With the latest operating system release from Microsoft, there’s a lot of options to consider, chief of which is whether or not to use the new system. Being part of that school of thought that prefers to wait for the second update or later for any new software, I had no plans on running VISTA anytime soon. I recently bought a new PC and, of course, it was loaded by default as the OS, taking up the entire 320 GB drive. First order of the day was to shrink that VISTA partition back down to a reasonable size. With no additional application loaded on the new system, VISTA was taking up about 15 GB - anyone remember when DOS fit on a single floppy? No matter how you look at it, this new OS is huge. The size is one thing to consider, as well as the performance needs for the PC that will be running it. So far, it seems to be running fine on my new PC, but this is a big fast machine with 2 GB of RAM, so it should run well. For the average user with an older machine, VISTA is probably not a good option. Especially when there are other options out there. I should note that this article is being written on that new PC but not from my VISTA installation - instead, I have installed a distribution of PCLinuxOS and have been working almost exclusively in Linux for the last few weeks.

With the advent of Live CD installations for many of the more popular Linux distributions, installing Linux is no longer the daunting task it used to be, though, in most cases, it does still require some additional tweaking of the the system once installed. Even with that extra effort, though, I find it to be a real pleasure to work in Linux and have been documenting parts of my experience with it on my tech blog, TechTalk.

Bla.st offers you an opportunity to put your business card in everyone’s face and it doesn’t have to cost you a thing. It’s a really simple concept - you upload a digital version of your business card to their site, pick the right category, and you’re all set. Though you can pay a few cents a day to have your card show up higher on their pages, you don’t have to pay anything at all if you don’t want to. The process of getting an account takes less than a minute and if you already a usable version of your card ready to go, you can up and running in lass than 5 minutes.

So far, I’ve only put up my card for TechCrafters, but I’ll be adding some more cards for some of my other sites shortly, as well as passing the word on to my clients so they can take advantage of the free advertising as well.

Ah, the joys of being a webmaster and dealing with the uncounted numbers of spam postings that hit my sites on a daily basis.. Luckily, there is a solution to help with some of that - a new version of the blog software that does a better job of blocking the garbage. Unlike the earlier version we were using, this version allows us to do bulk edits, so even if we do get hammered with a pile of would -be spam, it’s far easier to mark it all as Spam now and get rid of it more easily. Knock on word, but so far, the blog spammers haven’t bothered this site since we made the change.

We're in the process of writing an ebook to look at this topic in depth, but for now, we want to give you some ideas to think about. Adsense, despite some reports to the contrary, is alive and well and earning respectable incomes for many online marketers. If you're not one of the them yet, you definitely need to read on.

One of the bigger stumbling blocks to developing sites for Adsense is creating a framework for the sites that makes it easy to add new content. The vast majority of tools for this type of site create pages that are just flat out ugly and, unfortunately, look just like everyone else's Adsense site. Is this really what you want?

What we aim to give you with our new ebook is a simple system that allows you to simply cut and paste your content into the system and have clean, fresh content pages that stand head and shoulders above the others, complete with built-in SEO functions. And did we mention you'll be able to edit them from anywhere just using your browser?

Watch this space!