One of the really neat things about the Internet is how much data is available right at your fingertips. Zip Skinny takes some of this data, and shows you some demographic information for your neck of the woods.

You enter your zip code (hence the name), and shows you some basic information about your zip code, compared to your state average and the national average.

The basics include Education Level, Marital Status, Income levels, and Occupation, all represented with a graph like the one pictured here.

The statistics are compared with zip codes close by, and clicking on them drills down even farther.

The data is based on Census data, and of course may be a little out of date. You can also see some of the top zip codes for various population attributes, such as population density, median age youngest or oldest.

It’s really neat to see how your zip code stacks up compared to the national average, as well as some of your other neighbors. You should check Zip Skinny out.

Posted in WebServices, Web Tools, WebSites, Distractions No Comments »

This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »

I saw BlogRush for the first time on Phil’s new blog Tech Fires, and I was a little curious. Then I followed the link from his widget, and I started to get really excited. This is really a great idea, and I wish I had thought of it.

You display a widget on your blog, much like the one pictured below. The widget has 5 links in it, which open up in a new window if one of your readers clicks on it. Every time you have a page load, a link to one of your posts is displayed somewhere else.

That’s right. One page load = one link. What is even better is that when you sign up, you choose a category for your blog. Your widget shows links from that category, and your link is displayed on other blogs in that category. In other words, your link is being displayed to readers who are already reading topics close to yours.

Now I thought that was well worth putting the widget on my site. Then I found out that BlogRush also acts like a pyramid scheme.

For every person who follows your referral id, or clicks on your widget, and signs up, you get a credit. Every page load they have, you get your link displayed on another blog.

The referrals from your referral count for you too, down through 10 generations of referrals. After so many generations, it isn’t one for one, but it is still better than nothing.

The only thing that I didn’t like is that you can’t choose a size for the widget. That is why it is a little larger than my sidebar. I was planning on resizing the sidebar’s a little bit anyway, I’ll just have to do it sooner. 

Posted in Promotion, widgets, RSS, Recommendations, Blogging, Web Tools 3 Comments »

  Ok, maybe this is a cheesy way to get a post out, but I have a awful lot of links that I wanted to mention, and I spent much of the weekend hip deep in my Jeep, replacing a valve cover gasket. Doesn’t sound too hard, except that a small portion of the engine in under the firewall (not a computer security device). But enough of my woes… 

- Phil over at Thought Sparks, started posting a CSS tutorial. This week he posted Part 1 - The Body Tag and Part 2 - Horizontal Tabs. Really good stuff.

- I also joined Pownce this week, and I really like it. Combination mini-blog meets chat meets email. Really a cool idea. If you are on Pownce, let me know.

- Yesterday, I found Secure Cyber. What a great site! The author commented on my post about chasing Microsoft Certifications, it turns out he has been in the IT field just a wee bit longer than me, and he has really written some great stuff. Great resource for IT pros.

- I found out about Free Remote Access with Log Me In. They give away the free remote access so that you’ll want to buy their other products. Always a winning deal for me. I saw it in Redmond Mag.

- I spent a little bit of time looking for an online To Do list service, I settled on “Remember the Milk“, but don’t take my word for it, check out these “25 to do lists to stay productive“. Going through the list should prove an excellent way of dodging work.

- If you worked your way through that list of to do lists, here is another one over at Tech Crunch. Use it as an excuse to procrastinate some more.

- All right, this is the last “to do” list for this post. If you have your own server or hosting account, you can always install “Task Freak“. It’s open source. It’s GTD.

- Redmond Magazine released their 12th Annual IT Salary Survey (registration required for the full report), and it looks like the IT sector is still doing well. It got me a little curious about some Microsoft certifications though.

I run across a whole bunch of good stuff that I just don’t have to time to do full fledged posts about, but I still want to share it, so I think I’ll start making these roundups a regular feature.

Posted in How To, Certifications, free stuff, Tech-News, Microsoft, Web Tools 2 Comments »

I’m not sure how many of you noticed, but the “My Book Marks” RSS Widget is gone. For some reason, it broke this morning, thanks to Pearl for pointing it out, so I removed it.

About 3 minutes ago, I added it again, and it was working great, until I started to write this post. As soon as I started typing, it was broken.

I removed the widget again, I’m not sure if this is a problem with Del.icio.us, which is where it pulls from, or if it is a problem with WordPress. I’ll try and figure it out, but I have more pressing matters to attend to.

In the meantime, you can still snoop through my bookmarks.

If you are curious, the error was:

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /home/%UserName%/public_html/blog/wp-includes/rss.php on line 428

Posted in del.icio.us, Bugs, Web Tools No Comments »