Joe and Jamie’s Blog

Well I just hit my 100th spam comment today. It’s rather sad that a very new blog such as mine would already have more spam comments than real ones. I’m glad the Akismet plugin works very well and is part of Wordpress otherwise we would all be pulling our hair out more than we do already.

I have nothing more to say, just noticed it said 100, minor milestone for the blog. Lets see how long it takes to get to 200.

Hats off to Nigeria, Russia, and all the rest of the spam nations, keep up the good work.

Since I am a fairly new blogger with a even newer blog, I am very anxious to get and excited when I see comments. I know there are a lot more than my original two readers now, so please leave a comment if you like something or find anything interesting. I love the comments I get in person, but why not leave your mark here for all eternity?? While I was surfing around my usual round of sites to check daily I came across a post over at Blog Oh Blog about why people should leave comments.  Here are Jai’s 7 reasons to leave comments:

1. Do you know me?

If you regularly leave comments on a particular blog, it will make the blog owner recognize you and also your website. When you do this on multiple blogs, you will be socially recognized in the blogging community. Also, most of the blogs nowadays use Gravatars which can help in branding and getting some popularity for your own blog. I think that leaving comments on popular blogs is the best way to be known around the Internet.

2. Building Community

A community is built around people and their views. Leaving comments is a way of showing that you care and want to share your opinion with others including the owner of the blog. The comments can be a suggestion, feedback, appreciation or even criticism. They are good as long as they are not spammy or abusive. So, even if you are just stopping by, try to make that little effort of writing a comment, even if its just a line.

3. Getting What you Want

You should leave a comment because that’s the only way the blog owner can judge what the reader/customers want without getting a written e-mail or any other form of communication.

4. Link Building & Traffic

Most of the blogs allow you to leave your website link/s when writing comments (Dofollow or Nofollow) for the blog. This can help you in getting good inbound links and also some additional traffic to your site.

5. Selling yourself

If you are a service provider or have something to sell, comments can be an unobtrusive way to do this. I am not asking you to write your sales pitch in the comments but when you build a relationship with the people through commenting on their blogs, it gets easy to sell your wares to them. Cheap advertising for you

6. Go down in the Blogging history

This is for the people who do not run websites or blogs but just like to surf the Internet. Someday, when someone tries to search for your name on Google, believe me or not, if you mentioned your name in the comment author, the search results will pop out the comments that you wrote. For some people, the results can be very fascinating

7. Show off your writing style

Finally, if you have good written English skills, comments can be the platform where you can flaunt them. A lot of people will read them.

And last but not the least, when you leave a comment on a post, it is sort of a reward or a small prize for the blog owner. So, you know now what makes leaving comments so special! Go on, leave a comment and show me that you learned something

I found it very interesting, so support Jai and check out the original post here.

I decided to go with forums rather than blogs for the network administration help sites that I was designing. Forums are just easier for people to sign up and post their own topics, as well as making it easier to categorize everything.

For the last five days I have configured the phpBB forum that I have running now on NetworkAdmin.INFO. Please visit the site and feel free to ask any computer or technical question you may have. If I cannot answer it I surely have the resources to get the answer.

I hope this venture turns out well. I spent some pretty price money on old domain names to try and help this out and I would like to see it prosper. Over the weekend I will be posting as many help fixes as I can to try and fill the forum up a bit and make it look alive. I have some minor tweaking to do still and some SEO work, but nothing that will change or affect the forum.

VISIT NETWORKADMIN.INFO

I bought some more domain names this weekend. I was bored and stuck in front of a computer which never leads to anything good. I have had some idea of creating informative blog sites on basic computer and networking troubleshooting tips and guides. I started snooping around GoDaddy for some catchy names and found that they were all taken, like always. Some domain names were available for a premium price of two grand, but I don’t have that kind of cash to blow right now, especially when I don’t have time to make the site bring that much money in fast.

Here’s some of the names that I purchased that were surprisingly available for regular price:

• networksystem.us
• systemnetwork.us
• techadmin.us
• networktechnician.us
• systemtech.us

I picked up the same domains with different TLD’s (top level domains) along the way, whatever was available.

I wanted to get a few other domains, but they were too pricey. I searched around and found Sedo.com, a huge domain name aftermarket. Sedo.com allows you to actually bid on the site with the owner, rather than just pay the price posted on GoDaddy. After a few days of haggling with owners that wanted thousands for sites with absolutely no traffic at all out there, I obtained these two sites this morning:

• networkadministrator.org
• networkadmin.us
• systemadministrator.biz

What is great about networkadministrator.org is that it is seven years old and had a page available, it was not just owned without a site up. This means that it should be known to search engines and possibly already bookmarked by others and have links out there. You don’t make it in this business without links. I am in the process of getting the domain transferred to me now. There are a few more I am interested in, just have to keep beating the price down, hoping the owner doesn’t close the negotiations. [UPDATE] Just bought systemadministrator.biz while I was posting this for a fair price for a four year old domain, made for a fun night.

For these sites, I think I will start out using blogs to host the content. They are easy to set up and use, as well as free. The person who created this blog here as a whole slew of blogs, some free and some really nice premium templates. I really like a few of the templates at Blog Oh! Blog. You can check out the templates here.

I am out for now, going to start uploading the main templates now!

I am highly considering changing the name of the blog to Joe blog…..Jamie NEVER posts. She says she doesn’t have the time, but I think she needs motivation and all of you wonderful bloggers to tell her how much fun it is. She doesn’t know what she is missing.

Over the past two days I have been tweaking the look of the blog. I have modified the template to show 4 posts on the main page, rather than the default 1 post and small boxes to display the older posts. I also removed the older post boxes, to me they were just ugly. I also encapsulated the posts in borders, I think it looks better than just post after post with nothing but a title header to separate them. I found a cool plugin to place related posts in each posts, hopefully driving some more page views and reading.

These are the obvious things that anyone that has been checking the site regularly (the whole 2 of you) would notice. The little things were playing around with the placement of advertisements to make sure they all looked the same on each page and weren’t put into boxes. I also moved around the widgets on the sidebar to allow me to show more recent comments and recent posts, especially since I removed the older post boxes from the blog.

Hope everyone likes it!