Geek Daily

As you know I received a request to review a book on Google’s Blogger platform from Packt Publishing a couple of months ago. About 3 weeks ago I mentioned this to you and gave you my first impressions of the book which where completely positive. This book is very detailed on many aspects of blogging.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is perfect for someone that is just starting out blogging or has been blogging for a while but is unsure of how to take their blog to the next level with a customized theme and growing their reader base.

Getting Started

The book starts out by introducing Georgia Peach, a fanatical fruitier. We get a look at who Georgia is, what her business is, and that she has started blogging in hopes of increasing sales and creating a small community atmosphere among her customers.

Although that may sound corny, it shows the beginner blogger how to get their blog off the ground. It also shows us that there really are no barriers in blogging. You just need to be passionate about what you are writing about.

The key points of this chapter are focused on planning. That’s right. Before you even type a word you should have a clear plan in place for your blog. What do you want to accomplish? What is your target audience? What is the underlying theme of your blog? What are the goals of your blog? And ultimately, how are going to achieve those goals?

Time To Pimp Your Blog

You might assume, based on the title of this book, that it will be all about customizing and using Blogger. This simply is not the case. The book dedicates a couple of chapters to customizing Blogger and there are a few scattered looks at specific features related to various chapters but the bulk of the information in this book can be applied to any blogging platform to generate success.

With that being said, chapter 2 is all about customizing your Blogger template and making your blog you own. Having a unique blog is key to standing out from the millions of other bloggers and showing potential readers that you are worth their time to read what you have to say. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that packaging doesn’t matter because it is critical.

Chapter 5 is dedicated to looking at the widgets that are available to you to make your blog more interactive and personal.

Beyond these two chapters the rest of the book is dedicated to promoting your blog and positioning yourself for success.

Social Networking

Chapter 3 gives us an introduction to social media and how it can be used to drive traffic and build our reader base. We get a look sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and lots more and how they can be used to promote our content to existing and new readers.

There isn’t a whole lot I can say about this except that it is an important area and that you really should not ignore it or you may be missing out on hundreds or even thousands of potential readers.

RSS, Link Building, and SEO

An RSS feed is a great tool for your readers to stay up to date on what you are doing and saying without having to visit your blog every few hours to see if they missing anything.

Your reader will take the URL of your RSS feed and enter it into their RSS reader, like Google Reader or News Gator. This will allow them to see all the new updates you post to your blog in their reader, along with all the other feeds they are following, without having to go out to each individual site.

Offering your readers an RSS feed is very important and it should be placed prominently and made very noticeable so your readers can easily find it.

Chapter 6 covers what you need to know about RSS and some features of blogger that help you make your feed available.

Chapter 4 covers a crucial topic, link building. Your blogs failure or success hinges on backlinks. Without them you will not rank in search engine results and you will not be see by the Internet as a whole. Basicially a backlink is a link from an eternal web page to your site. This is what search engines use to determine your blog’s authority level and rankings for certain keywords.

Chapter 9 looks at SEO, search engine optimization. Link building is a form of SEO, but he core of SEO is making sure your blog is configured to perform it’s best in search results. This includes focusing your content on the keywords you want to rank for and tweaking your template’s code to make it easy for search engines to index and evaluate.

Conclusion

I want to wrap this up before it grows even longer. Sorry about that. I wanted to present a concise overview of this book but there is just so much great content in this book that it is hard to do in only a few words.

Some other areas that this book covers, that I won’t go into detail about, are making money through advertising, measuring performance with Google Analytics, and integrating your blog with your existing website.

These are all good topics but I just don’t have the time to talk about them.

Over all this book as a great spring board to get new bloggers launched and on their way to being successful with their blogs. I highly recommend this book and hope that you will take the time to pick it up and give it a read. You won’t be disappointed.

Popularity: 2% [?]

So it’s been a month since I have been running Unbuntu (Hardy) on one of my PCs at home. I just wanted to give a short overview of my experiences so far and some of the things that bug me.

Getting Started

Getting Ubunutu up and running is a snap. The nice installer pretty much takes care of everything. I only had to enter my routers DNS details and I was up and on the Internet, Firefox no less, in probably 20 minutes. Beats the pants off Windows in that respect.

System Updates

Another thing I like about Ubuntu is the updates. They download regularly and install fine in the background. I’ve lost count of the number of reformats I had to due because of bad updates for Windows.

A Bit Of Trouble

Beyond that I am still learning. I’ve installed a few games like FreeCiv and played with my video card settings but nothing too advanced and certainly not without a step-by-step guide telling me what to do.

The one major roadblock that I’ve encountered was trying to install a Jave/JSP development environment. I thought since I was free of Windows and didn’t have Call of Duty or Visual Studio to distract me that it would be a great opportunity to dive back into some Java development.

I installed Java, Tomcat, and Eclipse with no troubles and played around a bit. My problems started when I tried to install Web Tools for Eclipse. I used the update tool built into Eclipse since it seem like the most fool-proof way of getting it installed. The install went fine and evrything finished but when ever I create a web project, class, anything…I get SWT error messages and Eclipse shutsdown. Short story, Eclipse won’t create a web project and I am a little upset.

Not Done Yet

Despite this set back I am pushing forward and determined to become a comfortable everyday Linux user. With Vista a flop and no promise of things getting better I’ll have my XP box for a while still since I couldn’t give up Call of Duty or some of my other favorite games but that is about all it will get used for.

Popularity: 4% [?]

It amazes me that not more businesses are adopting Cloud Computing. With things like GMail and Google Apps available for free and rivaling the expensive desktop suites like MS Office why not use them? There are many reasons why some businesses choose not to use online applications.

Privacy

This is a huge hurtle for advocates of computing in the cloud. Business just don’t trust a 3rd party to host their sensitive email and business documents. This is for good reason too. There is no way to know 100% for sure that someone is not looking thorugh private communications.

That being said for non business uses cloud computing is perfect for the average internet user. You get access to your email and documents from anywhere in the world at anytime as long as you have an Internet connection.

Reliability

A debate broke out on Slashdot yesterday, as often does, in response to an article posted about recent outages of Google Apps and GMail. The article speculated these outages hurting the adoption of online computing. Some commentors strongly disagreed.

As the debate hit upon different arguments and angles the main discussion centered around GMail versus MS Exchange and which was better and more reliable from a business point of view. There were strong opinions on both sides which got me thinking…there is no right answer. No matter which you choose there will be trade offs. It just depends on your specific needs.

Here is a nice list of pros and cons for each choose. You decide which fits your needs and budget best.

GMail Pros

• FREE or just $50/user/year for premium accounts
• 24/7 access from anywhere with an Internet connection
• Solid reliability from Google’s enterprise data center
• Platform independant
• No overhead costs

GMail Cons

• Must trust Google to respect and protect your privacy
• No access if Internet is down, many fault points along the pipe

MS Exchange Pros

• No 3rd party privacy concerns
• More in control (or at least that is the illusion)
• 24/7 web access (some minor limitations)
• Access to stored emails and can send within network if Internet is down

MS Exchange Cons

• Expensive Windows and Exchange license fees
• Large overhead costs
  • Network administrator(s)
  • Servers and backup technology (data and power)
• Dependant on Windows (some may not care)

I am sure I have missed some points on all those list but those are the basics. You decide what you need and what you can afford to compromise on (financially and personally).

Popularity: 6% [?]

About a month ago I was contacted by a rep from Packt Publishing. Packt publishes a wide range of Internet and IT related books.

They had discovered by blog and asked if I would consider reviewing one of their books and post the review on my blog. I was a bit surprised but flattered at the same time. It wasn’t a very hard decision. Free book (I enjoy reading technical books), great content piece for my readers, and a chance to network with members of a publishing company…well, of course I’ll do it :D.

So I receive my complementary copy of Blogger: Beyond the Basics over the weekend and have done a quick overview of the book and have read chapter 1 in detail so far.

One of the things I wondered about while I waited for the book to arrive was what I would learn from the book. I ususally use WordPress for my blogs but have used Blogger on occasion. I was sure I would find some great gems about Blogger that I was unaware of.

After my first run through the book it is clear that is packed full of great content for using Blogger but it also has very valuable information of the mechanics of running a blog from setup, creating a plan for your blog’s marketing and goals, to how to customize every square pixel of Blogger to increase your success. This is a must read for anyone starting a blog or wanting to kick their blog into high gear.

I am looking forward to reading this book over the next couple of weeks, yes I read slow, and will be posting a detailed review of the book which I am sure you will enjoy.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Normally I don’t do reviews because I don’t really care to read them on other blogs. So, that being said if you are like me you may want to stop reading now although I think you may be happy if you do decide to read this.

Before I go any further I just want to make it clear that this is NOT a paid review. I do stand to benefit from doing this review in indirect ways but I was not paid to write this and it is my honest opinion.

I have been reading Jason’s blog over at The University Kid for a while now and I won’t deny the fact that I fall into his category of the passive reader. I like to read his posts because they are amusing and full of great marketing ideas but I rarely ever comment or participate in the discussion. In fact, when Jason first mentioned he was releasing details of a new marketing system and all I had to do to get free access was write a blog post and mention his blog, I thought about it but ended up not doing it. Why? Usually when it comes to marketing systems I am a critic. However, Jason put out his last call to get free access so I decided to do a review because he has proved himself many times in the past with accurate information that has produced results.

That right there is pretty much my opinion of TUK. He offers great information and ideas in a fun way. That makes a big difference. He is brutally honest, giving away most of his ideas for free, which is a breath of fresh air from most marketing guys that are trying to squeeze every dollar out of you that they can.

If you are interested in learning some marketing tips or getting some ideas for some small projects I would highly recommend going on over to Jason’s entrepreneur blog, The University Kid.

Popularity: 6% [?]

This is a follow up to my post on getting your clients involved in your projects. I am going to tell a quick story about customer relations gone wrong and respond to a reader comment about the whole idea being nothing more than a nice theory.

When things go very wrong

Last week my wife came to me and asked, “do you remember that article you wrote about customer’s being idiots?”

She proceeded to tell me that she had just heard that her brother had just been laid of because the company is going under.

Now my brother-in-law make kitchen cabinets for a living and he is very good at what he does. In fact, many of the kitchens he installs are worth more than my house!

Now this whole problem stems from one customer that flipped out and threw a tantrum. Now the company was installing the cabinets as the man had requested except there was an issue with the type of wood he wanted and the finish he wanted. This finsih will crack when the wood ages. So the boss went to the client to talk about the issue, explaining carefully why the customer was wrong and provided a solution.

I am not sure the reason for the blow up, maybe the client was one of those guys that can never except that they could be wrong, but a tantrum ensued and the client fired the campany and refused to pay his $40,000 bill for the work that had been completed.

So that was it, the company could afford to start any new projects because it now owed $40K for materials that were already used.

Luckily the customer consulted a designer who also told him he was wrong so he rehired my brother-in-law’s company and handed over a nice big check.

It’s more than a theory. It’s agile.

Even, though the story went bad it did turn out alright in the end. I know this is not always the case. To prove my “theory”, imagine if the client was not shown the kitchen until it was complete. He would have been far more angry to learn that different wood and finish had been used. Even though he reacted poorly initially the problem was able to be resolved early on and the customer was kept happy.

It is the same with software. You know that the client won’t give you all the details correctly, they jut won’t. So it is important to have them involved to keep the project on focus and clear up issues that are bound to arise.

Now this is not my idea to being with. It has been around for a long time and is called Agile Software Development. Agile Software Development refers to a group of software development methodologies that promotes development iterations, open collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project.

Now I am not going to convince you of this methodology’s worth. You can decide for yourself. Personally, I have been involved in enterprise level development for almost 4 years now and can tell that since switching to Agile style develoment and following the principles of Domain Driven Design that I have been more productive and produce far been software. Check it out for yourself.

Popularity: 10% [?]

This type of customer mentality really drives me nuts. I worked at a fast food joint for 4 years while I worked my way through college so I have seen, first hand, the ugly side of this way of thinking. This mind set gives the customer a puffed up sense of their worth. Sure it is their money that pays for salary and keeps you in business but it does not justify childish tantrums and harsh name calling or cursing because their coffee is wrong (even though you made it exactly as they ordered).

Now that I am on the other side I catch myself displaying some of these tendancies from time to time. Mind you, these behaviors only play out in my head, I am a nice guy after all. I wouldn’t ruin someone’s day just because I have to wait an extra 30 seconds while they remake the coffee.

Luckily for me, I have a beautiful wife to keep me inline. She worked in retail for nearly 6 years before deciding to be a stay at home mom after our son was born. She is always quick to point these things out when I start to complain to her about my bad trip to the grocery store.

What does this have to do with software?

Well, nothing. Also EVERYTHING! This thinking does not stop when a client walks into your office for consultation or for a scheduled development meeting. Yes, the client needs to be invlolved regularly through out the course of a project. They are the experts in their business (domain), afterall.

Let me momentarily digress to say that I agree that the customer should always be treated as the the King. They should be listened to and given all the attention necessary to keep them a happy and loyal customer. Their inappropraite actions, however, should not be tolerated.

Back to the point of the article that I am trying to get to. Applying to development, the client should have the final word on features and other design considerations. They are after all going to the the end user and are the ones paying for it in the first place.

You mean do everything they say?

Of course not! Your client doesn’t know anything about software engineering. Huh? What? How do you treat the client as if they are right and intentionally ignore their stupid ideas? Well, you don’t. I mean, you don’t ignore, seemingly, stupid ideas, you address them.

Your client is the expert in their business but you are the expert in your business. You need to find a middle ground to provide what is best to help the client acheive their goals while maintaining good design for your project.

You will first need to explain to the client why you think this is a bad idea. They will likely repeat why they think it is a good idea. Come prepared with a few senarios that highlight why it is a bad idea. You never know maybe you misunderstood and the client can show you why it really is a good idea and you can refactor your code to accomodate this feature in a sound way. Visual aids and narritive dialog go a long way in resolving misconceptions on either side.

This is why I think it is critical that the client be involved in the various stages of a project. They will help you catch mistakes or errors in implementation or they may even think of new or improved features.

Imagine if the first thing the client gets to touch is the finished project. “Why does it do this? I thought we said it has to do that” will leave both parties frustrated with the project even if you did implement it perfectly to specifications. Then you will get to experience those tantrums I am talking about.

Popularity: 16% [?]

It is no secret that Windows has security problems and that Windows machines get bombarded with viruses and spyware everyday. The problem is further compounded by users that use Internet Explorer and like to click ‘Run’ on those random popup screens asking to install some software.

Forunately there is antispyware software available to help remove the junk we get on our computers. Well, depending on how you look at it, it is unfortunate that this software is necessary, but is a fact of life with a Windows PC.

I have tried a lot of anti spyware programs in the 15 years I have been using Windows and they all provide varying results. That’s why when I heard that Spyzooka promises 100% spyware removal I was a bit skeptical. After doing a bit of reading they have a pretty strong guarantee. In fact, they are the only software promising 100% removal.

Firstly, they have a 60 day money back guarantee. Pretty standard stuff. The nice thing about their promise is that if Spyzooka doesn’t remove every single piece of spyware on the first scan you can send the scan results (there’s a button on the scan results page) to the Spyzooka team and they analize the data and send you a free update to remove the additional spyware it had missed.

With a promise like that and 60 days money back to give it a try I will be testing this out. I would love to get rid of the other 3 programs I use if Spyzooka can do it all.

Popularity: 9% [?]

We all love to hate Sony. In fact, I could make a full time job out of hating Sony and still work overtime. Instead of ranting about some of the reasons I think Techcult did a fine job of it here.

One of the things that really bugs me the most is how Sony crippled the PSP so it could not output to an external screen, like say your TV. So you had these PSP movies that you had to watch on a tiny screen instead of hooking up to your 46 inch flat screen. Thanks Sony. Not a good selling point.

Well, the Zune must have realized what idiots Sony were and decided to do the opposite and include TV out capabilities. You can watch your Zune content on your TV which is nice because seriously who wants to watch movies on a tiny screen especially if you want to show someone else? This may require some extra Zune accessories like a Zune AV cable but that is pretty common.

Another nice feature of the Zune is the ability to stream video and audio to your XBox. Sony could have easily done the same with the Play Station but nope, why would anybody want to do that? It amazes me that Sony is still in business.

On top of it all the Zune has a battery life up to 30 hours. This beats my old iPod by a long shot. Another nice feature of the Zune is the Zune charger. You can plug Zune into a standard powere outlet to charge and not have to plug into your computers USB ports, although that is an option if you want. This bugs me about my iPod I have to plug it into my PC and must have iTunes installed on the computer to charge the device. Not exactly convenient on the road sinceI don’t have a laptop to bring along to charge it.

The Zune seems to take some flack as a second rate player but I like the feature I have described and it easily beats the pants off PSP for any media content. Whether you’ll like if over iPod is matter of preference.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Information Technology changes rapidly and it can be hard sometimes to keep up with the skills required to maintain your career.

Programming is no exception to the above statement. Lately I have been reading books to upgrade my development skills. Programming is not all about the language you use. It goes way beyond the basic syntax to methodologies, patterns, and best practices.

With our companies latest piece of software we truly jumped into the enterprise market. I figured I better get up to speed on enterprise programming techniques as the software is growing fast and will need to be flexible and very maintainable. Consider it a bit of IT professional development.

My first stop along the career training path was to start reading Foundations of Programming Ebook by Karl Seguin which walks you through everything you need to know about programming for the enterprise and writing maintainable code.

This approach to continuing education applies to most trades, maybe not to the extent as IT. The long and the short of it is you never stop learning and you can’t survive in a career without learning new skills as they are presented. Consider professional development like the Natural Selection of the work force. If your skills are weak or out of date you will get pushed out by younger or more educated workers. It’s survival of the smartest working.

Popularity: 10% [?]