Sitting down to relax today after a lengthy night’s work on a WordPress blog for a new client, I turned my attention back to jq.info and decided I needed to look about for more ideas on promoting, and bettering the site.

It’s one of my many obsessions. I ended up with the Google search successful blog promotion. The first page of results wasn’t too bad, a few hits from sites that any search in this area of research tends to pull up, the good ones.

• How to Blog for Fun and Profit
• Pro Blogger

Then, there was an average one:

• Bloke’s Tips for a Successfull Blog

Great content on that one, but the layout was nausiating, especially as i’m currently using Kate’s laptop, binky, and sitting on a lounge a reasonable distance from it. Enlarging firefox’s fonts just slightly made things horrible. At least the content is good, something more then what I can say for the site that in essence caused this post.

Before I go on, I do need to point out that I am not the world’s best speller, nor is my grammar terribly good on occasion. I do often get Kate to have a read over posts and pages of my site to ensure they actually make sense to read (she recently did this on my subList documentation page and made huge improvements).

Anyway. JaredQuinn’s “You Can’t Be Serious” award goes to…

http://www.buildabetterblogsystem.com/

Starting with the fantastic suggestion to:

“Fire Your Web Designer!”

Great idea guys, the last thing the Internet needs is more badly designed, unusable blogs!

“You should be blogging because blog attract readers who make more money, and are more likely to buy things online!”

Excuse? Because Blog Attract Readers? This sort of grammar in a far too large headline in the middle of the page is just screaming for me to want these guys to makeover my blog!

Anyway, the page looks so bad, it goes on and on and on, I’ve read most of it now a couple of times and sat here amazed at how much like a 30 minute telemercial, including photos and snippets of “oh your so wonderfull.” from people who may have used the “service” these guys offer - which seems to be selling e-books?

They do have blog, it can be found at http://www.buildabetterblog.com, but when you take a look at posts like this one ones head begins to spin violently ready to explode.

When it comes to technical services, they should be provided by technical people, organisations and people who know what they’re doing, not just a marketed product. So on that note I’m giving up the idea of “blog promotion”, the good old “word of mouth” (or in this case inbound links and Google search results).

I’ve given the “You Can’t Be Serious” award earlier, now I’ll give out my “So Serious, It’s Good For You” award:

• Redwood Virtual

  Virtual Linux Servers - the website speaks volumes. No glitz, no glammer, just the facts.

• SEO Company

  Search Engine Optimization - again the website speaks volumes. No glitz again, just the facts… and Bob’s Hat.

• VCS Web

  DNS Hosting and other goodies - see a theme here. Website is again reliable and functional, much like the service they provide.

… oh and of course jaredquinn.info….

It’s crazy when the same thing pops up from two different sources within a day of each other, and in this case it was the need to be able to “inherit” Meta data from parent (and further ancestor) pages in WordPress.

I had already developed most of this plugin as part of another plugin specifically designed for a specific purpose, but this portion has been removed and genericised to form “ATEM” (pronounced ate-’em).

You can find download ATEM 0.1 here.

The majority of my time is currently spent answering a few questions from prospective clients, I figured I should cover a few of these questions here.

Which Blogging Software should I use?

I may be a little biased with this one, the obvious answer to me is WordPress. Why? Because WordPress is flexible, easy to use for non-technical people, easy to extend for the slightly more technical, and completely customisable for the fully technical.

Can WordPress do …

Yes. Yes it can. Whatever it is. It may not be able to do it now, but with the right amount of time WordPress can be setup to do almost anything you like. An example of this is a job I am currently working on which has extended WordPress to include a full CMS with specific options dedicated to storing and sorting Printer Information.

Why should I blog?

You should blog for multiple reasons. The most common reason I recommend businesses start blogging is to drive traffic to their website and to keep in touch with a client base for regular product and market information.

Driving traffic to your site depends on your content. A blog is the simplest way to regularly publish and provide up to date info to your customers.

What is SEO?

SEO is simply Search Engine Optimization. In more detail it is customising your website to achieve better results in a search engine. The most effective way of increasing your search engine ranking is a simple on. Providing content people want.

If people link to your content, your rank on google will increase. More people will link to your content if you provide good content. More people will link to your content if you provide fresh, updated content.

Why do I need a good search engine result?

Rarely will users go past the first page of results returned by a search engine. You should aim to be in that first page on a search for relevant search terms.

Why do I need a Consultant?

Do you re-wire your house, do your plumbing, mow your lawn, fix your car and television? No you generally find someone who is experienced in doing these, or can save you money by really knowing what they are doing.

Why should I pick you?

Sure Joe Bloggs has a cheaper price. But does he have 10 years experience in IT, with a focus on Web Technologies? Is he also a competent programmer, with the ability to provide custom code for a specific job? Does he also have graphics and HTML experience to provide layout tweaks. Does he understand XHTML and CSS standards, and strive to meet those standards?

I can answer yes to all of these questions and more.

I also provide my time voluntarilly to the WordPress community, answering questions in the support forums and providing plugins to WordPress released under the GNU Public License, making them free to use, distribute and modify.

I’ve spent some time recently tweaking kate’s laptop’s X configuration.

The display is an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY, using a Synaptics TouchPad.

The system is currently running Gentoo, Kernel 2.6.16 (r12) and X.org 7.0.

The major changes to the configuration have been due to an upgrade to Xorg 7.0, the fact that the nipple (Trackpoint) was not working under the previous configuration, and a general clean up.

Xorg.conf