Five Articles a Week Can Make You a Geek

Well, I know a geek is not really a very sociable person, but I had to find something to rhyme. Moreover, they say that geeks are born, not made. This was for the title. As for the article, I chose to share with you 5 articles a week, I to help myself to read more and in detail, not just browse through articles. Thanks!

1. Tomorrow’s CSS Today: 8 Techniques They Don’t Want You To Know This is a great article on eight powerful, yet not widely-known CSS techniques by Tim Wright. This techniques are not CSS hacks but very useful features that can help every web designer to improve his/her or their clients’ web presence. Why should one employ these techniques? The author answers:

The answer is very simple: you can do more with less code. With browsers evolving very rapidly in recent years, CSS support is improving. By having to use a minimal amount of markup, you can safeguard your site against browser updates and changes, and vastly increase accessibility with very little effort.

This article is a must read for every ambitious web designer. Do not lose it.

2. Brainstorming for Blog Posts This is a very enjoyable, yet quite useful article by Juggler at The WWW Observer. There you will find a list of places and time where and when you can brainstorm for blog post or other articles in general. I have chosen a nice time to share with you from his experience.

2. When I’m so pissed – Yeah, when I’m super annoyed and pissed off, I usually think of the reasons why I’m pissed. Then after thinking for a bit, I can come up with one or two blog posts because of my current state. Sometimes, you don’t even have to brainstorm anymore. You can just write about what made you so exasperated! Like this one… This post was published because I was annoyed. So annoyed.

3. 10 Things To Do To Help Your New Blog Well, I you are a new blogger, as me, you will find this article helpful for sure. This is a ten-step-long list that reveals to every body who read it some good tips about improving and promoting their blog. One thing you might figure out while reading is that there are not ten topics exactly in the article; some of the same topics are broken into two. However I enjoyed reading it and I recommend it to anybody. One of the tips that I found helpful and I could see its result as soon as I read it is this one:

Weblog Tools Collection News. Did you know that Weblog Tools Collection has a section on their site where you can submit news? It is basically a bb-press forum, but the main guys at WLTC look their, and it is where they find out about the new plugin releases that they feature that you might have seen in the RSS feed on your WordPress dashboard. Not only might the article get picked up by them and featured, assuming the content is interesting enough, but you will pretty much guarantee yourself some traffic. I submitted one article there, and I got 50 hits within the first day (I know this through Google Analytics).

4. The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Conditional Tags This is a very informative article for every WordPress theme designer and developer. The other make a very impressive use of his knowledge of PHP to produce high quality of code and neat content. I was impressed especially of one thing; the way the author used to exclude something form the home page. I have been used the other way around which has resulted in much more code. Here it is:

<?php if (is_home()) { } else { ?> <h2 id="recentposts">Recent Posts</h2> <div class="cont"> <ul> <?php wp_get_archives('title_li=&type=postbypost&limit=10'); ?> </ul> </div> <?php } ?>

5. Eight (8) Ways to Write a High Quality Post Saying the truth, I fund this article very helpful. There are 8 writing tips that one cannot say which is important and which is less important. It is a very compact article. However, I have to choose something to share with you, in case you do not get there and read it. Find it below.

6. Always proofread at least once. When I first started blogging I didn’t proofread my articles at all, which let grammatical mistakes and typos just slip through. When someone reads an article with bad English or a lot of misspelled words, they won’t be impressed and might not even continue reading if it’s bad enough. No matter how good of an idea you have for your post, it will be ruined if you don’t proofread it at least once or twice and catch all the errors you made. Even better, ask a friend or relative to read through your article before you publish it and see if they can catch any mistakes you might have missed!

I hope you will find what I read and choose to share with you interesting and helpful. If so, please drop me a line.