Wow, it’s been a wild last few days. Until today I hadn’t even had time to check my email; much less write a post, in fact, the last time I checked my email before today was Wednesday afternoon. This post is just going to be some basic housekeeping and updates as to what the heck has been going on.

First of all, my sister got married this weekend and that took me away from thinking about or doing anything with this site or any of my email or anything of that sort. However, it was a fun weekend filled with celebration, friends, and family. Now, it’s time to do some housekeeping.

When I get back to the computer today, one of the first things I discovered is that I was the winner of John Chow’s Market Leverage bag of goodies! I am totally stoked about this and can’t wait to receive it and tell in more detail what is all in there. I haven’t decided for sure yet, but I might give some of the stuff away to promote this site. It’s somewhat interesting: after reading about the giveaway, I immediately left a comment to get entered. I was also going to post about it to gain some additional entries, but just didn’t get it done in time. I guess that goes to show, it doesn’t matter how many entries you have, you only need one to win.

Also, Enkay dropped me an email over the weekend to let me know that my site was down for a period of time, I’m not exactly sure when this was or how long it was down for, but fortunately it’s back now. I’m thinking this might have been in-part due to my recent change of domain providers.

Which brings me to another recent change and update to this site; previously, I had registered my domain name through Network Solutions. While the service was excellent and everything worked very smoothly, the prices were outrageous. At the suggestion of Derek, I recently switched my domain registration over to 1&1 and am experiencing a very similar (although I’m not quite as impressed) level of service and approximately 75% savings.

Many of you may recall that I recently asked the question “How fast can you type?” and offered to put the names of the respondents into a pool and give one of them their choice of free advertising to run during the month of July. However, most of you either slacked-off and didn’t do it or procrastinated too long to get entered. Since ジェイソン (Jason) and Martin were the only two that took part, I’m going to give them both advertising space for July (see what you miss out on when you don’t participate) so watch for their ads coming soon.

Finally, I have been giving some thought to adding a “Recent Posts” section to the sidebar, but would like some feedback from the community on this. I know of many sites that have it and many that do not. If I were to install this, which of the gazillion similar plug-ins would you recommend? Where in the sidebars should I put it? Should I add it at all? If you could answer these questions for me in the comments I would really appreciate your input.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am only about half-way through my RSS feeds and still have about 52 posts to read.