Business Optix blog now live

The blog of my employer Business Optix has gone live. We’ll be posting there as we roll out new features to our web and desktop products, along with tips and tricks to use the current software and any other company news. Keep up to date by signing up to the RSS feed.

Paste from Visual Studio naughtiness

There’s a nice add-in for Windows Live Writer called Paste from Visual Studio that lets you copy and paste syntax highlighted code from Visual Studio into Live Writer. I’ve used it for a while and had no problems with it. But the other day I looked at the source of the generated HTML and was a little disappointed to find a link to the author’s website with no link text, meaning it never shows up on the page.

I guess it’s OK wanting to get some links to his site, but to do it in such a way as to be invisible to the end user is a little underhand. I’m not sure what a search engine would make of a link like that. Very possibly it will be considered as some kind of black hat SEO and my pages will be downgraded as a result.

So I guess I’ll have to re-implement the plug-in myself. The guy does kindly provide the source code on his website so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get my own version built. Or I guess I can go back to using the excellent C# code format site, which does the right thing by just adding a comment to the generated HTML that includes the URL for the site.

Great titles don't always lead to lots of readers

Some time ago Nick Bradbury (author of the marvelous FeedDemon which is now free!) said that the best way to increase feed readership is to use great titles. Whilst this is undoubtedly true if your blog has a lot of subscribers, the fact is most of us Z-list bloggers don't actually have many people who subscribe to our blogs. According to Google Sitemaps I currently have two people signed up via Google Reader, which I'm pretty astounded by given my tendency to ramble on incoherently about random subjects.

The fact is 90% of my hits come from Google and Google doesn't care about great titles, it cares about matching up search terms to relevant content. One good way to drive traffic to your site is to write about things that interests searchers and that other people aren't writing about, given that if some A-list blogger does write about it you'll get shoved down the search result list. For me, SonicWall, HTML tick marks and Vista sound problems are the most popular subjects...

Anyway, the things to have in your titles are the words people are likely to use when they are searching for something related to your post. If it's in the title, Google will consider the text more important than if it's just in the body of the post somewhere. So forget great titles, have relevant titles.

Blogging is like the lottery

The lottery people Camelot used to say "You've got to be in it to win it". Of course the chances of a big win are tiny but if you never buy a ticket you'll never win anything at all. So it is with blogging, you're pretty unlikely to ever get a big crowd of people to your blog, but occasionally you might get that £10 win. Every post is another ticket in the blogging lottery and every so often you'll get a few hits from one.

Which is what happened with my little post about SonicWall on Vista, if only because nobody else has bothered to post about it. And if anybody wants to know, the latest beta still has the same problems for me, Vista complains that two computers with the same IP address are connected to the network. But I'm coming to expect these kind of issues with Vista. Bring on SP1...

New template

I've finally taken the plunge and upgraded my template for the latest version of the Blogger software. I think the design looks much slicker and the template editing tools in Blogger look more powerful, although I haven't really done much with them yet. I've lost a few things from my template which I will be adding back when I notice them. Edit- Yes, the template editing is much better. Adding tags to posts is a pretty poor experience though. It looks much like adding tags in GMail but the usability is pretty poor. If you add a tag to a post, you're then sent back to the top of the first page of your posts after applying the tag. You can choose to show 300 posts per page but then it all gets very slow and after applying a tag to a post, the post remains selected. This means you have to trawl through all your posts again to find the post to deselect it before adding any other tags.

BlogSpot not very well

Lots of people getting a bX-vjhbsj error, as am I. So you probably can't see this...

100th Post

So somehow I have managed to reach 100 posts on this blog. I was presuming that by the time I reached this point I would be a major web celebrity with millions of readers and I'd be rich beyond my wildest dreams through the adverts on-site. But it hasn't quite panned out that way and I have to say I'm disappointed in you all. Where are you and why are you choosing to read some boring old shite rather than the riveting stuff here? I feel like this kid...

Formatting C# code for a blog

This C# code formatter does the business. Much better than the manual fiddling I was doing before.

OK, I've moved my blog here, because it looks like Blogger has better tools than Bloglines. The old blog is here