Happy Holidays & Small Business Branding Is Go

I hope everyone following the Christmas tradition had a good day and a happy Hanukkah for my Jewish friends celebrating too! Most of you are probably on vacation from work but I’m sure there are a few hardcore bloggers and entrepreneurs out there still sitting behind the computer making things happen, just like me.

I had lunch with my mum and her partner’s family yesterday while we watched a big summer storm roll in and wash away some of the heat we’ve been getting here, although it’s still managed to get back up to 32C today in Brisbane…sigh, I hate summer…grumble grumble.

It’s a very quiet time of year for me since most of my friends are off with family. I’m largely left to my own devices since I have just my parents in Brisbane and the rest of my family are in Toronto, although there aren’t many in my clan. I’ve been spending some time with my other loved ones – my blogs and business.

Gawd yes that sounds sad, but let’s take it as a light hearted joke and move on…

No seriously I’ve been quite surprised as a few large jobs rolled in over Christmas. Normally this is by far the slowest month for BetterEdit but organising three thesis proofreading projects has contributed to an increase of over 1000% from last December’s revenues. It’s still not much more than a salary for me, last December I only did a couple of hundred dollars in sales, but I’m not complaining, it’s good to have work to do at this time of year. Let’s hope January will continue the trend.

Blog Maintenance

I’m doing some behind the scenes work on Entrepreneur’s Journey, restructuring the categories and installing PHPAdsNew so I can maintain an internal ad network on my sites. I’m presently testing the delivery methods with PHPAdsNew so don’t be surprised if you see ads show up on posts and then disappear. Once I find a method that works both aesthetically and technically things will stabilize.

While I’m mentioning PHPAdsNew I once again have to praise this amazing software and recommend it to anyone wanting to install an adserver. It’s an open source program of commercial production quality and honestly I’d pay easily $100+ for a product as good as this, but it’s completely free. It’s just so polished, feature rich and intuitive to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get your head around it can do amazing things. My thanks go out to the developers.

Small Business Branding

I’ve just about got complete control over Small Business Branding and I have started to make posts. You can head over there to see my first article – Small To Medium Business Branding.

I’ll be leaving the site sit on TypePad for a while, although I’m not a big fan of the system, until early in 2006 when I move the site to WordPress. I don’t want to move the site until I have a new design for it ready to go.

I hope everyone is having a good time whatever you are up to and getting ready for a big 2006!

Yaro