Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Headlines don't matter anymore!

With the adoption of RSS readers picking up steam, titles no longer matter. When you are a webmaster running a newspaper website, your job is to capture as many eyeballs as possible, so you need catchy headlines, and lots of them. With RSS, the people that want to read your stuff have subscribed to your feed, there is no longer a need to draw these people in, now your job is to provide the service(content) that the reader originally subscribed for. That means you need to display the whole article in your feed! We use RSS readers to minimize the number of websites we visit, if I wanted to recieve your headlines I'd sign up for your email newsletter. If you have to insert advertising into the feed to make some money, so be it, just don't try and lure me to your website when I subscribed to your feed so that I wouldn't have to visit your site as often!

Monday, April 25, 2005

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Back from Lake Chelan

We're back from Lake Chelan and our retreat at Wapato Point. What a great time, it felt so good to reconnect with old (and get to know new) friends. The weather was amazing and I can't think of a better place to spend a weekend.

This is the view from the beach near the house we rented, check out that water!
Another view from the beach at Wapato Point

Friday, April 22, 2005

Weekend in Lake Chelan

I'm off for our annual retreat, this year to Lake Chelan rather than Port Townsend. It's supposed to be almost 80 on Saturday so I'm not to upset about the change in locale. As you can see from the webcam, things are looking ok!


Lake Chelan webcam

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Wedding Update

We are working hard on the "two month stuff" that should've been done a while ago. We got the proof of our wedding invitations yesterday. The printing is being done by a great printer down in Oregon, Dominick's Quick Print. They sent us some great proof's as well as a strip with some variations on the colors we picked, which was great as we ended up choosing a slightly different color tone for the green background. Below is a screenshot of our invites.


Our Wedding Invitations

You can also check out our wedding site for some more info. I'm working on getting some more info up there today so check back often.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

New Business Cards!

Well, Thanks to the recommendation of many friends Insurance Resource Group now has some great new business cards! Overnightprints.com did a great job, these people shipped our order the same day we uploaded the design!

ryan_biz_card_front


cards_biz_card_back

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Access to the wireless network

To "leonotebook" all you need to do is ask, maybe we'll let you on the wireless network. But stealing signal is really not cool!

Touching base with the family...

I just realized that I haven't done a great job of using this blog for what I originally started it for...a way to keep family & friends up-to-date with my current experiences. So here is a start: Tascha and I are still working hard on the wedding. Things are coming along great, we spent most of last Saturday getting our wedding bands ordered. Mine is a really great Titanium ring that we think will be the right mix of "trendiness and classic style" and Tascha's we are having custom made from a good friend's dad who owns a jewelery design business in Bellevue. We were a little worried about the cost and complexety of having her ring custom made but David was great and really took care to explain the process and cost as well as time restrictions in order to make us feel better. We left feeling great about the whole process (except for the part with Tascha having to leave her ring there, we trust them not to loose it but Tascha misses it on her finger!).

Tascha has been substitute teaching dance classes for some of her friends who are busy preparing for CDT this week. It's been good for her to get some hours as the Nanny thing has been a little slow lately. My work has been going well, as most of you know I closed a fairly substantial case last month and things are looking good for a couple more this month.

I hope everyone is having a great week!