As the day began at the crack of dawn, just prior to the sunburst emerging from behind the eastern horizon, I filtered through the various RSS feeds and and categorized favorites upon my top Firefox bookmarks. And what follows is a snapshot of what I read through, which includes blog posts that span the gamut of technology, marketing, advertising and retail ecommerce and mobile commerce. Amid the favorite items of interest is Facebook, specifically Facebook Places, as I am engaged in the launch of similar Facebook Check In marketing campaigns for two clients in the coming months.

I had mentioned I squeezed the trigger on a Gallery2 open source photo gallery install. Installing Gallery2 was quite simple. Though, integrating Gallery2 into the Joomla CMS was a bit more difficult but not like pulling teeth on a angry bear. I used the JFusion bridge component.

It's late. It's me. And I'm tired. I have another site that generally serves to host all my off-road racing photos. It used to turn a profit on them and retail e-commerce sales. That is why I was long deserting the idea of hosting a photo gallery here. Why do so when the photos were contributing to my bottom line and double up on the work for nothing.

Today’s navigation throughout the web fringe takes me back to web advertising as well as overall off-road industry marketing. But let's at least stick to the web perspective for the time being. Now, from the publisher’s perspective, I have great disdain for a reliance upon ad networks, especially when it comes to fashioning a business model based solely upon advertising for its revenue stream. I have fought this venture with entrepreneurs greater than I but fought it nevertheless, basing my reasoning upon tangible principalities and subsequent results. Inevitably, the few whom I am speaking of have lost on such entrepreneurial web efforts time and again. Now let's get it straight. I have yet to make my own fortune but have managed to make a decent living making others their fortunes.

I am hereby breaking into the business of making news of someone else's hard work. I toss a quick quip and a sensational array of edgy words. It's artistry and engaging. I don't dictate onto the masses. I embrace them. I call it news aggregation. It's nothing more than a modified blog of slightly more important subject matter. Yet it's news. I am a news aggregator. It's word of mouth marketing. I merely regurgitate what I refer to as news and do unto it like a cow chews cud. The normal method of consumption is chew, swallow, stomach and dump. So goes the old ways of the news world. The newspaper is virtually dead. Now, we mouth off a bit, chew it, swallow it, and combine the final two stages into one, regurgitating facts and opinion amid social media outlets and thereby commence into the abyss of new age reporting until the fad fades into emptiness.

Recently the DIRT FORGE Blog performed a migration from a Wordpress blog on a sub-domain to a JoomlaWorks K2 blog wrapped within the Joomla CMS framework installed upon the root domain. While Wordpress remains one of easiest all-around web development platforms, especially for websites that require the capabilities of a blog or content management system (CMS), it has its limitations, particularly for projects that require or may require a relatively high level of integration with more mission specific software applications, such as e-commerce, photo gallery, file download repository and forum software. This is where the Joomla CMS framework excels.

Since the days of Google's now renamed Froogle product search platform, which is now simply referred to as Google Products, I have made habit of dutifully exporting product data to product search websites through the use of CSV, RSS or through an API. This method of extending the e-commerce shopping cart's reach and the retail business brand has proven quite profitable. And to think that other than the cost of manual export or syndication configuration, such product syndication services are predominantly free or charge. But what about the your copyright? This morning, I was performing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for an e-commerce shopping cart and began drifting down the inbound link list. Further down the list of links, I landed upon TheFind. Now this is an interesting product search platform - perhaps one of the best. I was alerted to it a while back when I was asked by an enraged client why their products were listed upon TheFind's product pages.

I remember the days. I worked straight HTML. I wrote like a mad man. Lived the ultimate off-road lifestyle and documented the insanity by means of a camera, a keyboard and often times a satellite internet connection. Those were the days of Off-Road.com. There were editorial days that existed long before the ORC era of my life, but they do not size up to the workload, responsibility nor adventure. Traffic at ORC was ultimately bolstered by informative and often humor-laced excitement. And during that era of my life, it was far more difficult to web publish that excitement as it is today. Straight HTML via notepad and then manually publishing links via FTP file upload for an array of primary directory pages was an extremely tedious task. Homesite soon eased the HTML editing woes but also inserted erroneous code. Fortunately, Macromedia Dreamweaver segued onto the scene has long proven to be a standard asset in my code-slinging repertoire.

I generated my first Twitter account back in 2007. Shortly thereafter, I performed a few contextual posts to Twitter (Tweets) and audio posts to Utterz (now called Utterli).  This included posts generated from remote location at local races such as Mojave Desert Racing (MDR) and Mojave Offroad Racing Enthusiasts (MORE) but also SCORE Primm 300 and SCORE Baja 1000 races. During that time, all formidable websites offering coverage for these races, specifically the Baja 1000, were weak efforts. The only exception would be the Race-Dezert.com Weatherman Race Radio Live Audio Feed. But even that is rather limited in its redeeming value, which is an entirely different conversation. It wasn’t until mid-2008 that I began consistently using a Twitter account. My spike in Twitter activity was do in part to public relations guru Jim Graham (@RonJon), who is also a self-proclaimed pretty boy Class 11 VW racer, whose race addiction is delivered via @DesertDingo. There were other things that truly interested about Twitter, but it’s just as easy to blame it on Graham. Should you follow him, you might find his ever-changing array of avatars entertaining and even perplexing. While my fervor is for off-road racing, my primary interest in engaging Twitter was from the e-commerce perspective, since I have realized that e-commerce is indeed the driving force for financial sustenance behind the off-road industry.