Joe and Jamie’s Blog

Well I just hit my 100th spam comment today. It’s rather sad that a very new blog such as mine would already have more spam comments than real ones. I’m glad the Akismet plugin works very well and is part of Wordpress otherwise we would all be pulling our hair out more than we do already.

I have nothing more to say, just noticed it said 100, minor milestone for the blog. Lets see how long it takes to get to 200.

Hats off to Nigeria, Russia, and all the rest of the spam nations, keep up the good work.

Since I am a fairly new blogger with a even newer blog, I am very anxious to get and excited when I see comments. I know there are a lot more than my original two readers now, so please leave a comment if you like something or find anything interesting. I love the comments I get in person, but why not leave your mark here for all eternity?? While I was surfing around my usual round of sites to check daily I came across a post over at Blog Oh Blog about why people should leave comments.  Here are Jai’s 7 reasons to leave comments:

1. Do you know me?

If you regularly leave comments on a particular blog, it will make the blog owner recognize you and also your website. When you do this on multiple blogs, you will be socially recognized in the blogging community. Also, most of the blogs nowadays use Gravatars which can help in branding and getting some popularity for your own blog. I think that leaving comments on popular blogs is the best way to be known around the Internet.

2. Building Community

A community is built around people and their views. Leaving comments is a way of showing that you care and want to share your opinion with others including the owner of the blog. The comments can be a suggestion, feedback, appreciation or even criticism. They are good as long as they are not spammy or abusive. So, even if you are just stopping by, try to make that little effort of writing a comment, even if its just a line.

3. Getting What you Want

You should leave a comment because that’s the only way the blog owner can judge what the reader/customers want without getting a written e-mail or any other form of communication.

4. Link Building & Traffic

Most of the blogs allow you to leave your website link/s when writing comments (Dofollow or Nofollow) for the blog. This can help you in getting good inbound links and also some additional traffic to your site.

5. Selling yourself

If you are a service provider or have something to sell, comments can be an unobtrusive way to do this. I am not asking you to write your sales pitch in the comments but when you build a relationship with the people through commenting on their blogs, it gets easy to sell your wares to them. Cheap advertising for you

6. Go down in the Blogging history

This is for the people who do not run websites or blogs but just like to surf the Internet. Someday, when someone tries to search for your name on Google, believe me or not, if you mentioned your name in the comment author, the search results will pop out the comments that you wrote. For some people, the results can be very fascinating

7. Show off your writing style

Finally, if you have good written English skills, comments can be the platform where you can flaunt them. A lot of people will read them.

And last but not the least, when you leave a comment on a post, it is sort of a reward or a small prize for the blog owner. So, you know now what makes leaving comments so special! Go on, leave a comment and show me that you learned something

I found it very interesting, so support Jai and check out the original post here.

Tired of hearing about this yet? Regardless of your answer, here is more on it.

Paul at the Homeowner’s Blog recently posted an excellent article on a method of saving gas while driving. He backed everything he said up with equations and accurate results. I couldn’t say it better myself, so please read his post and its comments.

Click here to read Paul’s article on the best way to increase fuel economy.

I bought some more domain names this weekend. I was bored and stuck in front of a computer which never leads to anything good. I have had some idea of creating informative blog sites on basic computer and networking troubleshooting tips and guides. I started snooping around GoDaddy for some catchy names and found that they were all taken, like always. Some domain names were available for a premium price of two grand, but I don’t have that kind of cash to blow right now, especially when I don’t have time to make the site bring that much money in fast.

Here’s some of the names that I purchased that were surprisingly available for regular price:

• networksystem.us
• systemnetwork.us
• techadmin.us
• networktechnician.us
• systemtech.us

I picked up the same domains with different TLD’s (top level domains) along the way, whatever was available.

I wanted to get a few other domains, but they were too pricey. I searched around and found Sedo.com, a huge domain name aftermarket. Sedo.com allows you to actually bid on the site with the owner, rather than just pay the price posted on GoDaddy. After a few days of haggling with owners that wanted thousands for sites with absolutely no traffic at all out there, I obtained these two sites this morning:

• networkadministrator.org
• networkadmin.us
• systemadministrator.biz

What is great about networkadministrator.org is that it is seven years old and had a page available, it was not just owned without a site up. This means that it should be known to search engines and possibly already bookmarked by others and have links out there. You don’t make it in this business without links. I am in the process of getting the domain transferred to me now. There are a few more I am interested in, just have to keep beating the price down, hoping the owner doesn’t close the negotiations. [UPDATE] Just bought systemadministrator.biz while I was posting this for a fair price for a four year old domain, made for a fun night.

For these sites, I think I will start out using blogs to host the content. They are easy to set up and use, as well as free. The person who created this blog here as a whole slew of blogs, some free and some really nice premium templates. I really like a few of the templates at Blog Oh! Blog. You can check out the templates here.

I am out for now, going to start uploading the main templates now!

I came across the NextGEN Workpress Plugin tonight. I was looking for something to do a nice gallery or slide show for pictures on the blog. The plugin can be found here. So far I am having an issue getting the thumbnail pagination to work, but if I leave it showing all the images in the post you can click on it and the pagination works for the full image size. It’s pretty cool. To see what it can do/looks like, go to the link above and click on FAQ.

These are some of the features:

• Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
• Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
• Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
• JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
• Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
• Slideshow : Full integrated flash slideshow
• TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags
• Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
• Language support : Translated in more than 15 languages
• Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
• Tag support for images : Append related images to your post
• Meta data support : Import EXIF, IPTC or XMP meta data
• Sort images feature

Over the past two days I have been tweaking the look of the blog. I have modified the template to show 4 posts on the main page, rather than the default 1 post and small boxes to display the older posts. I also removed the older post boxes, to me they were just ugly. I also encapsulated the posts in borders, I think it looks better than just post after post with nothing but a title header to separate them. I found a cool plugin to place related posts in each posts, hopefully driving some more page views and reading.

These are the obvious things that anyone that has been checking the site regularly (the whole 2 of you) would notice. The little things were playing around with the placement of advertisements to make sure they all looked the same on each page and weren’t put into boxes. I also moved around the widgets on the sidebar to allow me to show more recent comments and recent posts, especially since I removed the older post boxes from the blog.

Hope everyone likes it!