This is always tough - the only things I really read religiously are the WebProWorld and WebProNews emails that I get several times per week and I know how fast things change in this field. Sad to say, I’d never thought of turning my Google homepage into a page full of RSS feeds - but I read about that today and that’s really a great idea.

Now my personalized homepage is full of SEO, web design and small business marketing news. I can see a few stories at a time and pursue them if I want, but in any event I get a nice daily overview of what’s going on in just a few minutes. This is much better than occasionally visiting some of the sites I’ve collected every couple of weeks, which is just about pointless.

Anyone else have other good ideas for staying on top of things?

More than one of my clients have remarked on how many icons I have on my desktop… this morning I went looking for a utility to save that icon layout (it would take me forever to redo it if anything ever happened to it) and found one in PC Magazine’s utilities archive from PC911.

Download and save the two files to /Windows/System32/ and double-click on layout.reg. Now when you right-click on any of the ’standard’ desktop icons (like Recycle Bin), you’ll get the option to save or restore the desktop icon layout.

I hope I remember this the next time my desktop gets screwed up…

Well, my outsourcing experiment is over - here’s how it went down.

I chose one of the programmers (I got five bids of $12-20) because he/she had four good reviews, but they never responded. So I chose the second respondent and he got back to me in about a half hour.

We talked twice via email - he was fast, his code is clean and it works. That’s all I needed, and it was well worth the negligible amount of cash I had to spend. I’ll definitely consider doing this again the next time I get stuck with a programming task I can’t figure out quickly.

…that might sound silly for a small company like mine, but yesterday I spent two hours trying to figure out why external Javascripts aren’t working in IE6 but are working fine in FF and Opera.  I even went to Barnes & Noble and bought ‘Learn Javascript in 24 Hours,’ which I think will be a smart move in any event, but I just don’t have 24 hours to read it today, oddly enough…
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