I have decided to shutdown my web design business, Etation Media. Over the years my interests and priorities have changed, and while I still have ideas for websites I no longer have the passion and interest in spending all my free time making them. I especially have little interest in making websites for other people for profit. My focus is now on family, friends, work, photography, and my passion of the moment.

I will still work on sites from time to time, but it’s more to help out friends or worthy causes. It was a nice idea, but it’s time to put Etation Media to rest.

I upgraded the site and started building a new design for it. Some parts are in place. A book library section for the books I read still needs to be setup. And I will be tweaking the layout over time. The key parts are in, except for the book library. Those would be a focus on my Flickr photostream, productivity, and a “more” dropdown that displays all other main categories. Hopefully this new design and focus will make it easier for me to post quick updates. Only time will tell.

I was just tinkering with an idea for a new site design. Take a look and let me know what you think. The third one is the same as the second one, but the “eyelids” in the o’s are more prominent. I see a mascot in the o’s.

Which do you like best?

First:

Second:

Third:

I had the idea recently to add circles to SightMapper. The way it works is that if you specify a radius in miles a circle will be placed on the map when you add that sight to the map. If you don’t want a circle just leave the radius field blank. Try it out at SightMapper. Let me know what you think.

Amazon is scaring Kindle news sites that have the term “Kindle” in their domains into handing over control of the domains to Amazon. They are threatening to cancel Amazon Associate accounts and withhold Q1 2008 affiliate revenue. They have already scared a few sites into handing over the domain, but I refuse to let them do this to my Kindle Report news site.

You can read my article on their attempts to strong-arm me here.

I just wanted to let people know that I am currently tweaking the site navigation. You can see a categories listing across the top of the page now, below the logo. I plan to have sub-categories open up below that listing when a category is visited. But since upgrading to Wordpress 2.3 they made it a lot trickier, so it will take some time to figure out. Especially considering I don’t have much time to work on it each day.

The goal is to have a simpler navigation and open up some space on the right side of the page where the navigation has been and still is. I’ve been visiting CNN so much lately I just had to copy some design elements.

So try out what’s there and let let me know what you think.

I have this great idea that could revolutionize the world. I just have to find some time to work on it. So expect to see something pretty cool and useful from me. As always you will find out about it here. So keep checking the site and reading all the great news that I find and post about almost daily, until which time I make my big unveiling.

I have finally upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.2. Let me know if you come across any problems. Most of the plugins I use seem to be working, but if anything isn’t working let me know so I can fix it.

I just realized that some posts on JasonBlogs.com had been set to private accidentally. This meant that I could see them but no one else could, and I didn’t know they couldn’t. I must have accidentally set a few posts to private when I was going through all my posts, reorganizing and tagging them. And how did I finally figure this out? Ayesha posted in the comments that she could not access my list of SingingFish Alternatives. For the first few days I thought she must be mistaken, but then I decided to use my Windows XP virtual machine to test the page in IE. What I discovered was that when not logged in I could not see the post. And after a few seconds of thought I realized the problem. Yet another reason virtual machines are great for development.

I have reorganized every post into new categories in many cases. New posts will now go into only one category, but tags will remain universal across all categories. I have moved things around to create a few niches within JasonBlogs.com. Hopefully this will enable people to read the section of the site that most appeals to them, or they can read the main area to see everything new that gets posted.

You will not see sub-categories in the category listing until you visit a category. Then that category’s sub-categories are displayed. This should make it faster to navigate to where you want to go, or if that doesn’t work out well I can always change it to a dynamic Javascript-driven fold-out display. So let me know if you would like to see something like that instead.

Some new categories or changes of note:

• Post links were changed from being based on the date of a post to being based on the category of a post. A plugin was installed to redirect all posts to the new format, so you shouldn’t notice any issues at all.
• Categories are no longer located in the “category” sub-folder, and they now reside in the main directory. This will make it easier to brand each section of JasonBlogs.com with a unique category logo and explanation of the section.
• There is now a Development category where I will post tips or scripts I come across, and the Projects section is now part of that. Projects is where I post about anything I am currently working on.
• Radio Firefox show postings are now under Technology.
• Web/Tech was renamed Technology, with a sub-category called Web.
• Many videos were moved to a sub-category of the new Videos section. They could apply to other categories but instead they will be tagged with relevant tags.
• Interviews are now under Business. These are original interviews and I will be adding a few more to them. I could have added them to the Thoughts category, but the interviews aren’t my own thoughts.

So in summation: categories were changed around, and the tag cloud is the new way you will be able to find items that could have previously been in multiple categories. There will eventually be a tag for most things you could be looking for. I will also be tweaking the site design. The right-side navigation will become cleaner, and the new categories will be clearly marked.

This is what happens when I go to an advertising conference. I start thinking of ideas to improve this site. Hopefully they will work better and drive up readership.