There is something to be said about lifelong learning. Even if you are not attending school anymore, there are a lot of lessons yet to be learned. In navigating through the blogosphere this week, we have uncovered these useful tidbits of information and fodder for discussion.

Amy Derby, like a lot of freelance writers, struggles with finding a healthy life-work balance. In her search for such a balance, she has discovered that it is easiest to attain when you have no life. Does this paradoxical or contradictory to you? You aren’t alone.

Miss604 is at Northern Voice and she attended the talk by Chris Heuer. There, she is learning about the death of advertising. People don’t want to be “sold” on anything anymore, and that’s partly why campaigns like the “Will It Blend” series of videos on YouTube are so successful.

Sonia Simone may be one of the successful few, but she is also able to explain why you can’t make money blogging. Taking a look at such prominent figures as Fake Steve Jobs, it’s clear that having a big audience does not mean that you will necessarily make a lot of money from your blog. That’s just one part of the ever-elusive formula.

Consumerism Commentary brings up an interesting point regarding the ongoing credit crunch and economic downturn. Is it better to walk away when it comes to your house and mortgage? If you are paying off an interest-only $400,000 mortgage but your home is only worth $300,000, does it make sense to get foreclosed on purpose?

Roger Ebert takes a moment to reflect on his old friend Gene Siskel. The two shared a very popular movie review television series for a number of years and it feels like just yesterday that we saw Siskel and Ebert on the balcony. Learn about the origins and development of their professional and personal relationship.

This week we’ll be going over how to install Webmin, a web-interface for system administration. We’ll be using it to configure our DNS, as it is much easier than creating the configuration files manually.

Start out by downloading the latest version of the .tar.gz of Webmin, over on the downloads page. Then decompress and unpack the file.

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.450.tar.gz
gunzip webmin-1.450.tar.gz
tar xf webmin-1.450.tar

Replace 1.450 with the Webmin version you downloaded. We can now change our working directory to the directory we just extracted:

cd webmin-1.450

Now, we can run the Webmin setup script. It is a shell script, so it will prompt us for some configuration options in our SSH window.

./setup.sh /usr/local/webmin

It will ask you a couple of questions, most of which you can just hit “enter” to, to use the default. You’ll need to choose a username and password for accessing the Webmin panel. You can answer “y” when it asks if you want Webmin to load of boot.

Once you have finished installing Webmin, you can access the Webmin panel at http://SERVER_IP:10000/ in your browser. Login using the username and password you choose during the Webmin setup.

Next week

Next week we’ll be going over setting up our DNS to begin accepting domains on our server. Stay tuned.

A big part of your overall marketing strategy will naturally involve your company website. For a lot of the ads that you place on the Internet, through print, radio, or any number of other avenues, there is a good chance that you will be directing your potential customers toward your website for more information.

Naturally, you’ll want your website to answer a lot of the questions that potential customers may have about your business, what it sells, and why they should choose you over a competitor. Another major source of potential traffic is through search engines, so you’ll want to have some SEO efforts in place as well.

In addition to the text posted on your company website, you’ll also want to make sure that any embedded images are also search engine optimized. Just as you would include the ALT and TITLE tags for all your images on a regular blog, the same practice applies to company websites as well. Since search engines can’t “read” an image, you need to tell Google what the image contains by using these ALT and TITLE tags.

Some websites take this knowledge to an excessive level by stuffing way too many keywords into the ALT tags of their images. In effect, they can have a very clean-looking website from a visitor’s point of view, but the quick look at the page source reveals a lot of extra clutter. This may sound like a clever SEO keyword stuffing technique, but most search engines can recognize this as spam or “gaming” the system. As a result, the technique can do more harm than good.

Yes, you should include the ALT and TITLE tags for your images, but don’t overstuff the keywords.

So, you are starting a blog now and wish to stand out in the cyber world. Well the cruel reality you might not know is that there’re 135 millions of ‘you’ according to Technorati. Yes, as a matter of fact, blogsphere is a crowded place. Apparently, it takes a lot more than just hard work to stand out from the crowd. You might think you have the best blog design and write the most interesting stories in the world but either one of these will not avoid you from sinking in the sea of blogs.

To success, bloggers need more than just writing interesting blog post. Search engine optimization (SEO), for example, is a crucial skill that every blogger should learn. By ranking better on search engines, you increase the possibility of your blog being viewed and expand its readership. While we might need an expert to perform advance SEO work; the basics, however, are not too tough to be done by ourselves.

In case you are willing to learn, here are the essential guides to bear in mind.

1. Study your market by doing detail keyword research

Before you start any SEO work, it’s important to know your direction. Good keyword research reveals your market trends and the competition. By targeting related keywords with low competition and high demand; you simply avoid tough SEO fights and increase your chances to be viewed by searchers.

To get the job done, you might want to check out Keyword Discovery, Google Keyword Tool, as well as Word Tracker – these are among the best keyword tools you can get online.

2. Write unique and keyword rich title tags.

A page title (namely the Title tag) is the most important onpage SEO element. Be very sure to include keywords in your title tags and do not repeat your title tags on all your web pages. In case you are running a WordPress blog, check out Stephen’s WP plugin on the title tags. It allows WP users to optimize their blog title tags easily and it’s highly recommended.

3. Get your own domain and hosting

Please, stop sweating on the blog that you run on free platform. Blogs on Blogger.com or WordPress.com are way too difficult to promote. A blog with the .blogspot or .wordpress extension project the ‘amateur image’ and it simply drives most webmasters away when you are suggesting them for partnership.

Hosting services nowadays are dead cheap; while domain name is often given for free when you subscribe to their services. BlueFur Unix hosting package for example, cost less than $7 per month and it allows you to host unlimited addon domains. So get your own domain name and web hosting as soon as possible.

4. Write link baiting blogpost

With the rise of Web 2.0 technology, gone are the days where you can trash Internet with junk contents. In fact, building informative too, is not enough. What you need to do is to create the kind of content that can grab readers and social bookmark users’ attention, Write content that makes people talk about it, share within their online social network, and link to it from their own blog.

All in all, write link baiting blogpost.

5. Write eye-catching headlines to draw reader’s attention

A good headline attracts readers to read further. As studied by Brian of CopyBlogger.com, 80% of the Internet readings are done on headlines. So make sure you spend enough effort in constructing your headlines for next blogpost.

What’s more about a good headline is their indirect SEO impact. Getting more readers to read further in turn offer better chances of a reader (who had read your post) write about you on their blogs. Such natural links are crucial and it offers valuable SEO values.

6. Use Heading tags appropriately

Headline tags are often misused by bloggers. Check your blog theme, does it have a tags on the sidebar with irrelevant heading text (example: Calender, Categories)? If so, your blog need more SEO work. To make sure your blog is well SEO-ed, one top thing to do is to remove or modify these headings into keyword-rich headings.

7. Construct proper internal links

Proper linking allows your users and search engine spiders to reach your content easily. A keyword-rich internal link offers indispensable SEO value and it helps your blogpost or page rank higher on search engines.

8. Quality inbound links are important; get them as much as you can

Basically a big part of the SEO work is all about link building. To rank high in search engines, Google especially, you need a lot of quality inbound links from related websites. Exchange links wisely with other blogs and websites in your industry; write guest posts for related blogs; stay active in well known related forums – these are some of the few ways you can develop incoming links for your blog.

9. Insert relevant keywords to image alt text

It’s always a good practice to insert descriptive keyword-rich alt text for your images. A relevant image alt text helps search engines spiders (as well as your users) to understand your images better. It in turn increases your blog’s SEO scores.

10. Avoid canonical issues

Originally, blogs built can be viewed in two editions: the non-WWW version and the WWW version. However, search engines are unable to recognize the issue occasionally and penalized innocent blog owners for putting up duplicated content (same content for http://www.yourblog.com and http://yourblog.com). Even if there’s no punishment imposed, the blog indexed twice will have difficult time to rank high as the back links are pooled over two separated pages.

To avoid this, simply create an account with Google Webmaster Tools and tell them which version of your blog is preferred. Alternatively, a simple 301 Redirect code in your root .htaccess file will be sufficient to prevent such hassles.

This guest article is written by Jerry of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. Jerry inspects and reviews web hosting services based on his own usage experience. Readers looking for honest hosting advice are recommended to visit his blog at Web Hosting Secret Revealed.

Would you like to guest post on the BlueFur Blog? Send me a tweet on twitter if your interested.

Continuing on with WordPress’ database manipulation functions, we’re going to be talking about a class that will allow you to do more complex SQL queries, while still utilizing the WordPress API. The WPDB class provides many functions for doing direct and assisted database interactions. It is the preferred method for access and modifying the WordPress database, as it attempts to do so in as safe as way as possible.

The functions of the WPDB class are contained in $wpdb, which may need to be globaled if you’re using it within a function or outside of the plugin or theme directories. Now, let’s go over a few of the functions within the WPDB class.

Running SQL Queries

We can use the WordPress API to easily send SQL queries to WordPress’ database. This is the preferred method to interact with the WP database when using SQL (as opposed to using mysql_query()). It works like this:

[code='php']$wpdb->query('query');[/code]

If there are any results to this query, the number of rows affected will be returned, and the result will be temporarily stored in $wpdb->last_results. If there are no results, 0 will be returned. If there is a MySQL error encountered, it will return FALSE.

Protecting Queries From SQL Injection Attacks

Before sending SQL queries to the database, we should always take precautions to protect against SQL injections. We can easily do this by using $wpdb->prepare. You should prepare your query whenever you’re using SQL to interact with the database (when you’re using a prebuilt function for easily accessing the database, it isn’t usually necessary). Here’s an example of preparing a query:

[code='php']$wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare("
INSERT INTO $wpdb->postmeta
( post_id, meta_key, meta_value )
VALUES ( %d, %s, %s )",
10, $metakey, $metavalue) );[/code]

When using $wpdb->prepare, replace any data you’re submitting to the database through your SQL (eg. variables, string, integers) with %s for a string and %d for an integer. Then, list (in order) the strings, integers or variables you want to replace the %s and %d‘s with as parameters in $wpdb->prepare.

Next week

Next week we’ll continue to go over more functions of the WPDB class.

One of the lesser known features in WordPress 2.7 is the ability to make a “sticky” post. In essence, you can choose any one of the posts from your blog and always have it displayed at the top of the page until you choose to no longer designate it as “sticky.” Also, it is possible to designate several posts as stickies, and these will still appear in reverse chronological order.

When it comes to many of the forums on the Internet, having “sticky” threads can come in very handy. This way, the same questions are asked over and over again, because a FAQ thread can be stuck at the top of the forum. The same can be used with a WordPress-based blog, should you choose to use this functionality.

One possible reason why you may choose NOT to use sticky posts is that it may give readers the impression that you are not updating your blog. When they arrive on your site, they see the same post at the top of the page and given the reverse chronological listing of blog posts, they’ll assume that everything beneath it is older. At the same time, there may be a certain post that you want to highlight or feature and the “sticky” function may be handy for a short period of time.

To designate a blog post as sticky, go into the Edit Post section of the WordPress dashboard. In the “Publish” area on the top-right, you’ll see a section called Visibility. This is set to Public by default, but you can also make a post Private or Password Protected should you choose to do so. Clicking on the “Edit” link, you’ll find that there is also a checkbox under Public marked “Stick this post to the front page.” That’s the sticky post feature.

What do you think? Would you ever use “sticky” for one of your posts? To highlight a contest or two, perhaps?