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To New MacBook or not to New Macbook? That is the question.

I was talking to a friend recently and he told me about his experience trying out the new MacBook Pro that his friend just bought. I have been keeping an eye on Apple, and was intrigued by the news about the new Multi-Touch trackpad.

If you have been reading the blogs I post on Themebot, you probably noticed that I have been down on Apple. All my friends know this, and it is somewhat surprising because I grew up with Mac computers. You would think I'd be a loyal Mac user. However, I had some major usability issues with the Macbook I owned one year ago and decided to sell it. My biggest complaint about Apple laptops has always been the single mouse-button.

It looks like Apple may have finally solved the one mouse-button issue that has plagued all of the previous generation MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Powerbooks. The new Multi-Touch trackpad let's you assign a region for right-click. This would be a much better option than the carpal tunnel inducing two-finger right-click. And I could actually get some work done on the go without having to take an external mouse with me.

To sum up what my friend had to say about the New Macbook... "Very, very nice." With my interest perked, I started in on the MacBook research. After doing some bargain hunting, I found what is currently the Lowest Price on the New Macbook and it was posted to Coupons Dealuxe. Then I started reading up on the specs. Very impressive!

You can now download Free MySpace Layouts on Themebot. It was only a matter of time before the MySpace layouts section was added.

Consider this:
On August 6th, 2006 the one hundred millionth MySpace account was created. That's a lot of MySpace users! It is also estimated that the number of users grows by 230,000 new registrations each day. That puts the current total MySpace users (as of July, 2008) at 267,900,000 give or take a few hundred thousand users. No wonder the website is so slow!

One of the nice things about MySpace is that you can easily customize your profile by downloading a free layout. You aren't stuck with the boring default layouts and you can even make your own layout if you know how. It is too bad that this functionality is not available with FaceBook. There are quite a few FaceBook users and I'm sure that many would like to customize their FaceBook profile. If this ever becomes possible, you can count on a section for free FaceBook layouts.

Anyhow, Themebot is going to be serving up some cool MySpace layouts so you can "pimp your profile". Instructions on how to add a free MySpace layout to your account are listed next.

A new series of upgrades is under way here at Themebot. What started out as a hobby is now one of the most popular websites for open source web design and finding free website templates. As traffic continues to grow, the Themebot team is hard at work adding new features to make the site better for both visitors and members. A big thank you to all of the members who have uploaded their free web layouts. The majority of uploads added so far have been WordPress themes. Hopefully, we will also see more templates for the other content management systems and platforms going forward.

At 7:47 AM on March 1st, the hosting account for Themebot was disabled due to resource usage issues. Considering the traffic levels that Themebot has grown to, this did not come as a surprise. Actually, it is amazing that the site was still running on a shared hosting plan with more than 1,500 visitors a day. Kudos to Site5 for not overcrowding their servers. All in all, they have been a good hosting provider over the past year and despite numerous site optimizations, the time had finally come to upgrade to a more robust server. Currently, Site5 only offers shared hosting through their website.

Enter Liquid Web. Themebot has found a new home. The decision to go with Liquid Web was based on many hours of research, comparison shopping and calls to sales reps. I have been recommending them to clients who need more power than a shared hosting plan. Also, my colleagues and I purchased a dedicated server for a project we are currently working on. Now it was Themebot's turn. I have enabled server uptime monitoring with Pingdom to find out if Liquid Web can truly deliver 100% uptime as guaranteed.

A few weeks ago my friend and I had the opportunity to attend a seminar at a local community college with Richard Stallman entitled "Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks". If you don't already know, Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1984, founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, pioneered the concept of "copyleft" with the GNU/GPL license and created the GNU development tools used by Linus Torvald to produce the Linux Kernel. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the work he has done and for his contributions to society.

Then I saw it... Clear as day.

If you look at the XPS logo upside down, it spells out sex. Subtle, but amusing. I'm sure this played a factor when the Dell R&D (Research & Development) team were deciding on what to call the product line and how to craft the logo.

Or, is it just me? Do I have a single-track mind? Do I wake up each morning thinking about sex? I'll let you be the judge.

If you've visited Themebot before, did you notice something new? Just in time for the new year Themebot launches with a fresh design. Not that the old layout was bad. It was functional, but not that exciting. Several concepts and revisions were tinkered with before settling on the current design.

Today, November 7th, 2007 is Themebot's first birthday. Exactly one year ago themebot.com was launched. A lot has been accomplished during the first year and there is much more to come. A big thank you to all of the members who have added their themes, and to the open source developers who make Themebot possible!

Traffic is increasing and it is time to upgrade to a more robust server. All Themebot wants as a birthday present is a shiny new VPS server. It will only take one hundred people Chipping In $5 each to raise enough to purchase a VPS hosting plan. The goal is to raise $500 before the end of the year. Anyone who Chips In $10 or more will be given special thanks and their website will be listed on this page. The links will be sorted by amount sponsored. Enter the URL for your site in the "Add special instructions for the Merchant" section during checkout to be listed. The ChipIn widget is in the right sidebar, in case you missed it :)

Mac OS X Leopard is Now Available! My question is, does anybody care?

I'm very happy with Ubuntu Gutsy. It is free, stable, can be customized with beautiful themes, has tons of quality easy-to-install applications, and most importantly -- I'm more productive than when I was using Windows XP. Since it is free, I decided to create a free advertisement to promote Ubuntu Gutsy. I guess you could call it an open source ad :)

Not too long ago, Themebot received an acquisition inquiry from an online advertising firm. This came as a surprise since Themebot is somewhat beta and still in active development phase. A friend suggested I hire a lawyer to handle this. After mulling it over, I decided it would be better to get a feel for the situation before dropping coin on a lawyer.