Then recently on twit.tv I saw an ad for Hover.com and from the screenshots of the site I could see right away that they are doing things better. The site is very Web 2.0, clean efficient and just there to help you get your work done.

For example, before moving my domains to Hover.com I did a quick check of my site and realized that my RSS Feeds were down. The way my feeds are setup is using a CNAME entry in my DNS records to redirect my URL to FeedBurner (you can read more about that at quickonlinetips.com). Godaddy’s Domain Manager is so busy and confusing I never looked into doing this myself before, and always had to open a Support Ticket with my web-host and have them modify their Name Server for me, which last time took a day or two of back and forth making it work.

After reading the help section at Hover.com (this tutorial in particular) I saw how simple it was to use Hover.com’s name servers to point to my web-host, and Google Accounts for Mail. So I transfered the domain to Hover.com pointed my web-host and everything still works fine.

Then after reading another Hover.com Tutorial, which by the way is the simplest and best intro to DNS I have seen and should be read even if you are not with hover.com, I changed my CNAME record myself. Instantly I was able to refresh the URL feeds.codemonkeyx.net/cmx and it went to FeedBurner.com correctly.

This post ended up being a little more gushy about how great Hover.com is so far, but sites that empower me to do more and learn new things always get me excited.

Oh and before I forget the, the big thing… PRICE.

At first when I saw the $15 price tag per domain I thought, well that’s a little high. But then when I compared to GoDaddy which advertises much lower prices I realized that on top of the domain name I also had to pay for Private Domain registration which was another $9 a year just for that, and added another whole layer of crap that I had to jump through when I wanted to change or transfer. So Hover.com’s $15 fee is lower than what I was paying at GoDaddy! when you factor in the premium add-on.

With Hover.com all I had to do to make my domain Private was to click the check box!! Because it’s included in the price! So far no hidden fees, no “premium add-on” services except e-mail hosting. Just a simple site that gets the job done.

Note: If you decided to use Hover.com be sure to use twit.hover.com to get a 10% discount. I am not affiliated with hover or twit but 10% off is nice, and both hover and twit are great.

With Google Wave everyone is focused on the application, and will it replace e-mail. But for me the Google Wave application is more of a technical demo than the whole architecture. If the Google Wave application fails it does not mean that Google Wave the architecture fails. The Pubsubhubbub project is a perfect example of this, we are already getting Wave functionality today without even having the Wave application. If you use Feedburner you can already enable “PingShot” which use push notifications to instantly push your posts to compatible sites. Right now very few sites support it, I believe Friend Feed is one of them. But when this sort of technology catches on it will already implement one of the biggest features of Wave which is the instantaneous updates from the web.

When this is made two-way then people will be able to instantly post comments on your posts from their consuming applications, and even collaborate on Wiki style pages from Within Wave applications.

So in short Google Wave is more of a way of doing things than one application, or even one protocol. And while it will not replace e-mail anytime soon, it will certainly change the way we do things on the web.

So with that I decided to give WordPress a try, and initial impressions are good. I have a blog up and running, and I am currently working on getting my old posts out of Drupal (much much harder than it should be) and importing into WordPress. I found a few tutorials for the move from Drupal, but most involve direct manupulation of the database, which in my eyes is a bad idea. So instead I am writing a small script that exports some basic Drupal post data into an XML file, then use the WordPress Import modules to import the data. So far it’s working well.

WordPress just seems much more focused on what I need right now, which is basically a blog. But it also seems to offer a lot of extensibility via modules and themes. I am about 60% of the way through creating a custom theme and it all seems quite well though out. Hopefully everything will be all back together by Monday. This will teach me to stop being lazy and just make a Linux server for testing next time, I was sure I could get everything upgraded in a day or two.

As part of the design I felt a little nostalgic and wanted to put a version number or founded on date on the new design. So I went to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive to view past versions of my site. It’s was really fun reading some of the old posts, what I thought was important then and the terrible design.

When you look back at things from several years ago you wonder if you will be looking at the stuff you are doing now and laughing at it ten years in the future.

The design is just a starting point right now, and the main thing I need to do is figure out how to get rails to do everything I want.

Revision3 and Twit.tv are two of my favorite sites to visit, and as any fan of those site will know they bombard you with SquareSpace ads. So know that I am looking into options I decided the give them a look first. After signing up for their free trial I was quite impressed with the WYSIWYG editing features. I quickly had a decent looking blog site up and running in a few hours.

The thing I like the most is just that they take care of all the little things for you, like layout CSS, blockquote formatting, and story entry. These little details always seem to end up taking the most time.

The post entry system is also nice.

So after working and learning about graphic design, and using my previous knowledge of web design and programming I decided to start my own little business, Zimian Design Studio. At the moment I am mainly focused on print designs, but I am also planning on doing web designs once I get settled in. I think my experience with Drupal module and theme development might be a good place to start.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on and why the site has been pretty barren for the past several weeks. The new site is for my tiny company is up at Zimian Design Studio, not much there at the moment, but I hope to add more content later. Right now most of the important stuff is there. Keep me in mind if you need some design work done.

One of the web designer blogs I have always admired the most has been Simplebits.com. Recently however the site has been coming up as unformatted html. At first I thought it was a problem with my browser cache, but after clearing the cache nothing. Then I assumed it must be the server and it will be fixed in short order. I was wrong.

I was shocked today when I visited the site and saw a new note stating that “This site is intentionally (but temporarily) un-styled while we build a new brand and site design.” Dan Cederholm has done great designs for very large companies, and the only way he has to design a new site is to work directly on his live files?

I can not imagine any reason why you would effectively cripple your own website to “remodel” when it is so easy these days to develop sites separately and in parallel with your live site. This is like the Web 2.0 version of the “Under Construction” animated gifs of the 90′s.

Even this site, with my limited resources, can afford a cheap Linux server to run my own development site on. In the past I have messed with the live site too, but this blog is far from a professional blog, and I do not make my living developing websites.

This is not really a big deal, it was just a little disappointing to see a site I admire, and have learned a lot from, do such a lazy thing as this. Let’s just hope that Dan does not start a trend in web development seeing as he is quite an influential player in the Web Design world.