I’ve been doing online publishing for quite a while now, at least 15 years, and am back at it with a new website, Office Fitness Tips. (Attention, massage clients: don’t worry, I’ll be doing this in the early morning, so you can still book appointments at your usual time.)

I have internalized so much of the technical, business, and creative arcana of web publishing that it sometimes helps to back away from the details and reflect on the purpose and potential of the medium.

How to Build a Successful Blog Business is a terrific e-book overview of the many aspects of building, promoting, and profitably operating a commercial blog. It’s a little daunting to see in one place all of the details that have to be attended to, but it’s also very helpful to have a mega-checklist of what it takes to make it as a serious blog publisher.

I’ve been so busy with my massage practice the past several years that my online ventures have mostly fizzled to this point. Office Fitness Tips integrates nicely with my massage practice, so I am confident that this effort should at least get a little traction.

Apple is starting to look just like any other technology company. Don’t get me wrong. I love my MacBook and my iPhone, and when MobileMe is working, it’s great. However, wasting well over an hour of my precious time resolving a simple login issue makes me wonder if Apple is so special after all.

I’m revamping the LarrySwanson.com website, so I added another directory to my iDisk (MobileMe’s nifty back-up gizmo). Apparently some attribute in a couple of the files in the new directory gave MobileMe some hiccups. I thought I had fixed the problem and went to the me.com interface to my iDisk to verify that the new set-up was working properly. When I tried to log in I got an “invalid password” notice. “No biggie,” I thought, “I’ll just reset the password and try again.”

Well, that lead to well over an hour of bizarrely un-user-friendly login problems at https://auth.me.com/authenticate. At this point – 15 years into mass consumer usage of the interwebs – I thought that resetting a user password would be a pretty straightforward task.

Well, no. Not at MobileMe.

After repeatedly trying their automated password-resetting system to no avail, I contacted a tech support person via their live chat gizmo. At first, she was having the same problem that I was, but after some magical background activity I was suddenly able to log in again.

I don’t like it when the interwebs behave irrationally. I’m doing a fresh MobileMe iDisk back-up right now and keeping my fingers crossed. I have multiple back-up systems in place, so I’m not too worried, but I just hate it when the interwebs get wonky.

OK, I’m done venting. . .

I just wanted to renew a few of my domain names. But, no. . . GoDaddy’s relentless up-selling system made me check and uncheck a bunch of boxes to execute this simple task. Not only that, I even had to go through a bunch of other machinations, including a call to a tech support/sales guy who had to manually cut and paste account info to remove domain protection that I don’t recall ordering in the first place. (I suspect that if you’re not careful they “give” it to you free for the first year when you first register and then make it so difficult to remove that they hope you’ll just renew it out of ignorance or frustration. In any case, a few simple domain name registration renewals took about 30 minutes of my scarce and precious time.)

After expressing my frustration with the situation to the sales guy and sharing my suspicions that the intention behind all of this unnecessary activity was to sell me more services, he said, “Yes, we hard sell. That’s how we get our bonuses.” Ah ha! Just as I suspected.

Can any of you recommend a reliable, non-sales-oriented, reasonably price domain name registrar? If so, please leave a comment below.

Once again, my worlds collide. Earlier today I was chatting with Rand Fishkin at the SMX Advanced conference. It was fun to finally connect with the local search engine marketing wizard (and former office neighbor of my friend Danielle). I wasn’t star-struck, but it was a little surreal having a face-to-face conversation with the talking head whose search engine marketing training videos I’ve been watching. Later that night, at a Seeds of Compassion wrap party, I ran into Tracy Wong of the well-known Wong Doody ad agency. Tracy admitted that he wasn’t totally on top of internet marketing, so of course I googled him when I got home to see how he was doing in the search engines. I can’t remember the exact query I entered, but the first result was this post by Rand, Seattle’s Wong Doody needs Web Site Help.

Years ago, back when I was a college textbook rep, a professor told me that when new college campuses are built the designers don’t put in all the sidewalks right away. They wait to see where the students wear a path in the grass and then build them there. You can use this same idea when you build a big, database-driven web site. You create stable URLs for all of your site pages and then build rudimentary navigation and then see how your users actually navigate, or try to navigate, your site. Once you’ve got a feel for how folks actually want to use your site, then you can go back and tailor your navigation to their needs.

I’m trying this with my new massage education directory, Bodywork U. Sure, there’s probably a more elegant and proactive way to do this, but 1) users will always do what they want anyway, so why try to outguess them, and 2) I don’t have the budget to hire a hot-shot website navigation expert.

I just love it that Yahoo! chose today, Valentine’s Day, to include Bodywork U in their directory. Links from big directories like Yahoo! are highly regarded by the search engines, so I’m very happy to have received this bit of link love today.

If you buy a lot of books and CDs, this cool new service might interest you. Amabuddy is a nifty service that lets you compare book and CD prices over your cell phone. You just call their automated service, enter an ISBN from a book or the bar code number from a CD and it will tap into Amazon’s database and give you price comparisons and other info on the item. You can confidently buy on the spot knowing that you are getting a good price, or you can simply enter several product numbers and browse them online later (the system uses caller ID to store a history of the items you look up via the phone). I’ve played with it enough to be confident that it will work for me the next time I’m at Elliott Bay trying to decide whether or not to buy an expensive book.