The guys at The Onion are genius.

One of the best duets I've seen and heard in a long time. I don't know much about Sara Bareilles (except apparently she's an a cappella singer who made it big), but she and Rivers sound great.

Weezer has really become one of the most creative bands out there — check out the AOL Sessions stuff. Chamillionaire, Kenny G (yes, it's true), covers of MGMT, Green Day, Coldplay and even Lady Gaga. Plus, Rivers' chorus on B.o.B's Magic is awesome.

Enjoy the video.

If you're running an installation of WordPress multisite or Buddypress, where the main site has a different look and feel than the network of sites, you've likely registered some widget areas that are only necessary for the main site.

The issue, however, is that your network of sites see these widget areas (that they can't use) in their Widget editor. And if you've created a lot of widget areas that their design doesn't use, you're likely confusing your users with unnecessary choices.

So if you want to have widget areas available for your main site and not your network, use this easy fix.

In your functions.php file (where you register the widget areas), simply add this line of code:

global $blog_id;
if( $blog_id == '1' ) {

REGISTER YOUR WIDGET AREA HERE

}

And that's it. You can put as many widget areas in this code block as you want.

If you want to register certain widget areas for your network and not the main site, simply change == '1' to !=='1'.

If you want to register certain widget areas for specific blogs, simply change the blog_id to the ID of the blog where it should appear.

I'm a bad blogger.

No, I didn't do anything bad with my blog, like plagiarize or defame someone (or is it libel? I can never remember). But I recently got an offer to sell Automatic Finances, the blog and ebook I created in 2009 and sort of stopped posting to in mid-2010. (I'm not selling it, but that's another story.)

It got me thinking, though, that I've done all the right things to have a successful blog: great content, great people contributing, a great topic, a great community and plenty of ideas. But, like this blog, it's missing the one thing that builds on that success: regular posts.

It's so easy to give up on a blog, or to become inconsistent in posting, or just push it to the back-burner for the time-being.

The longer a blog exists, the more value it has, especially from a Google/SEO perspective. And the real shame is that — and this is 100% true for Automatic Finances — most blog owners give up on their blogs right around the time the site starts to gain traction in search engine rankings. (I have no research to back that up … just conjecture. But it sounds right.)

If I had simply continued posting on a regular basis, the blog would have snowballed. More content, more comments, more dollars, more visitors, etc. It's not a 100% ROI — doubling your posts doesn't double your revenues — but it is all about momentum. The more you build on it, the more it produces.

There's no secret to a successful blog, but it's almost guaranteed that if you produce, so will your blog, either in revenues or traffic or comments. Keeping at it is the hard part, and it's the part we tend to fail at the most.

I certainly can't promise that 2011 is going to be a banner year for me blogging. I would like it to be, but it's certainly very easy for life to get in the way.

Here's Ben's ode to Merton, the piano improv chat roulette guy that I still don't think is Ben Folds.

(via Geekosystem)

Is this guy Ben Folds in disguise?

Debbie said it was from the start, but I'm not so sure. What do you think?

I haven't blogged for, what, a few weeks now? That's not a total shocker, per se, since I've always tended to go through peaks and valleys of creativity.

But as my life has started getting into a new routine (did I mention I started a new job? Press release coming soon), I've realized a few things about my priorities.

I don't need to stay as connected to the news as I thought
I've talked about selective ignorance before, but for the past few weeks, I've lived it. I've spent a total of about 5 minutes in my Google Reader over the past 2 weeks. And boy, a lot of stuff happens. And most of it is useless.

How much time are you wasting trying to know everything?

It's way easier to be productive to music than to podcasts
I love podcasts. But I only have a certain amount of time in my day to half-pay attention to them. And that's OK, since my time is probably the most valuable thing I have (after my family).

Rather than trying to listen to what all of my podcasts are talking about, playing music in the background is way more conducive to getting things done.

And, PS, I love Pandora.

There's only so many things you can do at a time
I haven't done jack with Automatic Finances in the past few weeks. I just haven't had the time, and that bothers me. Part of me thinks that it should be merged into this site, but I don't want to be pegged solely as the personal finance guy.

But since I started the new job, am now recording two podcasts a week — Tech Blab and This Week in This Week in Tech (TwiTwit) — and thoroughly enjoy it all, prioritization becomes even more important.

There's only so much lifehacking you can do (I already killed my commute) to make all this happen.

I have an argument that I am going to make about why net neutrality is a bad idea as it is currently being pushed through Congress.

It's controversial, will definitely stir up some comments, and — in my humble opinion — a win-win situation for both service providers and customers.

But I can't write it right now. It'd be like a major brain dump, into a post, with no coherent path to lead you through.

So I'm not going to write it. Right now.

But I will soon, since I want to be able to discuss it on next week's episode of TechBlab. You know, the podcast where I make fun of Blogger Bob, the guy who writes on the TSA's blog, and end up getting called out by a listener — and the TSA themselves!

While you're waiting, listen to the episode. It's a good one. And let me know what you think.

Click to play

Is it just me, or is everyone and their brother trying to get rich launching a membership-based teaching site?

You're right. It's not just me.

But I am tired of it. The people trying to start these businesses — especially targeted Web-savvy Internet entrepreneurs — are already behind the eight ball.

If you're not familiar with these types of sites, here's how they normally do it:

• See that people are making money selling programs that teach freedom, automated income and Internet success
• Coin a new phrase, like freedom rockstar or 4-hour business, to describe what you offer
• Connect with other ninjas and set up an affiliate program, boasting about how you're so generous to share your success with everyone else, for only $99 a month!

Look, if really had an automated income stream that allowed you to live a life of complete freedom, why are you investing so much time in a for-profit business?

You're not that nice, trust me. If you were, you'd give your program away for free. You've already got the money you need, right?

Oh, no.

Quite honestly (if I wasn't being honest enough), I gave major props to one of my favorite Web entrepreneurs, Brian Clark of Copyblogger, for starting this craze. He managed to develop the model, market it and profit from it before everyone else jumped in the market.

And then he moved on to develop the next big thing. That's brilliance.

You don't always have to be first in the market to be the best, but it doesn't hurt to own the market before the competition arrives.

The market has been saturated. It's time to end the program.

But seriously. If I see one more training program promising me the world, only at $99 a month, or all of my contacts on Twitter and the blog world whoring out the same product, I'm unsubscribing.

For real.