From the category archives:

Advanced Stuff

Shared hosting: Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys

See the bottom of the post for updates on my adventures with shared hosting..
My experience in selfhosting my blogs with GoDaddy moved from a glowing enthusiasm via consternation and frustration into a deep distrust and disbelief. In this post, I want to take you through the past year, as I discovered some of the issues [...]

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WordPress 3.0 is out. Should you upgrade?

If you don’t selfhost your blog, skip this post. It talks about a common problem all of us, selfhosters have. But if you don’t selfhost, you’re immune to this disease, which has as symptoms:

anxiety attacks,
dizzy spells,
recurring nightmares,
adversity to “check for upgrades” or even “admin menus” buttons,
and above all: fierce regret to [...]

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Basic SEO advice from the expert

For anyone taking blogging seriously, “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is serious stuff. SEO is the craftmanship involved in improving the volume and quality of traffic search engines generate to your website or blog.
As I described in my “Understanding the traffic on your blog” primer, a large part of your visitors stumble upon your blog [...]

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Browser size revisited

In a previous post, we looked at the optimum “blog real estate”: the surface of your blog which is visible on a visitor’s browser window. I mentioned that, according to the statistics from 350,000 visitors my main blog, 91% was using a monitor width of 1,024 pixels or more. Based on that, I suggested you [...]

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RSS to Twitter: The Big Boys Have Arrived

I have posted before about how you can capitalize on your Twitter social community to increase traffic onto your blog. Regularly tweeting the new posts on your blog is the secret. I tweet a few thousand posts per month, accounting for over 100,000+ visits on my aggregator blogs.
What tools are on the market to automatically [...]

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Posterous as an alternative for TwitPic

One of the great many things one can use Twitter for, is to share pictures “on-the-fly” with your social community: From about anywhere in the world, I can take a picture with my mobile phone and within seconds post it on Twitter, for all my followers to see.
The most popular picture-posting tool is Twitpic. This [...]

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Selfhosting your blog. Or not?

In a previous post I touched on the subject of selfhosting in a series about selecting the blog platform suited for your needs. The subject is important enough to elaborate a bit more.
When you start a blog, you have the choice of either using your blogservice to host your blog, or to rent server space [...]

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Automatic Email alerts for new backlinks to your blog

Sites linking back to your blog’s homepage or to a post, are a measure of success for a blog, as we explained before. It is always interesting to check the backlinks, to see what are others saying about your blog, what has been quoted or commented on.
As you know, you can find backlinks via the [...]

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Selecting a blog platform – Part 2: Selfhost or not?

After reading Part 1 in this series, you will agree with me that selecting the right blog platform, the software you will use to create and maintain your blog, is critical. Which of the four platforms we are considering will it be? WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad – Movable Type or Blogger?
Your right selection will be based [...]

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How does your blog score on PageRank?

A PageRank (PR) is one of the main ways to check a website’s “ranking” amongst its peers. Am I talking Chinese here? “PageRank” is Google’s rating (between PR0 and PR10 on an logarythmic scale) of ‘how valuable’ your site is to the web community (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 234,000 books and 1,234,000 articles written [...]

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Understanding the traffic on your blog – Part 1: Traffic Quantity

A serious blog is geared towards its audience. As a serious blogger, it is important you understand your audience, your readers.
When I started blogging, I struggled to understand my blog traffic. Simple and free tools like Google Analytics, gave me heaps of figures and graphs, but it took me a while before I could recognize [...]

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