I’ve been a follower of Becky McCray on Twitter for quite some time, but only today did I begin following her website, SmallBizSurvival.com. I don’t know what took me so long, the site is awesome! It’s packed with great articles, tools, and tricks for small businesses. It has a rural focus too, which is excellent for my area. As a web designer who has had success finding a niche in a b2b market online (primarily being outsourced to do work from other consultancies) and having a bit of trouble translating that success into direct work with businesses offline (eliminating the middle man) I’m finding a lot of great advice on the SmallBizSurvival website that will hopefully get me on a good track in this other focus of my business.

Some of my favorite articles:

Next questions from starting your first business
Checklists for starting your first business
Five common mistakes

I also enjoy the weekly “brag basket” posts. Hopefully I’ll have some accomplishments to share in the near future!

SmallBizSurvival is a great blog and it’s highly recommended for any entrepreneur, big or small. It’s already given me some great advice and I’m sure you can find something valuable too!

Jacob’s FOSSwire article about GNOME’s new appearances panel has hit Digg.

We’re doing really well lately, we just posted a survey for our readers and we’re getting lots of great responses. Keep up the great work Peter and Jacob!

I’ve been having an excellent time with the Grasshoppers, a networking group started by Chris Brogan. Grasshoppers asks the question “how can I help?” and gets you motivated to help others out (and ask for help if you need it). There are a bunch of great people in the community, it’s an excellent group.

One of this week’s goals was to “Donate up to $10USD (or whatever your currency equivalent is) to someone who needs it more than you.” I met this goal before Chris (brogan) posted his message (like 2 days before) so I’m considering myself set for this week on that front.

This post will fulfill parts 4 and 5 of the weekly goals. I’m inviting my readers (all 4 or 5 of you… hah!) to join Grasshoppers and get into the community. There are a lot of great networking opportunities that shouldn’t be missed.

Oh - if you do join, be sure to add me as a friend.

Chris

I just posted a few new items to my shared RSS feed. Check it out in the sidebar or by visiting the page on Google.

Don’t worry, I am not trying to compete with Scoble.

I got my invitation to GrandCentral yesterday, and I have been amazed by every minute I have used the service. It is fast, easy, fun, and works as advertised. It is free too, that’s a nice bonus.

GrandCentral is “one number to rule them all”, which is sort of hard to understand until you use it. The idea is, GrandCentral gives you a new phone number and then you add in all your other phone numbers to your account such as your mobile phone, your home phone, etc.

Once your numbers are added in, you import your contacts. This is where the fun begins, because you can set up specific rules for each contact and have them redirected to specific phones. I only have one phone, my mobile phone, but even then I find a lot of use for GrandCentral. Instead of redirecting callers to specific phones, I redirect callers to different voicemail messages - for example all my friends get a more friendly message, my family gets a message oriented toward them, and all other callers receive a business-y voicemail. If I wanted to, I could also personalise voicemail messages for individual people.

Another awesome aspect of GrandCentral is that all voicemails are recorded and stored online. For someone like myself who hates checking voicemail, this is an incredible feature that alone makes GrandCentral a killer app. You can receive notification upon new messages via email or SMS. Unfortunately, unless you have mobile internet you cannot check your messages from the phone (which I don’t mind so much - again, I am not a fan of checking voicemail ). That would be a nice development. Commenter D Murphy points out below that you can simply dial your GrandCentral number and check your voicemail that way, in a more traditional style. Very awesome! Thanks D Murphy.

There are a multitude of features that make GrandCentral a killer app for phones; no wonder Google bought it!

I look forward to continuing to use this service and exploring all the amazing features it has to offer.

I’m not going to Europe, but I decided to plan out a hypothetical journey for fun. It’s a pretty extensive trip and would probably require at least a year to get through all of the locations I put on the list.

The majority of the locations on the list are in Italy, although I have locations as far north as Finland and as far south as Gibraltar and Athens. Because of the Italy-centric locations as well as the locations on France’s southern coast and a few Grecian selections, it would be entirely possible to break that section of the trip into its own “Mediterranean trip”.

Check out the map at Google Maps. I used their awesome My Maps tool.

Also, I did put this link on my Tumblr blog, which is located at http://comitar.com/. I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Tumblog format, so you may want to subscribe to that blog as well!

Chris

Writer extraordinaire Joel Kelly (a longtime Celtx user and brief collaborator) is working on a brand new podcast - Ingenioustries. The new podcast is a story podcast; currently he’s reading through a story titled “Deltree”.

Deltree is incredibly dark and well written and it appears to be getting even darker. Which can’t hurt, can it? The main character, Dell, is an incredibly sarcastic person who gives the story it’s awesomely unique flavour.

I recommend this podcast to anyone and everyone who is up for a great story. Check the podcast out at Ingenioustries.com.