Back when the internet was a new wild untamed frontier small businesses flocked to sites like the now defunct Geocities to mark out their territory on the web.

They were often instantly recognizable amateur hodge-podges of clipart, blinking text and inexplicable music clips and while some evolved over time to their own domains and added pointless Flash intro page animations many watched the new Web 2.0 wave coming and decided it was too hard and have become detritus, abandoned to entropy.

That hasn’t changed the fact that small businesses looking to get started on the web need a platform. Often they can’t afford to go to bespoke developers, and they don’t need a complex CMS or integrated back office (when they do need those things, then they can probably justify the cost)

A couple of years ago there were a few second generation platforms appearing that allowed people to host sites that were more than just a Blogspot or Live Spaces blog – they provided layout tools and themes and pre-defined blocks of functionality and you could even make them appear on your domain not on someone else’s sub-domain (a friend of mine once described that as “Trailer Park Hosting” and I’ve never quite shaken that image).

Office Live from Microsoft is one such platform offering a one-stop shop will integration into back end facilities such as email and document management. It has free and premium offerings with varying levels of functionality and support.

Weebly is a simpler alternative that doesn’t try to offer as much but does provide a lot of flexibility and is really easy to get started with.

Both platforms provide themes to set up basic layout for your site, though at Weebly you have a lot of control over the underlying HTML and CSS – with premium accounts you can make quite significant changes to the layout and look of your site. Weebly offers an affiliate scheme so satisfied users can get a small reward for recommending them – that helps offset the (reasonable) premium costs.

While Office Live tried to provide everything you need in one place (though some functionality – for instance adding a blog – requires using a couple of different Microsoft services) Weebly instead allows you to include either pre-defined components from other services (a Flickr slideshow, or a Google Maps for directions, Nabble forums, or pre-defined Miniclip games as well as Google Calendar and Paypal integration) as well as some of their own services (they have an integrated blog for instance – which doesn’t support Windows Live Writer yet so the downside is you have to edit it online)

Both provide a “one stop shop” if you want to use your own domain name to host your site and both are adding new features and functionality – though it pains me to say Weebly is probably the more agile of the two.

I was surprised how functional and easy to use Weebly was. It’s had great reviews in Time, TechCrunch and others – and my wife can use it which can’t be a bad thing!

After a few years of blogging (it doesn’t seem that long but it’s been a while now!) I don’t really look at the stats to obsessively – it’s an outlet and if it sometimes helps folks find an answer to something I’m flattered.

I recently moved hosting providers and wondered if the changeover had made any different to the traffic so started digging into the analytics I’ve had running but never really paid much attention to…

Three posts show up as driving almost a 25% of my traffic … which is a little sad considering the number of posts I have. I wonder if they’re not discoverable enough, or if I’m not doing a good enough job of promoting my brand.

So, what are the posts that drive folks in…

• Maxlength on Textarea. This was something I put together to deal with a specific problem I was having on a form validation and wanted to try and make an elegant solution. Browsers may have moved on since then, but it seems like it’s still a valid problem. Wonder if HTML5 will finally fix this ;)
• Upload and Resize. This was some code I needed to use on Big Brother and MyTalk projects. It allowed a simple integration of an image upload and thumbnail generator with some validation into either a Classic ASP or mixed Classic/.Net site. Far from perfect, but still popular.
• Performance tuning SQL applications for the Web. Like many developers my SQL skills were learnt at 4am trying to debug queries that were taking minutes rather than milliseconds. After spending a lot of time fixing some mistakes I made I posted the things I have learned and it seems that folks have been referring to them a fair bit over the years since. As long as it stops someone else making the same mistakes!

I’m probably not going to change what I write about – as it tends to be what interests me at that moment – but if there’s something you like, or hate, about what you find here don’t hesitate to let me know…

As a blogger who just happens to work at Microsoft I sometimes refer to an official team blog when I want to link to more information on a topic. The problem is sometimes finding the right official blog for a definitive answer – while a personal blog might sometimes have the information it’s usually better to go to the source!

The biggest problem has often been tracking down the right blog for the right topic, but thanks to the Windows Experience Blog I now have a handy list of official blogs at my fingertips.

Just because there’s official blogs for particular teams that doesn’t mean that MSDN or TechNet or any of the personal “off network” Microsoftee blogs (or for that matter ones written by MVPs, enthusiasts or simply folks who have found a great solution to a  problem) are any less relevant.

So, if you don’t find the answer here in my ramblings… there’s always the official list :)

Normally I view TechCrunch as an okay source of information about what’s going on it the world of tech startups (though to be honest Scoble, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, ArsTechnica and others are better).

My biggest issue with TechCrunch has always been the egos and the echo chamber that it exists in… is it reporting the news or is it about Mike Arrington and his crew making the news? I’ve always suspected that they operate some pretty arbitrary policies and hold others to a much higher standard than they themselves use.

On a fairly slow news weekend it looks like Arrington has done a pretty good job of proving that.

Dare Obasanjo (a Microsoft blogger) on his personal blog has a post where he called out TechCrunch for not stepping up to the plate and helping the startup community they feed off by posting positive stories to help weather the crisis.

I read Dares post and didn’t see it as a personal attack on TC or Arrington, more a call to arms for the influencers in the community to do like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld have been doing – advise, educate and shine a light.

Sadly it seems that not only has Arrington decided it was an attack he’s decided to make it very personal bringing Dares family into it and also accusing Microsoft of having “sponsored” the attack on him.

Normally I can’t be bothered to comment on these sorts of posts – it was obviously a slow news day but Arrington has a responsibility to act like the reputable news source he claims to be and be mature about this, not appear as a thin skinned whiner who can dish it out but sulks when someone points a finger his way… well I made the comment in the image – which to me seemed fairly appropriate and certainly less offensive than the article itself.

I was pretty surprised when it disappeared so posted again (and took the screenshot this time) – I’d have hoped Arrington would at least be willing to entertain some debate rather than just censor everything apart from anti-Dare or Microsoft bashing posts.

Looks like I wasn’t the only person who was surprised to see the censorship in action… and even more disheartening was the fact that not only did Arrington – a self proclaimed news publisher and echo chamber A-Lister – confirm it was happening, but he seems quite pleased.

Looks like if Arrington and TechCrunch want to restore faith in their integrity and professionalism he’s going to have to grow up a little. In these tough times I suspect self-promotion alone isn’t going to be enough to sustain TechCrunch as a media empire.

I’m disappointed not only because of the original “Prickly Prince from Microsoft” headline (with accompanying silly picture) but the total one-sidedness of the discussion. I expected more from the New Media.

As a Windows Mobile user I’ve sometimes felt left out of the whole “livecasting from the phone” revolution by those cool kids using Qik so I was really happy to discover PocketCaster from ComVu.

It’s a really simple app that you download and install to your Windows Mobile device, give it the username and password you set up on the website and then you’re good to go – livecasting or recording pieces to review later.

If you have a GPS equipped device (built-in or a bluetooth connected one like the Freedom GPS I use) then the livecast or clip can be automatically geotagged.

Just like Qik you can advertise to the world when you’re broadcasting via services like Twitter and automatically post videos to your blog.

PocketCaster works on both mobile phones and PDAs, but what’s cool is the same capabilities and functions are available in the PodcasterPro app for UMPCs, PCs and OSX.

Everything changes and the service now has a new name and a new logo – check them out at LiveCast. The new name defines what they do just as well as the old…

… but I’m still not very photogenic ;) Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t want a career as an internet livecasting superstar… but if you want a way to broadcast sights and sounds from your life then give it a go.

From a mobile device check out their Mobile optimized site – you can download the client and get started straight away.

To be like all the cool kids and join the Web 2.0 world of community rather than isolated islands I’ve updated my blog template to use Disqus for comments rather than the inbuilt solution.

All the old comments are still there, they just don’t show up on the homepage but if you click through to a post (eg this one) then you see any old comments but also the new disqus comment block.

I know there’s a bunch of services out there – coComment (which is built into Blog Engine) and IntenseDebate spring to mind but I prefer the feel and community at Disqus.

Give it a try. Leave a comment. Tell me what you think. I think it’s the start of what I asked for when I blogged about MeGC – now you can see what inspires me to join the conversation and also see any comments to this blog in one place – and it even integrates with other services like FriendFeed to spread the conversation.

After playing with WebSlices in the run up to MIX08 and the IE8 Beta1 launch I thought I might give it a try here.

Turns out it is as easy as the IE8 told us ;)

I use BlogEngine.NET as my blogging platform but if you can edit your template the following rules should hold true… (it’s fully documented on the IE8 site as well)

<div class="hslice" id="1">

<h1 class="entry-title"><%=BlogSettings.Instance.Name %></h1>

<div class="entry-content">

<blog:RecentPosts runat="Server" />

</div>

</div>

The first line with the hslice div defines the block of code that will be presented to the browser as a WebSlice. You can have more than one on a page, but each must have a unique ID.

The addition of the class=”entry-title" to the title determines what will be displayed in the browser toolbar

The content of the entry-content div determines what will actually be polled/displayed in the slice.

You can see the code as displayed on the right hand side of the blog below the calendar… or if you’re running IE8 add it to your slices.

In my instance it’s not very pretty at the moment as the default “RecentPosts” functionality in BE.N isn’t optimized for WebSlices…. but I’ve asked how to improve it and when I get an answer the slide should magically improve.

So there you go. WebSlices. So easy even an Offbeatmammal can work out how to use them.

What with my UMPC and my new phone and my laptop I have a lot of places to consume blog posts. The problem is that it's very easy to get very out of sync and confused very quickly - especially throwing in reading on the web on a bunch of machines in various places.

Admittedly with a lot of the blogsphere you're not sure if it's deja vu because you're reading the same post twice or because a meme has suddenly popped and everyone is writing about the same thing!

I've tried a bunch of different solutions over the last year to try and manage it. Google Reader, Bloglines, RSS Bandit, new the Origami Experience (which has such a good RSS reader on the UMPC platform I hate to be without it! It's coming soon Steve), Outlook, IE, Viigo ... and while they're all good in their own ways it comes down to keeping in sync, being able to flag things for follow-up and just making good use of my time and attention.

The other day I saw on Brads blog that NewsGator was making it's clients free. That was the most ridiculously good bit of news for managing my problem! Greg Reinacker explains why they made the change, but it quickly makes it the best solution for Windows, Mac, Mobile and Web users.

I now have NewGator Go! on my phone, Newsgator Desktop on my UMPC to keep that in sync, Newsgator Inbox running in Outlook for when I'm at the laptop and when I'm sitting at someone elses computer... NewsGator Online of course!

I can now read, clip and stay synchronized over pretty much any device I use. The only exception is on my UMPC where I can't clip posts to follow up later - must ask someone about that...

Looking to the future, like Steve I'm keen to see Fav.or.it ... I just hope it supports my mobile, distributed, attention disorder, reading and posting syle!