Constant Ads for Debt Settlement

I've gotten a bit fed up with the increasing number of debt settlement ads on the radio promising to reduce credit card debt. As the economy goes down, there are more and more of these showing up. I decided to look into these firms a bit. Go to my financial blog Road to a Million and check out the article titled "Debt Settlement." These services are there if you need them, but I recommend staying away.

Dear Rick, someone on Classmates wants to get in touch with you.

Dear Someone on Classmates:

Have you heard of Facebook? How about MySpace? Why would I pay classmates.com for the privilege of you contacting me?

Social networking is here to stay, but the business models are very different. While Facebook isn't perfect, what does classmates offer me that's worth $39.00/year? Nothing.

Sincerely,

Your Classmate on Facebook

P.S. If you're like me and you created an account on classmates.com in the year 2 B.F. (before facebook), and you're still getting the obnoxious emails every week, you can free yourself. There are two options.

Option 1: Log into classmates.com, and go to the account section. Click on "Email Subscriptions." If you see an option with a check mark, uncheck it. If you see a radio button, select the item where it says "unsubscribe." Then, look for the header that says "Communication Updates." Select "Customize the email" and change all of your alert settings to "never." Do the same for "Change the frequency." Hunt for all of the various settings and turn them off.

Option 2: You can delete your account completely from classmates.com. The directions are in the help section - Canceling your Classmates membership.

Slowly Getting Started

I’m starting to get better with this whole blogging thing. Now, technology isn’t exactly intimidating for me. My career has had plenty of technology work, to be sure. This blog was, by far, the easiest to set up. My Movable Type installation, was a lot more challenging, but much more interesting. I’ve been learning how to set it up and administer it, add blogs, users, plugins, and templates. It got really cool when I started to customize the templates to make them do what I want them to do.

My biggest success was with my dad’s web site sabatinoconsulting.com. I customized a stock template and layout, even added some conditional logic to make it work more like a web page and less like a blog. Now, certain postings can stay on the home page as static articles, while timely articles list below that as usual with a blog. It’s a nice hybrid.

The Joomla installation I use on my web site humancatalyst.com has also been quite a learning experience. I had started that site with Mambo and then moved to Joomla 1.0.x. The jump to 1.5 required me to start over completely.

When I left my technology career six years ago, I was tired of it. Now, it’s much more fun. PHP, Ruby on Rails, and that sort of thing is still a bit intimidating. But, learning Movable Type and Joomla has been interesting and rewarding. I’m starting to see possibilities for combining my education in communication (training/development, corporate communication, and interpersonal communication) with knowledge of these platforms as well as some other software tools to increase my offerings to the companies I work with. One stop for communication strategy and communication technology.

For now, that’s daydreaming. The important thing is to get my websites off the ground, attract readers, and enjoy blogging.

Getting Started

I’ve been really skeptical about blogging. At first, it seemed like a really crazy fad. Now, I’m not so sure. There are a lot of bloggers out there and a lot of people paying attention to what is said. Now, I do think that the term blogosphere is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard, but I’ll deal with that much.