Faisal Khan

How I started my blog

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:25:00 +0500

Old look

New look

Introduction

I am a freelance software developer and technical writer. I am also the founder of Stardeveloper.com, a website that has articles, tutorials and walkthroughs to help you learn web application development using ASP.NET and JavaServer Pages. At the end of 2009, I decided to start my personal blog where I could talk about some of the things I was working on, in a more informal way, and share some of my insights with fellow developers, bloggers and beginners who want to one day step-up their level to live a free and independent life as a freelance software developer, author and technical writer.

Background

I started by writing my blog posts within a new forum that I created in the forums section on my website. But I soon realized that I needed a separate blogging space. I had to make a decision to either develop my own blogging software or use another one’s. In case you haven’t noticed, all of the background code that serves tutorials, registers users, and allows discussions in the forum, was all designed and developed by me. Like they say, you learn the most when you do it all by yourself.

The forums application does not allow anonymous users to post comments. That was a big limitation in itself. Besides, the layout of the forum gives an impression as if a question has been asked. It is not the same as reading a blog. I had to develop or use a blogging application.

But with blogging, I didn’t want to invest my time reinventing the wheel, unless I could do it better and I could do it differently than others. If I indeed had developed a blogging platform, I would have opened it up for others to participate, download and use the software as necessary. Perhaps after paying a small license fee, or even free if I had got a good following from developer community. But never got to think about that enough.

After giving both options some thought, I chose to not develop my own software for blogging purposes. Perhaps, it was because I became involved with developing my ASP.NET Newsletter application. I don’t know.

As a side note, if I had decided to develop my own blogging application, I would have done it using ASP.NET MVC 2 and SQL Server.

Self-hosted blog vs online blog hosting providers

Once I had let the thought, to invest the time in developing my own blogging application, go, I had to choose between downloading and installing a blogging application on my own server, that is, at Stardeveloper.com, or to outsource my blog’s hosting to other online blog hosting providers.

Self-hosting is very good if you want full control over your blog and want to customize it to the last bit to match your exisiting website’s theme and structure. Since I was just starting up, I wanted an easy entry into the blogging World. I chose to host my blog on one of the free online blog hosting providers. I short-listed the free blog hosting providers. For me, it was either WordPress or Tumblr.

WordPress

WordPress is a feature rich blogging platform. It is the most popular blogging application Worldwide. There is virtually no feature that a blog should have, from categories, pages and tags, to comments, that WordPress does not have. It even has a wonderful iPhone application. Creating a free blog at WordPress.com is not difficult at all.

But if you are just starting up and create a free blog on their servers, they show ads from time time. And the ads, my friend, are not pretty at all.

Tumblr

Tumblr is micro-blogging platform, which means that it is some where inbetween Twitter and Facebook on one side and full fledged blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, on the other. There is a huge collection of themes to choose from. Creating a new theme or customizing an existing one is very easy. You like to customize CSS or even change from 2-column to a 3-column layout of a theme? You can do so without paying a penny. Unlike WordPress, where you have to pay if you want to customize the CSS, every thing is free on Tumblr.

Why Tumblr?

Tumblr allow easy entry into the World of micro-blogging. You can select from a huge set of free themes. Creating new posts is very simple. Online editor is nice. You can email them anything, from video to pictures, and they’ll make a post of it and post it on your blog. Everything is automated and very nicely set. You can incorporate Disqus commenting system very easily in your blog to allow users to post comments on your website.

The best part is that they make it so easy for you to either customize an existing theme or develop your own theme from scratch, just like I did. The documentation is pretty nice. The server-side variables and blocks make it very easy to develop your own theme. The process is so simple that you have to try it yourself to get a true feel for it. And you don’t have to learn a new language, like PHP, if you want to do this.

You can also setup either a full domain, like stardeveloper.com, or a sub-domain, like blog.stardeveloper.com, to send traffic to your blog. So the address of your blog then becomes from something like yourname.tumblr.com to blog.yourwebsite.com. Cool!

Customized theme for my blog

Soon after I started my blog on Tumblr and setup a sub-domain, blog.stardeveloper.com, I created a new theme for my blog.

Old Theme

The theme was pretty simple, using mostly HTML and CSS. It loaded pretty fast and I liked its simple look. I setup a Disqus account for my blog and incorporated it into this theme.

Old Theme

It was all nice and working as such but then I began to work on a new theme for articles and tutorials at Stardeveloper.com. The new theme’s color scheme was different and layout was far superior to anything that my simple theme offered. The discrepancy between the two themes meant that when a user browsed from Stardeveloper.com to my blog, it looked like as if he has come to an entirely different website. I had to develop a common theme for both articles and blog section. I began work on a new theme for my blog at Tumblr.

New Theme

The new theme used the same color scheme as the new theme on the articles’ section. The layout was pretty straight forward and I used HTML and CSS to keep the load time of the blog, very low. Very few, if any, images were used in the new theme. I also changed the Disqus theme to make it look more incorporated within the blog.

New Theme

Disqus commenting system

This new theme was set live just days back.

Summary

In this blog post, I talked about why I decided to have my own blog and how I moved every step of the way to where my blog stands right now. I also commented a bit about why I chose Tumblr and shared my thoughts on developing and customizing themes on Tumblr.

I hope you found information in this post useful. Good luck!

Making money from your blog

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:21:00 +0500

I saw a post at Copyblogger about making money from your blog. I commented about the topic in that post. I have copied my comment here so that my users can benefit from it as well:

Hi, I am a developer and have been running my website for last 10 years and generating some revenue from it. I want to share my 2 cents.

This article is spot on when it comes to generating revenue from displaying ads. Lets face it, we hate ads. The more you have them, the more the bounce rate will be for your website. And if you have to put Adsense, then it becomes even worse.

With Adsense, you have to place it, as they call it, above the fold to improve our dismal CTR from say 0.05% to 0.1%. Above the fold means making the visitors see these ads as the first thing on your website. Not only it gives the impression that you are perhaps one of those struggling bloggers trying to make your first $100, it puts off the visitor entirely.

What I advise to users is to please focus on the content of your website. If you are not even getting 100,000 page views a month, you shouldn’t be putting ads on your website at all. Unless of course, you can sell ads directly to advertisers.

Promote yourself! That’s they key thing. I missed the social networking train myself. Your objective should be to get your visitors to come back, at least one more time. Your goals should be to get followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook, get email and RSS feed subscribers.

The thing I liked when I read this blog post was that Copyblogger has placed in the most important visible area on their page, that is, top right corner, a subscription form for their newsletter and a link to their Twitter account. That my friends is what I am talking about! Promote yourself, write good content, and motivate yourself by seeing a constant influx of new followers and subscribers on your social networks.

How to make money? As a developer, I can say that the answer lies in innovation and creativity. It is easy to develop a web application, a piece of software, write a technical article or journal, and contribute in a book if you are a developer. You have got to have something of your own to sell.

Ads are the single worst thing that kills your website repeat visitors. I had the model, but now am changing this to writing my own software and selling it. I develop software and then give it away for free; actually explain how it works step by step in my tutorials. This is all fine and I will continue with that. But I will also develop that piece of code further, that I wrote about in the tutorial, and make it available to be purchased online. Giving users value.

So please don’t worry if you aren’t earning much. Focus on your content, with discipline, keep on adding content to your blog. Try to judge the value of your blog from the growth in terms of visitors, page views, followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook, subscriptions to your newsletter and subscribers to your RSS feed. Keep yourself motivated and keep following the blogs that inspire you. Your persistence and perseverance will reward you.

Besides, if you love blogging and enjoy blogging about what you know and love, there is nothing that is going to stop you from blogging anyway, money or no money, right?

Denial of service attack on Stardeveloper

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:19:40 +0500

We had an early morning DOS (Denial of service) attack on Stardeveloper. You can see from the image below how the hits graph took a sharp jump to go North. It happened on Sunday morning December 5th, 2010.

An HTTP module successfully logged the attack. I am considering to block future DOS attacks by developing a separate HTTP module for that.

ASP.NET and JSP show a declining trend

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:26:00 +0500

A quick glance at the Google Insights for Search for keywords like ‘ASP.NET’ and 'JSP’ shows a markedly declining trend. If you add keywords for other web development technologies like 'PHP’, 'Perl’ or 'Ruby’; a similar pattern is observed.

Looking at the data in the graph, it appears that these keywords are now being used less and less often in the searches.

Is it because less people are looking to learn web development?

One reason for this loss of interest may be that it is now very easy for anyone looking to have his own website to use a blogging solution like WordPress or Blogger. There is no need to learn web development to have your own website. These solutions make it very easy to use your own domain name for your own blog. The rapid spurt in the spread of blogs all across the net for users who do not have even basic knowledge about web development can be one reason attributable to a general decline in the interest for learning new web development technologies.

Following is a snapshot of the interest for the keyword 'blog’ in the user searches:

The rising trend started in the same year in which the declining trend started for many web development technologies.

Can this be the cause of the decline in the interest of users for keywords like 'ASP.NET’ and 'JSP’?

BlackBerry Bold 9700 Review

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:56:00 +0500

BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the latest and greatest of the BlackBerry devices to date. Performance and design wise, it has some of the best features that sets it apart from the other BlackBerry devices.

I bought BlackBerry Bold 9700 after I sold my BlackBerry Bold 9000 a few weeks back, which was a poor decision in many ways.

Specifications

Battery: 1500 mAh
Display: 480x360 resolution
Camera: 3.2 MP
Processor: 624 mHz
Memory: 256MB
Micro-SD Card (included): 2GB

See full specifications.

Design

Its size is almost the same as BlackBerry Curve 8900. This is in stark contrast to BlackBerry Bold 9000, its predecessor, which had an enormous size. It is light in weight and fits in my pocket very nicely. It has a leather battery cover with soft volume rocker and side keys.

What’s new is track pad. It was very easy to use, and unlike people who say it took them a day to getting fully used to; it took me only a minute. The track pad feels soft and nice to use on the thumb. Although I miss the soft grating sound of track ball, track pad does make using BlackBerry Bold 9700 very easy to use.

Performance

The CPU underneath is the same as the older BlackBerry Bold 9000. The memory though has been doubled. And the fact that 9700 has OS 5.0, makes it a very fast device to use. Using this device, I did not have to hard reboot this device, although I did do it couple of times to, just you know, for old times’ sake. It has plenty of memory to make your device usage as smooth as possible to use. I have quite a few applications running simultaneously and in the background, yet I do not notice deterioration in device usage.

In BlackBerry Bold 9000, running out of memory was a common issue. Most of the time free memory used to be around ~40 MB which in BlackBerry Bold 9700 stays around ~120 MB.

Sliding the battery cover was difficult at first. But as soon as I learnt the right way to do it, which is shown on the sticker on the battery cover when you open the box, it was very easy to do.

Things I miss

One of the few things I miss from the old BlackBerry Bold 9000:

The resolution is better in the newer device but the display looked much better in 9000.
The keyboard is a bit too crammed up. I prefer the wider keyboard in BlackBerry Bold 9000 or the spaced up keyboard in Curve 8900.

Overall, it is a very good device, and with excellent battery life, it makes using this device fun to use.

BlackBerry Bold 9000 vs iPhone 3GS

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:00:00 +0500

I bought my BlackBerry Bold 9000 in the fall of year 2008. Liked it a lot. Used it for like 14 months. Then sold it just last month. The reason I sold it was because I became obsessed with capacitive touch screen phones like HTC HD2 and Apple’s iPhone 3GS. I now own an Apple iPhone 3GS and have used it for like a month now.

Having been a BlackBerry user that made the switch to Apple’s iPhone, I am in the position to give my opinion on the pros and cons of both devices, and comment on which device I like more.

BlackBerry Bold 9000

It is a magnificent device. It has an incredible display. While the resolution (480x320) is slightly less than the newer BlackBerries (480x360), the screen gives better display than them. The reason is that in the newer BlackBerries the size of the screen is smaller and the resolution is larger so the pixels look a little crammed up. It’s speakers were also excellent. Texting on this device was an incredible experience. The sound of ‘new email’ and the flashing LED were gorgeous. Every time I typed, the moment there was a typo, BlackBerry used to underline the typo. So it was easier to spot the mistake and correct it. Auto-Text was just so helpful. I had created shortcuts like if I typed 'sd’, it used to expand it to ’Stardeveloper.com’. Selecting text to copy/paste was also much easier. All I had to do was to keep shift key pressed to select the text using trackball. Multi-tasking made it fun to run and switch between multiple applications simultaneously. Facebook and Twitter applications running in the background notified of new messages immediately. Copy files between BlackBerry and PC was easy as connecting the cable to the PC and simply copy/pasting it to and from the BlackBerry.

What I found frustrating with BlackBerry Bold 9000 was that its browser was very slow. Scrolling too much with trackball wasn’t too great. It wouldn’t play Youtube videos on EDGE. And even when it did on Wi-Fi, the experience wasn’t too pleasant. The video had much lower resolution, wouldn’t play full screen, one could even see boxed pixels on the screen, and the connection often broke in the middle of the video. Restarting the video made the video stuck. I had to restart the device and/or the router. BlackBerry Bold 9000 was a heavy set. Carrying it inside the pocket wasn’t easy. The trackball was very delicate and often durt/dust would settle on it making the fingers slip over it. I had the trackball changed yet the newer one started to give problems only after 1-2 months of use.

Apple iPhone 3GS

It is a beautiful light weight device which is easy to carry in the pocket. The capacitive touch screen works very well. It’s browser is the best among the rest. Tapping and pinching to zoom in and out rule! Configuring Gmail on it wasn’t too difficult. Watching full screen high resolution videos is a real charm. Youtube rocks on this device. Buffering and video resolution aren’t that bad on EDGE either. Yeah, one can watch videos on EDGE and that too without much interruption or buffering. Facebook and twitter applications give a better user experience because of bigger and better screen.

What it lacks though is a physical keyboard. No matter if the keyboard is in the landscape mode, there are still plenty of mistakes to correct before sending the message. The typos are not underlined. There are more mistakes made typing on iPhone than BlackBerry Bold. It is just so frustrating to type on this device. The small collection of tones to select for emails and SMS messages is also quite irritating. And it has no LED, so I have to open it and check again and again to see if new emails or messages have arrived. No LED makes it so user-unfriendly.

Verdict

There is just no replacement for BlackBerry. I hate myself for selling this device for cheap. I will love to have a BlackBerry (Bold 2 9700?) again. Keeping in view the video and browsing capabilities of iPhone, I will prefer an iPod to go with my BlackBerry. That makes a perfect combination.

Without a contract, one can get an Apple iPhone 3GS on ebay at around $750. A BlackBerry Bold for $500 and iPod for $250 will cost the same except that the experience in texting and watching videos will be unparalleled. (All prices given are approximate values)

So my advice is to get yourself a BlackBerry and if you need to watch videos and browse, get yourself an iPod.

Read full length articles at Stardeveloper in your RSS reader

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:00:00 +0500

RSS feed at Stardeveloper.com has just been modified to publish full length articles. Previously, it was only publishing synopsis (one or two paragraphs) of the article with a link that lead to the article on the website. Now, you can enjoy reading the full length article as soon as it is published on Stardeveloper.com.

The email subscription to this RSS feed is handled by FeedBurner. This change will also apply to email subscriptions. So if you are subscribed to the feed by your email address, you can expect to receive full article delivered in one piece to your email client.

I hope this change will make the content more user friendly for all the readers.

Links:

Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter v1.1.2 released.

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0500

A minor update has just been released for Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter Software. v1.1.2 adds support for sending emails in any language. This update also includes numerous internal improvements.

Stardeveloper's Google Page Rank improves to 5/10.

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:00:00 +0500

Stardeveloper.com’s page rank stepped up to 5/10 from 4/10 just a few days back where it had stayed for almost full year in 2009. So a bit of encouragement there from Google.

I look forward to making 2010 a really productive year where:

I publish more articles than in any calendar year before.
To update existing articles.
To work on and continue to update the fascinating piece of software that it is; Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter.

Thank you all for your support and good wishes.

Faisal Khan,
Stardeveloper.com

Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter v1.1.1 released.

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:00:00 +0500

The popular open source ASP.NET Newsletter has just got a new release. The v1.1.1 fixes bugs in 3 of the files that were shipped in the previous version. This new version is a stable release. If you like the free edition of this software and want to support the development, please move on to purchase the latest version for only $10.00 .

Poll: Do you have a twitter account?

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:19:00 +0500

Please spare a minute and click a Yes/No option in this poll: http://polldaddy.com/poll/2513584/.

Update

Results approx. 4wks after starting the poll are:

Yes (35%)
No (65%)

Note: This poll is still active.

Page load speed may be a factor in deciding page rank for a website at Google.

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0500

News: Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010.

If indeed this is true, as I mentioned in previous blog post (above), I am not sure what I can do to improve the page load times for my website. Just today I checked again Stardeveloper’s page load performance only to realize that it has gotten a little slower, and thus slower than 93% of the websites on Google. That’s pretty bad. But, why more slow? Does it have to do with the JavaScript enabled Twitter Gadget that I have placed on my website?

I don’t know what I should I do to make the website any faster than it already is on the server-side. I mean it uses Gzip compression and caching. The only weakness is probably the client-side JavaScript that has to be loaded for every ad on the website.

How to not lose ad revenue without compromising website load times is going to be an interesting dilemma for most webmasters in 2010.

Sending emails directly to mail exchangers by by-passing SMTP relay servers.

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0500

I am working on developing the new version (v1.2) of my ASP.NET Newsletter Application. One of the things that I want to add in the new version is the ability to bypass SMTP relay server and deliver emails to user’s mail server (MX Server or Mail Exchanger) directly. I want to do this because certain SMTP servers (like Gmails’, for instance) put restrictions on the number of outgoing emails that can be delivered to them. In Gmail’s case, that number is around 100 emails in an hour.

I do acknowledge that most folks will not be using Gmail’s SMTP Server to relay the emails, but I wanted to solve this problem for those who will be using Gmail anyway. The solution is to send the emails directly to a user’s mail server by fetching its name from the MX (Mail Exchange) records by querying the DNS. I have already developed the code to query the DNS using pure C# (no inter-op to Window’s libraries) to fetch the list of MX records for any domain name. Now, the next step was to test the code to deliver the emails directly to the users’ door steps by sending emails to mail exchangers directly.

Here, I got stuck and wasted 2 hours trying to pull my hair out as to why it was not working. Just now, figured out what was wrong and the emails finally began to be delivered successfully. The reasons why my code was failing was:

My ISP was blocking the port 25. So my code couldn’t connect to port 25 of destination mail servers.
I was instantiating SmtpClient without specifying any port number. I was hoping here that it will pick the correct port (25 in this case) automatically, which it was not. It was always searching for port 587. Once I changed the port to 25 explicitly, everything began to work out like a charm.

I want to mention here that my code had to be uploaded to my website server (Stardeveloper.com) for it to by pass the port 25 blockage by my ISP to work.

So that is that. I want to mention here that those folks who want to buy Newsletter (v1.1) will be given a 50% discount once the new version is released, so don’t wait, go and get started sending newsletters right now.

Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter Application 2009 v1.1 now live on the website.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0500

I have just uploaded a new version of Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter Application. This is v1.1 and includes minor updates and fixes. This version is capable of running on ASP.NET 2.0 enabled IIS. This is a big improvement over previous version which required ASP.NET 3.5.

Please go to Stardeveloper ASP.NET Newsletter Application to download and install on your web server.

Pages at Stardeveloper load SLOWER than 90% of websites - Source: Google webmaster tools.

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0500

I am astonished to find that Stardeveloper loads 90% slower than the rest of the websites (source: Google webmaster tools). This after a lot of effort that has been put in its design, data access, caching and Gzip compression. In this blog post, I discuss the performance report with an image showing the performance graph, and examine it in detail to find out what has been the cause of slower performance and what can be done about it.

Google has introduced new website performance data on its popular Webmaster Tools website. I immediately logged in to see how Stardeveloper.com compared with the rest of the competition. To my surprise, Stardeveloper was labeled as “SLOW”, with an avg. load time of 8.6 seconds, and was slower than 90% of the websites.

This data was depressing in the sense that I have made a lot of effort in improving website performance by judiciously using caching to improve data access speeds. I have also enabled Gzip/Deflate compression on all pages as well. But this improvement apparently did not do much good when it came to how the website’s performance is perceived by the end user. And there is a good reason why.

The reason Stardeveloper is slow is because of the external elements within its web pages. There are are references to external javascript files to display ads from LakeQuincy ad network, and to track statistics using Google Analytics and Quantcast. These external referencing are 3-7 in number and take a lot of time to load. Add to this the fact that these external javascript files aren’t even Gzip compressed.

What can I do to improve the performance of Stardeveloper.com? Unfortunately, there is little I can do. I mean, I cannot remove javascript references to Google Analytics and Quantcast. I have been using them for years now and they provide reliable data to compare to and to provide insights on what is going on within my website. I also cannot remove ads. They are my source of revenue and as much as I’d want to have as less (but more paying of course) ads as possible, unfortunately I won’t be able to maintain this website without that monetary support.

So, as much as I am depressed to see the stats, there is very little I can do about it. So what is the lesson of this post? Doesn’t matter if you have programmed your website to the best of your abilities using caching and Gzip compression and what not, if you cannot remove external javascript based ads from your website, your website cannot get any faster than it already is.

Create a new Blogging software or use an existing one?

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0500

In this post, I discuss the merits and demerits of creating new blogging software for a website or making use of an existing one. I cover background info related to the development of code base at Stardeveloper.com including ASP forum software. After that, I discuss the specific requirements for my blogging software that I am seeking for my website. In the end, I ask my users to comment on how best to proceed.

This blog post is as valid for anyone looking to add blogging software to his/her website as it is for me. If you are interested in seeing what others advise me and what I choose in the end for my blog, please read on. And if you have experience with creating or incorporating a blogging software in your website, your advice will be very much welcomed.

I started my blog a few weeks back. Since I wanted to make the least effort to get started with my blog, I created a new forum and locked it so that only I can post in it. I then started posting my blog posts in that new forum, which I call my blog.

It is okay except the fact that the look and feel of the blog is exactly like that of a forum, so as such there is no uniqueness in it. It also doesn’t show blog categories and archives (based on the dates blog posts were posted). It also doesn’t allow anonymous users to post comments. Along with those things, I want to be able to moderate user comments and remove any spam before it makes it live to my blog.

Everything on Stardeveloper.com including the forum was developed all by myself. Much of the code base on Stardeveloper.com uses classic ASP 3.0 to display data from highly optimized SQL Server 2008 (originally it was SQL Server 2000) database. Lately, I have been working on ASP.NET 2.0 and slowly moving the code base from classic ASP to ASP.NET. An example of this is the home page of Stardeveloper.com.

Initially, for the forum, I used Snitz Forums. But I didn’t like their spaghetti code. Besides, I didn’t want the user to sign-up twice, firstly for posting comments under tutorial pages and secondly to post in the forum. I decided to drop it. I then developed my own forum software. It turned out to be a good move and I am pretty happy with how it has performed over the years.

I am stuck in the same dilemma again and this time it is for the blogging software. I did some research online and two packages come very close to my needs; Subtext and Presstopia. The problem is that Subtext uses a URL like http://www.example.com/archive/2009/12/02/title-of-the-blog-post.aspx, and Presstopia uses http://www.example.com/blog/default.aspx?id=123&t=Title-of-the-Blog to link to blog posts. To make it simple to link to and understand, and for SEO purposes as well, I prefer links like http://www.example.com/blog/title-of-the-blog/ which Matt Cutts has on his blog.

Now, either I can develop my own blogging software, and this time make it free for users to download and use, which fits in well with the rest of the website or change/make use of the existing ones. Got to make this decision by end of December, so that by the start of 2010, my blog will have a new look, exciting for me to post, and interesting for the users to read, comment on and follow.

Why should every developer have a website?

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:00:00 +0600

I believe a web presence is a must thing for developers now a days. From social networking to publishing content, a website or a blog gives an identity to a developer. The more valuable the content in that website or the blog, the more repute that person earns. And that repute I believe can be very rewarding.

I believe that every person should have a web presence. If you are not a developer and know nothing about programming but still are comfortable working with computers, a web presence is still useful. You can have accounts on social networking websites which you can use to connect with your family and friends. You can upload your photographs and write a little about yourself and areas of your interest. You can create a blog and write about the stuff you feel you know about and share your ideas with others. For instance, if you are a real estate agent, create a blog about owning, selling, and developing on a real estate. This can provide tips to others on the internet who are looking for this information. At the end of the day, all of this will give you an identity, an identity of your own. So next time you meet a new person, and this person can be a new employer, you can share with them the link to your website. That person can visit your website and view your blog posts to get a good impression of areas of your strength. And this is just one element of it.

Same is true for developers. Developers are more knowledgeable when it comes to using computers. So for them, it is more easy to develop a website, an effective web presence. They can create blogs and write on the areas of their strengths. For instance, a database administrator can write on topics relevant to database administration. He can share tips that he has learned from his experience working in the field. The more valuable these tips are, the more value that person will receive from his readers. Your website will be a valuable resource to talk about in your resume. Remember, your website is your identity.

The more you work, the more popular your website will become in that niche. You will begin to receive offers from advertisers who are willing to sponsor the content on your website. And the further you go into it, you can even start to develop your own software and begin to sell on your website. The more popular you and your website becomes, the more the opportunities will begin to open up before you.

Even if you think you are not that good a developer yet that can develop code or share useful insights for other more experienced developers out there, or you think you are not a good writer and writing posts is not your strong point, or you think you don’t have time for all this, I suggest that you think again. The topic of this post applies as much to you as anyone else. Every programmer, every developer out there was as much a beginner as you are at this moment. They moved on, worked hard, and developed and reached a more comfortable place in their lives, and so will you. You are beginner? So what. Write on topics for beginners. You figured out how to install or configure basic stuff about some program, write about it. You hopped from one web host to another and finally found a good one? Write about it. You are enthusiastic about learning some thing new? Write about it. The more you write, the more you will learn and the more experienced you will become. Sooner, as you become more comfortable with this, you will begin to get ideas for new topics and new software to develop on, all by yourself. Keep polishing your creativity and soon it will begin to shine. Your writing skills will improve and what used to take 2 hours to write will take 15 minutes to complete. Your small web presence, your small website will continue to expand. The search engines will begin to notice it. Other developers and bloggers will begin to notice it. Your website will continue to grow in content. That is how all big websites started. This is how everything works. Start small and make it grow to something big. Spend some time on it every day, ever week. Make it your hobby, love your work, and do what you want to do.

Think about it, take your time, but make a decision. You need a web presence, you need a website, you need an identity.