Amber Eyes is back after a long hiatus.

Basically I was hospitalized in summer of 2010 and it took over 18 months for me to get back to the point where I could handle any new business.

So we are back in business! Yay!

Well, I've been away quite a while again. I've been very busy however. I designed some incredible sites and learned quite a bit about organic groups, organic group blueprints, podcasts, audio, video, iTunes integration, user profiles, ubercart, and tons of hacks to make things interesting.

Just now, I finally gave up trying to upgrade my last 4.7.x site and just put up a brand new 6.x site instead. I still have the upgrade in my backlog in case I should stumble onto some copious free time ... sorry ... that just cracks me up!

Anyway, I did a bit trying to integrate one of my ical feeds with Facebook, harder than it sounds though there is a great Facebook app that is almost there ... ya get duplicates after a short bit ... but hey I can turn it on then off -- saves me a bit o'typing I say.

Look at what I just did there ... I'm suddenly typing wit a British accent! Yikes!

I started using "scrum for one" to handle the sheer magnitude of my backlog -- which is a great term if you think about it. I am also using Zen's kanban board system to organize my sprints. I am thinking of upgrading to a paid account -- it is that good.

And what else ... oh yeah ... I am using Autofocus to manage my GTD next action list -- fantastic!

It has been really hard with the economic downturn to get paid work, I guess it is a good thing that this is only my part time job. In the mean time, my next big project is converting my over 10k lines of perl script into a drupal/ubercart app. This just gives me the heebie-geebies, but my site admins are tired of double and sometimes triple entry. Sigh ... the hits keep coming ... Happy Belated New Year ... and I am out!

Well, it has been a long time since I posted an entry here. I had been working feverishly on two major web designs -- one which is finished and the other is almost finished. So I literally forgot about this blog.

In the meantime, I became an ubercart, event, nodeprofile, panel, views and og aficionado! At the same time, however, I seemed to have missed the memo to upgrade anything to drupal 6.

Yeah, I pretty much gave up upgrading anything. It became too time consuming.

I will consider upgrading my 5.x sites to 6 when and if I suddenly get some time and ... some motivation. The main problem is that I sort of burned myself out on the big projects.

I am curious. How do you motivate yourself to upgrade sites that are working just fine, thank you very much?

What is Web 2.0?

It is the next phase of the world wide web.

In the beginning, there was HTML.

In the mid-nineties, Tim Berners-Lee crafted a new markup language by extracting a subset from an older markup language and boom! The Web was born.

Web technology continued to improve over the next decade, producing a whole slew of applications with each having their own set of bells and whistles. Then in 2004, ten years after the birth of the web, another Tim, Tim O'Reilly, declared the birth of Web 2.0.

With all the new technologies and seemingly endless array of options facing web users, Web 2.0 in many ways goes back to the basics in terms of usability and scalability.

In Web 2.0, no longer do you have to handcraft each web page, or know a programming language to have a web site, you do not even need a web guru to run your web site. In Web 2.0, you enter the world of content management systems(CMS), search engine optimization (SEO), web services such as RSS and Amazon, web automation such as Google sitemaps, and countless other improvements.

What does this mean for web site owners?