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.

A bit about my habits

Normally I browse with Firefox. I use Firefox for all the typical reasons; it’s more secure, has better web staqndards support, easier javascript debugging, Firebug, and a host of other great extensions that improve my browsing experience. However, Firefox is a big memory hog, not as big as early reports of IE8 mind you. There are plenty of intense sites that just don’t perform well for me in Firefox (especially in a terminal server environment) and are sluggish. For those of you that are yelling at me, yes I have Firebug turned off and it is still slow.

First reaction

I was pleasently surprised when these sites were blazing fast when using Chrome today. Quickly looking at the Task Manager, it looks like Chrome is only using a fraction on the resources of Firefox as well.

Putting it to the test

To put Chromes promise of better performance for JavaScript and Ajax applications I decided to pull out all the stops. Benjamin Joffe’s Canvascape is a 3D JavaScript world using the canvas tag. Firefox really chokes on this app, especially in textured mode. I thought that if Chrome could preform well here it probably would perform well just about anywhere.

To my delight Canvasscape runs smoothly and flawlessly in Chrome, even in textured mode. It runs so well it seems that the walking speed may need to be adjusted to as it seems to walk very fast or maybe that is just because I am used to the very slow performance in Firefox.

Conclusions

This first experience with Chrome has been very positive and I hope that future betas and the final product continue to perform this well. Currently Chrome doesn’t have a lot of options, not extensions facility which will hopefully be added in a future beta. Hopefully performance isn’t degraded once more features start getting added to the browser.

On the other hand, early test of IE8 beta 2 don’t look so promising. According to InfoWorld IE8 consumes a whopping 400MB of RAM and executes upto 200 concurrent threads. In short, it uses more resources than Windows XP..yes I mean the OS!!!

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.

Red Hat, Fedora Servers Compromised
“In an email sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it has been revealed that both Fedora and Red Hat servers have been compromised. As a result Fedora is changing their package signing key. Red Hat has released a security advisory and a script to detect potentially compromised openssh packages.”

Mootools Bomberman
Munteanu Gabriel has produced a Bomberman clone using the Mootools javascript library.

Microsoft Hires Jerry Seinfeld
In a marketing ploy to turn Vistas bad reputation MS has brought Jerry Seinfeld on board in it’s $300 million PR blitz. Personally, I think the money would be better spent on development and actually fixing Vista instead of trying to convince people that it’s not so bad.

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).

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.

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.

I have been working with LINQ to XML for the last couple days working on importing some XML data into a database.

I have used LINQ before with very little effort which is why I decided to give it another go for this project.

I got my program all fleshed out and started writing the LINQ query. The XML file was very simple just a root element with a collection of children.

<root>
	<child />
	<child />
	<child />
	<child />
</root>

So when my query kept returning 0 elements I started to get frustrated. Why wasn’t it working? I pulled up the past project I had done using LINQ and compared the queries. They were identical from a syntax standpoint except the new query wasn’t returning anything.

After a few short Google searches I discovered it was because the new query was reading an XML file that was using namespaces.

<root xmlns="http://namespace.uri">
	<x:child xmlns:x="http://x.namespace.uri"/>
	<x:child />
	<x:child />
	<x:child />
</root>

In this case I was able to remove the namespaces as they were not needed and had been automatically add when I downloaded the file from SharePoint.

After removing the namespaces the query worked beautifully as I had originally expected it to.

The long and short of this is watch out for namespaces when you are writing queries for LINQ to XML.

I didn’t take the time to find a solution that left the namespaces in place because I didn’t really have the time to waste if it wasn’t necessary. If anyone can provide some advice or a solution I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Let’s say for example you wanted to call the Win32 MessageBeep method to output an audible prompt to your user when they type something incorrectly. Yes, I know that would be annoying but this is just an example.

First we need to call the Win32 assembly with P/Invoke like this.

[DllImport("User32.dll")]
static extern Boolean MessageBeep(UInt32 beepType);

Now this imports the MessageBeep functionality so we can use it in C#. Now all you do is call it like a normal Method passing the beep type as a parameter.

MessageBeep(0);

It is that simple. P/Invoke gives use some nice flexibility to leverage existing Win32 API functions that may be missing from C# or reuse unmanaged code we have written for other projects.