You may have noticed the wordpress theme I am using has a section for a Headline article and another section for featured articles. Supposedly the best, most thorough or enjoyable post should fill this most loftly of positions. But I have a problem and I would hazard a guess that I am not the only one who has this problem.

I have a friend who has written a 1500 page novel, edited it countless times and is now trying to get it published. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with his dedication and patience to complete such an enormous task. As a blogger I am lucky to have enough patience and dedication to read all my emails without being sidetracked with something else. An analogy of blogging I often use is the primary school classroom. The authors and novelist are sitting on the bean bag in the corner quietly reading their books and us bloggers are running around the room, screaming, hitting other kids, throwing toys, opening drawers, and frustrating the hell out of the teacher. So how does a blogger overcome this inherent ADD issue. The answer is setting short term goals.

March 2010 not only marks the start of a new season it is also the 4th anniversary since the first tweet was sent. Its amazing to think that Twitter, the global social phenomenon has only been around for 4 short years and grown into one of the top 50 most popular websites according to alexa.com. Personally I was an early adopter signing up for my twitter account in late 2006 after hearing positive reviews about it being the next big thing on other websites similar to this one. Despite my almost non-existent participation with twitter since, I am still going to make a claim that may demonstrate my ignorance and marginalise me from every social user in the world.

1. You get hundreds of emails a day

As far as I can tell the successful echelon of bloggers all have this in common. Us mere mortals wanting and begging for their help, advice, traffic, business and wasting their time with our petty request. So if you are getting hundreds of emails (excluding spam) its a fair sign that you have made it.

As a blogger of any niche one of the most difficult tasks can often be trying to find ideas for new posts. It has been discussed many times in numerous blogs but its generally the same advice; write list, top tens, resources, interviews etc. However I thought I will throw my own 2 cents in with some more unique ideas that will will not only provide ideas, but great ones for your new post.

Today I have finally gotten around to adding a feed and a twitter profile for the site. Probably should have done this months ago but it was one of those annoying little task that I never put enough priority on. If you care to glance to your right you will notice a slight change in the sidebar with two little icons taking prominence. Hopefully this will improve the sites retention rate and increase the number of return visitors.

Whilst moderating these comments I have noticed trends with spammers trying to get their links published on my site. Some are plain stupid, some are completely irrelevant to the site and some are copied and pasted across many sites. I think the funniest part of the following list is all of these comments have been collected from my site within the last 14 days only. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences and I expect some more classic comments added in my own comment section below (don’t worry I will approve these ones).

I am soon to implement a small change to my posting style. As you (hopefully) know I spend a good portion of this blog experimenting with products, ideas and services. After all the only way to know if something works (or does not work) for sure, is by testing it out. However in my haste to answer so many questions at once I have ended up with a lot of open articles without conclusions. The problems include:

New articles with only half the content look unfinished and unprofessional
By the time I …

You may have noticed that one of my favorite online activities is buying and selling websites. Pretty much everyday I start out my day by quickly scouting Flippa and Digitalpoint to see if I can find a bargain or a site that complements my current portfolio. Anyway I thought I would share some of this hard work with my loyal readers and as such, I have decided to post the best sites I could find for sale (at reasonable prices). If you are thinking of buying an established website check out these listings first:

Just before Christmas I was doing a blog design for a client. The client was a difficult one who seemingly hated to divulge any information. Anyway my fiance went into early labor (6 weeks early) and my son was in intensive care for an indefinite period (turned out to be 2 weeks). As a result of the news I simply couldn’t deal with the client or the project, even if I chose to delay the project I just did not want to think about work at that time. I set up another designer to take over the job and then explained to the client why I couldn’t deliver. When I did this it got me thinking about all the excuses I have been told by designers, programmers and freelancers over the years. Whilst I will concede every now and then