This past Tuesday my power blinked out at 6:40am and didn’t return for 12 excruciating hours. No power, no PC, no cable. Agony. My daughter had my laptop so I couldn’t just dash off to the coffee bar with the free wifi.

So I got my coffee at the local Starbucks, came home, and took my pile of biz magazines and newspapers upstairs to where the light was best and began to read. I scanned several weeks worth of DM News, and several months worth of Direct (I love Herschell Gordon Lewis’ back page column) and Target Marketing (another good back page read is Denny Hatch’s "Famous Last Words.")

I also spent a lot of time, more than I thought I would really, with the newly renamed, Website Magazine. I found myself ripping out quite a few articles for further follow-up once my power returned. Here’s some of the good stuff I found:

• If you do any sort of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns for clients, you’ll want to know about Microsoft adCenter Labs and Adcomparator.com
• A nice example of clean, context-sensitive navigation that keeps visitors oriented no matter how deeply they’ve delved into the site. The product is SiteNav and it builds the navigation, breadcrumb navigation, and the site map — and you don’t have to be a tech genius to use it.
• Online form creation is a bear and much of the time, you just can’t use simple email forms. Here’s a company with an easy, nifty idea: FormRouter.
• My real life is complicated enough, thank you very much, but when Sears is thinking about setting up a presence in a virtual world, I need to know more. Get a guide to Second Life and welcome to the Metaverse.
• This may be more than you need to know, but since I do some web design work for small sites, I liked having the basic info on 301 and 302 redirects, mod rewrites, and writing .htaccess files all on page. (Man, I gotta get out more.)

The read is free, and you can get the online edition, print edition or both, also for nada. (And if you hate the idea of killing a tree for a print read, the magazine will plant a tree on your behalf. Go ask the Wall Street Journal to do that for you and see what they say :=)

In fact, all these biz journals are free and worth your time, especially when you have some (like when your power goes out.) So let’s recap, follow the links, and get your subscriptions in.

• DM News
• Target Marketing
• Direct
• And my brand-new favorite, Website Magazine (aff)