• First up, check out my entrepreneurship coach’s latest post about living fearlessly and without regrets. The crux of the post is that we should act more and spend less time worrying about what our proper actions should be. Once we learn to recognize our fears and anxieties as feelings that we produce internally, we move closer to our core, to our competitive advantage. It’s a great motto and the less time we spend fearing the more time we can spend creating genuine, quality content. Lately, I’ve been in a bit of a funk and Tom’s post reminds me to simply be myself and my readers will appreciate my honesty and will be delivered a better product, whether that’s a blog post here, an article at one of The 42nd Estate’s properties or a paid service (more to come on The 42nd Estate’s upcoming services and new design very soon). Make sure to check out Tom’s post, especially if you’ve found yourself contemplating at the expensive of actual action. My on footnote to Tom’s post would be to be careful. Living fearlessly doesn’t necessarily mean exposing your innermost secrets to the world, which could be dangerous depending on your secrets and current career. To me, living fearlessly means acting without worrying about negative consequences, but you should still plan for all situations and realize that the more you expose yourself the higher the reward but also the higher the risk.
• After you’re done reading and commenting on Tom’s post, bounce on over to fellow The 42nd Estate member, Justin Wright’s blog post about the top ten WordPress plugins you can’t miss. It seems like every blogger and his/her mom publishes a top ten WordPress plugins list, but Justin’s list features several very useful plugins I’ve never heard of before, such as Theme Test Drive, which allows you to load a different theme from your blog’s public theme that will show only to logged in administrators. It’s a great plugin that allows you to tweak or test a new theme and ensure it works without submitting your visitors to a work in progress theme. Another great plugin on Justin’s list is the Automated Excerpts plugin, which automatically creates a post excerpt while keeping intact any formating and tagging on the post. A nice time-saver!

  Two additionals plugins I’ll recommend that are not on Justin’s list are the Flickr Photo Album plugin and the Whydowork Adsense plugin. I use the Flickr Photo Album plugin to generate the photo album section on my blog here. The Whydowork plugin is great as it inserts adsense code into your theme so you don’t have to go mucking about in the code and even better it has a feature that allows you to rotate different ad types into the post based on how old the post is. It’s a great feature as it allows you to show a small ad when the post is first published, and then automatically switches to a larger, more lucrative ad after a set period of time. Make sure you check out Justin’s post for the full list and let us know if you use a plugin you find particularly useful that’s not mentioned.

• Since we just took a look at a post from a 42nd Estate member, we’ll keep the theme on business as we take a look at ten tax deductions freelancers can make. Freelance Switch, a great resource for freelancers such as myself, posts some common tax deductions that we freelancers can take. The list includes deductions for:

  1. unpaid invoices
  2. paypal fees
  3. job hunting fees (such as fees to access Elance or other job boards)
  4. cellphone and skype bills
  5. home office expenses.

  Head on over to Freelance Switch to check out the full list. Remember to consult a tax professional before utilizing any of these tips.

• Perhaps you’re not quite a freelancer yet and are considering making the move from a full-time job to freelancing. If so, check out Daniel’s latest post at Daily Blog Tips about the asset value factor of working online. In the post, Daniel explains that we cannot simply look at annual gross income in a full-time job versus freelancing and decide which is more lucrative, as freelancing and working online also develops value in your blog, brand, and skill set. If you consider that your blog and other sites are valuable assets that can generate income via a sale then you’ll see that annual gross income is just one part of an online freelancer’s compensation. Be careful, however, not to overvalue your blog’s worth when making this comparison, which could lead to you making the leap to freelancing before you are ready.
• One of the reasons I’ve been posting less here the past couple of months is due to the winter weather that forced me off daily bike routine. It may sound odd but riding my bicycle actually gives me energy and helps me generate article ideas (biking around gives you plenty of solitary time to think). Without my daily bike boost, I fell into a slump that I’m now emerging from, thanks to the improved weather and my return to biking the past few weeks. With this in mind, I’d like you to check out the latest post over at Boston Biker, which urges fellow Bostonian bicyclists to smile and say hello to other bikes they see out on the roads. The thought is that we can generate a friendly, happy bicycling community here in Boston and by doing so will encourage more people to leave the confines of their automobiles and hit the streets on two wheels. I like the idea and think it ties in a little bit with Tom Volkar’s post about living fearlessly. Instead of isolating ourselves and acting as if we’re all still in cars, bicyclists should embrace their fellow bikers and create a positive environment for us to travel in.

  To a certain extent, I feel this sort of attitude comes naturally to bicycling, as we experience an adrenaline rush while pedaling that improves our mentality and makes us more susceptible to acting friendly. Now if we combine that with a conscious decision to greet other cyclists we can take on step towards getting even more cyclists out on the roads.

That seems like a nice note to end this twelfth edition of Web Quotes and Counterpoints. Let me know any thoughts, comments or ideas you have on the above posts in the comments section below!

Last month I wrote about a huge contest giving out tons of awesome wordpress themes at Blog Oh Blog. Well, I was one of the lucky winners and have chosen the uber-popular and nice Thesis theme. I’m quite pumped as I’d considered purchasing Thesis in the past as it’s a very nice and flexible theme. I’ll let you all know what I think of the theme soon.

The premium theme prizes:

• Arthemia Premium Theme from Colorlabsproject.com – $70
• Chimera Premium Theme from Themespinner.com – $59
• WPRemix 2 from Wpremix.com – $75
• Thesis Premium Theme from Diythemes.com – $87
• Revolution – Real Estate from Revolutiontheme.com - $59.95
• Fresh Folio from Woothemes.com – $70
• On Demand Premium Theme from Press75.com – $75
• Braincast Premium Theme from Storelicious.com – $79.90
• Jobpress Premium Theme from Dailywp.com – $59
• Fresh News Premium Theme from Woothemes.com – $70
• WpShowcase from Gabfire.com – $59

Adding up the regular price of each of these premium wordpress themes, the contest is worth over $700! Granted, each winner only receives one theme but that makes it even better deal as everyne has a great chance at winning.

Entering is easy and requires two steps.

1. Sign up for Blog Oh Blog’s RSS feed.
2. Write about the contest (with a link to the contest, of course).

That’s it! Pretty easy, eh?

So head over to Blog Oh Blog and join the contest (or don’t the less competition the better).

Pax.

A few wordpress plugins were deleted too (revver, top commentators, 404 notifier, social bookmarks, gregarious, post ratings) that were either inactive or unnecessary. Also, it seems that at some point the contact form stopped working so I’ve replaced it with a much better contact form. Also installed an awesome comments plugin called get recent comments. It has a ton of customization options and you can check it out right now in the sidebar.

Hopefully these changes make the site load quicker and improve readability. Next up is to get rid of the header image and replace it with something else. Also, the categories on this site need to be simplified and combined. All for another day though.

If you notice anything missing or errors or have any suggestions, drop me a line.

Have a great weekend everyone!

I’m now using CommentLuv on this blog, and we also use it at The 42nd Estate and are planning on installing it at We Demand Videos! and at the freshly launched OTIBR. I know several of my readers also use CommentLuv and I want to make sure everyone knows of a contest going on at WPMU.org to choose the best wordpress plugin. If you use and love CommentLuv as much as I do, please head on over to WPMU.org and vote (once!) for CommentLuv as your favorite plugin.

Oh, and if you don’t like CommentLuv, well then your vote’s not welcome! Just kidding, but seriously, what’s not to luv?

Due to the Saturday Sezwho Server Shenanigans, as well as two other issues, I’ve decided to remove the Sezwho comment rating system from this blog. Hopefully no one will miss it too much and remember bloggers, you can still get your commentluv here!

The other two issues I had with the Sezwho system were the CSS popups and the “Who Am I?” link that proved near impossible to remove. The CSS popups were very tacky and annoying in my opinion and combined with today’s server outage proved to be the nail in the coffin for Sezwho on this blog. Honestly, I wish Sezwho and any bloggers using their system the best of luck.

It’s a good step for this blog, in my opinion, to minimize 3rd party services on this site in order to prevent future outages. I’ll be working on a site architecture issues over the next few days to make this site a lean, mean, blogging machine. Aside from today’s issues, this site seems to work well and is improving. In other words, to borrow a quote from one of the greatest books ever written, Don’t Panic!