Whee~!, originally uploaded by Claudia Snell.

Three day weekend! And I’m pretty happy about that. I’ve been so busy and It’s good to have a little time off.

This week I started exploring a couple of very cool new things. Well, new to me anyway.

The first is yourminis.com. Basically you can build custom widgets to use on your site or on your own “yourminis” page (check out mine). You can also get widgets from other users for your page(s), share your “yourmini’s page” and do a bunch of other cool things. I’m sure I’ll have more to say after I’ve messed with it a bit more.

I’ve already popped a few widgets around on this blog (see “stuff from MySpace”) and on my MySpace page. It only took me about an hour to get it up. So far, the only downside is that the MySpace system blocks the RSS feeds links - stupid MySpace. I had to add links hard coded to the sites I was trying to get feeds for. I’m hoping to use some of the widgets to my regular web site very soon.

The other thing I’ve signed up for is Brightcove.com. If you haven’t heard yet, this is a really great way to publish video for your site. I can’t wait to start messing around with that. Soon… very very soon.

Both of these things are very cool. They both seem to have pretty good documentation on their sites -better than I can give you. If you’re interested, go to their sites and read up.

I added a bunch of photo galleries to the JC site. Of course there will be more of those since I can’t stop taking pictures of everything.

There’s also a new sample of Jason’s motion graphics paired with Damon’s music. Very cool indeed!

Next project - getting Sarah’s photos into a gallery.

Didn’t I say that it was good to have some “time off” - hehe!!!

Sarah, originally uploaded by Claudia Snell.

Well, my book, Building Web Sites All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies, has sold through the initial printing and is going into it’s first re-print. Not bad for only about 4 months on the market.

I’m pretty excited that it’s doing well. We all worked hard on it and it’s good to see it out there.

Yippee!!

SPLAT!, originally uploaded by Claudia Snell.

Well, anyone that knows me at all would know that sitting still for 5 minutes is very hard for me. For some reason I was very amused by photographing the car wash.

The pictures did come out kinda cool I think. There’s more on my flickr.

Here’s a very silly video

I liked it. If you’ve played any of the Super Mario games you may like it too.

One small warning - they do have a few “naughty words” so this is not really for kids.

The end of the semester…., originally uploaded by Claudia Snell.

And this is the gift we get each year when the college kids clear out and go home. There are other options like: call someone to pick it up, call the landlady for help, haul it to the dump yourself. So, why do they do this?? People move out all year and manage to not trash the place. Every year when the kids clear out we get this mess. Why??