There are two kinds of bloggers. The ones who edit their works offline and the ones who prefer to do it online (or just don’t know they could do it the other way).

Also, there are bloggers who don’t know that they are bloggers. Some websites are built on blog engines, as blog platforms are basically article-optimized CMS systems. For example, the BlogEngine.NET home page is built over their own blog platform.

This article is a comparison of two most widely used vital tools of modern blogging – the Microsoft Live Writer 2011 and MarsEdit 3.5 by Red Sweater Software.

When writing articles about SEO, it’s easy to fall into one of two categories. Either you will write something, that everybody knows, or something that is perhaps shouldn’t be revealed, as it will lose it’s value very quickly because of misuse.

So you don’t see many articles about the Search Engine Optimization here, mainly because I am trying to be original. However, I can’t count on everyone to study the subject and avoid traps, so part of my articles are like “Achtung, minen” sign for those, who focus on other areas of life than Informational Technology.

So, this article will be about so called Black SEO discipline named “Referral Spam”. What it is, how it works and why you should avoid it. More...

There are many reasons why people decide to host their web projects on notebooks. Either way, the question is not why, but how. Like everywhere else, there are pros and cons in hosting of your web application on notebook hardware, so we are going to discuss here how to do it properly and get most out of it.

Possible reasons to host your web server on a notebook

Usually people think about hosting on notebook, for one or many of these reasons:

• The price of hosting is higher than expected revenue, or no profit is expected.
• There are less than 1000 users expected to use this web project.
• The web application is not consuming much of resources.
• Notebook is powerful enough.
• You can’t sell this old notebook, but also don’t want to refurbish it, as it is still working as designed. And now you have this web project of yours that needs cheap hosting.
• Your internet connection is fast and reliable and you see no reason or have no resources to acquire new hardware and data center (DC) allocation.
• You want to host the web application on-site but want to keep your electricity bill at minimum.
• You have to make your server mobile.

More...

This is a story about me choosing the notebook for maintaining this blog.

Usually I am writing about something related to technologies which I am either exploring or training. Sometimes it’s about non-technological parts of the training or lifestyle. Something that consumed considerable amount of time to learn or get to. I’m sort of showing a shortcut to others and we usually call it “sharing of knowledge and experience”.

Since I am very serious about keeping my blog to be a useful and creative place, I decided to devote more time to it – especially the time when I am most mentally capable. And during that time I am usually far from my main 17” laptop – heavy powerful gaming-class machine which is theoretically portable.

So I made a decision to purchase a laptop especially for blogging. Taking into account that this blog doesn’t bring any income – pretty much enthusiastic move. But however, I’ve started with research. More...

Do you remember such thing as Outlook Express? A lightweight e-mail client from Microsoft which was the part of operating system since the stone age. It was separated from Windows for good, so unlike in Windows XP, we don’t have to cut it from the distribution DVD anymore. However, once separating some applications from the system, Microsoft added a few more tools to the Live family.

One of them is the one I am using at this particular moment – Windows Live Writer. The thing looks like a Microsoft Office 2010 product, something similar to FrontPage, but it’s about blogging. Whatever platform you are using for your blog, it can connect to it and you can use this wonderful editor without ever having to log into your blog. Styles, working with resources - everything is here. And it’s free.

Another one is irreplaceable for me and it is called Live Mesh. Once you’ve got your free 5Gb space at Windows Live, called SkyDrive, you can synchronize folders between your multiple computers. Like, for example, between home and work machine, so you can make sure that two folders on these machines are equal. Works perfectly for source code sharing for my notebooks and desktop, as having multiple versions of hundreds of files is a pain.
Another feature of Live Mesh is remote desktop, which works also through proxy and is just great when you want to log into your home computer but don’t want to set the remote desktop NAT rules. At some point it is more secure, as you won’t forget to switch off your rules later.

I know how hard it is to find a gem in a pile of software and services, so if you have a problem that any of these two programs solve, try them out!