You are reading an archived post from the first version of my blog. I've started fresh, and the new design and content is now at boxofchocolates.ca
Through BlogAid, I’ve pledged my earnings from this blog for the month of January to be donated to disaster relief efforts in Asia. If you are looking for ways in which you can help, feel free to join the effort and pledge your earnings as well.
Obviously this will work on the honour system – if you pledge, it is up to you to follow through. Head on over to BlogAid to enter your pledge.
Kudos to Andy Budd for getting this off the ground.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2005 is to keep better track of my clients so that I can contact them more regularly. Let’s face it – without clients, a business doesn’t really amount to much. I decided to invest in software to help me out so that I don’t have to hunt for contact information when I want to send out materials to individual clients or groups of them.
I’ve been looking at my installation of ShortStat created by Shaun Inman, and noticed that while there is a lot of valuable information that ShortStat is tracking, I don’t necessarily want to see all of the items ShortStat shows. Sometimes I do want to see everything, but certainly not most times. Most times I’m really just after the latest referrers, just to see if anything new is coming through the pipe.
So, here is ShortStatom – which takes some of the core ShortStat code, and is modified to produce an Atom feed from the latest referrers tracked with ShortStat. It is a lot quicker, and ultimately convenient to view it in my RSS/Atom reader of choice.
As the year comes to an end, I’m pretty pleased with how the year went personally and business-wise. One area I’m not happy with (actually quite disappointed, really) is the professional development side of things: I haven’t been to a conference since 2001. When you run your own business, it is sometimes difficult to attend some of the face to face events that are vital to your own professional growth — quite often it takes a back seat to pretty much everything else.
Having said that, there were a number of conferences that I “attended” this year from the comfort of my own home office. Here’s a rundown of the events that I was able to experience remotely.
Last Thursday, December 2, 2004, Athletics Canada awarded the Jack W. Davies Trophy for the track and field athlete of the year to two of Canada’s finest athletes.
One of fhe athletes, Chantal Petitclerc, has refused to accept the award, and her high profile within Canada has vaulted this story into the news (see Petitclerc refuses Athletics Canada award). She felt that sharing the award underlines how Athletics Canada views Paralympians as second-class athletes and not on the same level of their able-bodied brethren
.
My web development and accessibility consultancy is FurtherAhead, based in Ottawa, Canada, with clients around the world. And I'm not just saying that.