how to make an icon, how to draw a car, how to create a flash website? These are all questions sitting in my traffic logs. Obviously Google thinks studiowhiz.com is a site that can help - and in the past that would have been true, back when Studiowhiz was well known in the Flash Community. I even wrote the book Build your first website with Flash MX a few years back.

Now however Studiowhiz is my personal blog - still why can’t it provide a resource for these things? So this post will answer these 3 questions:

• How to make an icon
• How to draw a car
• How to create a flash website

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Vandelay Design have a great post today showcasing 25 beautiful website designs.

I enjoy Vandelay’s blog as they have some great tips and tricks for WordPress and general website design. Today’s post is a great one for stirring up the inspiration.

» 25 Beautiful, Minimalistic Website Designs - Part 2 on Vandelay Design

If you hadn’t heard Apple are running their MacWorld conference at the moment. This is the ‘holy of holy’ events for any true Mac aficionado. At these events Steve Jobs has a keynote speech in which he reveals the direction for Apple in the coming year - oh and he throws out any new hardware.

Well I have to say all in all I’m rather disappointed. I mean he announced 4 new things today and none of them have the usual ‘wow’ factor I’ve come to expect from Apple. (more…)

It’s become a very easy process these days to start a blog. There are a number of services that can give you a free blog within minutes - however these are not always the best solutions.

Now that you have completed the planning of your blog you will have a firm understanding of what you are trying to achieve. For now we are going to assume your primary purpose is to share some understanding you have without having to shell out a fortune.

I am a fan of wordpress, a fantastic free application that powers some of the bigger blogs on the net today. They have both a download version and a hosted solution - we talked about this in the planning of your blog. For the sake of this article we’ll assume the use of a hosted solution. (more…)

You walk into a meeting with your web designer (marketing/advertising agency) and ask them to help you drive traffic to your site. They reply “There is no such thing as a free lunch traffic”

I’m here to tell you there is such a thing as free traffic and here are 5 easy steps you can follow to drive traffic to your site. (more…)

I enjoy using WordPress, after all it is pretty much the leading blogging software. It’s been through a number of iterations and has become a pretty solid hunk of code.

However I have to say, WordPress upgrading sucks. I’ve just completed an upgrade here and seriously, all that downloading, unzipping, making sure I backup my files and then uploading the new ones. Bah humbug. Why can’t WordPress have an auto-upgrade feature?

How hard is it to have the system know what files have changed, and simply update those directly? Sure allow the admin of the site to verify file updates (in-case they have hacked the odd file).

Maybe I should just switch to a hosted version of WordPress ey?

Well it finally happened. Dwindling traffic finally took it’s toll - that and I blew away all my old posts. I found an email in my inbox from TextLinkAds wondering why their system couldn’t find the posts on my site.

After tyring to explain that I was rebuilding the site, intending to grow traffic again (which is starting to happen) they kick studiowhiz.com out of their inventory. I was asked to resubmit - which I did & no longer meet their criteria. Sad really considering I’ve been with TextLinkAds (and still have other sites with them) for many years.

Oh well, for now Studiowhiz will run without advertising & I will resume funding the site from my back pocket.

My mate over at webhelp.co.nz has an interesting post about his favourite Google Search, a nice little trick that allows you to quickly and easily find mp3, mp4, pdf, avi, mpeg, audio, music, videos, movies and much more.

I thought I’d extend this a little by adding some new functionality to his search & introducing Firefox bookmarks as a quick and easy way to do your search.
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So I’ve finally started using Flickr. It’s not that I haven’t had an account. I remember getting introduced to Flickr by my mate Josh not long after they started. I was using Stock.xchng instead for my photo storing needs.

I’ve always had issues with flickr, not sure why really, but maybe it’s their ridiculously small limits for free accounts. I mean 3 sets only? Come on. Still as a business model they need to get you to upgrade.

Anywho, I figured I’d get back into flickr and try them out. So I’ve uploaded some photos of my recent 4×4 adventure that resulted in almost rolling the truck, scratching the heck out of it and blowing the clutch (actually breaking the flywheel into bits)

» flickr set: 4×4 adventure in Thomson’s Track

Over at Gizmodo I found a like to some really rad new headphones that do away with the MP3 player altogether. No more needing to lug a big iPod around, instead simply slot your SDCard in the slot and away you go. These are currently being shown at CES and haven’t yet hit the SkullCandy site.

» Gizmodo - check out the Gizmodo storey
» SkullCandy - check out their funky headphones and other gear