We had a great birthday for Codi today.
Here is one of the pics.
There are more at Rachel's lounge.

Here is Codi in the Spaceship room, sitting on the King's throne, eating his cake, that his mom is cutting for his 17 little friends :)

We sent out a press release the other day, about going out of Beta etc. See here.

Dawn has started a new game, and has tagged me.

I will try answer her questions... then ask 2 new ones and tag 2 new people...

Here goes...

Here are my answers...

1. what does the T. in Captain James T. Kirk stand for? I have no idea sorry. I am not a star trek fan and wikipedia wouldn't even tell me
   
2. who sang the song "She's Like The Wind"? Patrick Swayze alongside Wendy Fraser. How did I know this?... I found it on Wikipedia here.

Here are my Trivia questions for JadieLady and cheleinkal...

1. who won tha AFL grand final in 2005?
2. what is the most popular beach in Perth?

 

Codi is 2 tomorrow (30th Aug 2006).
Please feel free to drop by Rachel's Minti Lounge at any time on the 30th of Aug and help celebrate.
Maybe you migt want to post a picture or just say happy birthday

Quick blog entry... tired today.
Struggling a little to fit in time for it all....

1. family
2. business
3. health (ie: excercise)
4. relaxation
5. sleep

At the moment the health side is really suffering! ... and also the sleep side a little.

Here is Codi checking out a circle in the sand this past weekend :)



Note: I sharpened this photo, increased the contrast slightly and also increased the saturation :)

We had the best weekend!

One of the most exciting bits was when Rach, Codi and I went to the beach....


wow - bubbly!


run run mommy! this is sooo much fun!


can i go surfing out there one day mommy? pleeeaaaassse :)

Some new features that we uploaded at the end of last week include...

1. Website tips on the homepage of Minti.
2. Q&A's can now be reported.
3. Q&A now uses editor where you can include links and images in your post.
4. Bug Fix: Anonymous Q&A no longer shows member name in activity list.
5. Group admins can now change the type of their groups.

I have decided to start blogging about other web/tech companies at TechUncut again rather than blogging about them here on my Minti Member blog. Here I will blog about Minti, some personal thoughts, fun stuff etc... and at TechUncut I will blog about my views of other Tech companies.

If you want to stay tuned into what I am talking about on TechUncut subscribe to it's RSS feed.

Once again I seem to be drowning in email. 237 in my inbox with about 30 tasks marked red indicating they are overdue. If you are expecting an email from me... i am getting there! :)

Looks like I have been tagged by angelmum and also Jessgore .... thanks for picking me ladies :)

Minti blog tag looks like a great game!

So here are my answers...

1. What's your child's favorite book? Maisie's fire engine.

2. What's your favorite children's book? Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie

3. What's your child's favorite thing to eat? Hot Chips, then probably soft cooked chicken or grilled fish at the moment.

4. What's your favorite thing to eat? Pizza... especially if it has ham and pinapple on it.

5. What's your child's favorite game? Playing with Duplo building blogs (like Lego) at the moment.

6. What's your favorite game? I love watching Australian Rules Football (AFL). In regards to what game do I like playng with Codi it is probably peek a boo! and also tickling him :)

I have decided to tag RachelCook, Yumsus, Considering, Joeyjo, and hr2004. I will send them a private message now and refer them to this blog post.

Here is a great photo I found tonight...
Love the colour.

Photo is from here.

We decided to award an extra Roomba this month since we had soo much great Minti activity.

And the winners were for this month are.... named here.

NOTE: We are drawing another Roomba next month, and also the month after... so keep contributing! ;)

This is just a bit of fun for bloggers.
Go to here and type in your blog address ( ie: This blog's address is... http://claycook.minti.com/blog )
And it will display how much your blog is worth. This blog was only worth $76.50 apparently
Then you can even display an image of the worth in a button like below.

Due to member requests we have 4 new forums in the forums list.

1. Single Parents
2. Stay at Home Parents (SAHP)
3. Working Parents
4. Potty Training (This is located in the "Hot Topics" list)

As a Minti member you now can view a list of all your comments and also any other member's lists.

Here is my comments list as an example.

How do you do this? On your Minti member homepage, click the "Comments" link on your left hand navigation bar. You can also do this on other member's Minti homepages, or just go to the members list and click in the "Comments" column.

Just wanted to increase the awareness of this good cause.
A collegue that I know is leading a team on this walk to cure diabetes.
By the way: Minti has made a small donation.

hrs2004 is our next "featured member".
Helen - if you see this we are waiting for your answers ;)
See here to find out what a featured member is.
See here to see Izzy our first featured member.

You are now able to set up 3 types of groups on Minti...

=== Public ===
- Everyone/anyone can view group posts.
- Headings of posts/comments appear in Activity List.
- Automatic acceptance of membership requests.
- Group appears in the group list.

=== Restricted ===
- Everyone/anyone can view group posts.
- Headings of posts/comments appear in Activity List.
- Administrator of the group accepts or rejects membership requests.
- Group appears in the group list.

=== Private ===
- Only members can view group posts.
- Headings of posts/comments do NOT appear in Activity List.
- Administrator of the group accepts or rejects membership requests.
- Group does appear in the group list.

Rich155 strikes again - these are some amazing clouds in Perth...

Image is from here.

A few days ago we uploaded some new features on to Minti.
We hope you are already enjoying them :)

* Search now also searches Advice Articles, Advice Comments, Answers from Q&A, Forum Threads, and Member Blogs.

* Activity has been added to the top green nav bar.

* "[more]" links have been next to the headings on the Minti homepage to make it clearer the headings are also links themselves.

* A whole bunch of small improvements and fixes.

Note: You are also now able to claim your external blog at Minti.

Here is an amazing photo I found tonight while surfing through flickr...
I can see Codi doing this in 3 months time :)

The photo is from here.

A friend of mine rich115 did this photo of a popular winery in Perth.... Sandalford Winery

The photo is from here.

So I had a friend over tonight and he showed me how to sharpen photos etc.
Here is one I just did.
This is of Codi some months back :)

I sharpened it up, and made the colours a lot brighter... hope you like :)

We have been working hard behind the scenes with a new version of Minti.
We expect to upload it either today or in a few days time.
Stay tuned... I will let you know once it goes live.

We have decided to introduce (thanks to a member's great suggestion) a new activity on Minti called "Featured Member".

What will happen is that I will email a member every so often with a list of questions and ask them to post on their blog the answers to those questions.

Note: Their blog heading should be "Featured Member: MemberName"

The result will be that we will learn more about the featured member.

Below is the list of questions I will ask...

1. Starting with name, location, how many children.
2. How did you find Minti?
3. What's your favorite thing or feature at Minti?
4. What's your favorite thing about being a parent?
5. What has been your biggest parenting challenge?
6. What's the best parenting advice you've ever gotten from someone?

Note: If some questions are too personal or confidential, feel free to ignore the particular question
If you see a "Featured Member" blog post, please participate and comment on the blog post... this will give the member warm fuzzies!

Also: If you have any suggestions for additional questions that I should add to the list, just let me know in the comments below, or send me a private message through my homepage.

Oh... I nearly forgot. I will be asking Izzy to be the first "Featured Member" since she is sooo active on Minti.

Cheers
Clay

Do you have an external blog to your Minti blog?

If so you will want to claim it.

Check out the following posts on how to claim your external blog...

1. Here
2. Here
3. and here

I have created a new group here to introduce yourself to the rest of the Minti community .

1. please sign up
2. please intro yourself
   
3. please say hi to new people that intro themselves :)
4. have fun! :)

Just wanted to let everyone know... we will be drawing our first Roomba prize winner in the next few days :)

I just listened to a great podcast about Digg the news site where (like Minti) the members read, write, and rate the news.

Interesting info...

1. Launched around Dec 04
2. Currently they get... 1500 new members a day
3. 1500-2000 new articles (seeds) a day
4. 700k-800k unique users/day
5. 9.5M page views a day
6. 8M unique users per month
7. Their page views are doubling every 3 months.

Digg is now not just Tech news. They are going to be massive!

USD$900M for MySpace to use Google's results when people use the MySpace search box.
I think the deal is until about 2010.

I have been waiting for this deal to happen. I read somewhere a couple of months back that the current level or searches from MySpace makes Google about USD$200M a yr from adsense revenue, so it would have been a huge loss for Google if MySpace had moved to Yahoo! results. Especially with MySpace's growth.

If you want to be part of the User Testing Group of Minti just go here.
You get to join in the discussion about what you like about the site and what you don't like.
Some recent blog threads are...

1. Do you use the Latest Activity page?
2. Finding Photos : free photos to use on Minti.
3. Referring a friend an article and Minti.

Hope to see you in there ;)

It should be simple right? Well unfortunately it isn't that simple at the moment.
I just posted a forum Help post on how to reply to an email you receive from a Minti member. Lots of people are getting this wrong unfortunately Please have a read.

So I started a little Internet business 10 years ago... who would have risked to dream back then  (apart from me off course) that it would turn into a very successful global Search Engine Marketing firm (ineedhits).

Not only did it grow extremely quickly (5th fastest growing company in Australia according to BRW for 2002, and 11th fastest for 2003), it also had the added benefit of introducing me to my wife (Rachel) and we had the pleasure of running the company together from 2000 until about 2 years ago when we signed Jackie Shervington as the new CEO.

The team at ineedhits has created a dedicated site here to celebrate it's 10th birthday.

Here some fun things I would love you to do...

1. Add a comment/blog here about what you were doing 10 years ago.
2. Wish ineedhits a happy birthday here.
3. Win some real gold here.
4. Check out the cool 10 year time line here.

I hope you can join the celebrations :)

-- Clay

I have just noticed a Minti member who needs to be congratulated!
Well done to TheMentorMom... she is soaring up the Minti rankings!! Currently 9th. But I suspect she will be 7th in a  week or  2.

What a cool photo - couldnt resist showing letting people know about it. Our boy loves bubbles and we have a similar bubble blower but this photo is not of any member of our family.
I found this today from the Flickr blog.
It is by this Flickr member (dogseat).

If you went to blogher - i hope you enjoyed it :)
If not here are a couple of photos I found relating to Minti at Blogher...

Rachel talking to Caterina Fake (Co-Founder of Flickr)...


Here is the Minti bib that every attendee received...