While I can understand a little lag due to the circumstances of life that we all go through – I can’t excuse my own behavior in not posting anything on this blog in OVER A YEAR.

That is, quite frankly, unacceptable. I’m not going to be so bold as to make a declarative “I will now blog every day for the next 100 years” statement. So, suffice it to say – I will be visiting again soon. When and how often remains to be seen.

The folks over at Sitepoint are offering a free eBook on CSS called “The Art & Science of CSS”. From my initial review, this is a great primer both for those learning CSS and those who currently use CSS but are on the look-out for more resources. When it comes to stylesheet design, I don’t have a “too-much” scale when it comes to the tools and tricks of the trade. The link to acquire the free book/download is over at http://twitaway.com.

On the matter of free eBooks – there are often many opportunities for “free” stuff if you keep your eyes open. Chris Garrett of chrisg.com has a free offering if you subscribe to his RSS feed – there are currently 2 free eBook offerings in exchange for a simple (free) subscription.

These days (or any day for that matter) … free is a great price.

If you happen to also follow me over at my personal site [ www.jonhaarstad.com ], you may already be aware of my passion for the iPhone. So what happens when you combine a WordPress (blog platform I use) aficionado and an iPhone user? Well, I installed a plug-in yesterday on this blog that is a clever and well-designed plug-in that turns a WordPress blog into an easy to read page on an iPhone.

Thanks to the folks over at BraveNewCode [ link ]. If you’re an iPhone user, go to www.webshoptalk.com and you’ll see the difference.

New Blog Set-up Service & Pricing

On that note – if you’re looking for someone to create a customized & optimized blogging system for you or your business, I’m now offering my services for a cool and affordable $350 per blog which includes a customized look and the full setup of all the backend items that will make your blog a thing of absolute beauty – sleek on the outside, with a monster engine under the hood…so to speak. Contact me for further details. Hurry before I get swamped and realize I’m charging too little…

If you are a WordPress user as I am, I wanted to offer a tip to help you maximize your search engine results. Make sure you set your “Permalinks” to the Custom option with the following as the custom field.

/%postname%/

The reason? When you enter new entries, the default settings sets all the pages to a numerical schema such as

http://www.webshoptalk.com/?p=2

Search engines that find your pages and especially links to your content cannot give much weight to a URL with something as ambiguous as “?p=2″. However, with this customized Permlink structure, your pages and links will now be the title of your entry which, in this entry’s case would be:

http://www.webshoptalk.com/wordpress-and-permalinks

That provides two great search engine friendly words and will greatly bolster your sites search engine effectiveness over time.