Blogging

confessions of a blog addict

‘My name is Norman and I am a blogoholic.’

Two years ago, I started this blog purely as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about.

Two years ago, I didn’t even know what blogging was. I certainly didn’t expect that I would still be doing it two years later.

I didn’t anticipate that I would subsequently play with themes, plug-ins, spend money on a domain, migrate to my own WordPress blog and eventually add Adsense.

how to create perfect tables in WordPress

Create tables, resize, add rows and columns, preview the output and add the finishing touches in Google Docs.

Then simply paste the HTML into the WordPress WYSIYG editor.

how fast is Google Blog search ?

Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.

out with the old, in with the new

A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad.

Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy.

Movable Type 4 (beta)

No one ever asks me: ‘Hey, Norman - why haven’t you installed Movable Type 4 (beta) yet ?’

Well, I just did. The product is pretty impressive but I have invested too much time and effort in WordPress to switch blogging platforms.

Adsense update

After a promising start, the recent introduction of Adsense on this blog is seriously floundering. I am bitterly disappointed with the financial returns in June and my wife is seriously doubting the wisdom of my decision to resign from a highly paid job in IT consultancy in favour of professional blogging on the kitchen table.

Consequently, after an extraordinary board meeting, I have decided that desperate measures are necessary. I have cashed in my £12.50 Adwords vouchers bundled with my Bluehost account and launched a brilliant, inspired, marketing campaign aimed at driving traffic to this site, increasing e-commerce sales and boosting the click through rate.

June spawned a monster

Graham started a technical blog and Andy used the Drupal theme on his new WordPress blog.

I felt left out so I decided to start a technical blog on Drupal with a WordPress theme.

recycle pool

Welcome to the long delayed and much anticipated issue 2 of ‘Recycle Pool’.

We did have a world famous guest writer lined up for this month’s edition but, unfortunately, he got cold feet and decided to pull out at the last minute.

Eddie Awad gets ready to tumble by sharing interesting snippets from his feeds and travels on the Web.

Graham decides to start a technical blog focussed on three letter acronyms (CRM and SOA). Brave man, particularly as his wife is expecting a new arrival - imminently.

blog milestone

100 subscribers Who would have thought it ? Certainly not me.

sit back and watch the money roll in

I have had an innate fascination with Google Adsense and the correct spelling of monetization for a while.

Countless times, I was poised to hit the ‘Unsubscribe’ button while hovering over John Chow’s blog. But every single time, I stopped myself. Is this guy for real ? Is he really making thousands of dollars every months from blogging ? Does he really eat in those posh restaurants ?

This decision to place banner ads and a sponsored search box on this site was not taken lightly and sincere apologies to all my principled, minimalist, long-standing, traditionalist readers.