I wanted to share with everyone that I created a new online magazine using BlogEngine.Net. I made use of all the existing features of of Blogengine along with a few new widgets and extensions.  I even created a new theme to go along with it.  I don’t know if I will share it at this time because it is specific to my site.  But the odds are it will show you some new ways to use the software.

Take a look at it and let me know what you think.

I will get into the specifics of the site in a later post.  

Just an update for everyone.  You can now visit the site at http://www.ichoosetofeel.net.  Please take a look and review it.  It's ad free and we don’t ask for money.

I have been giving SmugMug a try now for several days now.  I have been looking to do online backups of my photos for several years now.  There have been several road blocks that I saw each time I thought about making the transition.  The primary dissuasion has been the cost to space ratio.  The second issue that I always came across was the mechanism for uploading the photos. 

I looked at a lot of vendors, Flickr, Google, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, PhotoBucket, and more.  I  found SmugMug to be the best deal for the money going.

I can give you the details but I’m not the marketing department for SmugMug.  You can go to the site to find out. 

It costs $40.  You can save some money by using the referral code ( AGD0hvUIDki26 ) and you will get $5 off.

Some of you may know, I am preparing for a leadership retreat this weekend. You can find out more by reading here in an earlier post.  I have been reading the Gallup book called “Strengths based Leadership”.  So far, it is a really good sequel to the book “How Full is Your Bucket?”  These books have an online questionnaire that you complete to access what your strengths are.  There are about 150 questions and it takes about 30 minutes to complete it.  At the end of the questionnaire you get your results.  The results consist of your top five (5) strengths, a Strength-Based Leadership Guide (with action strategies), and a Strength-Based Leadership Report (with your personalized Strengths Insights).  With the reports and guide you get some valuable information that will make the material in the book more relevant.

I too the questionnaire several years ago and I admit that I did not take the the first results all that serious.  However, after taking the second test I am surprised at how close my second score was to the first.  Three Strategic Thinking attributes remained the same, I added one to a new leadership domain, and switched a Strategic Thinking attribute for another. According to the “Strengths Based Leadership” there are four domains of leadership strengths; Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking.  If you read the book you will know, my leadership strength is in the domain of Strategic Thinking, 4 out of 5 attributes are in this domain.

The result?

What I am learning is that as the CORE President and with my leadership domain I need to change the way I do things.  I have always thought of myself as having a leadership strength similar to Executing.  What I found is that I execute extremely well in areas that I thrive in.  If I veer too far from my passions I tend to not execute anything.  That is were this book comes in.  It has taught me some immediate skills and tools that I can use to foster my teams to flourish and succeed at their goals.  As interesting as all this is, I still need to finish reading the book.  When I get that finished I will post an addendum.

Here’s the deal.  I clicked on the link to install the Google Toolbar while reading my email in Chrome.  It redirected me to the install page then said I needed to have the latest FireFox 2.x installed to install the toolbar.  Well, for starters I want it for Chrome not FireFox, secondly I have FireFox 3.0.1.  Shouldn’t Gmail know that Chrome is a browser that doesn’t support toolbars?  Come on. 

Chrome has a lot of issues from what I can tell.  There are still issues with FaceBook that haven’t been resolved and JavaScript functions on other sites are causing problems as well. 

Also, Gmail is still in Beta.  Don’t they have a road map for release?  How many years is it going to take?  I am starting to have serious doubts about Google’s ability to release reliable software that we can bank on.  Perhaps they should get a product out of beta before releasing a bunch of other Beta software, please.  Good thing everyone gave them their money up front in share purchases.