Without question… the growth of Wordpress is in no way slowing down. In fact, the reach of Wordpress grows leaps and bounds with each new day.

Thanks to the heads up over on the Wordpress Publishers blog, I see that Arena Magazine is now powered by Wordpress.

Arena Magazine, from what I understand, is a fairly well known brand with a decent sized following. It’s encouraging to see a large scale site such as Arena not only embrace Wordpress, but in doing so embrace open source software.

Arena isn’t the first, of course. Just days ago the Wordpress Publishers blog linked to Revista, another online magazine site powered by Wordpress.

I think this is a positive move for both sites, and I look forward to seeing others begin shifting in this direction as well.

As Wordpress advances and becomes much more like a full scale CMS, us users will be able to do a lot more with the software and many more doors will open up.

Good stuff!

Now that I’ve figured out how to record my actions on screen, I plan on creating a few simple video tutorials for blogging and various other projects I’m involved in.

I probably won’t be able to start these until the second week of February because I’ll be in DC all of next week. But it should be a lot of fun once I get them flowing.

But, in the mean time you can find a plethora of Wordpress video tutorials over at iThemes. Most of the videos are fairly basic, but they’re well done and helpful for anyone just starting to dabble with self hosted Wordpress blogs.

Check back for my own version of these videos, which should start coming in mid-February.

I came across a cool “Wintery” Linux wallpaper today and figured I would post up the full size image… along with a few others while I was at it.

And if you’re an Ubuntu fan… check out my Linux Ubuntu Wallpaper collection (sorry the formatting is messed up on those posts. I changed the theme of the site and it screwed everything up… working on fixing it)

Enjoy!

Click here for full size of the above image
read more from "Couple quick Winter wallpapers…"

My post about the internet in 1996 got me thinking and prompted me to take a look at my own websites from five years ago. Until now I didn’t realize how long I’ve been doing this. Sure, many have been doing it for a lot longer, but for me five years of being self employed, at least part time, has been quite a run.

My first website went live in late 2003. It was at Backpackerdeals.com, but for some reason Archive.org has nothing previous to February of 2004 and even then the cache seems to be missing.

Anyway, the site was an affiliate site for student travelers. It was a lot of fun, and the site made a few bucks. More importantly, it helped me learn what NOT to do and opened up a lot of doors for my internet marketing career.

My main mistake with Backpackerdeals.com was that I knew nothing about code when I started it so I used an out of the box solution. Which, at the time, was complete crap. After a few months I began to learn a bit about code and felt backed in to a corner with the site builder.

In the summer of 2004 I launched two more student travel websites. Backpackearth.com and Traveljive.com. I’ve since sold both sites, and it looks like the new owner took the content and parked the domains. But the two sites made me quite a bit of money from 2004 until early 2007.

This is Archive’s cache of TravelJive in the summer of 2004.

As you can see… it’s quite laughable. But in those days it was quite popular. On average, any given day in 2005 would result in about 600 unique visits. Backpackearth.com was doing MUCH better!

In 2004 the main source of revenue was Google Adsense. I was getting decent checks every month and it felt worth the effort. In 2005 Google Adsense started paying so low that it was almost insulting, so I yanked Adsense in favor of the new Yahoo Overture network. Overture paid more per click, but was still somewhat lacking.

This is when I entered the text link market. Yes, I was one of those…
read more from "One of my first websites… 2004"

In short… it’s absolutely amazing what 12 years of online innovation can do. I recently discovered a post that used WayBackMachine to pull together a collection of corporate websites from 1996. The results were quite astonishing.

Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs. Additionally, very few web designers had even the most rudimentary of aesthetic sensibilities, and nearly half of them were clinically retarded. The internet in 1996 looks like it had been created in its entirety by a panel of 13-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.

Here is the official Lego website, for example.

They include McDonald’s, Pepsi, Best Buy, and many others. Well worth the click.

Good news today… I got my paperwork back for my LLC. That’s right, I now officially operate as Fresh Vision Media LLC!

Thanks to the paperwork coming through, I’ll finally be able to make some of the changes around here that I’ve been wanting to make. I’m pulling all of my blogs into one single place, which is the main domain here at FreshVisionMedia.com, and I’ll be moving my consulting business to this site.

Lot’s of changes coming…

So before we get it all underway, I want to plug my social networks and give everyone a chance to connect in. I’ll also be listing the bloggers who I read daily via RSS.
read more from "Fresh Vision Media LLC"