I discovered Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero video this evening as I was trying to do some personal filtering, and it’s so drastically changed the landscape of my personal email.Twenty or so extra filters, even though the suggestion is against this kind of thing, mean I’ll be getting one, perhaps two personal messages per day instead of thirty to fifty newsletters, notifications and so on. The mail will still come in, it’ll just be routed to an appropriate box to be dealt with not-on-my-blackberry.

I was also pointed at an article about GoDaddy sales techniques, talking about how a Google patent lets them suggest longer terms on domain sales to boost multi-year registrations. It won’t mean anything for me, though, because all of my projects are term-based, if that, but it may have implications for other bloggers out there.

Does this happen to you? One or two things come together, and suddenly the system changes for the better. This happens to be all the time, especially with the internet.

What can I say? I get excited about new prospects.

Since I bought my first dot com in 2003, I’ve owned nearly a dozen different domains. I’ve also let lapse just about every one of them within their first year except my former blog, which lasted six before I retired it in favour of this one last fall. I’ve been told it looks like a habit of failure, but I disagree. I choose to think of it as metered utility. Wings of Wax (the six year long blog) had its usefulness, as did Why Read The Manual (the four month long study in blogging the wrong thing). Similarly, The Arcadia System still has potential as a collaborative story, The Dowager Shadow just started, and others such as Red Gryphon Design are lapsing soon. It’s a mixed bag of success.

I’ve had just about the same ratio with web hosting. Two hosts I’ve outgrown, including the last one – Host Gator, which had this blog until last night, as well as everything else I had going over the last year – and one failed my etiquette standards when the administrator offered to trade a month of hosting for a donation to his online poker account. Hey, people are people, but putting a human face on business sometimes has drawbacks.

So now I’m doing this site, as well as a couple of others including the soon to be launched Unspeakable Media repository and The Dowager Shadow. As of yesterday all of these are now hosted on Media Temple – the Grid Service that Hann of Chickenball Design and I are now sharing has more than enough space for both of us to grow into, and is extensible. It’s an exciting prospect, especially considering all of my experience up to now has been with CPanel-based hosting services, and this gives me an excuse to learn a bit more about server administration.

Trivial? Maybe. But then again, it’s opportunity.

My job doesn’t allow for much rabbit hole chasing. As I’ve said earlier, I let the cat very slowly exit the bag, I’m now a content developer and SEO (search engine optimization) technician for Modern Earth Custom Web Design – which is a dreadfully exciting job, full of loads of new skills and information. The kind of extensible component I’ve been looking for in other areas for ages and now seem to be finding everywhere.

The job is very precision-oriented and, while I’m learning a lot, exploring what’s possible within the scope of my new skills is not something that can happen at work. So, I take notes, and fiddle with the toys I’ve already got when I get home. Which, in this case, means two or three new sites, new skills, and a whole new server slice to play about with.

So that’s what’s happened in my world lately. What’s happened in yours?