I am in the IT industry. As a programmer we really have a hard time sometimes. I suppose the biggest challenge of any programmer is to produce a bug free program. Something that is considered the Holy Grail of the programming world.

Here is a good funny list of a program life cycle that I found while browsing the internet. Don't know who the author is.

We have just traveled from South Africa to the UK. Going through both airports is an eye opener. So many differences as to how the employees handle people and customers. It got me thinking, if your blog was a real physical business and you were it's employee, would you be friendly and helpful. Many blogs today are indeed businesses and their bloggers are it's employees. But the question is, is your blog presentable and friendly

.style1 { color:#FFF; Font-weight:bold; } This post is inspired by the really useful, Things I wish I knew and did when I first started blogging. Part I and 10 Things I wish I knew and did before I started blogging.

Contrary to what everyone will tell you the hardest part of blogging is taking the initial decision to put your name to your words and send them out into the world. If you’ve already taken that step I  salute you and welcome you into the fold my brother/sister blogger. Even if you’ve been at it for a few months, if you still feel like you’re lacking some direction or worse still lacking the results you hoped you’d receive this is for you too.

The purpose of this post is simply to help you find a way to manage all your blog related tasks as efficiently as possible during the course of the week.

Be a Jack of all trades and you’ll master some This schedule can be scaled to fit the time you would like to allocate to your blog. I find that I need to go through this scheduling process weekly to determine my priorities for the week since I write for 3 different sites. The key to using this schedule is not how much time you spend on it but how much time you spend on each task.

Broadly speaking these are the areas that a new blogger should be focusing on: Writing Content and SEO - Creating Killer blog posts Networking or as I like to call...

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Welcome to the October 26, 2009 edition of web developers. Once again a fantastic issue. From styling input fields to creating a viral twitter campaign. From Real world texture to online radio. I am sure you will ahve a wonderful time. Read, enjoy and have fun.

Many articles have been written about good design and great quality content when it comes to Blogs and websites. Often we stress one above the other. Probably because of the theme of a particular post or article. But practically speaking, both good quality content and exceptional design is what will make your website or blog.

When we give too much emphasis on one or the other our websites will surely suffer.  One person said it this way: “Web design and content need to go hand in hand. They complement each other. Great content can still rule, provided you don't spoil it with a failing first impression of your website.”

Good Attractive Website Design. For a business this is all important. A good website will become an integral part of your growth strategy and help you increase your customer base. You have to ensure that you work...

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Image author unknown



ReTweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The retweet was not in the original functionality or feature of Twitter. It all began when somebody added the letters "RT" to somebody else's tweet and posted it as their own. This then went viral, every one started doing it, even to the point that there are now services that use retweeting as their primary function.

If you are not a Twitterer, you may not be familiar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will add "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user's name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links. This provides lots of exposure, tons of traffic and might even go viral.

Tweetmeme is one of those ReTweet service providers. You insert their ReTweet button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. The Tweets are counted and are listed as ReTweets. Similar to other social buttons like Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. The effect is that the more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance.

Why is this? Well supposedly, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and of Good quality. They will...

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Inbound links are the lifeblood of traffic and traffic rank for your blog. It not only shows confidence in your blog, but has the ability to spread your brand all over the internet. As with any product there is always someone wanting to be better than you. To your surprise you will probably find that there are a few who have more inbound links and have done their link building better than you. In today's post we look how you can find what links your competitors have.

Finding out where your competitors' links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.

Yahoo's does give more extensive and accurate data. But there is a limit of 1,000 links per website. This is often a problem as some competitors will most likely overshoot that limit. How can you then overcome this limit and yet still find all your competitors links. Well here are a few tips that I found on Sitepronews.com that might help.

Search for Links to Particular Web Pages Include the full URL of any particular page that you might be interested in researching.

link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html

Exclude Internal Links It is external links that you are researching on your competitors site. Including the internal links will skew your research. What you need to do is exclude the internal links so that you are only left with the external ones  You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in: link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com and you'll get a list of external backlinks only.

In Yahoo! site explorer there is a dropdown list that will do the same. That's cool.

Exclude Links Coming...

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Welcome to the October 19, 2009 edition of web developers. This week we have a small carnival that packs a large punch.

seowizz presents Link Building Factors – The Aspects That Really Drive Results posted at Search Engine Optimisation.

Robert Fenn presents Why Any Easy Website Builder Should Start With Keywords « Internet Business Opportunity posted at Internet Business Opportunity, saying, "Designing a website is one of the difficult and challenging parts of the online business. If you are new to the world of online, I would advise against it. Not because you cannot do it. Thousands are doing it. An easy website builder can accomplish that in no time."

General Case Ernsting presents Upgrading Your Rails Development Environment for Snow Leopard posted at MetaSpring Blog, saying, "If you're still having trouble or just looking to update your development environment for Mac's Snow Leopard, check out this post. We walk you through updates to get you back developing websites in no time."

Visual Studio Case Ernsting presents How Wireframes Can Save Your Life posted at MetaSpring Blog, saying, "Ever used Wireframes for website design and development? Ian Wilson looks at how to maximize your Wireframe use."

That...

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Google Wave, the new hype on the internet. But Google Wave is not new. In fact there are other pieces of software that have been around for a while before Google Wave hit the scene. Some have been around for years, even before Google.

Google assimilated all this technology, took on all the new ideas, group it all together, put a new skin on it, upgraded and improved it, and then made it open source.  Viola you have a fantastic product. Add to the fact that this has been done by an internet giant, who has also brought enterprise technology to the common man, thereby creating an internet craze.

But there are alternatives to Google Wave. Some are commercial and have been used for a while, while others are free. Some require some form of client software while others are completely online. The point is that Google Wave is not the only online collaboration, email, document sharing tool out there.

Best Online Collaboration Tools 2009 Lest start of with what is out there. Here is a collaborative mindmap created in real time listing all the collaboration tools you can find on the web. From IRC Chat to Twitter. Everything that you can think of is included. File Sharing, desktop sharing, remote control, chat, video conferencing, project  management, collaborative writing and reviewing. Really everything is there. It all depends on what you need. Sure the only thing is that they are not integrated the way Google Wave is.

Sharepoint Yes Microsoft did it as well....

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The latest craze on the internet now is Google Wave. People all around the internet are scrambling to get Wave invites to test and preview the latest from the internet giant, Google wave. In fact, there’s been so much buzz that you might just not have enough time to read the thousands of articles being released on Google’s biggest product launch in recent memory.

The only way you can test and preview Google Wave is to get a Wave invite. When Google first announced the product you were able to register for an invite. When Google Wave was finally let loose on the public, Google decided to only invite a limited, selected, privileged few. Those few would get eight (8) invites where they could invite their friends to try out Google Wave. Needless to say Google Wave invites became the hottest new commodity and they were like hens teeth to find.

I was one of those select few that got an invite. Don’t ask me how or why, but I do feel important, if only for a little while. I headed over to get my Google Wave Account to test it out. This post is more about my experience, views and thoughts on Google Wave. Because there are hundreds if not thousands of posts on Google Wave all over the internet, I am not attempting to go into too much detail.

What is Google Wave? The best description is probably from those who have the vision, Google: “Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless -- in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is a conversation with multiple participants -- participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It's also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.”

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