Each person I spoke with was totally passionate about their city. Even Jason Calacanis got in on the action – offering me full use of his Tesla for one week if I move the mothership to LA.

It got me thinking – so often we hear about how the only place to create or grow a startup is in a few ZIP codes in California. But we all know that there’s great technology and impressive startups launching from nearly all points around the world.

Here’s my thought – let’s all show off what makes our cities great (SF/SV included). From the startup culture to the social scene  to the costs and show off some of the great startups along with those that are on their way to the top. I’d also like to see a look into general life in each city.

So far we’ve got several top entrepreneurs and bloggers on board representing Philadelphia, LA, New Zealand, Seattle, Portland, Boulder and more. I’d love to get as many cities represented as possible and that’s where you come in. If you would like to show off your city (anywhere in the world, big or small), drop me a line and let’s get your city listed! The posts will begin early next week.

This weekend I will be in Austin and am interested in meeting with any local startups.

1. Must be less expensive than NYC
2. Must have a tech scene
3. Must have a good airport – meaning multiple carrier choices

I have considered moving back to Atlanta where I lived for nearly a decade. Atlanta meets my requirements for 1 and 2 but not 3 as the only airline choice is basically Delta.

I am currently considering the following cities:

• Austin, Texas
• Portland, Oregon
• Seattle, Washington
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Boulder, Colorado

I would absolutely love some input on the cities I’ve listed above and/or other suggestions for places to move to.

It’s important that I move to a city where I can get the word out about my startup along with the ability to fly whenever needed to conferences and events.

Interestingly this afternoon I had a discussion with Mashable writer Josh Catone about my potential move. Josh is also considering moving later this year and has a very similar post looking for advice.

At this point I am planning to visit Austin from August 7-12th and would like to meet some local startups and entrepreneurs. Drop me a line if are interested in meeting.

Featured Jobs:

• Senior Brand Strategist at Red Lever Inc
• Traffic/Production Manager at JWT INSIDE
• Front-end Web Developer at GOOD
• Designer at Demand Media
• Technical Director at Your Majesty
• Web User Interface Developer at Computerized Assessments & Learning, LLC

Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs now!! (it looks like the board has set the jobs to $5 each, better get your jobs posted quick before the bug is fixed!)

I will be at the Cosi tomorrow (Tuesday) from 7:30-8:30am. Feel free to stop by for some breakfast anytime during the hour to talk about your startup, CNN’s coverage of Iran, why fake blogger fights equal pageviews, we can debate the Twitter suggested user list and/or any other topics you’d like to discuss. I will have my video camera - we can shoot a video about your startup as well.

I will also have CN stickers and discount codes for my startup.

Cosi is on the corner of 51st and Broadway and is one block away from the conference center (3 minutes walk). Take the #1 train to 50th, the N/R/W to 49th or the C/E to 50th. Cosi has free wi-fi.

I am staying in downtown San Francisco but am willing to travel for best results. So if you are interested in meeting, shooting some startup videos and rapping about other tech blogs, leave your thoughts on local and preferred time in the comments.

Also – should you decide to place an order with my startup, bring your business cards with you to the CNup and grab a cool bonus 20% extra cards for your order.

Featured Jobs:

• Director, Production and Operations at Disney ABC Television Group
• Senior Interaction Designer at AKQA
• Director, Social Media Solutions at CFA Institute
• Digital/Print Art Director at Brunner
• Executive Interactive Producer at Crispin Porter + Bogusky
• Senior Product Manager at Atlantic Media Company
• Vice President of Engineering at Synacor

Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs now!!

Everyone who attends gets a free CN sticker :)

I am looking forward to traveling from the airport to the hotel on the Seattle city bus system for a travel report on InsideTransit. I assume a trip to the top of the space needle is also a requirement for a first-timer to Seattle? Any other suggestions on must-do touristy-type Seattle-area excursions?

If there is interest, we could do a meetup on Tuesday evening – leave a note if you are interested. Also please suggest some locations — preferably in downtown Seattle. Garage has pool tables – perhaps I could bring my Brooklyn game and school ya’all!

Fun fact: The Space Needle elevators weigh 14,000 pounds each with a capacity of 4,500 pounds. The counter-weight weighs 40 percent more than the elevator fully loaded. Each elevator carries 25 people. Two of the Space Needle elevators are high speed and can travel at a rate of 10 mph, or 800 feet per minute. Actual travel time from the ground level to the top-house is 43 seconds.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.

With that in mind, here’s what I am offering:

• 125×125 ad on all pages of CenterNetworks in our sponsor area – not a rotation (max 5)
• 125×125 ad on all pages of HTMLCenter in our sponsor area – not a rotation (max 5)
• text link in CenterNetworks RSS feed (max 3)

Each option is available for $100/month and you are limited to only one selection. Only “real” startups will be allowed to participate (sorry Facebook) and the term will be renewable for the time being.

If you’d like one of the slots, send me an email at (allen - at- centernetworks – dot com) noting your company and a link to your ad. I will reply to confirm the ad buy or to let you know of your place on the waiting list – ads are first-come, first-served. Payments can be made via PayPal, Google Checkout or by company check.

You can check out all of the job postings, signup for the RSS Feed or receive an email each day with the new job postings.

Special Offer!

To help us test the new job board and to get the postings loaded up, from now through May 1st, each job posting will be priced at $5!! (normally $79). Use the button to place your job postings today and thanks for your patience during this brief transition period.

I’d like to first thank several people who have helped tremendously in the conversion and post-conversion efforts. They include Terry Smith, Zach and Rob La Gesse from Mosso, Matt Cutts from Google and Mark Jaquith. Each of them went way above-and-beyond to help me and I very much appreciate their effort.

When Matt Mullenweg provided a demo of Wordpress 2.7 last year in NYC, I immediately fell in love with the administration control panel. The admin panel has been one of my biggest frustrations with Drupal. The Drupal admin feels like it was developed by a developer while the Wordpress admin feels like it was developed by an end-user. With thousands of posts, it was just difficult to manage. We have a variety of excellent contributors and I’d love to be able to let them post their own stories but never was able to get it working in Drupal. Actually I could have easily created an account for each contributor but the usability was at a point that I feared that their stories might never get posted correctly.

The other two major factors that influenced my decision were that the admin can handle timed postings and auto-save. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve lost over the last two years because I accidentally clicked something and lost the entire post. And many of you know how I feel about broken embargoes so it would be great to actually have timed posting that I can trust.

In terms of theming and front-end capabilities, I’d say that Drupal and Wordpress are basically even. Both have amazing user communities and support channels. It seems like it’s easier to install plugins in Wordpress while Drupal is more extendable in terms of functionality. I do believe that Wordpress is no longer just a blog platform, but a CMS just like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

As my startup continues to grow, the final decision was based around the administration control panel. If I could cut out even just a few minutes out of writing and processing each blog post, it could add up to a chunk of additional time I can devote to my startup. So the decision was made — I will move CenterNetworks to Wordpress. I still plan to support the Drupal community as much as I can and will consider using it for future projects.

I used InsideTransit as my testing ground and moved that from Drupal to Wordpress as well. I will post all of the technical details of the conversion later this week on HTMLCenter. After about 100 (no kidding) revisions of the SQL queries and a lot of help from Terry, we got the conversion done and live.

That’s when the fun started. And by fun, I mean URL hell. You see, it appears that over 1,000 URLs broke because of the structure that Drupal uses for URLs. So one-by-one I had to fix each one – I’ve spent over 48 hours and they still aren’t done – but I am close. What’s interesting is that Google is so fast to index content that as quickly as I fix each broken link, Google was indexing the new link (which was also broken). So close I ordered a celebratory pizza in anticipation for tomorrow.

I thought that once I fix the URLs, my fun would be over and I could get back to writing content and programming on my startup. Again, I was wrong. As I was cleaning up the URLs, I noticed the site template was off in layout. Took a look at the source and hello spam URLs. It’s a good thing I don’t drink :)

I don’t want to share the details of the exploits until I hear back from some of the parties who are investigating the matter. If you’d like the details, send me an email and I will share the details. All of the people I listed above have just been amazing with helping me get the exploit removed and working to get the Google warnings removed. I plan to thank them in the best way I know how — which is to send them NYC transit merchandise. The last piece is to confirm that the Google warnings have been removed.

I will also post later this week my thoughts about Mosso/Rackspace – for now let’s say that they have very good customer service.

So with that, we are now on Wordpress and I think the site should look/act/function the same as before. Replies to comments seems to not be working properly so I’ve turned it off for now. I think the site loads faster than before – give it a try and leave your thoughts in the comments. There is currently no job board on the site – I am working to get one installed and will post an announcement once the job board is live.

Lastly I’d like to apologize for the lack of content around here the last two weeks or so. Now that all of the backend work is done, we can get back to writing content that makes you think. I have a few posts in the hopper this week that will certainly make you think. I appreciate your patience during this transition. Please leave your thoughts and/or any bugs in the comments.

Thanks for your patience during the transition – more to come later tonight.

Update: The changes are now complete. This weekend I will share details of the changes both on the front and back-end. Everything should work and commenting should be easier than before – give it a try and please let me know if you run into any issues. I will be working to correct lots of small issues with URLs and other links.

Thanks for your patience during this very brief transition time.

If you are a startup entrepreneur and would like to participate in the Startup Tips Month, send in your details – you can also suggest other entrepreneurs as well. We are also looking for one ebook sponsor.

Thanks to all of the awesome entrepreneurs who participated in the first CenterNetworks Startup Tips Month.

DOWNLOAD CENTERNETWORKS STARTUP TIPS MONTH EBOOK »

The eBook includes tips from:

• Alex Bard, goowy
• Alex Hillman, WeKnowHTML
• Alison Covarrubias, Ladies who Launch
• Amy Andersen, Linx Dating
• Andy Sernovitz
• Angie Chang, Women 2.0
• Avichal Garg, PrepMe
• Ben Elowitz, Wetpaint
• Benjamin Gott, Indistr
• Craig Walker, GrandCentral
• Curtiss Grymala, Ten-321
• David Weekly, PBwiki
• Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
• James Thomas, WackyLabs
• Jan-Joost Rueb, eBuddy
• Mark Polson, Gradefix
• Matt Curry, PlanbookEdu
• Noah Kagan, OkDork
• Patricia Handschiegel, StyleDiary
• Peter Glyman/Shawn Ward, Geezeo
• Rachel Cook, Minti
• Richard Anson, Reevoo
• Stephan Uhrenbacher, Qype
• Steve Poland, Web2.0forsale.com
• Sumaya Kazi, TheCulturalConnect.com
• Tara Hunt/Chris Messina, Citizen Agency
• Ted Rheingold, Dogster
• Yukiko Ohta, One Team Technologies

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