Bloxorz:  I don’t play many online games, but this one was highly recommended.   I started playing it Sunday and had to pull myself away..  I left the screen open and went back Monday night, I can’t seem to get past level 6!   Very cool game though.

Reminds me of Stomp. Click the picture to view.

You’ve probably seen the beef jerky commercials - check out Sasquatch’s myspace page, with some videos you probably won’t see on television - joy buzzer is my favorite. - Thanks for passing along Florida Dave.

How is your blog rated? Drop in the url of your blog, and see what it’s rated. The system must work off of a list of words, and it does a quick scan of all the text on your blog. If it notices any word in it’s master “bad word” list, it changes the rating.

It’s safe to say, that TechBox received a G rating!

Internet alarm clock: This is pretty sweet. Wake up to an mp3 or a YouTube video. I suppose for those who leave their computers on 24-7 this would work. I’m going to try this at home, set it to jam some Iron Maiden full blast at 6 a.m. Saturday morning.. I’m sure my wife will dig it!

Click the picture - put your name in - hours of fun!

“Under sunny skies, Google.org chief Larry Brilliant drove a white plug-in Prius emblazoned with the Google colors into a parking bay whose roof is covered with solar panels, part of the company’s 1.6 megawatt solar installation - the nation’s largest. He got out of the car and grabbed one of the retractable power cords hanging from the roof and plugged in the Prius to applause from the Googlers and guests.” Read more.

MonroeTalks.com - I still remember walking away from the Publishers office with my head spinning.. she had an idea to create a community website for Monroe County, and suggested we launch it in the next 6 months. With a lot of research, an amazing team of managers and employees - we were able to make it happen.

MonroeTalks offers registered users a place to discuss anything and everything about Monroe County, or, whatever they’d like. Users can also create their own photo gallery as well as post events to the calendar. The topics of discussions are still displayed on monroenews.com, in the top right sidebar.

How was it built? I started looking around at other community websites in the beginning of research, and stumbled upon the wonderful world of Drupal. Drupal is an open source (free) software that allows users to build a community website. We specifically really studied ModestoFamous, a community site built soley on the Drupal platform.

For the photos we first decided to use another open source software, Gallery2. The problem the developer was having was merging the two systems together, he was having a tough time with it, and the gallery just didn’t look as good as we imagined. A month before launch, we switched to another open source photo gallery software called Coppermine, which has proved to be much more flexible for the developer to work with and a lot more user friendly for users.

The forums are utilizing Simple Machine Forums, which are much more robust than most forum systems out there.. also open source!

We weren’t really thrilled with the calendar system that Drupal had to offer, and were really struggling with a solution. A few weeks before launch, I was reading an article that our Publisher had passed along to me, about Pittsburgh Live. I checked the site out and found they were using a calendar system called Helios. Helios, for a single licence costs $149, which isn’t bad for the amount of options it offers, including a reverse publishing feature already built in.

What’s next? I think we’ll find out what users have to say. The response to the site so far has been good. The first day we received well over 3000 unique visitors. If you have any ideas for future development, please submit some ideas - we look forward to hearing from you!

A big thanks goes out to everyone that helped make this project a success! We really put John (codemonkey) through the ringer on this project, and he’s still with us, so that’s a good thing.

Check it out, and let us know what you think! MonroeTalks.com

Glad to see Paul finally came around to accepting iTunes. Rumors have it the Beatles will be next…