As many of you have probably seen, the much (or so I hear) anticipated Blog Rush has finally launched.

In their words:

“BlogRush is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their #1 need:
More Readers For Their Blog.

By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs.

BlogRush users earn “syndication credits” (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic (loads of the widget) as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush. Users can automatically refer others to BlogRush via special links on the widget, as well as through the promotion of a special referral URL they are given.”

I figured it was worth a shot. I’ll do an update in a few weeks to let everyone know how it does. In the meantime:

Feel Free to Sign Up 

It’s been a while since my last post so I figured it was time for a general update. A few big things have happened over the past couple of weeks. I accepted a new day job working on an exciting new web startup, so I’ve been trying to prepare for a departure from my current day job. The end of my two weeks notice is this Friday, so once the transition goes though, things will run a little more smoothly for me.

In addition to accepting a new day job, I decided to move Design Float over to a new host that I feel can better handle current and projected bandwidth demands. I decided on Media Temple’s Grid Server and couldn’t be happier. The transfer went much smoother than I expected and took only a few hours with no downtown and no data loss. I feel good about our new home and look forward to settling in with Media Temple as Design Floats permanent home.

The site is still steadily growing, we are approaching 500 members and should hit 600 by the end of the month. Feed subscriptions have surpassed the 1,000 mark and continues to increase (1,389 at last glance). I expect over 40,000 unique visitors this month and am hoping to break the 100,000 page views a month mark.

Advertising
In an attempt to lighten the burden of my student loan debt, I have opened up some sponsorship sections throughout the site. My intent is not to cover the site in ads and the majority of the banners that display in the sidebar currently are banner exchanges with other respected and relevant projects and I will only accept sponsors that I feel our users will find useful and relevant.

Learn about advertising opportunities on Design Float.

Thank you to everyone who continues to visit and support Design Float and remember, your praise, complaints, suggestions, and ideas are always appreciated!

Design Float was featured on Killer Startups (a startup about startups, go figure) a few weeks ago. It’s actually a pretty neat Digg style website and they’re currently adding about 30 new startups a day. Anyway, if you have some free time, head over there and give Design Float a vote!

I spent some time this weekend learning about Dashboard Widgets and was able to successfully create version 1.0 of the Design Float Dashboard Widget. When installed, the widget allows you to choose from any of the Design Float categories and display the latest 10 published entries along with a brief description and the number of floats they have received. Enjoy!

» Download the Widget

As I was obsessively checking my stats with Snoop, I realized an influx of visitors from Smashing Magazine. Turns out they have included Design Float in their “Best of July 2007” post. It’s nice to be recognized by a blog as popular and respectable as Smashing Magazine so thanks to the editors for including Design Float and I hope the exposure trickles down to all of the Design Float contributers and authors!