I had an email today from Barry (have a look at Barry's personal site to see some of the projects he's involved in) about the caricature image I created for my header. I created the cartoon image of myself using befunky.com. BeFunky.com allows you to transform any image into multiple styles of artwork with the click of a button. There's no need to download any application as everything is done online and it's also done very quickly!

photo credit: Drew and Didi

After I created the cartoon image of myself I edited it in Photoshop to create the desired effects and also split the image into 2 pieces one for my header and one for my hand clasping over my nav bar.

What I've done is by no means brilliant but with a bit more work on Photoshop I'm sure you could come up with something very good. I did follow some youtube tutorials on creating a caricature image of myself but none of the outcomes looked anywhere near what I was able to produce using BeFunky.com in a couple of minutes.

It's great to get someone asking about something relating to something on my blog or indeed get any kind of feedback, as at least I know someone is having a look about on here

Updated: See a more in depth post on using be funky here.

A few weeks back I launched two sites that I'm involved in, topcommentator.com and lucky.ie. Lucky.ie has thrived and between myself and Sean we've been able to produce 60 posts in 25 days. It's also been great fun working on it.

I'm afraid the same cannot be said for topcommentator.com. The idea behind the site is to generate traffic by posting on other blogs. It's pretty experimental and I suppose it was always going to be a long term thing but so far we've done nothing with the site apart from create it.

photo credit: Stephen Hackett

We've even had a free plug for Leo over at LeoFogarty.com (go and have a look at Leo's site - there's loads of great info on there), but we just haven't got round to actually going out there and commenting on other blogs. As I say it's a long term project and hopefully I will take some time to start some of the experiments we have planned for the site some time soon. At the minute I don't really have much time as I'm getting ready to move over to England. One thing I have done for topcommentator.com though is to prepare some posts for it. So I'll roll these out over the next week or two just so the effort doesn't go to waste and we have some nice content for search engines to pick up.

Anyway, I'm just letting you know that I haven't forgot about this site. We may need to devise a new strategy to grow the site but won't thing that won't happen no matter what is that we'll throw random spam like comments about to try and gain traffic. That was never the idea behind this project. The idea was to promote traffic by commenting on other blogs. These comments will be genuine comments that hopefully promote discussion on other people's blogs and our own site too. I'd rather leave the project as is than become recognised as a site that 'only' comments for our own benefit!

I've mentioned top commentator before, it's going to be a website that acts as a control centre for commenting on other blogs of interest. It's easy to get carried away reading blogs and as it's something I do anyway, I thought I may as well try and get some links back to the top commentator site by dropping a comment or two when I'm reading other people's blog.

photo credit: premasagar

Anyway, this one has been on the back burner for too long. If you check out the sidebar on the right hand side you'll see a countdown timer indicating that TopCommentator.com should be launching in about 5 days times. Well I've started work on this site today and plan on completing it ahead of schedule. The main objective of this project is to use the site as a base for commenting on other blogs and it's essential to complete the site and get working on this sooner rather than later. The design of the site and ideas for the content we develop can evolve over time, but for now the main thing is to get it out there and see how the project kicks off! I'd normally be hesistant to go public with a site without having much content up on it but for this one we'll be sticking around on other peoples blogs for a while so I'm sure they'll keep coming back to the site every now and again to have another look anyway!

I've teamed up with Sean MacEntee on this project and we're taking the launch date forward to the 1st of August. That leaves us kicking off on a new month with zero visits and we'll be updating the site with monthly stats to check the progress. So check out TopCommentator.com later this week to see how it looks.

When I launched my new theme design, I said that I'd be trying to drive more traffic to this site:

I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com

photo credit: Ross Mayfield

So yesterday I got round to commenting on some other blogs for the first time. For now I just left comments at JohnChow.com on his Canada Day post and I also got in with one of the first comments on Shoemoney's post on switching over to the iPhone. One of the main things I see bloggers mentioning is to get active with your comments and to get in there first, if you want to increase traffic back to your own blog. My site needs a lot of work yet, but I did this as a experiment, I've commented on these two blogs as I enjoy reading them anyway and I'd like to see how much traffic I get back as a direct result from these comments. I'll be looking at the stats tomorrow to see the effects and will possibly follow up with another post to show the results (if any ). It's something I'll be doing long term anyway with the launch of topcommentor.com, so a bit of practice in getting active with the comments is worth it at the stage!