Recently, fbCal was featured on LifeHacker. It provided for a nice bump in adoption, as seen above. Here’s to productivity apps!

I made a few websites recently for UCF-related groups. Enjoy!

• Progressive Council http://www.progressivecouncil.org/
• Eco-Advocates of Central Florida http://www.ecoucf.org/
• Adam Giery (SGA Presidential Candidate) http://www.adamgiery.com/

I am moving all of my professional-related material to my new website, CSBob.com. This includes everything related to my website portfolio and my resume. Photos, weblog, and other smaller pages will stay here, on my personal website VeganBob.com. Hopefully, separating the two will give search engines a more clear idea of the content of each, and it will allow people I meet to be more easily directed to the appropriate content.

Enjoy!

• Cover flow is infinitely more useful in the new Finder than it ever was in iTunes
• Glossiness and translucency makes everything look better
• The new Safari 3.0 combines what I loved about Safari 2.0 with the smaller features in Firefox that I liked
• Spaces is what virtual desktop managers should be
• I haven’t gotten into it yet, but I’m sure Time Machine will make my backups more easy. I will get more enthusiastic when I get AirDisk working with Time Machine.

To see what I’m talk about, watch the guided tour on Apple’s website.

The new brushed metal Apple Wireless Keyboard shipped!
It’s been working great so far. Very responsive, very sleak!

fbCal: Facebook’s missing calendar feature. It makes two calendar subscriptions! That way it’ll be easy for you to remember your Facebook friends’ birthdays and all events that you’ve been invited to or RSVPed for! These two calendars can be subscribed to (which will have them automatically update) or you may simply download a current copy of it.

The calendar subscriptions idea has been the most requested feature of fbCal. I’m happy to introduce it to the users!

Help me promote it, by digging it.

I have been getting questions about cost estimates for business websites lately. I try to give my honest and direct opinion. The following is a concise version of what it takes to have a website made and managed for you.

“Complete creation and management” of a website has three main costs.

1. Domain name registration (officially owning “somewebsitename.com” or “hilariouscatpicz.net”). This is a fixed cost, for the most part. If it’s a domain name that isn’t already taken by someone else, it’s roughly $10 to $20 per year per domain name. Also, add on a little for the person to fill out the forms and manage renewals.

2. Server hosting (having hard drive space somewhere on a server that is connected to the internet). These can vary by how much traffic (how many visitors) you will receive, how much data you must store online, and what server technology you (or, more specifically, the web developer uses). This typically starts at $8/month but can go as high as $100/month and up. Also, account for a little extra for whoever is managing this for you. For general information, I use Dreamhost for my websites.

3. Website creation (actual design and coding of your website) and updating (occasional changing of text and adding news snippets). This is the real variable cost. Some people charge a set amount per month for this. Others charge hourly (usually between friends to be fair or between businesses as “billable hours” and “bill rates”). Others charge a flat rate after negotiating and determining exactly what work is to be done (and then updating is hourly after that).

To give you an idea of the cost of a website, use the estimates above, and take a look at BobAbernethy.com. This is a website that I created and manage. I made it about 3 years ago. The initial design, formatting, setup, and coding took about 75 hours of work. Since then, I’ve done periodic updates to the site, totaling 25 hours of work. Billing at an hourly rate for work by me, $10/year for domain registration, and around $100/year for hosting. The first year’s cost was significantly more than each additional year, of course.

Basically, websites are an investment, like anything else. They don’t come for free usually. If they do come free/cheap, they are often not worth having. Your website can help or hurt your business. A website of poor quality will (in my opinion) hurt your business potential. But, of course, it is up to you. Good luck with your decision making.

I don’t usually comment about software upgrades, but I must make an exception. I would like to thank the team of developers at Apple that worked on iTunes 7.3. iTunes, I feel, has always been a wonderful piece of software. However, there has been one thing about iTunes that has bothered me. Whenever I’d update my iPod, by dragging music/video to the iPod in iTunes, it would always stop (and sometimes stall iTunes completely) on dragging. The issue (albeit minor) has been fixed with the latest release of iTunes. Thanks Apple!

For those of you looking for web hosting, I highly recommend Dreamhost.com. All of my domains are hosted by them. They are pretty reliable, offer so many features and so much disk space & bandwidth.

Here are some promo codes:
AMAZING50 - saves you 50 bucks
DREAMHOSTPLUS - free domain name and 10% extra bandwidth
SAVEMEAYEAR - 2 years for the price of one ($97 dollars)
1UP - free domain name

I was paraphrased in an Orlando Sentinel article today about Windows Vista.

My thoughts:

• Great new look and features, reminds me heavily of how OSX has been for years.
• This will be adopted by users slowly, because (1) people are afraid that they might not be able to learn the new OS, (2) they are not willing to shell out the extra money, and (3) they are worried the OS won’t run on their computer (which it most likely will, but possibly not as smoothly as it would on a newer computer).
• Microsoft is going to make a LOT more of money in the next two years. I bought stock.
• If you want Vista, instead of spending $150 on the upgrade, spend $500 on buying a shiny new laptop. (There are a lot of deals out there right now).
• Don’t forget to buy the new edition of Office. MS Office has been the greatest product by Microsoft, in my opinion. They have been more innovative and trendsetting than any other office suite.
• Immediately, install Firefox. I will not support MS Internet Explorer, until they are standards compliant. IE is a tremendous pain to every website developer.