Another week is in the bags and can you believe it July is already here. It seems like Summer is just flying by and I haven’t had much of an opportunity to enjoy it yet. Don’t worry about GrandmasterB though, I’ll be heading to Vegas next month with the wife for a weekend of rest, relaxation, drinking and some fine dining. Usually when the wife and I travel somewhere we try to hit a nice restaurant and I think this trip we’ll hit Bobby Flay’s restaraunt Mesa Grill at Caesar’s Palace. I’m a big fan of Southwestern cuisine and have a few of Bobby Flay’s cookbooks, so I’m sure it will be the restaurant of choice. Put a fine dinner together with a weekend away in sunny Las Vegas…sounds like paradise to me. Well, enough day dreaming let’s get to the review.

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Hey there readers! Hope you all had a great weekend. This past week was very exciting for GrandmasterB as I finally managed to get not one, but two of my tutorials published on Pixel2Life. I was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to happen, but it finally did and the results were amazing! I spent a great deal of time last week busting my hump at the office working on a new advertisement that will be appearing in the August issue of ACCESS DIRECTV. The ad was approved late last week and is already off to the publisher. Once I have a copy of the magazine in my hot little hands I will publish some pictures and let you all know where it appears.

Aside from all of the hullabaloo at the office, I spent some more quality time with the new MrPappagiorgio.com theme and I think that I have finally nailed down a solid look that is sure to impress. If time permits, I should be done within the next two weeks…that is if I don’t get carried away this Fourth of July weekend with the festivities. I’m also in the process of putting together a new tutorial to be published soon along with some Grunge RSS Feed Icons. Other than that it has been business as usual at GrandmasterB HQ. With all of the upcoming news out of the way…onto the review.

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After a long weekend of rest and relaxation…GrandmasterB is back at it. I had to take some time away from the blog to get some other work done that I’d been putting off and to get some other projects rolling again. For the past few weeks I have been writing content for Arriesgado Clothing’s Blog and it’s been going pretty good. I’m still working on ideas for my client that will work to get some buzz out about the blog and bring in the visitors. Managing two blogs is definitely no easy task, but one that if I manage my time should become a little easier as time goes on.

I’ve been very excited to see the response to some of the more recent tutorials and posts that I’ve put together. It appears that I have finally found my viewing audience. I think that it’s about time to kick the site into another gear. For the most part I have been concentrating on putting together good content that people will read, but I haven’t put much thought into building my RSS subscriber numbers. I seem to fluctuate between 10-15 readers on a given day and I want to get that number up. I’ll be researching some ideas for getting those numbers to increase, but if any of you have any tips or have found some information that worked for you I’d love to hear it.

For now…let’s move onto the quick and rather short review of this past week.

June 17: Firefox 3 Arrives…Download Now! - The lastest version of Firefox released last Tuesday and the launch was a HUGE success. Another site popped up the same day (Spreadfirefox.com) to showcase the number of downloads within a 24-hour period. The reason for tracking the downloads was to see if Firefox 3 would break the previous record of 3 million downloads in a single day. Well, they did it with just over 8.6 million copies of Firefox 3 downloaded. The download counter is still climbing though and stands at over 17 million downloads since last Tuesday 6/17.

June 18: Freebies: RSS Feed Icons - Glassy Set - After writing my tutorial on Creating Custom RSS Feed Icons, I decided to take the product of that tutorial and make a set of glassy icons for my readers to download and enjoy. The response to this “freebie” offering has been excellent and has inspired me to release more quality icons in the future. If you have any suggestions for the next icon set let me know…perhaps we can put it to a vote.

Well, that is all for this weeks edition of the Week in Review. I’m hoping to find a little more time this week to get some great content out to you readers. Hope you all had a great weekend…see ya soon.

~ GrandmasterB

Holy cow! Is it just me or is the month of June flying by? Here we are now it’s June 16th and the official start of Summer is almost upon us. GrandmasterB has been enjoying the beautiful weather here in Colorado and spending more time outdoors and at the grill. Yesterday was Father’s Day and for those of you dads a belated “Happy Father’s Day” to you. I spent my Father’s Day wisely with a brunch at Pappadeaux; followed up by a birthday party for my youngest Mini-Me. It was hard staying off the computer all day, but I managed nicely. It was good to take a break for a change. Last week started off fairly unproductive as I found myself becoming addicted to Digg. Luckily, I snapped out of it to bring in some great posts…and a great guest post from Cuzzy.

June 11: How Do You Size Up To The Dirk Digg-lers of The Internet? - The first ever guest post on GrandmasterB dot com, and it was a doozy. Cuzzy from Cuzoogle.com knocked this one out of the park and it received some decent traffic both on Digg and with comments. I will definitely need to get Cuzzy back here soon for a follow-up. For other great Digg information check out The Truth About Digg by by Jeff from BuzzMyBlog.com…it’s a great piece.

June 13: Incredible Friday the 13th - Another week and another Summer blockbuster movie. The second film from Marvel with a Hulk title and it appears that this one blows the other one out of the Gamma Radiation filled water. I didn’t get to see the movie as the weekend chores took over…perhaps this week.

June 14: Photoshop Tutorial: Custom RSS Feed Icons - A Photoshop tutorial to end out the week. This time around I show readers how to use the resources at Feed Icons to create their own unique RSS Feed Icons.

In what could be described as perhaps the Murphy’s Law of Blogging…if it can go wrong it will, last week was the craziest lot of bad luck ever. I had hoped for great numbers for visits to the site, but came up very short of the mark. The Month in Review post, chronicling the first full month of recorded stats was the most viewed post of the week bringing in 195 page views over the week. Some might think that’s an impressive number, but it wasn’t even the best content on the site last week.

I dug deep and came up with a fantastic tutorial to throw the Photoshop tutorial world on its head; only to be served a nice cold dish of reality. I’m not sure what lead to the tutorial’s downfall, it could’ve been a number of things. Maybe making the tutorial a two-parter killed it? was it too detailed or not detailed enough? It could be either of those things that lead to it not taking off, but I know one thing for sure didn’t help it any. Somehow, someway when the first part of the tutorial was discovered it was placed in the wrong category. I’m not entirely displeased as I’m hoping the tutorials will get picked up by either Pixel2Life, Tutorialized or get Dugg and build up sustained traffic. If you wouldn’t mind giving it a digg, I would greatly appreciate it.

1000 Entrecard Credit Winner

Well, the contest for the 1000 EntreCard Credits ended on Saturday, and through the magic of the BuzzMyBlog Contest Winner Picker I am proud to announce that John from Matsubonsai.com has been chosen as the winner! John, I will be sending an email over momentarily with your passcode for the 1000 ECs. Congratulations!

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