See the player to the right that says “Project Opus”? I will be updating that occasionally with music from the unlisted (independent artists) world of music. You’re unlikely to hear these songs anywhere else because they weren’t just “good enough” for the big boys to finance their production.

If you like like what you hear you can add the song to your Project Opus player on your account. Or you can buy the high-quality stereo version play it wherever you like (sometimes they are free, depends on the artist). Drop them a line and let them know they are appreciated!

Support the little guy! I hope to be on the player one day!

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I’ve recently become a bit enamored with Italy. It’s land, people, and culture are very unique and yet they ride the cutting edge of technology. I’m learning more about it, but I thought I’d provide you, as well as myself, with a small collection of fantastic Italian pictures (in the form of a slide show).

Check it out.

Italy Slide Show

And for laughs, you just have to see the traffic in this place! You know those lines on the road? The lights and signs? All decoration

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I guess I haven’t updated you on my business endeavors in a while.

Since I left my previous position as a web designer/master of a large health food store, I pursued a new web design venture with a good Christian friend I know through our church. He’s a talented salesperson and I can make websites. It seemed like a good match.

Using open source CMS (Content Management System) technology to help design our system, we’ve created a website that almost anyone can run with no prior knowledge of web design or HTML. In fact, it’s nearly as easy to put text in pictures in your site as it is to do so in a simple email.

We recently created our own site using our system and is now public!

www.AlterNetLand.com

If you like it, drop me a line and let me know!

I have some other businesses that are still in the brainstorming phase, but if they become solidified I will keep you posted!

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For those of you who want to upgrade to the new Windows Vista Operating System, Aaron introduced me to an excellent guide to help you through the process. Perhaps one of the best free guides on the net today. Enjoy.

(fedora style hat tip, Aaron)

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Originally, I had decided to discontinue the “Taking Your Life Online” series and changing the direction of this blog. If you want to see the series completed, please let me know, otherwise I will assume it’s not really important to those of you who do read my blog.

So what am I trying to say here? I want this blog to have information that you CAN’T find anywhere else on the web, and for that to happen, it needs to be about me. So the following items will be my new focal points for creating posts:

• My Music: Thoughts on music and, of course, delivering the original music I have written (as they are recorded). If I feel particularly daring I may post some demos of songs that haven’t yet been recorded properly as well!

• My Tech Recommendations: No more long articles about various products, that’s easily found on the net already. Instead, only my recommendations and opinions. I may still write articles, occasionally, if I’m passionate enough about it
• My Life: I’m going to begin to try to include more information about the various events going on in my life to help give you a glimpse into what I’m up to when I’m not blogging.

I also hope to increase things like video posts and pod casts in the future.

To keep things simple, I hope you will consider subscribing to my feed by clicking this link or the feed icon at the top of the right column on my site. If your still not using a feed reader for some reason, then I’ve provided one more alternative so that you are, officially, without excuse!

Subscribe to Just A Leaf by Email

There! In all its aged cave man glory, you can now receive my blog posts in your email! This link is now permanently on the side bar as well.

Cya around!

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Notice the two new icons on the right? No more complaining about not being able to get my RSS feed. The orange icon will work with any feed reader (Thunderbird, Google Reader, etc) and the shiny-beautiful-new “webwag.this!” icon adds my feed directly to your webwag.

That’s ONE click. Can you handle it?

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It shouldn’t take this long to make something look this simple.

Anyways, take a look at the new coat of paint and let me know what you think. I tried to follow some of the Web 2.0 “less is more” mantra along with bigger fonts. Hopefully, this is starting to look better. I will probably be tweaking it off an on while trying to avoid my usual, complicated, decorating habits :).

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Alright… my blog is going to look ugly for a little bit, but this in the beginning of a new template :).

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My Webwag

Wow….

This is a competitor to PageFlakes… actually, never mind, this is the defeat of PageFlakes.

It’s similar in that you can make your own home page with the exception of one majorly incredible feature…

Widget on Demand - Make a widget out of any piece of the web. ANY piece!

This is a feature I wanted to move to Mac to get (it’s going to be on the new OS X Leopard) but here it is right now! Yours for the taking.

Do me a favor and just try it, you will NOT be disappointed, it’s the most incredible net feature I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Just go to www.WebWag.com and click the Widget on Demand demonstration video on the right to see how it works.

Have fun

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Here’s a question I was asked recently that you may find interesting:

“Do you know what’s the best way to go if I want to set up my own website for free? I googled “free website” and pulled up a bunch of stuff that looked kind of tricky–like officelive.com that said it was free but when I looked deeper it said it would charge my credit card after awhile. I was wondering what you thought.“

Of course, if you are willing to put up with the culture and ads, MySpace was made for this. But since I can’t reccomend Myspace to anyone without feeling like I have to make a burnt offering to the Lord afterwards, I suggested a more creative approach… WARNING: This is not for the feint of heart (or those afraid of “words” like HTML):

Free hosting is hard to come by but there are some options out there for the creative.

I guess it really depends on what you need the site to do. If you were doing a basic info site with some downloadable files I would probably try a Wordpress/Google Group combination. Wordpress, while intended to be a blog is actually a highly evolved CMS (content management system) that can be used to make great websites.

The best part is, the site is controlled like a blog, so it is very easy to edit content.

The reason for the Google Group is that you can upload files to it and that link directly to those files on your site (this is transparent to users).

Another plus to using this set up is, no ads! It’s completely ad free.

I would advise that you buy a domain name though unless you want mysite.wordpress.com to be your address. You can get one for $8 a year at godaddy.com. Using domain-forwarding through godaddy you can have your site appear to be hosted on your own domain.

http://wordpress.com
http://groups.google.com/
http://godaddy.com/

You’re going to have to get your hands pretty dirty to get it done (what do you expect for free!), but it should be fun and completely convincing when you’re done. WordPress is an awesome system. You’ll need a good template that allows for multiple pages. Here’s some good WordPress links:

http://themes.wordpress.net (if you don’t like any of the defaults)
http://wp-plugins.net/
http://faq.wordpress.com/ - to answer your questions

If you need to host images for your template, try photobucket.com or flickr.com.

There’s probably an easier way to do this if you want to put up with ads, but for the best end product, this is the route I would take!

Sorry if that seems like too much work to you! You could always fork out the dough if you don’t like it though

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