As great as technology is, when it comes to finding the time to completely immerse yourself in your work, let’s face it – the same technology we depend on can just as quickly turn into a major hindrance. Being a web designer, the very nature of my job requires that I spend the majority of my workday online – which makes it that much more important that I take extra care not to get easily sidetracked.

While the suggestions below are mostly common sense, and quite frankly nothing you probably haven’t already heard, sometimes you need a bit of a reminder – myself included! These are all tried and true tricks that work, as long as you commit yourself to sticking to them.

If you are one of the over 200 million people with a Facebook account, there’s no doubt that you’ve heard all of the hype over Facebook usernames and vanity URL’s.

These initially became available for both personal profiles and fan pages at 12:01am EST on June 13, 2009. I for one was among those who stayed up late on a Saturday night to get a vanity URL for my own personal profile.

Like many others, however, my fan page was fairly new, and did not meet the initial requirement of having 1,000 fans in order to get a fan page username. That would come later…

The Second Wave = Mass Confusion?

This past weekend, on June 29th, Facebook opened up the second wave of fan page username registration. However, it didn’t come without a bit of controversy and confusion…

Within the last few months, I have written several guest posts on Freelance Folder that focus on topics relating to web site design and development. As I spread my wings in the blogging world, I’ve recently been approached by Mashable about contributing a WordPress related post to their blog.

Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. With more than 6 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web and offering social media resources and guides.

Given Mashable’s popularity, you can imagine my surprise at the invitation – one that I could not turn down!

Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles

A bit overdue, but I’ve been wanting to write a post about social networking for a while now. Casual Friday is as good a day as any to kick back with a little bit of socializing – so I hope you’ll join me!

More Than Just An Online Water Cooler

Let’s face it… participating in social media can be fun. But, if utilized correctly, it can also be a fantastic networking tool that can help grow your blog and bring in new business. Of course, if you aren’t careful to use it productively, it can be a ginormous time-suck, as well – so you also  so you also need to learn when to disconnect.