It can often seem as if our blog’s growth is out of our control. We post regularly and try to write the best content we can, but sometimes this doesn’t seem like enough. Our growth might plateau, or even start going backwards.

Thankfully, there are some things that are in your control. In this post, I want to explore ten actions you can do straight away that will grow your blog and send you traffic. Perform one of these tasks each day, or one a week. You’ll breathe new life into your blog.

1. Give something away. These days, most bloggers don’t want to give something away unless they get something in return (a link, or maybe a review). This seems intuitive: why give away time or resources without any clear benefits?

The truth is counter-intuitive. Give without expecting to receive and you’ll receive anyway. I’m not speaking about this hypothetically. On [...] Continue Reading…

When you look for new revenue streams, think about what you do well. Whether you’re an expert  in your field, a talented designer, a programmer, or a producer of content, there are ways to leverage your knowledge, skills and abilities, package them and provide them for a fee. And don’t forget that successful web workers are often pursuing more than one income stream at the same time. You may be able to assemble a career out of numerous smaller activities.

Read our latest list of 10 new ways to make money online after the jump.

1. Team up with Yahoo! to offer custom search services.
Yahoo! recently launched their BOSS API, which lets anyone build their own custom search engine or mashup using their search results. But you may have missed this teaser on their blog: “In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! [...] Continue Reading…

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Position
Aug 2008
Position
Aug 2007
Delta in Position
Programming Language
Ratings
Aug 2008
Delta
Aug 2007
Status

1
1

Java
21.571%
-0.20%
A

2
2

C
16.178%
+0.48%
A

3
3

(Visual) Basic
10.857%
+0.21%
A

4
4

C++
10.057%
-0.05%
A

5
5

PHP
9.349%
-0.35%
A

6
8

Python
4.975%
+2.23%
A

7
6

Perl
4.694%
-0.63%
A

8
7

C#
3.697%
-0.29%
A

9
10

Ruby
2.920%
+1.01%
A

10
9

JavaScript
2.892%
+0.32%
A

11
14

Delphi
2.732%
+1.51%
A

12
13

D
1.357%
+0.11%
A

13
11

PL/SQL
0.679%
-1.15%
A-

14
12

SAS
0.549%
-0.84%
B

15
-

PowerShell
0.440%
+0.44%
B

16
24

Pascal
0.416%
+0.00%
B

17
18

Lisp/Scheme
0.379%
-0.21%
B

18
15

Lua
0.373%
-0.27%
B

19
16

COBOL
0.358%
-0.24%
B

20
23

ActionScript
0.355%
-0.07%

Ruby on Rails is Ruby stands [...] Continue Reading…

By now most of us are familiar with Google’s PageRank algorithm, or at least the principle behind it, whereby a web page is ranked based on who else is linking to it. One key aspect of blogs is that, while a few cover just about everything under the sun, most blogs have specific areas of focus, be it art, news, politics or what have you. Such information is potentially valuable in the context of search because a blog can announce its areas of focus — keywords, in effect — that can be taken into account by search engines, which would then know what topics a specific site tends to cover.

Using existing meta tags within HTML, it would be pretty easy to create a de facto standard in which tags are used to place a blog, as well as individual posts within it, into categories or sets. For example, I [...] Continue Reading…

There are literally over a hundred of JavaScript frameworks out there that make writing complex client-side code significantly easier. If you’re in the market for a powerful, relatively lightweight, and customizable JavaScript framework, MooTools is worth checking out.

To help you get on your way to developing highly-interactive web applications using MooTools, here’s 20 tutorials and working examples that’s worth a read.
Getting Started with MooTools
1. The “Mootorial”

The Mootorial at //clientside is a comprehensive, practical tutorial on the MooTools framework. The tutorial allows you to execute the sample code either by Firebug or the website’s built-in console.
2. MooTools Overview Video Tutorial
Here’s an excellent screencast that introduces the MooTools framework. It covers the basics such as the concept of chaining, customizing MooTools to your needs, and where to find documentation for MooTools code.
3. Increasing User Experience With Javascript

Beauty By Design provides a nine-part video series on [...] Continue Reading…