News Update

   I apologize for being absent for a short while.

   My youngest daughter got Pneumonia and ended up in ICU, she was in the hospital for a whole long week, which made me fall behind in everything.

   A customer of us wanted to update his website, but wanted to use WordPress as his content management system.  We came up with some cool ideas and ways to integrate things to their site and make it easy for them.  I was new to WordPress, and my PHP was a bit rusty (we usually use .net as the backend), so besides being backedup in work, I also had something new to learn (WP) and refresh (PHP).

   So anyways, time to work on this blog was very lacking.  But now I'm back on track.

   When I started this blog I was pretty new to the writing blogs thing, I grabbed the easiest and quickest thing I could find, which is blogger, and started off.  After playing around with WordPress, I've been missing out so........  much.  Blogger is ok, it is certainly easy, but the editor has some serious issues where it really screws some things up.  I got to the point of writing everything in Word, and copy and pasting to blogger, just to keep a copy in case blogger decided to nuke the contents.  Well, there is another benefit of using Word.  English is not my first language so it helps a bit with the grammar.  I have a serious problem with using it's instead of its.  I know the proper use, but that Pinky finger just loves to push that apostrophe.  Word helps me notice those little typos.  But it does take me more time.

  The other thing I truly hate about blogger, which is somewhat related, is they way the editor handles links.  If I want to have a link to open up a new tab window, I have to manually go and edit the html every single time.  I wish the cursor would actually stay in the same place (ala Dreameaver), but nooo... as the post gets longer, this becomes even more of a pain.  Last, the editor every once in a while is unsuccessful in saving your changes, but it tells you it did.  The only way to know for sure is to navigate away from the page.  If you get a warning, then it isn't saved.  I once lost an entire post because of that reason.  If a post is getting long, I tend to copy the html code to notepad, just in case it decides to nuke the post again.

   So... what does that mean?  Thanks to you, I'm moving the blog to a better place, to a permanent place.  I have enjoyed building this, and I'm very pleased to see that it has helped some people, so I'm going to continue with it and take it up a notch.

  The new home isn't ready yet, and no, it will not be hosted on wordpress.com, but I will use the WordPress software.  So when the new site is up, you will be the first to know.  I will make a last post on this site, which I was already working on before the Hospital visit.

   One thing I must say that it is freaking easy to do with blogger, is to add ads to your blog.  I didn't have much personal experience in that department, knew how to implement it, but no clue on the return value.  That's something I've been asked multiple times before, but could not provide a real answer.  A lot of people think that they can be rich just by setting up a website.  Well, truth be told, adding adsense to the blog didn't make it profitable.  To give you some clue... you make about US $0.13 per 1000 visits, at least that's my experience.  I could plaster a whole lot more ads, and probably improve that a bit, but that is not the goal, the goal here is to help developers like you, the ads where just a tool to learn a bit more, and well, they paid for the registration of the domain name.  :)

   I do have a question though, and please leave answers in the comments.  This came up from a comment in one of the posts.  Would you consider purchasing a downloadable/printable PDF with all this material and some more for say US$5?  Or a book (CD Included)?  (ok. no publisher would accept the $5 on a book price tag I think)  Let me know.  Thanks again.