The new site is live now.  Its at Something-About-Harry.com ( www.something-about-harry.com ) .  I haven’t updated the feed yet for everyone that is subscribed, but aside from this post, all future posts will go to the new site.

I’ll work to get the feed fixed as fast as I can (probably over the holidays).  :) 

I’ve still got to work some kinks out of the new site, but its not completely useless just yet.  :)

Hey everyone, very soon, I’m going to be getting some new diggs, and you will be invited over for the moving party.

We finally going to move this website, There’s Something About Harry to a new location.  I’ll provide more details on this soon….

Today, I built a new theme for Viral Grape Vine.  I consider this one partially complete as I have not yet been able to work my background image (a great picture of a family grape vine that we have been keeping alive for over 100 years) into the image for the site.

Here is what I have live so far.  I’m happy with the way the menu turned out, as I learned how to incorporate 301 redirects into the menu so that I can link to related locations out of the home site.

Here are some of the more recent articles from VGV:

1. Astronauts Tinkle in Urine-to-Water Machine
2. Armagedon News Offers up - How to Profit from the Coming Rapture
3. How to Profit from the Coming Rapture Part 2
4. How to Profit from the Coming Rapture Part 3
5. SURPRISE ATTACKS…
6. Can’t Win for Losing-Darwin Award Nominee Reject

In general, I’m going to try and do about 3-4 site upgrades with brand new themes across all of my sites per week.

Tonight Iearned some cool stuff about menus, and how to incorporate hover over images into the header (even though I didn’t use that here).

I think if I can keep my hands on these things every few days, I’ll have this new skill mastered by Christmas.

Here’s an article I wrote over at The LiveWriterz.  If you have not yet signed up for an Izea Insider Group, I’d like to ask you to consider joining mine. :) 

The group is open to anyone that wants to improve their blogging efforts.

In this particular article, I talk about 10 tips (plus a bonus tip) to help Pacific Rim Bloggers that have real talents, avoid being stereo typed with the thousands of Pacific Rim bloggers that write low low quality content.

10 Tips to Help ‘Good’ or ‘Improving’ Pacific Rim Bloggers Avoid Being Type Cast as ‘Bad’ Pacific Rim Bloggers

Yesterday, I built and launched three new themes.  The first theme was for an existing website, The Solar Gold Mine Digest.  This is a site that I have been running and writing for now for over a year.  All of these new themes were designed by your truly.  This is a new skill set I have recently developed, and I’m having a lot of fun getting more experience with it.

The New Look

The Old Look (not a theme that I designed)

The other two sites are new projects.  The first is the Global Depression Survival Guide.  I’ve been preparing for the worst myself, not in terms of building a bomb shelter and stock piling food, but trying to find practical ways to keep my business thriving during the current major recession and the likely depression that it is leading into. 

We are in for some choppy times, and I’m working to insure that I am prepared for those choppy times myself, and looking to help others get prepared too.

The other site is a concept that is still a little bit undefined.  The site is the SMO Tipping Point.  The SMO stands for Social Media Optimization.  The more I work in social media and the more I expand out my efforts in Social Media Management and Social Media Marketing, and Social Media Execution, the more I see a need for companies to optimize their efforts to get the most bang for their buck and their effort.

My work on this site will likely start out in the form of position papers, and case studies and grow out from that point based on my real world experiences in the industry.

I have not yet loaded up the last two sites with content yet.  They are virgin sites, but it won’t take me long to generate some great content and get things running there!

So as yours truly was trying to get some work done today, I heard water running down on the ground under our house in the crawl space.  It was just about this time, that my wife sent my son downstairs to tell me that we had a leak…

Well, I just made my second pass at a custom theme for my future group site for the LiveWriterz.  There will be essentially two fronts to my efforts on this.

All of my events and general communications will come through this site There’s Something About Harry, which will likely get a make over itself.

But my individual group work, counseling, mentoring, contests, etc will go through The LiveWriterz.

This week I learned that I was selected as one of the Izea Insiders.  You may recall that played for this program a couple weeks ago utilizing a very long-winded article that I've room with Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10. You could kind of consider that articles not just an application into the program, but a bit of my thesis on where I've been and where I'm going in the world of social media and blogging in general.

Well I've been picked for the program, and now it's time to let the rubber meet the road.  I'm still waiting f. or a number of details myself, but while those details are coming in, I'm moving forward. To start with, I set up a Facebook group for my new IZEA insider team. (Friend me on Facebook and I can send you a group invite or search for TheLiveWriterz )

I have also set up a group on Utterli to enabled people to join up with my team the ability to communicate with myself and everyone else. I have been active at Utterli for over a year now, and find it to be a great place to help people communicate with each other, no matter if they are on a computer in an office, or traveling about the country. 

Among other things, Utterli is a fantastic blogging tool. For this reason, I'm also an utterly evangelist, and a former Utterli ambassador. With the group that I'm going to set up, I'm going to help the people in the group benefit from all of the experience and tools that I've learned how to utilize to good effect over the last few years. I'm also hoping to learn many more things for the people in the group and cross pollinate all those good ideas amongst us.

The primary goal here is to strengthen the blogosphere. To give bloggers new skills and new purpose. I want to help people deal to generate better content, be more creative, and earn a very good living doing it. :-)

So if you are interested in joining up with my team, or with one of the themes of the other IZEA insiders, drop me a comment, or send me an e-mail, or stopover at Utterli and talk to me there. We've got a lot of work to do, but it's going to be a lot of fun too.

Oh and did I mention that we're going to make a lot of money as well? 

First things first, let's get organized, and improve the quality our content and our blogs and the rest will follow! :)

EDIT

I just finished putting together an initial custom theme for the new site, and getting the site itself up and running.  :)

You can check it out http://thelivewriterz.com/

OK, so as a novel writer, I’m a blogger first.  That means that I don’t think I can sit around and well, sit on a book until the whole thing is done.  So I think I’m going to serialize it like they used to do with novels back in the 17th century (Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe etc.)

I’m going to publish the chapters one at a time and space them out maybe every 3 days.  So far, I’ve written 19 chapters and about 15 of those have also been through a rough edit.

I think I’m going to offer up the book under two lines or threads.

One of the threads will be the rough edit.  Where people will see the raw book before it is edited.

The second thread will be the next draft up the chain, where I take any and all feedback from the rough draft, and fix it in the next draft.

Some of that feedback might even be used to cover future chapters when people ask questions about what is going on.  My goal is to tell a good story, as if people were sitting around listening to that story as opposed to having the story automatically unfold as if I’m a puppet master guiding people through a plot on a stage or screen. 

This should even give my audience (whomever they might be :)  ) some ability to guide the direction of the plot, and tighten things up.  Since I’m a GooseGrade user even, some of the people that contribute the most help, might even get drafted in to participate in other ways as well. 

But my biggest question with this project is “Where do I publish the book?”

I’d like to put it here on There’s Something About Harry, but this site is powered by blogger an that’s really not the ideal platform for this type of thing.  I will more likely put it on a WordPress powered site, but haven’t decided where that will be yet.  Likely a new sub domain on Softduit, I guess.  :) 

I’ll keep you posted!

I did not decide until the very end, but ultimately I ended up voting for Barack Obama.  My gut tells me that he might be as bad if not worse than George W Bush.  Hopefully, he will prove me wrong.

On the flip side, I’ve never voted for a Presidential candidate that actually wound up winning, so my support on this may not be the boon that Obama and supporters are looking for. .  .