A recent article on cigars was published in UR Chicago, a great lifestyle magazine in Chicago by an even greater journalist, Daniel B. Honigman. Following the statewide smoking ban in Illinois, Daniel introduces cigars to some - reaffirming them to others - and how smoking a stogie adds to an experience, rather than just getting a quick drag on a cigarette in the cold outside of a bar. He interviewed me for the article, and my quote is at the end of the article. You can download a PDF of the January 10-30, 2008 edition and read the full article.

I enjoy an occasional cigar, and it usually compliments an event or get-together with friends. There’s nothing like a cigar during a Patriots game tailgate party!

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For the past couple of days my two blogs - The Hot Iron and sourcegate - were broken. You could bring up the main URL and see the home page, and if you clicked on any link you would get the very same home page. This happened midday on Tuesday as the hosting company "upgraded" something, causing previous patches to prevent this problem to reoccur.

I am pleased to say both blogs are working. Special thanks goes to Andy Knight who reached out to me after I posted this issue on the ExpressionEngine support forum. Today he sent me details of a fix he made and it worked for me as well. I posted the details of this fix on sourcegate.

Interestingly, over that time period my Feedburner subscribers increased by 5 readers! I'll look into that another time, as there's a little catch-up I need to do. And thanks to Andy, I have one less thing on my list.

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Currently The Hot Iron is experiencing technical difficulties - only the home page will display! All links redirect to the home page, and I suspect the feeds are impacted as well.

I am, um, "hot" on the trail and will work to resolve this as soon as possible. As my Feedburner numbers have been increasing, this message means more than just to me.

Thank you for your patience.

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January 2, 2008 marks the 1 year since my first post on The Hot Iron titled Communication and Resolution. Well, my very first post was my test Hello World post a couple days earlier on December 30, 2006, as I set a goal to get the blog setup and running by the end of ’06. In either case, the world has had the opportunity to read The Hot Iron for a year.

And what a year it has been! Where I set out to write on topics swirling in my mind on business and technology, I added book takeaways, a focus on domain names and took several tangents, many inspired by surroundings here in the Windy City. The Hot Iron is my personal blog, though it generously took on the same template as the Web site for my Internet consultancy Dunkirk Systems. As much as I tried to keep The Hot Iron personal, being an entrepreneur makes that nearly impossible, and I intertwined experiences and anecdotes from my daily work.

So here I am 237 posts later. Where I have seen many year-end recaps of posts by many bloggers, I chose not to pour through all and rank them. Some posts that stick out include the one on German domain names, as I received comments with insights from German nationals; the post on the Web sites of my current and former Chicago Alderman as I heard from the sitting Alderman himself (yes, I verified the post was from him!) and the one questioning the rebranding of Delta Airlines, which was quoted on an airline industry blog. The lesson I learned is if you write it, it is out there, and you never know who will read it.

However I am more intrigued by the 410 comments I received. Many were by people I knew prior to writing the post, but more and more came from people I did not know at the beginning of 2007, some I have gotten to know outside of the blog and a few I have met in person. Comments mean more to me than my Feedburner subscriptions, especially when you hear from people who have no idea what the little orange icon means and visit the site on a regular basis.

Now onto 2008. Thanks for reading, and here’s to more “hot” two-way communication.

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Virtual Hosting has compiled a list of 100 blog posts on the topic of domain names and domaining. They have organized them under the category of Parking, Buying and Selling, Value and Appraisal, For Beginners, Questionable Practices, Making Money, Management, Search Engines and Traffic and Miscellaneous. I am proud to have 2 posts on the list - Know Who Manages Your Domain Name (#74) and Who Should Own a Domain Name? (#96).

I am still going through the list, but the people represented are the leaders in this area. The list also shows the breadth and depth of aspects and issues with regards to domain names. I recommend this list to fellow entrepreneurs as well as those in the domain name business.

Updated 9/5/2017 - Changed links to their new site at HTML.com

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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