JaredQuinn.info is celebrating it’s first birthday, and what a way to celebrate!! We’ve just started clocking an average of 300 unique visitors a day, peaking at 996 unique visitors a couple of days ago.

What’s in store for the coming year?

Lots of the same, more themes for WordPress, IceWM, XMMS, gkrellm.. more plugins. Video related info is coming soon, as it’s what i’ve been tinkering with lots lately. Kate’s been busy with POVray, so we should see some scenes and samples of that coming soon too!

Direct payments are now accepted from leading credit cards as I have upgraded my PayPal account to a business account. This means that customers no longer require a paypal account to make payments to me.

I have now allowed all visitors to post comments without the need to register first. If this is abused I will remove it, however I am hoping to get better feedback from customers and users of my themes and plugins without them needing to go through the extra step of having to register first.

Feel free to comment…

Please bare with me while I re-organise the categories on this site.

In an attempt to make the categories more logical and useful, I have began a full reorganisation of the structure, and categories that posts appear in. You can find the full list of the Categories under “Browse Posts/by Category”. As part of the re-org I have split the previous Browse Posts page into three seperate pages, the primary “Browse Posts” page will now show the most recent posts from all categories, however this can be filtered by digging deeper into the ‘by xxx’ pages under “Browse Posts”.

If you have any comments or suggestions on how I can improve the navigation and browseability of the information on this site, please do not hesitate to either contact me or comment here.

In other site news, I have now upgraded WordPress to version 2.0.4, which fixes around 50 (small) bugs in WordPress, and enhanced it’s security even further. I urge all WordPress users to make this very simple upgrade (especially if its done from an existing 2.0x install).

This book is guarenteed to keep your inner-geek happy.

I have just finished reading Corey Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe”, and found it to be hilariously funny (in the LOL¹ kind of way). Corey is an excellent writer, and this particular book develops into an interesting tail of comedic techno-drama.

It’s light and fluffy, and I personally knocked it over in two sittings, I could have easilly done it in one, at no point in the story was I lost, or even contemplated putting it down. It takes a fair lot to pull me away from a computer screen for long enough to read a novel, and even more to then go and blog about it, but Corey’s futuristic in a current-day kind of way world with twists of hillarity from occasional “fartmobiles” and a mention of a “metric shitload of porn” had me totally absorbed.

What is even better is that Corey is a fellow WordPress user, whose personal blog can be found at http://www.craphound.com. He also blogs at Boing Boing.

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.

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….

This site has been down over the last couple of days due to an oversight on my part which caused it to be shutdown by the company I lease the server from. Unfortunatly it took a couple of days to resolve the issue, but thanks to their support department it is now back up and fully functional. Additional measures for redundancy have now been added, including several additional DNS servers and a backup MX server.

This site has now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.3, a little further behind release than I’d normally like to be, but things have been so busy lately I haven’t had a chance to do it. This release is primarilly a security update and I’d personally advise all my clients to upgrade as soon as possible.

I am available to do upgrades if you run into any issues with your upgrade or would like it done for you, please don’t hesitaste to contact me.

I’ve made a few other changes to the site during the process which will make future updating easier, mainly to do with the paths WordPress was installed into and some customisations i’ve made. If you notice any issues on this site, please contact me also.

Giving up extra real-estate on a page over to ads is a hard choice to do. A balance needs to be acheived between the space used for advertising and the user experience. You want ads to get noticed by visitors (so they click), but you don’t want the experience to feel like they are sitting through 15 minutes of ads to watch 5 minutes of quality television (dispite how well it works for commercial tv networks).

The layout and design are important to keep things asthetically pleasing for the visitor, however making ads stand out enough to be clicked on is also important as far as adsense revenue goes.

I’ve added an extra AdSense block to the foot of single posts on this site, to see if they get noticed.

Currently my banner ads across the top of the page, which take up very little real-estate, blend in well with the rest of the site and do not get in the way are the most popular ads to click on at this site. The little google ad bar down the right hand side under the contact details and paypal link are probably placed very badly, because they never get noticed, or if they do rarely get clicked on.

So I’m trying an ad block below the content before the comments when viewing a single post (not on search results or semi-static pages). I only want to keep 2 ad blocks on the site in total, as I really am against bombarding the users with ads, but unless the advertising is actually getting some attention i’ll continue to tweak it until it does, as without it getting attention I would rather not have it at all.

I’ll post again on this topic in a couple of weeks and let you know the results of my adsense experiment.