I’ve been working on a magazine style iPad accessories website for a couple of months now, and have seen a raft of cool gadgets and gizmos reviewed. Some have really tickled my fancy so I thought I’d do a bit of a round-up here for my readers, and also so I don’t forget where to find the best ones! If you like any of these I’ll leave a link at the end of the article.

The first accessory that gets my vote is the “Cradle” from Quirky. It’s a super cool iPad lap desk that is not actually in production yet – the way things work at Quirky is the community designs and influences products, and when a product has had all it’s boxes ticked it goes up for pre-sale. Then, when enough punters have bought it, Quirky goes into production. It’s a neat system and these funky design items sell like hot cakes, this one will be sold out in a matter of weeks by the looks of things.

Number two would be the Incipio Destroyer Overkill iPad Case – it’s the most indestructible case I have seen on the market, and something I would consider to be essential. I can be a bit rough with my gadgets, I’m an outdoorsy type of person and when I decide to chuck everything in the car and get out of town for a day or two, well… I tend to literally chuck everything in… This case is so tough I think it would handle almost anything I would want to do with my iPad.

Number three would be the Skooba Design Messenger Bag, It’s a super light-weight bag with lots of great features, probably more than I can remember right now! Lets see… It has a zipper on the top so you can get your iPad out really easily and quickly without opening up the entire bag, big tick for that one – I imagine it would be incredibly useful when, for example, standing on the subway or a cramped economy class flight – you don’t want to rummage through the whole bag. It also has neat compartments for all those other essential accessories such as chargers and USB cables – and a well thought out compartment layout that means you will always be organized.

The fourth choice is something I consider to be an absolute necessity, and perhaps should be at the top of the list, an iPad screen protector. I’ve seen heaps of makes and models, but the one that I always choose is the military-grade invisible shield from Zagg. They are the most well known name in the industry, and they stand by their products with a lifetime guarantee. It’s maybe not the most exciting accessory, but it certainly is an essential, and will have your iPad protected and looking like new for a very long time! I will be getting full body protection when my iPad arrives.

My last choice is an arty alternative to the Zagg – also a screen protector of sorts, this one would probably be referred to as an iPad skin. They’re called Gelaskins, and like the competition they cover your whole device with a scratch proof surface however these ones have funky designs printed on them. There is a whole range of prints, from fine art to modern art and graffiti style prints. Many of them are just beautiful! Another neat thing about Gelaskins is they all come with a matching iPad desktop wallpaper image – so that the stick on scratch-proof surface matches up with your screen. Ingenious. I suspect a few people maybe a bit precious with their iPad to make it Gelskin funky in the first month of owning it. However, long term, and as the iPad becomes more prolific, I think iPad skins will become more and more popular, they are a neat way of making your iPad unique and you will certainly stand out from the crowd.

I hope some find this is a useful list – I’ve noticed the big gadget blogs all featuring the same iPad keyboards… iPad docks… etc. I think everyone has seen these on Apple dot com so I thought it might be nice to show a bit more variety. If you want more information on any of these great iPad accessories then check out the link. I said I’d give you one

And if you missed it and were wondering, especially those who know me, the answer is yes, I had a hand in the development and design of the site. Hope you like it, let me know what you think in the comments.

Violeta, my very good friend and business partner, has just posted an especially cute video of her cat. I just had to add it here for posterity.

Note: The cat goes by the name of the “The Cat”, and it’s breed is Russian Blue.

I must say I was not particularly fussed about the iPad coming out. I didn’t think I would want one – It’s just another gadget right?

Well now I’m not so sure – checking out some of these iPad demo videos is making my fingertips tingle with anticipation… I want one!

White Love, Fantastic track from the band One Dove.

This music sustained me during the early 90’s, one of the best periods of  my life.

If you love this track as much as I do you may want to Buy White Love at Amazon.com

If I were you I would get a copy while you still can – only four left when I bought mine.

Big Bear who makes Joomla templates has just posted a great Bluehost Joomla video tutorial. I highly recommend checking this out – It is sooo easy. Simplescripts means you just click, click, click and done!

The video also explains everything in simple, easy to follow steps.

Lately it seems everyone I know is interested in window blinds and shades. A good friend has established a site on bamboo blinds that I helped out with, mainly aesthetics, programming and SEO.

And then most recently my Mom has decided she loves Hunter Douglas blinds so much she wants to review them!  Many of her friends have purchased Hunter Douglas window treatments, so I guess it’s quite easy for her to get hands-on with these and talk to people who have them in their homes. And while she is about it she can grab some good pics as well!

So I helped out with the design of Bamboo Blinds as mentioned, my good friend Violeta has written all the reviews and information for the site – I designed the Joomla template, which incidentally will be released over on Joomlabear shortly under the title “Notebook Template”.

The site is built on the Joomla Content Management System and also usesd the K2 Extension which provides a lot of additional options for organizing and formatting Joomla content. One example is Tags, something Wordpress does out of the box but which Joomla is sadly lacking at this point.

K2 bridges this weakness and we can see an example of a K2 Tags page here: Bamboo Blinds for Sliding Glass Doors. The benefits of tagging are definitely worth the additional effort – Search Engines love them and users love them too – Tags provide a great way to organize and explore content.

The last thing I wanted to mention in today’s rambling post is my Mom’s site on Hunter Douglas Blinds. This is built with Wordpress and is just a skeleton currently, but I like to work this way when designing because it gives me some  text based content to work with, really useful to get a feel for how the site will behave with images, long pages, etc. I also like to get my Wordpress optimization sorted out first because it gives us a head-start in the search engines

I can spend weeks tweaking a layout until I’m happy with it – but it’s always good to remember search engines don’t look at all that fancy design stuff – they read the text and make an assessment of  what your site offers from this – so if the copy is on hand it’s very good to get this up immediately and then refine the layout as you go.

My next post will actually step you through my Wordpress setup and optimization process so you can see exactly what I do.

Until then.

I have two relatively new recipe websites that Google is not playing nice with – I’m really not sure what the issue is but am considering fileing a reconsideration request from Google webmaster tools.

The first site is http://easyrecipecooking.com, A domain name I mentioned a couple of posts back – a week or so on and it still is not appearing in Google’s index.

I have verified in webmaster tools and also added a site map which has been submitted to Google – the site has been online for a month or so. The issue with this domain is that it was an expired domain name and I don;t know what the previous owner used it for… hopefully nothing evil.

The second domain name is free vegetarian recipes, This one is at least popping in and out of the search engine results pages, but is not at all stable – the domain was ranking 3rd for “Free Vegetarian Recipes” when it was purchased but has slid backwards since.

I’ll be keeping an eye on these and will post a progress report. Any thoughts you care to leave in the comments are appreciated.

My friend Violeta has whipped up another delicious masterpiece and I’m thinking of cooking this for dinner.

She calls it a healthy dinner recipe and it consists of grilled chicken and yellow beans.

Mouthwatering….

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My good friend Violeta has overhauled her website Tips and Tricks. She’s used the Thematic theme by Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper, a Wordpress theme I am very impressed with. At present Violeta has been working on the layout and placing modules to display “Recent Tips”, etc.

Already the site has a clean and minimalist feel that reminds me of the design used over at the NY Times. Thematic theme has really nice typography out of the box and makes for a very ‘readable’ blog.

As I understand it, Violeta’s intention is to customise the header in due course, and add a little colour and style. Thematic also makes this very easy if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and diving into a little HTML and CSS.

Thematic is also a very well search engine optimised theme, with H1 tags for your blog description on the home page, but H1 applied to post titles on post pages – sexy! There are some other quite advanced SEO things happening under the hood, and it will be interesting to get a report from Violeta on the search engine performance of Tips and Tricks a month or so from now.

In summary I really like what Violeta has done and I think the Thematic Wordpress theme framework is a great starting point for developing a new look for your Wordpress powered site!

Just uploaded my first Youtube Video – a quick tutorial showing how to backup your wordpress database before backing up.

Hope you find this useful