I was checking out some winery websites and came across Livingston Cellars, an E & J Gallo Winery company.

It strikes me as odd that their website design is targeting a younger, more fun demographic when their wine labels are going for the exact opposite. There’s no continuity between the two.

Most people aren’t going to see the website. Their only exposure to Gallo’s marketing efforts will be in the wine aisle–through the label and packaging.  If they are going for that younger demographic, they won’t succeed.  So I’m curious what’s going on.

What do you think?  Do you like the design on their website?  Would you be more inclined to purchase the wine if it had a “fun” label on it, matching their website?

I just saw that Trevor Fitzgerald, of Fitzgerald Jewellers, in the UK, wrote his first blog entry.

He’s absolutely right about blogging being a tremendous business opportunity. Keep up the blogging, Trevor! I hope to read more from you in the future.

It looks like Facebook finally added the “Remember Me” feature to their login.

I was trying to properly setup a graphics card on an older computer but the computer kept spitting back an error message. The terminal said “init_nvclock() failed!” I had no idea was that meant so of course I go to Google and type in “init_nvclock”.

Next thing I know, an error message pops up prompting me to enter a captcha before I can continue. Apparently it thought I was a spyware program or virus because I searched for that. I wonder why spyware programs perform Google searches and why Google feels it needs to protect itself from them.

Click here for the full image.

I finally got around to setting up Open DNS and I wish I would have done it a lot sooner. It was incredibly easy to setup. At first I did it for just my computer but then realized I had to do it 5 more times to completely transition our house, so I then did it at the router level and all is done.

Now I can rest assured that nobody in my house will get phished or find themselves on any malware-infested website.

I suggest you check it out and change your DNS settings over, but more importantly, make sure you do it for your parents or grandparents so they don’t fall victim to any such situation.

I was just looking around for some tutorials on how to work with the Google Maps API and found some pretty great examples of some awesome integration.

This one shows you what’s on the other side of the world. It looks like if you’re going to “dig a hole to China”, you better be in Chile or Argentina. If I start digging through right now, I’ll end up in the Indian Ocean part way between Australia and Antarctica.

Check it out for yourself: http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html

Just two days ago I said I was really excited about Magento, an open-source e-commerce platform that should be released this Summer. Well, I just got an email from their newsletter with some updates.

They posted a screencast on their blog that shows a pretty cool looking backend. It already looks much better than anything like Zen-Cart, OSCommerce, 1ShoppingCart, or DigiShop.

My excitement to try it out is even further increased!

I’ve tried many e-commerce software solutions and have yet to find one that I really like. However I’ve recently heard of two that will probably be released within the next few months.

Magento Commerce

Magento is going to be an open-source shopping cart program. The company behind it, Varien, really seems to know a lot about e-commerce so I’m sure it’s going to be a fully featured script.

Interspire’s StoreSuite

StoreSuite is one of the next offerings of Interspire, an Australian software company. I’m impressed with their products so far (I use SendStudio for work), and am sure that StoreSuite won’t disappoint.

In a question-and-answer segment before the taping of his show, Stephen Colbert was asked if he ever participated in any Google-bombing. He answered and said he didn’t even know it was possible. While it may be new to Stephen, Google-bombs have been around for a while.

I remember when “talentless hack” was the first one to go around. Then of course there’s the “miserable failure” which was recently corrected by Google.

Despite Google’s recent changes to prevent future occurrences of “Google bombs”, Stephen Colbert would like to be known as the greatest living american.

It’s very likely that he’ll be able to achieve this top spot considering his viewers have rallied behind him to vote a bridge in Hungary and a hockey team mascot in Canada to be named after him.

Like I’ve said before, my site is proudly powered by WordPress, a great content management solution for creating and managing websites. One of the important things when running WordPress is to always stay current with new releases and to upgrade as soon as one is made.

To know when one a new version is coming, you can always monitor the development progress at WordPress Trac. It is home to the most up-to-date development versions and bug submissions. All changes to the code go through this system.

If you want to know when a new release is coming, you can always check the Roadmap. The Roadmap lists milestones that list upcoming features as well as release dates. The WordPress project recently adopted a 4-month release cycle, so we can expect a major release about 3 times a year. You can plan your upgrades accordingly and have some idea of when they’re coming.