One of my favorite Windows tweaks involves the creation of a windows shutdown button. It's one button you can click to shutdown your workspace ASAP. Besides being a dead simple shutdown - it's dead simple to setup.

Here's how it works:

1. Right Click your desktop and select 'New -> Shortcut'
2. When the 'Create Shortcut' dialog appears type "shutdown -s -t 0"
3. You'll then be asked to name the shortcut, "Shutdown" should work nicely. This finishes the Create Shortcut dialog.

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If you're using the Digg Integrator plugin be advised that I'm releasing a small bug fix tonight. I had originally intended to include a small tracking widget in the plugin to let me see what sites it had been installed on.

I never really finished developing that portion of the code and ultimately abandoned the idea. Unfortunately a remnant of the test code got left behind and had an unforeseen side effect - it's basically causing a linkback that Technorati can read.

There are two ways to fix this. Either download the plugin again (it's got the old code removed and is now ready for use) or you can edit the plugin directly. The offending code is on lines 269 AND line 294. Just remove the linked image that traces back to this site.

The updated plugin can be found here.

If you have anymore questions just leave a comment here.

March has been one of my best months revenue wise here at Bill2me dot Com. I've also seen some significant traffic growth and, best of all, some great new commenters! Along the way I also managed to rebuild my template, update my diggIntegrator plugin, and more. Of course it hasn't all been good. Along the way I've made a few mistakes and learned a few lessons.

While the month isn't over yet, I thought I'd take a moment to share my blogging regrets from the last few weeks. Feel free to jump in if you think I missed something.

1. Rushing Things: By far my biggest regret this month was rushing the release of the digg Integrator plugin. While it appeared to be working on my test site and my live site it ultimately wasn't. The first few people who downloaded it probably got copies that weren't working which is never a good thing.
2. Not Checking Facts: I goofed a couple times this month with people's names and Blog names. I tried my best to correct all those mistakes but I shouldn't have made them in the first place. From now on before I post or respond to a comment I'm going to be sure to quadruple check URLs, Names, and Titles for everything.
3. Concentrating too Much on Revenue: When I first re-launched this template I had WAY too many ads on the page. I've always hated browsing into a site that has more too many CPC ads 'above the fold.' Then I went ahead and built a theme with tons. Right now I think I've found a happy medium - What do you think?
4. Not being Diverse Enough: I spent a lot of time posting about Blog Design this month. While I hope to continue authoring good design related content I'd like to get back to some more fun stuff.
5. Not Finishing Things: I've posted a couple things that were intended to be muli-part posts only to not follow up on them. This week I'm going to go back and review those posts to update them. I'm also going to make sure to finish any "series" posts I start.

There are definitely a few more things I'd like to do differently starting in April - these are just the top of my list. Anyone think I missed something?

If you've been looking for a new way to monetize your site I've got some exciting news for you. With little fanfare Amazon has launched a new service for it's Associate advertisers. The service, "Context Links Beta," works a lot like Kontera and Intellitext in that it dynamically adds advertisements to your content using JavaScript.

Unlike Kontera and IntelliText, though, Amazon Context Links are actually CPA rather than CPC. You earn revenue when someone makes a purchase on Amazon.com after being referred by your site. Amazon Context Links also offers a much greater range of customization options. After reviewing everything, I'm about 90% certain I'll be switching from Kontera to Context Links this week.

Here's the lowdown as I've seen it. Read the Rest of this post

About a month back I wrote a short post about creating a more functional 404 page. At the conclusion of that post I hinted at the fact that I'd be writing again about a special addition to the 404 page that might make it a bit more functional. I thought now would be a good time to fulfill the promise I made back then.

Occasionally visitors come looking for content that's not where it used to be. Maybe it was deleted, maybe it was moved, maybe it was lost - who knows. As I mentioned in the previous post it sometimes helps to add things like a tag cloud, a more pronounced search bar or even a plugin like Landing Sites to treat your users to another way of locating content on your site.

Recently I added something new that I thought I'd share. While it's nice to be able to find content on your current site, if you've removed content (for whatever reason) it may pay to direct your users to the Google Cache. Read the Rest of this post