more often. It’s just failing all around.

Unfortunately, there’s only so much time in the day, only so much time to do everything I want to and *need* to do. WordPress themeing, WordPress plugin coding, language optimization with WordPress, social media integration, speaking instead of creating and most excitingly, moving forward with HTML5 in all my projects. So many thoughts, so many directions, oh so much to do.

So it’s time for a change, a new direction. I’m excited and I can’t wait to see where I end up. You should stick around for the ride.

Wood Sign – One Step At A Time at Art.com

Have you made and broken your New Year’s resolutions already? (I’ve already broken a few so don’t be ashamed to raise your hand… You’re not alone!) Now that you’ve gotten the guilt out of the way, you should get down to business and make some new 2012 goals for your online business presence. Here are a few to start you off:

Goal 1 – Update your Website Regularly

Your website won’t work for you if you don’t update it regularly. Think about it… would you keep coming back to a website if it wasn’t updated with new content or product listings? Position yourself as an expert (even if you aren’t one) by making regular updates to your website:

Action Items For You

• Decide on a schedule for adding new content or products. I recommend twice a month to start out with.
• Collect ideas for your blog. You can write about the latest news in your industry, new product ideas, partnerships with other companies, etc…
• Update the copyright date, address, phone number, portfolio, customer testimonials.

Goal 2 –  Stop using Flash on your Website

Adobe has officially stopped developing Flash, so in a few years it will have gone the way of the dinosaur. Instead, focus on HTML5, the new star of the web:

Action Items For You

• Do a search for “HTML5 examples” to get ideas on what can be done with it.
• Contact me to discuss alternatives to any Flash you currently have on your website.

Goal 3 –  Make your website Mobile Friendly

With so many smartphones coming out on the market, many people visit websites using devices like the iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry, to name the most popular. If your website is image heavy and/or it doesn’t have a mobile version available, the display may not translate nicely to a mobile device.

Action Item For You

• Contact me for a mobile compatibility assessment of your website.

Goal 4 – Use Newsletters to Stay in Touch with Customers

Having trouble getting visitors to your website or keeping your client base updated with the latest on your site. Then you should reconsider using newsletters. Newsletters are a widely accepted tool for social media and are easily incorporated into your website.

Action Items For You

• Add a newsletter signup for to your website.
• Create a regular schedule of mailing for the newsletter.
• As with your blog, collect tidbits and ideas to share with your newsletter readers.

Goal 5 – Schedule Time for Marketing

Your business and your website cannot grow if you don’t schedule time every week for marketing. Make some time on your calendar to write a blog post, schedule future tweets or attend a networking event.

Action Item For You

• Mark out that time on your calendar and treat it like an appointment!

You should see by now that websites and businesses are not a “build it and they will come” idea. Just like everything else, they take a little work to make them work. The 5 goals above are a good starting point for you to reap the benefits of the website you built.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for the goal list?

Google Chrome finally has a fix… sort of… for printing PayPal shipping labels. For those of us who have had to go to another browser just to get those labels printed, this is a big step closer to label printing nirvana.

The Problem
When printing labels with PayPal, a Chrome window would pop up with the sad face background. Now, the window pops up with the sample label displayed. Once printed, the “OK” or “Cancel” confirmation window appears, but blocks the printing of the actual label appearing in a new background tab behind the pop up confirmation window.

The Workaround
If you click the “Ok” button, PayPal assumes the label printed and moves on with its next step. If you click “Cancel”, PayPal sends you back to the label window and closes the Print Preview window it opened with the label. BUT if you click the “X” button on the window itself, the pop up window closes and the Print Preview page remains open so you can print the actual label!

Voilà ! PayPal shipping labels printed from Chrome!

On July 4th, while we were all celebrating with fireworks and apple pie, the WordPress team released the latest edition of WordPress. Say hello to WordPress 3.2!

What can you expect with the new version update?

- A faster WordPress
- Refreshed dashboard design (very sleek, if I may say so myself)
- Distraction free writing or zen mode (It’s like WriteRoom for WordPress!)
- Speed improvements for software
- Retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6

Interested in what else changed? Check out the WordPress Codex for the full details.

For all of you that have been fighting the push to use newer browsers, here is one more company kicking your butt into the future. With 3.2, WordPress is dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, a 10-years-old outdated browser that even Microsoft is leaving behind.

From now on, if you access your WordPress dashboard from an outdated browser, the software will let you know. Why? Because as web technology improves, so does WordPress and they build features to take advantage of those improvements. If you’re using an out-of-date browser, chances are you’re missing out.

If your browser is out-of-date, you’ll see a friendly orangey-yellow box in your dashboard letting you know a newer version is available (which you can dismiss, of course). If you’re using IE6, though, the box will be red, and your dashboard will not function properly.

So if you’re now in the market for a new browser, I suggest you give FireFox or Chrome a try!

That’s right! You read right… WordPress 3.2 is just around the corner. It also comes with big changes behind the scenes.

The minimum requirements to run WordPress have now changed. As of 3.2, you’ll need to be running PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. Don’t know if you’re running those version? Check your webhost settings.

You’ll want to log in to your hosting account, and check to make sure you have at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. Most major hosts already default to these or newer versions, but there are some exceptions.

If you don’t know how to log into your hosting account, you can find out if you’re ready for 3.2 with the Health Check plugin. In your dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and search for “health check” (it should be the first result). Install it, activate it, and it will tell you if you need to update anything!

1616 -Vinyl Lettering – If you don’t know where you’re going,
you’ll end up somewhere else. by DesignDivasGallery on Etsy

Without a goal for your blog, you’ll find that you’re missing out on opportunities to really connect with your community of followers. Don’t have a community of followers, yet? No worries! Giving your blog a meaning and purpose tends to end that nasty dilemma.

What I can also tell you about not blogging is this:

1. If you don’t ask for comments, you won’t get comments.
2. If you post it, they won’t necessarily come.
3. If you don’t offer a chance to subscribe, most people won’t follow up on comments.
4. If you stop writing, they will stop coming.

With all these distractions, you can see that it’s easy to end up someplace else than you want to be with your blog. So how about you out there trying to get back on the blogging bandwagon… what have you learned while not blogging?

The Broken Chain by Mesho0o0o, on Flickr

With over 2700+ links on the site, I had no intentions of checking each and every one individually. After a quick plug-in search, I found Broken Link Checker for WordPress.

What Broken Link Checker did for my blog was priceless. Running through every single post on the site, it cataloged all the links, marked which ones were redirected automatically by WordPress and then listed all the broken links on the site. It also added CSS to the site that applied a strikethru style to all the broken links. I found that very helpful.

The most useful features of Broken Link Checker are all centralized in its Tool panel. From one location, you can get details on the link, view the post in which it’s used, edit or remove it. Finally, if you use the same link more than once, one edit from the Tool panel fixes all instances of that link!

When I started working on correcting all the broken links, I had over 400+ and was seriously not looking forward to how long it would take me to do that. However, with this plug-in, I quickly found myself completing my broken link project in just under 2 hours. You can imagine how happy I was about that.

How about you…do you have a plug-in that simplified a task for you? I’d love to hear about it!