Not Having a Niche - The New Niche?

When you’re thinking about starting a blog and you’re reading all the information you can about the best way to start a blog, what’s the number one thing you’ll read? That you must have a niche to be successful. Whether it’s about a blog about blogging, making money, design, or anything else, it must have one centralized niche as the main focal point or the odds will be against you to succeed. It seems that over the last few months, the tide may be turning on the idea of having one single niche. Here lately, I’ve noticed that more blogs are talking about not having a centralized niche. One of the blogs I came across the other day which discusses the pros and cons of this topic is The Abundance Highway.

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DIY Covers Review

DIY Covers eBook Example

It seems everyone has an e-book these days, doesn’t it? Well, except for me of course. Maybe one day I’ll be an internet millionaire and have desires to write an e-book telling all about how I made my millions online? For the time being, I had to settle for getting a little practice creating an e-book cover and store the experience back for a rainy day when (and if) I ever decide to write an e-book.

A while back, my good friend Sarah who had such a big part in helping me get the rating system set up on Nice Stylesheet asked if I would like to take her new DIY Covers for a spin. Of course I said yes. Last night I finally had a chance to try out DIY Covers and here’s what I think:

Ease of Use

I wouldn’t consider myself a Photoshop guru, but I definitely know my way around it. I could easily fire up Photoshop and create a cover myself, but after trying DIY Covers out I’d never attempt to do it manually in Photoshop. You can see my e-book cover above, which took all of 10 minutes to create. If I had created the cover myself, it would have taken much longer than 10 minutes for sure.

With this pack, you can create amazing covers without tons of Photoshop experience.

Not Just for E-Books

I only had to opportunity to try out the DIY Covers Review Pack, so I was limited to creating an e-book cover, but don’t be fooled, the full product does so much more. With the full product you can create: e-book covers, covers for software, quick reflections for your covers, CD graphic and lots more.

Give It a Try Before You Buy

Contact Sarah for a free download of the same review pack that I test drove and see for yourself how easy it is to create great covers in no time at all.

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Wow! Very surprised to see the Random Jabber logo as a finalist at the Logo Design Love Awards

Logo Design Love Awards

I bet you all thought I had fallen off the face of the earth, huh? Nah, I’m still here, just staying very busy trying to get a new site launched in the next week or so. I really hope after the launch I’ll be able to get back to some sort of regular posting schedule. I really have some good article ideas, just no time to publish them. I appreciate everyone hanging in there with me and checking back in from time to time. Random Jabber definitely isn’t dead!

I took a look at my traffic logs tonight and noticed some traffic coming in from David Airey’s Logo Design Love so I popped in to see what all the fuss was about…

Random Jabber’s Logo is a Finalist in the Personal Blog Logo Award Category

A while back I entered into the Logo Design Love Awards contest under the “personal” category. I’m pretty critical of my own work and honestly didn’t think my logo would get a second look in the contest. Obviously I was wrong as David and the judging panel thought enough to make it one of the top logos in it’s category and it seems that some of my peers feel the same way as my logo has quite a few votes already.

Check out all of the designs the personal category and don’t forget to leave a comment on the entry and give Random Jabber another vote!

Found a Little Inspiration From the Contest

Random Jabber Logo David had to slightly alter my logo because of the small size. As you can see to the left (from the Logo Design Love website), it’s small. The border around the talk bubbles needed to be removed as I’m sure they were blurry at that small of size. I’m actually glad David did this because it provided me with some inspiration for a Random Jabber logo revision. I’m a big fan of simple and I actually like the logo better without the borders around the talk bubbles. So, kudos to David for this accidental inspiration.

On a Final Note… Anyone Want to Do a Guest Post?

One last final thought before I close, I thought I’d ask if anyone out there would like to do a guest post here on Random Jabber? This would be my first experience allowing someone to guest post but with next to no time to write lately, I think getting a couple guests posts could be a great addition to the site and would hopefully pay dividends to the guest poster in that they would receive some traffic out of the deal.

So, if you’re interested, just drop me an email and let me know what topic you’d like to write about (should be in line with topics found here) and a link to your site so I can see some examples of your writing style.

DON’T FORGET TO VOTE FOR RANDOM JABBER!

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ExpressionEngine 2.0 Official Preview at SXSW

EE to CodeIgniter

The long awaited ExpressionEngine 2.0 preview from theSXSW Interactive Festival has finally arrived. You can check out some official screenshots of EE 2.0 from Derek Allard’s blog.

ExpressionEngine is now built on CodeIgniter, which is EllisLab’s (the group behind EE and CodeIgniter) open source PHP framework. The most interesting thing about this is that the ExpressionEngine community will become one with the CodeIgniter community. Derek explains it well:

You an ExpressionEngine developer? This represents an instant expansion of EE’s capabilities. Faster, easier, more modular code, with a huge number of libraries and functions. You a CodeIgniter user? How about instantly being able to drop ExpressionEngine on top of your code base, and have fully accessed, fully shared information between each. Instant forums, instant wiki, instant EE – on your existing code

I’m Pumped!

I’m very excited about 2.0 and can’t wait to see the final product. The only thing I have to do now is try to at least get a beginning grasp of PHP (I know zero about PHP currently). With ExpressionEngine being built on CodeIgniter, knowing your way around PHP would prove to be invaluable. If you don’t like how something worked in EE, you could simply build your own way of doing it. The possibilities are virtually limitless when you think about what could be developed using EE on CodeIgniter.

What Do You Think?

If you’re using EE, what do you think? If you’re not using EE, are you considering taking a look at it?

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I Was Tagged to Share My Secrets

Secrets

A month ago fellow blogger Jarkko Laine participated in the no more secrets meme and tagged me to do the same. I told Jarkko that I would also participate but as you can see, time got away from me and I’m about a month late. Better late than never right?

Well, without further ado, here are my seven secrets:

1. I Hate to Read

Unlike Jarkko, I absolutely hate to read. I don’t mind reading books as a reference (CSS, HTML, etc.) but I cannot read a book from cover to cover, just can’t do it. My mind wanders to much. Whenever I’ve tried to read a book, my mind always wanders and it ends with me thinking about a CSS problem, development of my next site or I have an epiphany about my golf swing that I just have to write down before I forget.

2. I Cannot Stand People Eating With Their Mouth Open

This has been something that has bugged me for a while. I think it all came about when I was growing up, my younger sister would always chew with her mouth open just to annoy me. Now, when I’m sitting in the vicinity of someone chewing anything with their mouth open, with every chew it’s like nails down the chalkboard to me.

3. I Hate My Food to Touch

Again, I have no idea how this ever came about, but as long as I can remember I’ve hated for the food on my plate to touch. If my plate didn’t have the little dividers, I would take extra care to ensure nothing on the plate touched; never getting anything like green beans that may have juice that could make it’s way over to the other items on my plate. I also used to eat each item on my plate one at a time, never moving to the next item until the first item I started eating first was finished. I was able to shake this habit though.

4. Little Things Bug Me

Most of the little things I’m referring too involves the web. When I’m developing a website, the tiniest thing could keep me up at night. There have been times that I have stayed up for three or four hours longer than I anticipate staying up simply because of a couple pixels being out of place. I just hate for things to not work like I want them and will torture myself until they are fixed. I’m getting better at this, but not there yet.

5. I’m a Perfectionist

I know it’s a pretty common thing for people to say that they’re a perfectionist, but I really am. I cannot accept mediocrity. If I cannot do something well, I would rather not do it at all. This is most prevalent in my golf game. Statistics show the “average” golfer will normally shoot scores right around the 100 mark. My normal scores are generally in the low to mid 70’s (the lower the better). It drives me absolutely nuts to play a round of golf and not play to what I consider “good” or “average” for myself. It bugs me so much so, that after a bad round, I’ll spend the next week or so visiting the driving range on my lunch break as well as after work trying to figure out just what it is that I’m doing wrong.

I’m Tagging You!

Now you know five secrets about me. The rule of the game is that I get to pass the tag on to some bloggers and they get to do the same thing on their sites:

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