Recently I've been following the comments for a David Airey Blogging Transparency post. I noticed that many commentors had sidenotes relating to David's blog no longer using gravatars in the comments. I just have a couple things on my mind relating to the use of gravatars in blog comments.

Have you ever had it where you weren't very familiar with something but as soon as you got clued in you saw it everywhere?

That's the way it's been lately for me and my Moleskine Notebook. I first heard about them from this productivity post. So I figured why not and decided to make the purchase. I ended up buying four. I use one and gave three as gifts. Since then I've heard/seen references to them almost everywhere. I've seen blog posts, heard it mentioned on Freelance Radio, and even some stranger at the coffeehouse commented on me "being a moleskine guy". So what makes them such a great item that everybody is talking about it.

While looking through some free WordPress templates for a niche blog that I am starting, one made me question the designer's choice of ad blocks. I am wanted to eventually sell ads on this blog so I am looking for themes with ad blocks already built in. This particular one is a very nice theme but it has three 100x100 ad blocks. At first that didn't seem like such a big deal, but the more I thought about it I realized that it probably wasn't a very wise move to go down from the de facto 125x125 sized blocks.

Here's why.