Follow Up on The Design Critique

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For those of you that keep a keen eye on this blog, you might have noticed a post about critiquing this blog over on Blogging Tips.

There were some amazing comments, including an analysis by Kevin Muldoon, Blogging Tips owner, and I feel really humbled by those that chose to participate.

Kevin drew a little flack from coming up with a set of criteria for entry, but I think that he handled it well, and I look forward to seeing which other blogs get put under the magnifying glass.

The biggest tip for this blog was to work on scaling back advertising, which I have already started, and work on moving items around to give the site a better flow. Many people seemed to enjoy the content, as well as the branding, but overall it seemed like there were many things people thought could be done better.

It is very humbling to have people put their opinion out there, and while I am still digesting some of what they said, I am definitely thinking about hunting down a great designer to take my current branding and help me take the design of this site to the next level. Don’t get me wrong, DesignDisease is absolutely amazing, and I will probably contact them first, but I think this site is ready for another slight design shift.

Originally posted on September 2, 2008 @ 9:45 pm

Gary’s Blog World Expo Keynote in More Formats

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For those of you that have been complaining about the huge file, or the bad quality of the Viddler upload in my previous post, a friend of mine, Tom Leroux, has created some more great ways for you guys to have access to Gary’s great keynote speech from Blog World Expo.

A nice compact 230MB Quicktime Movie version.
A MP3 version and a M4A version as the audio is the most important part.

Very cool stuff for those that haven’t checked this out yet.

Originally posted on September 29, 2008 @ 8:17 pm

Uber Blogs: Top Blogging Blogs List

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For the longest time now, I have been getting frustrated with a top blog list that I enjoy watching as it continued to focus on the making money online aspect, while I continually moved away from that world. Making money online is great, but I am a blogger, and what I know is blogging, and so that is why I decided to build my own list around blogging blogs called Uber Blogs.

This list will be comprised of blogs that focus on blogging, the blogging industry and teaching others to become better bloggers. It won’t focus on blogging software, nor specifically making money online. It won’t focus on affiliate offers, niche sites, or online advertising.

While there are already a few blogs in the list that span more than one niche, I want to say that the Uber Blogs list will make exceptions based on my own personal feelings when reviewing the blogs.

If you would like to include your blog on the list, there is a short form at the bottom of the list to quickly apply. I will review submissions at least once a week, and the rankings will be updated at least two times a week.

I hope you will all enjoy the Uber Blogs list, and appreciate it as a quick way to find blogs that can improve your blogging skill.

Originally posted on August 30, 2008 @ 3:16 pm

Frustrations With WordPress: No Server Optimization Guide

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Recently, I have been talking to more and more people who are complaining about the server usage that WordPress is putting on their hosting. Some are buying inexpensive shared hosting accounts, some, like me, are on a managed VPS, while others have their own dedicated server.

The amount of server resources used by WordPress varies wildly for these people, with some coming across horrible performance walls with less traffic than myself, and others having much lower usage levels on their servers than I do. The part that bothers me so much is that there isn’t a nicely compiled guide out there to performance tune WordPress hosted blogs.

Sure, there are caching plugins, but going beyond that Matt Mullenweg has said that Automattic has helped hosting environments with their situations so that they can better support more traffic with the resources they have available, and so why isn’t there a basic server performance guide for WordPress? A best practices guide when setting up a server for displaying the PHP pages that WordPress needs to generate, or dealing with MySQL calls, or best practices for caching. Which applications should we be using to get the most performance from our WordPress blogs?

If there are so many great tips out there for making WordPress run effectively in high traffic situations, where is the organized guide for web hosts, or server owners? This could resolve so many issues that my friends are having, and help me reduce the load on my own VPS. Sure, it would take some time to compile, but the guides out there for serving up PHP pages and optimizing MySQL are currently difficult to understand, with little information on the overall benefits with relation to WordPress itself.

Come on WordPress ninjas, it is time to write a best practices guide for server administrators.

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Originally posted on September 13, 2008 @ 6:53 pm

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Keynote at Blog World Expo

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Gary has given me what will no doubt be my daily inspirational video for doing what I do, and I sat with my Flip Video in hand for half an hour to record it the best that I could. Cramped up before the Q&A, but there is still lots of great content in this video.

I will have an embed, flash version soon, but for now, here is the full quality, unedited AVI for consumption.

Gary V’s Blog World Expo Keynote Video – Note: 787mb, 35 minutes.
Mirror #1 – By Erik Boles

I have also added it to Vimeo, and so now have a lower quality Flash version for people to watch. It is about one third of the file size, so it should be easier for those of you that are sick of the nearly 800mb version I uploaded previously.


Gary Vaynerchuk Blog World Expo Keynote Speech from David Peralty on Vimeo.

For more sizes, and downloads of the video, check out Erik Boles blog, where he’s put up a mirror of the large 780mb version, and a Quicktime version that runs in at 207mb and an iPhone version at 22mb.

Originally posted on September 19, 2008 @ 9:34 pm