For anyone working with the web or other technology, it really pays off to keep up with current news and trends in your industry. The interesting thing about developing websites is the different aspects that need to be taken in to account to build a successful site: marketing, design, coding, writing, public relations... the list goes on and on. 

I've found these three blogs to be both useful and interesting in my day-to-day work, and I think you will too.

Signal vs. Noise

This blog covers a lot of topics, but it's core is all about business culture. Who you are and what you do are nothing compared to how you treat your customers and how you work together with the people in your company. 

• Favorite article: Apologizing like a human, not a corporation

Mashable

Any news that's even remotely related to social media usually finds its way in to Mashable. While the volume of posts can be overwhelming (expect 20+ Twitter updates per day) there are always a few gems that sparkle through the rough.

• Favorite article: IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On

Seth Godin's Blog

Seth is a marketing guru and relentless self promoter. He's written a bunch of books and coined some industry terms, but what's interesting are his daily quips on a variety of subjects that all relate to marketing in one way or another. 

• Favorite article: The lesson from two lemonade stands

Last week my friend Chris challenged me to try out a new web browser for a week. The browser is called Flock and it's available as a free download for Mac or PC.

Based on the popular Firefox browser, Flock takes the next step with keeping users constantly connected to their favorite social media. Whether you're into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, MySpace (for real?), or any other social networking site, Flock has a way to keep it in your face at all times. To get started you just open Flock and enter your various usernames and passwords for sites you want to stay connected to. Flock adds these to a sidebar that displays updates from all of your friends, recently added pictures and video, or even just links to news stories. You'll also get a home page with a more detailed view of all this info (see the screenshot below).

There are a couple of things I really liked about Flock: it was really easy to connect to my various networks, eveyone's updates are aggregated into the same feed, and grabbing an RSS feed or media stream from a page was simple and quick. On the other side though, all of this constantly-updating information is a huge distraction. I'd log on to check my email and spend 30 minutes on Facebook, or I'd start to check my bank account only to find 10 new stories about a soon-to-be-released video game. While I wasn't particularly productive while on Flock, I always knew what everyone else was up to.

The one thing that really bugged me was that the default search was set to Yahoo. Now, I don't want to get into a "religious" discussion here, but let's just say that I generally prefer Google 100% of the time. However, a quick search (on Google) revealed that Flock is endorsed by Yahoo.

Long story short, Flock is great if you love social media. Why don't you take the challenge: try out Flock for a week and let me know what you think!

This post was originally written by Jeff for his company blog at GreenLite Web Solutions. It has been modified slightly from its original version.

I decided to switch my website theme from Painted Wall to Acquia Marina, a newer theme that's only available for Drupal 6. Although I liked Painted Wall, I was trying out some different themes and this one really stood out.

Some of my favorite features of the new theme:

• It's green and blue (my favorite colors)!
• It has a very open, clean, and modern feel
• There are a whole bunch of block regions (for menus, custom content, etc.)
• There are icon sets for various blocks

I also revamped my logo using Photoshop. It's a phoenix, but it's also shaped a little like my initials (JP).