Well we just made it by the skin of our teeth getting this month’s newsletter issue out to you all. It’s been a busy month at LP so check our the news section, but also we have a pretty huge promotion coming up next month that will make you all incredibly happy!

As you all know when Lunarpages gets a special deal happening, we always pass it along to our existing webmasters too. Keep an eye out for an email from us in about 2 weeks!

In this month’s issue:

• LunarNews: May 2008

• The Art of Crowdsourcing

• Content Management Systems

• SEO Tips: Step Two of Ten – Competitor Analysis by Ross Dunn

• Lunarpages Interviews Mitch Keeler

• AdSense Users, Have Your Privacy Policy Ready?
  
• LunarLegal: Commercial Email Rules Under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

• Favicon Help, Fun and How-tos

• Online Advertising Terminology

• Domain Name Transfers – A Helpful Tutorial

Enjoy!

Spring Coupon – Use it For Renewals, too!

Just a reminder to take advantage of the Spring Special for web hosting for $4.95/mo! That means you get Unlimited Website Hosting, Unlimited emails, Free Domain Name, Blogs, Forums, Photo Galleries, Joomla, WordPress, and everything else you could possibly want but didn’t think you could afford. Now you can!

Use coupon code SPRING upon signup for 24month Basic Hosting Plan for your discount! Offer is only valid until mid-June, so make sure you take advantage of this awesome price.

Also, if you’re renewing with Lunarpages, feel free to ask our friendly CSRs for the same discount! We want to make sure everyone is taken care of, so just make sure to use this coupon before June 22, 2008, and we’ll honor the Spring deal.

WordPress Web Design Contest

The WordPress Theme Design Contest (Series 2) is still going! There’s still plenty of time to enter your themes for your chance to win $1,000 and 5 years free hosting! For more details, visit the Lunarpages Web Hosting Blog! Here’s our winners so far who are advancing to the Finals automatically!!

Winner of Round 1: Mag On Wood by ChiQ Montes

Winner of Round 2: TeamRejoice by Edgardo Canape Jr.

Winner of Round 3: Translucent Dream by Nicki Faulk

Winner of Round 4: Vectorize by Ed Canape

Winner of Round 5: Phunk Attack by Dulce Rose Lada

Head over to our Lunarpages Blog for 95 Free WordPress Themes or check out the new designs filtering in every day. Good luck to everyone still in the running!

April 2008 Lunarforums Site of the Month

The Site of the Month winner for April 2008 was our forum member Jason2 with his awesome tech resource forums techsupportteam.org. Big congrats go out to him, and if you too would like to enter our Site of the Month contest be sure to register on our forums and then sign up!

Stay tuned, because we are about to send some other BIG NEWS your way very soon.

Getting a ton of people to do your job for you is an webmaster’s dream, right? Well that task is not just a dream – and it does have a name. Crowdsourcing (according to Wikipedia) is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.

To help answer the general questions about this type of service, we thought it would be time to turn to a professional, Matt Mickiewicz of SitePoint.com.

For the guy of the street who may not know, what is the quickest way you can describe crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is simply amassing a diverse group of people to work on a single task, usually by motivating them with some sort of incentive, like cash, a prize or simply public recognition.

What are the benefits of crowdsourcing something like graphic design?

Crowdsourcing graphic design through an established online player like 99designs allows business owners and online entrepreneurs to get everything from logos, to banners, t-shirts and business cards designed in a shorter time frame, with less hassle, and more options.

Rather than hiring a single designer based on his portfolio and hoping for a quick turnaround and a satisfactory result, you simply post a “project brief” to 99designs.com, name your budget, and within hours designers from all over the world start competing for your money by submitting fully completed graphic design concepts. At the end of a couple of days, you pick your favorite, and pay the winner. Obviously, the greater your budget, and the more interesting your project, the more designers you’ll attract to participating in your project.

So it’s all about diversity of choice, quick-turn around, and less risk.

Where do people often miss the mark or have misconceptions about crowdsourcing?

It’s often thought that the quality of work received through a crowdsourced marketplace is lower than what could be achieved elsewhere. That’s definitely not the case, as the spirit of competition drives a group to achieve an outcome that is often superior to what any one individual tackling the project by themselves could do.

How do you get a crowd of your very own to reference to when needed?

Your best bet is to go to an existing crowdsourcing marketplace. They’ll hopefully have the critical mass of users, and the technology infrastructure, to allow you to get your project done.

Can you give us a few examples of crowdsourcing marketplaces?

There’s usertesting.com for usability testing of your website. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) for “grunt” work where you pay a few pennies to each individual. Uservoice.com which is a crowdsourced suggestion box for businesses. iStockPhoto.com is a crowdsourced marketplace for stock imagery. And finally, 99designs.com which caters to any and all types of graphic design.

I want to thank Matt for taking the time out to answer our questions about the art of crowdsourcing, and to check out more of his work – you can do so via Sitepoint.com.

If you are new to building websites online, you’re really in luck these days, because you have unlimited options for building your new website. You can buy a web design template and simply use that, if you sign up with Lunarpages you can use our WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) website builder PageMason, you can signup for LPQuicksite, you can buy Dreamweaver or use Frontpage, and tons of other options depending on your comfort zone and skill level.

But there’s one solution that is often overlooked, even though it can really save you money and help in getting your website designed and even developed, all in one breath. I’m talking about using a Content Management System or CMS if you want to sound all savvy.

A CMS is just what it sounds like: an easy way to manage your website’s content. For non-techie users or those new to web hosting, using a CMS is a very affordable way to add great style and easy updating for your website. A CMS also includes the ability to install advanced features (or plug-ins) to really extend what your website can do.

Here are a couple of my favorite content management systems, all of which are free, open source projects:

Definitely the Godfather of content management these days, even though some people do argue that WordPress isn’t exactly a CMS. If you want to get technical, it’s just a blogging platform, but people are using it more and more for managing all aspects of their website. For example, we use WordPress for our Newsletter here and our own Blog, and I use WordPress to manage other websites of mine as well.

The Pros of WordPress Web Hosting: It’s fall off a log easy. Maybe even easier. And it’s 100% free, you can install it with about 3 clicks of your mouse via the Lunarpages control panel, and there are thousands upon thousands of Free WordPress Themes (templates) you can download and use.

The Cons of WordPress Web Hosting: It has its limitations, as it’s designed to be a blogging platform…though that’s never stopped me and countless other from using it.

The exclamation mark makes it sassy. Joomla! is one of the forerunners of CMS, and has really become synonymous with that term – you say “CMS”, I say “Joomla!”! This is because it’s been around a long time and is a really powerful system, which can help you improve website performance, incorporate RSS Feeds, enable printable pages, news flashes, add blogs and polls, paste website search tools, and all this can be done in a million languages.

The Pros of Joomla Web Hosting: Once you get used to it, there really isn’t anything you can’t do. It’s also 100% free and just like WordPress you can install it via Fantastico in about 3 clicks. Besides the gazillion free Joomla templates and skins out there, you can also find reliable Joomla extensions, which when installed add features like ecommerce shopping carts, advanced RSS options, advertising units, and a ton more.

The Cons of Joomla Web Hosting: It’s really not easy to get started, which is unfortunate because many people miss out on the chance to utilize Joomla’s extensive features. If you have the time to learn it, Joomla is a great choice.

Read all about b2 from last month’s awesome interview with Francois Planque, one of our favorite guys to chat with!

b2evolution is, like WordPress, primarily a blogging platform. But so many people recommend and use it for their websites that I can’t keep from adding it to the list. Plus, I love it, and it’s a powerful system for managing your websites with incredible advanced features you can learn as you go. One of the main things people like about b2 is its ability to manage multiple blogs under one single installation. This simplifies the process and just saves you so much time in the long run.

The Pros of b2evolution Web Hosting: Easy, Free, Simple. Lunarpages-recommended.

The Cons of b2evolution Web Hosting: Limitations as far as content management goes and there aren’t as many templates/skins out there for you unless you’re willing to customize them yourself.

And those are just 3 of the available choices you have. There’s also Drupal, Mambo, DotNetNuke (Microsoft-based CMS), Expression Engine, Typo, and many others. To start, check out the ones listed above, but if you have recommendations or experience of your own, feel free to shared with us so we can spread the word!

Welcome to part two in this ten part SEO series. The ten parts of the SEO process we will be covering are:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

What is a Competitor Analysis?

Have you ever wondered how a particular competitor always does so much better than you do in the search engines or online overall? A competitor analysis is one very effective method of deconstructing their online marketing strategy to discover how they are doing so well.

What Exactly Can a Competitor Analysis Reveal?

This is a very common question because many site owners don’t know the lengths that a competitor may have gone to obtain top rankings. The following examples are some of the discoveries I have uncovered in a typical competitor analysis:

• By examining a competitor’s link structure I have found that many of the links with the most credibility came from websites the competitor actually owned. (Determining the ownership of the domain names required some sleuthing because the whois information was ‘private’ but ultimately the info became available.) In a couple of cases several of these domains had legitimate websites and this prompted some great ideas for my client to attain more traffic.
• While researching a competitor I noticed that although the competitor’s website was very similar to my client’s, there was one major difference; the competitor’s website structure was far better optimized. By outlining the structure the competitor used and improving on it with my own expertise our client had the information he needed to apply changes to his own site.
• In another instance I provided a client the list of all the pay per click keywords and organic keywords that each competitor was currently using. The client was flabbergasted when she realized just how many keywords she had missed promoting for her own comparable services.

The Basics of Conducting Your Own Competitor Analysis

Now that you have seen some examples of what can be gleaned from a competitor analysis you might want to conduct one of your own. For the purpose of this tutorial I am assuming that you are fairly new to SEO so I created a basic plan that works for most users; but even this will require a little preparative reading. The following is a list of essential reading material:

• Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist
  This article will show you what elements of a website make it search engine friendly and this will help you see which optimizations your competitor used.
• The 10 Minute Search Engine Optimization (Updated in 2007 from 2004)
  A refresher on the proper elements of optimization.
• 15 Shades of Spam
  Jim Hedger wrote this back in 2006 to increase awareness of the types of Spam that can get webmasters into hot water. It is an excellent refresher to help you identify them.

Many more free SEO tutorials are available if you find yourself needing more information. The following is an outline of the most revealing steps with the least amount of technical expertise required. Please keep in mind that the objective of this competitor analysis is to compare what you find to your own website later on. What you find may not seem earth shattering (or it might) but this analysis is meant to show you what you might be missing:

Competitor Walkthrough

Grab a piece of paper and a pen and while you walk through your competitor’s website look for any particularly obvious search engine optimization techniques. Here are some elements you should check:

• Does the title tag appear well written and if so is there a common syntax used throughout the website?
• Look at the source code of the home page and search for “H1″, “H2″ or “H3″. Do any of these tags show up? If so that means the competitor is using heading tags within the page. Now try identifying the text they used in the heading. Likely you will find the competitor’s Keyphrase is found within the tag.
• Check if the navigation is search engine friendly. Sometimes the navigation is a drop-down menu; make sure it is a type that is search engine friendly. If not, check the footer of the page and see if a text menu is placed there.
• Keep an eye out for a pattern of keywords being used in text links. Certain words are likely to appear more often and these are likely some of the target phrases your competitor has decided to focus on.
• Look for nofollow tags. No follow tags are often used to channel Page Rank efficiently throughout a website. This is called a themed structure and it can have incredible ranking benefits. If you see a pattern of nofollow tag use then you can be relatively certain your competitor has/had a well-informed SEO firm on hire.
• While you roam through the site look for pages that have particularly high Google PageRank and try to identify why. In most cases these pages have information that visitors decided to link to. Perhaps this will give you some ideas for creating similar quality content for your website.
• Check the site for the presence of an XML sitemap. Usually it will reside at the root of the website so try typing in the basic URL of the competitor’s website and add (minus the quotes) “\sitemap.xml” on the end. The details within the sitemap might be a little confusing to you but just acknowledging that the competitor has one is noteworthy.
• Have you found any incidences of spam throughout the site? Take note, I have lost count how many competitors succeeded using shady tactics. This doesn’t mean you copy them, however, but it may at least give you yet another indication of what helped the competitor attain rankings. Believe me, in most cases these sites will get caught with their hands in the cookie jar at which point you won’t want to be associated with the same tactics.

I can’t possibly list everything you need to keep an eye out for when walking through a competitor’s website; at least not in an article format. Just keep an eye out for anything that looks particularly purposeful in the site and linking structure as well as the content of the website. If you find something you can’t be sure is worth noting, then try researching it online; chances are someone has written about the topic/concept or can provide you advice in a forum.

Backlink Analysis
This portion of the analysis will require that you use one of the following link analysis tools: OptiLink (not free but my first choice) or Backlink Analyzer from SEO Book (free). In each case these tools have excellent help files that I suggest reading in order to get the best results from the data they generate.

In this particular stage you are going to use your new tool to analyze the first 1000 backlinks of your competitor’s domain.

Program Setup Note: Be certain to set up the software to acquire Google Rank and Alexa Rank information for each backlink and filter out any rel=nofollow links. The setting is easily found on the front of both applications with the exception of the rel=nofollow which is an option in Optilink but automatically checked in Backlink Analyzer.

When the report is completed sort the backlinks by both PageRank and then Alexa Rank; examine each sorting separately.

Why Are Both PageRank and Alexa Rank Used?

The reason both are used is because they each have notable disadvantages and advantages. PageRank is notoriously unreliable especially lately since Google now penalizes the PageRank of any site with any relation to link buying. As a result, sites with low PR could be missed as a quality site. Furthermore Alexa Rank is a decent indicator of a site’s popularity but I can’t rely on it since it is not an established indicator of how well a site is regarded in Google. Between the two stats, however, we can glean a good indication of the sites that have the best reputation for link building.

Creating a List of Authority Competitor Backlinks

Using Excel or another spreadsheet application copy and paste the data you received from OptiLink or Backlink Analyzer into a worksheet. Then create a copy of the sheet so that you have an exact copy of all the data on a single sheet. Now follow these steps:

1. On the first worksheet sort the data by Google PageRank (PR) from highest numbers to lowest. Now remove all of the pages that had less than a PageRank of 4 so you are left with the best sites according to this data. OR just separate the lower PageRanked sites so they don’t get in the way.

2. On the second worksheet sort the data first by Alexa Ranking (sort lowest to highest numbers) and then do a secondary sort by the Google PageRank (highest to lowest numbers). Delete or remove all sites that have a negative Alexa Ranking (“nm” is how it shows in OptiLink) or otherwise partition them from your other more valuable data.

Now you have two excellent worksheets that provide lists of authority pages that have links pointing to your competitor.

How to Use the Backlink Data

Take some time now to filter the links by domain and you will see just how many links per domain each competitor has. If you see a website that appears to be linking to a website a lot it is usually because either the competitor owns the website or has purchased a link on the website. To find out if your competitor owns the website try running a Whois on the domain.

Also check the content of the link data for how many pages listed are from the competitors own website. If you see a great deal from their own website then you can be relatively assured they have good content which is important to note; perhaps you need to focus on better content on your own website OR how to get others to notice your good content.

Now the most logical step is to figure out which links are worth getting for yourself. Chances are a decent number of the links you found are from pages that would be willing to link to you as well.

Don’t Lose Focus on Your Own Website

So now you have a few tools to conduct a cursory competitor analysis. You will likely find some very useful data that you can act on but is this all you need to do? Is a competitor analysis going to be the golden key to increased profits? No. I have a great deal of faith in competitor analysis because I know determining what a competitor is doing successfully can improve a marketing plan dramatically. That said, you also have to pay close attention to your own website and the quality information that can be gained from using free tools like Google Analytics or handy paid tools like ClickTracks Professional.

Using a quality analytics program will allow you to get as granular as monitoring the success of each page in your website with details such as: where did visitors come from (somewhere in your site or from another?), how long on average visitors stayed at a particular page, what keywords led visitors to the page (if any), and much more.

With proper analytics you can actually compare and contrast the effects of minor edits to a page’s content; this is called multivariate testing. For example you can run tests to see if you can improve the retention of visitors by adding a better image or a better tag line because you noticed that many visitors were entering at a page deep within your site that was not originally designed as an entry page.

Truly, the sky is the limit with analytics and it would be irresponsible for me to state that competitor analysis is more important than making your own website run smoothly. Do yourself a favour, if you haven’t already got an analytics program running on your site, get it done now or learn how to use the one you have; it will pay off in the long run. Especially when you want to monitor the success of the tactics you applied to your site from your competitor analysis findings.

Ross Dunn is the CEO and founder of StepForth Web Marketing Inc, a web marketing company founded in 1997 and based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Ross Dunn is a Certified Internet Marketing and Business Strategist (CIMBS) with a background in web design and online marketing. His broad Internet experience in combination with a talented staff has made StepForth a name synonymous with top results.

Last month we had so much to report that we skipped over a Lunarpages interviewee! So this month we are making up for that hardcore with an interview with one of the most influential and well-respected members of the web hosting community. This guy is so big that you will absolutely not believe we got him to sit down and agree to an interview for our Newsletter!

He’s collosal. He’s spectacular. He’s….MITCH KEELER.

*fangirls go wild*

Mitch not only writes for our web hosting blog, Newsletter, and takes care of our LunarForum community and pre-sales customers, but he also hosts his own podcast, runs some incredibly-successful websites, and knows just about all there is about web hosting and the industry. We figured it was finally time for a good, old-fashioned sitdown with our buddy Mitch.

Hey Mitch! Thanks for taking some time out from writing our Newsletter articles to handle a quick interview.

Not a problem. Nice to be on the other side of the content stream every once in a while in front of my close and personal amigos, the always awesome Lunarpages clients.

You’re another one of those people who work for Lunarpages and does just about everything in every department. So what’s your official job title and what do you do for LP?

I don’t know if I have ever been given one? I guess officially I would be considered a Level One Customer Service Representative, Senior Forum Moderator, Content Writer, Sales Guy, Blogger and Official Odd Jobs Associate. Think I almost got everything covered there.

How long have you worked here?

I have been happy to have been with Lunarpages for a year and half now with the greatest customer base known to man.

You’re a remote worker, which I am quite jealous of at times! Where do you work from and can you tell us a bit about remote working?

Well, working remote (which is something I’ve been doing in one way or another the past five years now) has its blessing and hardships. Sure, there is no commute to work and I don’t have to wear pants if I don’t want to. On the other side of things though there is never really a boundary of “OK, I’m at work now, time to work” or “OK, now I am at home, I can do other fun things now”. It all just blends in together. I love it, but it might not be for everybody. There is a lot of gray area and not much black and white with the work that we remote workers do. Another special thing about working for Lunarpages is I get to spend my day working along side some of the best support staff guys and gals in the business too. From top to bottom everybody offers something unique to the team and I am sometimes in awe of their awesomeness.

You run a bunch of websites as well. Tell us a bit about The Web Hosting Show, to start. What do you do there, what’s it all about, and what makes it super cool and exciting?

The Web Hosting Show, a weekly podcast that I produce and host, was a project I started after writing the Lockergnome’s Guide to Web Hosting eBook. At the time podcasting was just starting to get popular, and it looked like an exciting bandwagon to jump onto. I have been doing it for three and a half years now and it is still one of the highlights of my week to be able to reach out and help or discuss hosting topics for both novices and experts. My goal since day one has been to produce an audio broadcast that is a melting pot for both web hosts and hosting clients so each can learn more about this industry we are all apart of.

Everyone should definitely take advantage of listening for all things Web Hosting related. You also write for and manage Firefox Facts, another website I adore. Personally, I love Firefox and gave up IE a long time ago for its sophistication, but tell us about Firefox Facts and why Firefox is so important that it deserves its own facts website.

Well this was another project that came from an eBook. It started as a project pretty much brain stormed for me by Chris Pirillo. He took a lot of my articles I had done for the Lockergnome.com web site and put them together as an eBook. We needed a device to push the eBook out to the public, so there is where FirefoxFacts.com came into play. It is probably my most popular project to date – we have over 4,000 subscribers to the RSS feed alone. I’ve always been passionate about using Firefox and it is another area where I get to help and inform the mass public about something I really enjoy.

Any other web projects you’d like to pimp?

Well, there is my resume web site, MitchKeeler.com and my own personal blog at Mitchelaneous.com where you can find all kinds of oddball things that have caught my interest.

It looks like you also dabble in website design. What sites or themes have you designed?

Web design is one of those things I like to dabble in, but I am far from being a master at. Reading more about how to do this, or what is the best way to do that is interesting to me and has helped me with the design of my own previously mentioned web site as well as a few Lunarpages powered projects.

Since you write, design, podcast, code, and moderate forums, what’s your favorite thing to do?

Writing was first, so it will probably be my biggest passion. It may sound a little corny but I enjoy anything I do where I can reach out and help people. Almost everything I do on the Web is in one way, shape or form to inform the public and try to help out as much as I can.

And how about in whatever ‘downtime’ you have, if it exists! What do you like to do outside of web hosting?

Well, that goes back into the whole remote workers have no downtime discussion. Seems like I always have a project pending or a task that needs to be done. I don’t mean to sound like I work all the time but I guess the best way to explain it would be that work is fun to me. In my opinion I have one of the best jobs in the world because I wake up everyday loving what it is I do. When it is time to lay back and relax though I have been having a lot of fun with my recently purchased Wii. Just holding back the urge to start up another side project about it.

When I was in high school, I made a list of 10 things I wanted to do before I died, which included 10 things I’ve yet to do. lol What would your 10 things be?

Lists like that freak me out a ‘bit, maybe cause I am a little on the paranoid side or perhaps I don’t want to look back at it ten or twenty years later thinking, “Well, I had better get this, this and that done!”. Call me anal if you must, but if I make a list there is an impulse in my brain that says to get it done ASAP. I would say anybody should be happy if they can look back after the day is done and point out one thing they did they were proud of. If you can do that on a daily basis, your going to be well on your way of doing more than just 10 awesome achievements before you kick the bucket.

That’s an awesome philosophy, Mitch! If you could work from any locale in the world, where would it be and why?

Any golf course (personally don’t know of any by name) across the world. The grass is always greener no matter which side of the fence you are on and I am not responsible for keeping it that way.

Do you have any pets?

Yes, I have a miniature sheltie named Ash (yes, from Evil Dead and Army of Darkness fame). He’s more than enough for me right now.

Amy’s been on an iTunes music kick lately, sending me some awesome music recommendations. What about you? What kinds of music are you into?

Did I mention you can get me on iTunes? For the most part, anything heavy metal or rock-related will tickle my fancy. Also to dive a little more into my geeky side, I have a thing for video game music too – mostly from the Final Fantasy series.

What’s your greatest hidden talent?

I used to be able to stick both my legs behind my head, which was somehow related to my fixation over Weird Al Yankovic when I was young. These days though I can only manage to get one back there.

Okay, so your new nick will be Mitch “the Human Preztel” Keeler. On that same vein, tell us one secret that you’ve never publicly told anyone – a Lunarpages Newsletter exclusive.

I believe in UFOs, my older sister dressed me in drag when I was little and I know every single word in Hulk Hogan’s “Real American” entrance music (also known as “Real American” by Rick Derringer). Gave you a three for one deal, just ’cause I know the Lunarpages customers are so great they deserve it.

LOL We need pictures, Mitch! You’ve worked for a lot of web hosts in the past, so I’m guessing you have some amusing customer stories. Any you can share?

Hmmm… that hardest part of that question is to think of one that won’t get me in trouble. Asking for some sort of photo identification, only to receive a modeling head shot photo is a funny one that comes up more often than you would think. One time I was asking for that information and the guy in question sent me the portfolio head shot. Also, working sales as I have done for so many years you get the oddest requests when it comes to “can I host this type of site?” which some of the weirdest I can’t share here because they would at least be rated PG-13. Just look at some of the weird sites online and think that once upon a time they had to pitch that idea to their web host trying to make sense of it all.

Okay, the most important question of this interview – are you excited about the new Indiana Jones movie or SUPER excited?

Always been an Indiana Jones fan, how could you not be excited?

My point exactly! Aaaand would you rather: eat a worm or a beetle?

A worm, the crunching of the beetle would freak me out a ‘bit.

Go skydiving or climb Mt. Everest?

Climb Mt. Everest, not a big fan of not having ground under me.

Teach a class or be a student in one?

Teach a class, very much related to what I do now in a way.

Eat fast food or a 5-Star Restaurant?

Fast food. I have to respect it as that was where I worked my first job, actually flipping burgers for a local fast food chain.

Listen to music or watch a movie?

Watch a movie, always interested in seeing a story.

Read a book or write one?

Write one, however I think you have to read much more before you are able to write so maybe that one would be a toss up.

Thanks again, Mitch! I hope to see some photos posted soon with your legs behind your head, pretzel-style. Or maybe you eating a worm. It’s a tough decision. hehe