All kinds of successful people choose to use BlueFur for their web hosting needs. There are freelance writers, professional photographers, small business owners… and then there is Lee Down, the man behind One Man Can. What does that site name mean?

Well, it’s short for One Man Can See You Succeed. Lee Down is a professionally trained life coach with extensive experience in information technology, web industry, and other creative and technical endeavors. He has worked in project management, facilitation, promotion, and more.

In addition to the life coaching services that he can provide you on a one-on-one basis, Down also has a number of useful articles on his site on such topics as leadership, awareness and motivation. Coaching services include social media coaching, career coaching, and business coaching.

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.

WordPress is a very powerful content management system that can be heavily customized and personalized to suit your specific needs and preferences. One way to do this is to look for a WordPress theme that fits what you want. SpinnyLite was recently released and it looks to be quite robust.

You get a woodgrain background image, which can be suitable for a number of different niches and genres. The navigation links at the top of the page are easy to use and you’ll also notice the “featured posts” section close to the top as well. To add articles to this section, simply create a new category and assign that category in the theme options page.

The theme has also been preconfigured for social media integration (via the social icons and Twitter updates) as well as for the placement of advertisements. There is a slot for a 468×60 banner in the header, plus a series of 125 x 125 block ads in the sidebar. SpinnyLite comes with a contact form, multi-page support, and widget support too.

The free version of SpinnyLite can be demo’d and downloaded from WebDesignLessons.com. If you’d prefer the magazine style version of SpinnyLite, it is also available from the same page, but it will cost you $35 to buy.

What’s going on in the blogosphere this week? Let’s have a look.

Free Money Finance breaks down a recent report from BDO USA, a national tax accounting firm, that says $250,000 a year is not enough for a family of four to live on. This takes on a number of assumptions, of course, but the breakdown really does start to break down when you consider some of the unnecessary expenses this hypothetical family is taking on.

Dragon Blogger gets us ready for the weekend with a review of You Don’t Know Jack for the Xbox 360. It’s a great trivia game that can be fun for the whole family, as well as your friends of varying ages. The quirky presentation is certainly unique, but that’s exactly what sets this title apart from all the other trivia games available on the various home gaming consoles.

Zen Habits‘ Leo Babauta is currently on vacation in Europe and he’s finding that this travel is interrupting his usual plans. So, he has devised a simple fitness plan for when you’re on the road and just don’t have the time to hit the gym like how you normally do. Try to eat in moderation and do a lot of walking. I personally find that I do a lot more walking while on vacation than while at home, so that has to make up for something.

Scott Young takes a slightly different spin on the self-fulfilling prophecy by saying that we become the story we tell ourselves. In fact, it is quite possible to change the past if you simply tell yourself a different story about the past. Ironically enough, “the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.”

The Savvy Freelancer asks her readers whether they would take on an exclusive client as part of their freelance work. For me, this sounds far too much like conventional employment without the regular employment benefits. If you are interested in working for one client exclusively, doesn’t it make more sense to get a regular job with them instead?

Marketing can take on a variety of different forms. You see the ad banners on websites, advertorials in newspapers, and commercials on television. Another venue that can be worth considering is product placement, even if your budget isn’t the biggest. There are a number of YouTube partners with large viewerships, for instance, that may be interested in sponsorship by way of product placement.

Should you choose to partake in this kind of advertising, you have to ask yourself a very simple question: do you want subtle product placement or do you want obvious product placement? As with so many other things in life, there are pros and cons to either approach. With subtle product placement, you are less likely to upset the viewers, but you may also be less likely to get their attention. They might not notice that you’re in there at all.

With more obvious product placement, it’s much more certain that the viewers will notice that your products or your brand are featured prominently in the video. However, video producers may be less likely to take on this kind of sponsorship and you may actually offend or upset many of the viewers. People don’t like being “sold” on something in this way.

So, not surprisingly, the best approach is usually somewhere in the middle, but what do you think? How do you react to product placement on television, in movies, and online? Perhaps The Greatest Movie Ever Sold by Morgan Spurlock could be worth exploring.

There are all sorts of WordPress plugins to integrate a variety of social networking and social media platforms with your blog. You will have no trouble finding a widget or two to put your latest tweets in the sidebar, just as you can find plugins for Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and more. Foursquare shouldn’t be any exception.

If you love “checking in” to just about everywhere that you go, the Foursquare Latest Checkins WordPress widget plugin is for you. Rather than simply providing a text-based list of your most recent check-ins on Foursquare, the displayed widget will actually show the appropriate icons relevant to each location. Restaurants show a fork and knife icon, for example.

The plugin is very simple to install and configure. All you do is download and upload the appropriate files, activate the plugin, and enter your Foursquare credentials. You can change the title for the widget, as well as the number of recent plugins to display at any given time. A widget like this can be fantastic for a travel blog, but it can be just as easily applied to a range of other sites.

More information can be found at no-panic.at, including a couple of useful screenshots. Download Foursquare Latest Checkins via the official WordPress Plugin Directory on WordPress.org.

One of the bigger business stories to emerge last week came when Cisco announced it was ending its Flip Video camera department. As you may recall, Cisco bought the Flip Video business from Pure Digital in 2009 and it seemed like a good move at the time.

The Flip Video (which spawned the Flip Ultra, Flip Mino, Flip UltraHD, and Flip MinoHD) looked like it could be very successful, providing a very easy and accessible way to record relatively high quality video. Cisco built up the software and brought a lot of marketing muscle to the table, but it did not really do enough in terms of innovation, especially in the face of the smartphone and other competing devices.

Cisco is a company that has always specialized in networking products, both under its Linksys brand name and as Cisco infrastructure. The Flip Video represented an entirely different line of products, approaching consumer electronics with no direct link (no pun intended) to networking. And that might have been one of the reasons why Cisco ultimately had to close the division.

Perhaps one of the take home lessons from this news is that, as a business, it may be better to stick with what you know, master that niche, and do positively everything you can to be a leader in that field. At the same time, you can’t exactly blame Cisco for looking to expand into the increasingly popular (and lucrative) world of consumer electronics.