Gregg Hilferding

Total US mail volume is down 14% according to a recent report from the GAO [PDF]. Currently being discussed on WebmasterWorld.

After reading about Dave Child's Trivibot (and playing for awhile) I thought, "Wow this whole Twitter Bot thing could be huge! I should do something neat!"

Of course, my disappointment at learning how many Twitter bots are already in existence just underscores how far behind I have fallen after my one year hiatus from tracking industry developments.

The good news? I built and deployed my first Twitter bot within just a few hours of discovering the possibility. Basically it retweets the blog posts from HalfEagle.com. (Of course, I'm doing that because HalfEagle.com is a project of mine... I'm not scraping someone else's site.)

Next step? Writing an interactive twitter bot. :D

...I just need an idea that isn't already been done. :/

After a 12 hour debug session last Friday, a new site I've been working on finally went live.

Working in-house on web projects mostly means I am fixing sites that are already online. Although I often build entirely new sections and features for the site, I rarely get the satisfaction of launching an entirely new site.

I'd almost forgotten how it felt.

Especially considering the short amount of time this site took to get going (compared to my last site which took a year and a half). Although, I have my coworker to thank for that as he took the lead on the more difficult aspects of this new site.

Ecom sites aren't the coolest projects to work on, but this one was pretty fun, particularly the image zoom feature for individual products. For example, check out this Eagle Scout coin. You can still get the traditional "show larger image" experience by clicking the thumbnails, but if you simply mouse over the main product image you are treated to a much smoother experience.

I don't know if I could have made this post unless the site had already made a sale so I wasn't expecting to have the chance until later this week. However, thanks to the miracle of Adwords I had an ad running in about five minutes on Friday night and arrived to work this morning to see the first sale had already been made and shipped.

It's a good day. :)

I have a tradition of entertaining crowds around Halloween. About 3 years ago I had an idea for 2 pieces of PVC pipe, a pair of shoes glued to a couple buckets, and a bolt of black broadcloth. I've moved up to using jointed PVC arms and drywall stilts but the concept remains the same.

Here's a video taken in downtown Zephyrhills at the Halloween event on October 28th, 2006. :)