2005 was a very eventful year. Looking back, a couple of things happend that I didn't even think of earlier. I met people who are very important in my life, I created tools that are valueable to people, things went just fine.

I'd like to thank each and every visitor of this very site for his/her ongoing support and would like to review 2005 in this short article.

More and more people switch from regular static homepages to dynamic ones. The so called WCMS (web based content management systems) are very popular because of their ease of use and setup. One module you can see in about every WCMS, be it a stand-alone forum, a portal or even a blog, is a poll module.

I've analyzed 49 sites running the phpWebSite WCMS. I've taken a look at how the site owners use the polls, especially what kind of questions they are polling and how successful they are in doing so.

Building Websites with Mambo is already the third book I'm reviewing from Packt Publishing. Mambo is the CMS that has won three awards in 2005 alone: Best Open Source Solution twice and Best of Show once.

Should you decide to give Mambo a go you might be interesting in having a printed manual for it. Building Websites with Mambo could be just the thing for you.

A few days ago, Wayne from the phpWebSite support forums posted a question. Is there a way of previewing and trying all the different phpWebSite themes without downloading them first? A few hours later, there was.

I've implemented a very simple site using Wiki and the Anonymous Theme hack. The Wiki takes care of a history as well, so everyone can check out which new themes there are available for preview.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company -- better known as AT&T -- has a natural affinity to voice-transmissions. It comes to no surprise that a company with telephony-roots would encourage and sponsor the developement of a high-quality, artificial voice system.

Still, listening to the Natural Voices demos is quite amazing anyway. Except for minor glitches, Natural Voices intoniation is first class. What's even more amazing: I like the german speech better than the english one. It sounds even more natural to me.

A few days ago, I met with a couple of friends in Viennas' first district. It is probably one of the most expensive places for businesses and also very crowded. Successful advertisements would probably have a very high impact there.

But what about non-successful, even non-working advertisements? Would they be also boosted? Or would people simple pass by and ignore them?

Most hosting plans including MySQL also include phpMyAdmin as a front end. A lot of open source php applications depend upon MySQL as a database backend. Knowing more about phpMyAdmin could thus improve a webmasters experience.

Packt publishing was as nice as sending me a copy of their Mastering phpMyAdmin book for review. I hope you enjoy this review as much as I did reading it!

...and by bombing I don't mean bombing Iraq. No, the term Google Bombing actually refers to something else, spamming Google by doing lots of links with a given anchor text.

In a recent post of the Google Blog, the major player of the search engine market itself defends this practice. It's reflecting the current opinion on the Internet and thus needs to be respected, they write in an article to be remembered.

September, 11 in US probably wasn't just another day. People thought about the World Trade center, the two planes that crashed into it 2001 and the sadness that followed that event. There is a reason why searching for september 11th on Google doesn't lead to a calendar.

But what about Europe, especially Austria? I haven't noticed too much of worries here. US is far away, there's a big ocean between Europe and America. Some people even get adventurous and fly anyway. Like us. We did a helicopter ride and enjoyed it.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Patterson started a phpWebSite contest. The judges Sharon Renshaw and Shawn Murray were found rather quickly, people started working on their submissions. The goal was finding a new look for a new portal.

phpWebSite themes is the new project from the creators of phpwebsitemanual.com and will focus on phpWebSite themes. I'm already curious how it will turn out and wish all involved parties the best of luck!

Today at breakfast I had a surprise on my homepage. The Outlaw Group apparently payed me a visit! Instead of the usual Sharondippity-Theme, all I got was "OutLaw Group". Nothing more.

The good thing of course is a lot of saved bandwidth. Instead of the old 3.7K, the dispatcher was only 13 Bytes big. Then again, a static content management portal isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

This is a small testpoll to find out, wether the phpWebSite poll module can handle images in questions as well. The answer to this question is yes, it can handle them perfectly.

Please look inside the article to see it for yourself ;-)