Richard Lee Thomason

Recently re-designed and re-wrote the XHTML / CSS code for Bank Card Finder (www.bankcardfinder.com), a business site about credit cards. This is a website that has had its ups and downs. Unfortunately, it has been on a long, steady "down" for the last year. So, it is due for a big "up". This will be the first site which I'll apply the SEO techniques I recently learned from Bruce Clay. I'm very optimistic about the results, though it will take some time. I really like the look of the new site and I enjoy watching the website's content grow as we take steps to make it into an authority site for credit cards. Details can be found under Bank Card Finder.

Posted by Rick at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man, all I wanted was to rip some DVDs so I could cut out little funny things from my favorite episodes of South Park, Simpsons, Futurama, etc., but finding good software programs for those things was a chore. There are so many different types of software to choose from so many different companies. And the reviews people provided about each one were always divided. For as many users there were who loved one program and claimed it to be the best, there were just as many who hated it and cursed the program developers to eternal damnation. So, I just tried a few of the most popular and picked the ones I liked.

For DVD ripping, I went with Magic DVD Ripper (www.magicdvdripper.com). It broke down DVDs into chapters and would save them in various file formats. The MPEG 2 format was what I went with when ripping. When it came to DVD copying / burning, I decided to go with Nero 6 Ultra Edition (www.nero.com) since it was the software that came with my new Plextor DVD-RW drive. Finally, for cutting out scenes and joining MPEG files together, I bought Easy Video Editor 2.0 from Honestech (www.honestech.com). There were really just SO many versions of DVD software programs out there for DVD ripping / burning / copying / etc. that I just had to choose and stick to my choices without trying them all. You would think there would be some good software bundles that did ALL these functions and did them well, but I sure didn't find any.

Posted by Rick at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't use any of the extensions that are available for the Firefox browser, and I just didn't care for the Google toolbar for Firefox. However, there are two extensions that I do use. One is SEOpen (www.seopen.com), which adds a bunch of search engine optimization tools for examing websites. The other is a PageRank tool for Firefox which displays a site's PR value in the lower right corner of your FF brower. That PageRank Extension can be found at Tapouillo.com, which is some French web developer's site. I added these sites to my favorites because I love using both of these extensions, especially SEOpen.

Posted by Rick at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This weekend, I added a Western Digital 320 Gig network hard drive to my home network. The thing is awesome. Real easy to setup and start using. Basically, it's a hard drive that I can use from any computer on my home network (three desktops and one laptop). I can back up any computer's data by copying it onto the network hard drive, and all of my computers can share the data that's stored on it. For example, I copied my website files to the network hard drive and now I can edit and upload them with Dreamweaver using any of my computers. All my MP3 files are now backed up on the new drive and I can listen to my songs from any computer. If you have a home network, think about getting a network hard drive.

Posted by Rick at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)