Halloween is just around the corner, but this edition of In The Sphere is anything but spooky. Nope, today we’re going to provide you with a bunch of helpful hints and discussions that have been posted on the web in the last week or so, each of which will surely aid you in your journey toward dot com mogul status. The last entry, however, is a new development that is more than strange. It’s pretty outrageous.

In your quest for blog superstardom, you will inevitable make a wrong turn here or there. OpTempto describes his 5 biggest blogging mistakes. Of the five mistakes described, I am personally guilty of the first one: not using WordPress right away. I migrated my blog later on, but it was a big pain in the butt to do it. Then again, I didn’t even know about WordPress at the time.

Martin Reed of Community Spark is a well-respected blogger in the area of forming and maintaining online communities. One of his most recent posts reminds you that forums don’t have to popular to be good. The true value of an online forum isn’t in the number of members it contains. Much more important than member count are post counts and post quality, because many “members” could be either lurkers or spam bots.

Matt has grown up in an online world, so he knows all about PHP, HTML, and all those other acronyms that web-savvy people seem to know. He also recognizes the increasingly huge size of files we send over the web, so he’s quick to note that Gmail is giving users more space much quicker than before. At the current pace, Matt projects that Gmail will give each user 5GB by October 28, 10GB by December 21, and 100 GB by December 15, 2009.

Darren Rowse, who most people know simply as Problogger, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the 125 x 125 pixel ads that have been popping up on blogs lately. We can see their implementation on Darren’s blog, as well as countless others, including the panda killer John Chow. Are 125×125 ads right for your blog?

Speaking of John Chow, Jeff Kee has discovered a new blog reportedly written by the lovechild of John Chow and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker. This is the result of one crazy dot com love affair that just may have started with a certain RSS competition. Feel free to navigate over to Chowmoney.com, but be warned that the kid isn’t exactly pretty.