I’ve been blogging for about two years now and I have to say that I love blogging. Blogging is one of the few things that we can all do to help each other share thoughts, gain more knowledge, and maybe make a couple of bucks.  There are so many ways to do a blog, and things to blog about that I wonder why everyone doesn’t have a blog already. In fact, I’m so happy blogging that I run 4 personal blogs, as well as half of dozen blogs for my company.  In addition, my company is seeing the value of blogging and they are letting me set up even more blogs to help generate viral marketing on the web.  Blogs can be about anytime and everything.  The best blogs are the ones that really have good content and not just some collection of random posts and articles that a person gets off another site.  True bloggers know that the only way to build an audience to put out unique original content that is thought provoking and relevant.

I’m currently putting together thoughts on a new book about social marketing.  In doing so, I’m trying to figure out if the title should be very technical sounding title for the savvy-minded, or if it should be a more common sense approach to socializing and how it relates to every day people.  The book will cover the many new emerging social networks, how they work, which ones to be one, and for what reasons, as well as it will touch on how to apply those to various strategies on the web today.

I had a couple of thoughts about the title and I’m going throw them out here. It would be nice to hear from some of you about which ones you like or if you have a suggestion of your own please feel free to write a comment.

I just got finished updating my personal website and portfolio, and I put some cool new UI features on it.  I’m ready to officially launch the new personal site and look forward to some input.  I think the effects are pretty interesting and made are strickly with CSS and Javascript features, and that should make some people think and hopefully play with it once or twice.  I personally like the fold out effect on the home page.  When the personal div opens there is an option that says “Are you done with me”, click on that option and watch the cool effect that takes effect.  None of the page effects were done with flash or animation, and were all done with CSS and Javascript, with all data still being rendered on-page for search engines.  It’s a personal goal of mine to make sure all necessary data gets indexed by the engines.  It’s not that I don’t like flash, but I like to see how much I can do without it.  I really like the fade in a fade out effects as well.  How about the slide in navigation bar.  It’s a way of keeping data out of the way, but still have it available.  I’m going to be working with more effects on the site over the next few months, so stay tuned for more fun! You can visit the new site at SalSurra.com.

I’ve been using various UI libraries over the past couple of years and the thing that I’ve learned most is that it’s better to use them then try to re-invent the wheel. I personally like to use Yahoo’s open source platform called YUI. It’s a great library of tools that can be downloaded and installed on any directory. It makes for setting up pages and having great UI a snap. They have tons of pre-set configurations and you can do everything from menu-building, page-building, interfaces, pagination, and other various effects that can give a website sticky content. You can find YUI at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui.