Not everyone is exactly tech-savvy and fumbling through a complex configuration system may not be your idea of a fun Tuesday afternoon. The people at Cisco Systems understand and that’s why they have released the Cisco Valet Plus Wireless Hotspot. It’s a wireless router that just about anyone can setup and use.

Instead of navigating your way through confusing menus and cryptic language, the Cisco Valet Plus comes with an included USB key. Simply plug this into your computer and it will automatically run the wizard. The setup process takes about five minutes and only requires about a half-dozen mouse clicks on your part, many of which are simply to click on “next” to continue the process. It’s really simple and you’ll have a wireless-N network running in no time.

The wireless hotspot comes preconfigured with a unique SSID (none of that generic “linksys” or “default” network naming), plus WPA2 encryption for security. The password and settings are automatically entered on your computer, but you can easily change the password and other settings (including parental controls) through the easy-to-understand Cisco Connect software tool.

For more on the Cisco Valet Plus, read this review and then head over to Amazon where it is available for sale for $89.99, including free shipping.

Atlantic Canada has a unique culture and it has produced some of the best entertainers this planet has ever seen. Tapping right into that talent base is Garrison Hill Entertainment. This is a “team of experienced artists and agents located in the heart of it all” in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The company aims to provide a full suite of services to cover all of your entertainment needs. Garrison Hill will handle artist bookings, artist management, funding applications, event coordination, special event booking, stage production, and more. Whether you’re a comedian looking for an agent or you’re a festival organizer needing some entertainment, they’ve got you covered.

Among the names that are attached to Garrison Hill Entertainment are Dardenelles, The Once, Snook, and Jonny Harris. If you are interested in utilizing any of this talent, you can check out the bookings page to request additional information.

Do you use BlueFur to host your websites? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website URL, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

Looking to start an online magazine and don’t know where to begin? The great thing is that WordPress can serve as a fantastic (and free) content management system that comes loaded with lots of features you may otherwise only find in paid back-end software packages. There are free templates to suit just about every need too.

One such case is the Channel theme. This WordPress template is laid out to mimic the look and feel of online magazines, professional news outlets, and other similar publications. There is a jQuery slider at the top for featured articles, pre-configured ad placements, and footer widgets.

It’s also very noteworthy that the sidebar already comes with widgets for RSS subscription, email subscriptions, Flickr thumbnail images, recent comments, and more. Along the top of the page, it is easy to configure different sections based on the categories of your articles. If you have a sports news site, for instance, you can have tabs for NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, MLS, and so on, making it easy for readers to find exactly what they want.

Check out the live demo for a better sense of what to expect from the Channel theme, then go to Theme Junkie to find the free download link.

What did the blogosphere have to offer us this week? Let’s find out!

Free Money Finance offers an interesting case study about a couple who, on paper, appear to be financially sound. After all, they’re earning a million dollars a year, but they’re having trouble making ends meet. The trouble is that they can’t control their spending and they don’t even know where their money is going.

Meg Fowler recognizes the importance of putting in an honest day’s work. She recognizes the importance of accomplishment and being all that you can be. At the same time, she also recognizes that sanity is more valuable than strict hustle. At the end of the day, you only have one brain.

Zac Johnson is already a relatively well known Internet marketer, but he always has something new to learn and explore at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. In a recent blog post, Zac highlights both the good things and the areas needing improvement with this relatively young blog conference.

Tiff Chow is a video game enthusiast, but she doesn’t restrict herself solely to the mainstream games being released through mainstream consoles. That’s partly why she had so much fun at the IndieCade conference, an event that attracts all kinds of independent developers and publishers. Thanks to services like WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade, these smaller developers have a place to flourish.

Gus Fosarolli is going on a trip and he has secured his Buenos Aires condo for the duration of his stay. It’s not the fanciest of bachelor suites, but it is well-furnished, well-kept, and well-designed. The best part is that it’s only going to cost him $560 for a two-week stay. Compare that to how much he would have had to pay for a hotel room… and the latter wouldn’t have a kitchen either!

By now, you’ve probably heard about the kerfuffle surrounding the new logo for the Gap. The clothing store chain felt that it needed to refresh its brand with a new logo, one that felt more contemporary and modern. However, the new logo was met with a lot of negative press and a general negative reaction from the public at large.

Upon receiving this feedback, the Gap decided to pull back the new logo and revert back to the old one. This is not only a negative experience from a public relations standpoint, as it mars the company image in the eyes of the consumer, but it was likely also a very expensive one. The Gap likely hired an advertising or branding agency of some kind to design the new logo. Much time, effort, and money was likely invested in the rebranding effort.

Now, all that time, effort, and money has effectively gone to waste, because the new logo is not going to be used. This is a very important lesson that all companies should learn. There is nothing inherently wrong with attempting a rebranding for your company if you feel that the image has become stagnant and is no longer relevant with your target demographic. However, you need to be very careful about such efforts.

It makes you wonder if the Gap even made use of a focus group to gauge their reaction to the new logo, because it solicited a very strong response from the general public. If no focus group was used or if the testing procedure was flawed, then the Gap has no one to blame but themselves.

Perhaps you’ve started a new blog and you’ve imported a number of posts that are ready to be published. Perhaps you have an existing blog and you recently purchased a number of blog posts that are saved in draft form. Whatever the case, it can be time-consuming to timestamp all of these posts for publishing in a manual fashion.

Alleviating this concern is the Drafts Scheduler WordPress plugin by Jeff Rose. This plugin will automatically take all the posts in your WordPress blog that are currently sitting in draft status and it will schedule all of them for publishing at a future date.

Going through the options for this plugin, you can choose to publish your draft posts sequentially, defining the exact interval that you would like to use to separate each blog post. Alternatively, there is an option that allows for publishing the posts in a random order, but still based on the intervals you prefer. The third option is a full random publishing time for the posts, but you can still define the start date, the maximum number of posts per day, and the daily time frame.

It should be noted that there is no “undo” function in this build of the plugin and all draft posts will be time-stamped (“scheduled”) when you activate its use. The download link is available at the usual WordPress plugin directory.