The migration was fairly easy, but a it time consuming. First thing you need to do is get a hosted service an install WordPress.

If you had a registered Domain you were using WordPress.com sites, you’ll need to change your name servers before you can access your new installation. Change the namesservers from pointing to WordPress to point to you hosting solution. In my case it is Godaddy. It took about 4 – 6 hours for the DNS to propagate before I could access my new installation.

Next, you’ll need to export your blog data from WordPress.com (admin function unter tools). Log into you hosted version of WordPress and in the same tools area, import your data. That’s the easy part.

Now the more difficult things:

First, you need to find a theme (plenty of free ones out there) and install it. Installing in requires saving the theme to you local hard drive then FTP-ing the directory to you hosting server space.  The entire directory is copied to the themes folder under the WP-Content directory.  Once this is complete login into WordPress and activate you theme under the ‘appearence’ – ‘Themes’ section.

Next you’ll need to select the plug-ins you want to install.

Here are a few of my choices

• Akismet - for spam protection
• All in One SEO Pack - for search engine optimization
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - for HTML sitemap generation.
• Google XML Sitemaps - for XML based site maps that can be submitted to Google
• Permalinks Moved Permanently - allows me to use SEO friendly URLs – a must!
• Secure WordPress - a set of tools to help better secure you installation
• Ultimate Google Analytics - requires setting up a google analytics account, but the best way to track our stats
•  Youtube Brackets - for embedding youtube videos
• WordPress Database Backup  – another must.
• Smart Ads - for serving Google adsense
• Sociable - adds links to posts for bookmarking to social sites (digg, delicious,…)
• Top 10 - Displays top posts, plus dashboard widget.
• WordPress.com Stats - WP stats in your dashboard

Most of these plug-ins require some level of configuration, but they are well worth it.

- Steve Hart

Here are the top 10 skills from Networkworld.com

1. Business Process Modeling – business process modeling is one of the key skills that business majors should be studying.
2. Database – Database expertise is another area where pay is on the rise, up 2.9% in the last quarter.
3. Messaging/Communications – experience in unified communications and messaging systems, which was among the highest paying IT skills .
4. IT architecture – companies are looking to hire enterprise architects as well as system, network, application, data, information and security architects.
5. IT security – Demand for security specialists is likely to remain strong because few teens are entering the field.
6. Project management – experience managing complex IT projects and delivering results on time and on or under budget.
7. Data mining – understanding data mining and related fields such as information on demand, content management and unstructured information management.
8. Web development – there is a need for developers who understand the latest Web trends, especially social media. It was the highest ranked of the technical skills listed by CIOs.
9. IT optimization – experience in IT optimization, including virtualization and cloud computing.
10. Networking - Network certifications are earning the highest pay premiums.

- Steve Hart

Recently, several lists and surveys have sought to predict the tools and strategies that will play the critical dual role of supporting business strategy while boosting company revenue. These lists offer a “sneak peek” at which technologies many CIOs and top IT executives will be implementing and/or expanding over the next three years.According to technology research firm Gartner, Inc., its 2009 list focuses on technologies that “… impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.”
 

Although they may be labeled differently, several technologies appear on both notable lists above, which is a strong indication they should be given serious implementation consideration. Here are the technologies that overlap:

• Virtualization: Though definitions vary depending upon the type of virtualization, essentially this technology allows one computer or application to do the work of several.
• Web/Internet Apps and Architectures: As the need for the interoperability of applications increases, so will the need to build Web-centric applications to meet global needs.
• Social Networking: When it comes to this technology, Gartner says the “risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.”
• Unified Communications: As consolidation continues in the communications industry, so will a company’s reliance on fewer vendors.

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You’d be amazed how many folks still don’t understand how important link building is for high ranking in search engines, and in specific for Google. And, what are valid tactics for 2009, what things have changed?

Backlinks, or ‘incoming links’ are a critical part of your website’s ongoing visibility in search engine results. If you couple this with quality incoming links, you’ll likely see benefit (increased traffic) from people clicking as well.

The game has changed over the recent years. Now, you see the fast emergence of the “social web”, and new tactics such as social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, social news has to be learned. Still, reliance on traditional marketing and public relations is a must, more than ever.

To become and continue to be a leading website, more thought and care must go into developing ‘link bait’ – quality content, tools, widgets and similar – that may receive faster/better links from other websites back to you, with less ongoing work – links just keep coming!

Creating content is not enough – you must promote and drive users back to your site from many channels, which can include PPC (Pay Per Click), for example. Running a quick campaign using Paid Search to send visitors to your content bait is one of the creative ways to build awareness and traffic. Think about your target audience before starting any of this.

Things To Remember When Link Building:

1) Rich Keyword Use – in the anchor text. This is the recognized “blue underline” link that points back to you. Get keywords in there!

2) Trust and Authority – incoming links from other significant sites – to send powerful ‘link juice’ and to help elevate your site as another professional, trusted site amongst users and search engines.

3) Natural Link Acquisition – no massive, short and spiked build up of links, no bad link neighborhoods, but a carefully distributed effort amongst varied IP#’s – to show breadth of sites. No black hat approaches or spamming. Also, remember that sites that have more trust and years established online, can get away with more than newer sites.

Manually searching for these authority sites can take time, but professionals do it all the time. Since relevancy is key, try to stick within your marketplace, but don’t over-analyze either, mix it up.

You can submit to directories, use article marketing, and locate blogs for a wider distribution, and I recommend picking a few strategies to start. Don’t try to do too much, too fast.

Some Tools and Ideas:

a. Keyword link search builder – Linksearch – type in a keyword, and it will build Google search strings to speed up the processs.

b. Directories – you should consider Yahoo Directory, Business.com (B2B), Botw.org, Goguides and JoeAnt to start. If you find 20-40 directories of higher quality and related to your niche, that’s good. Try dmoz.org as well, but it will take a while. To find more, use ISEDB.

c. Social Media Sites - The ‘link juice’ is often excluded on sites in this marketplace, but can garner secondary links and certainly visibility and traffic for your brand. Look into Delicious, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn (B2B), Twitter to start.

Quality of links are important, and you should check to make sure links don’t have a “rel=nofollow”, robots.txt exclusion, or javascript redirect code applied. Check also the Google “cache” date – to make sure the page has been recently included, and spidered regularly. As a general guideline – anything page older than 30 days or more is less quality.

These simple tactics and steps should get you thinking about how you must change your link building game for 2009.

—————-

-Steve Hart

Picnik.com is an online photo editing tool. Picnik comes with some great special effects, and can be used with a bunch of community photo sharing sites (Flickr, Imageshack, Photobucket, etc). It’s not as powerful as Photoshop, but for a free browser-based image editor, Picnik does a great job.  

Here are some photos I modified using the Picnik tool: 

Upload a photo and tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with the effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.  Pretty cool.

Only 16% of IT pros said they didn’t visit social networking, social media or social bookmarking sites. That means 84% of our readers use these sites, which is up significantly from 68% last year.

A majority of IT pros — 64% — said they are using social-networking sites more than they did a year ago.

Survey respondents were split on whether social-networking sites increase their productivity at work. Only 14% agreed or strongly agreed with the idea that social networking makes people more productive at work. In contrast, 40% disagreed or strongly disagreed with this idea, and another 40% were neutral on the question.

Read the full story here

• Socialscope (Alpha) -Twitter app for Blackberry...yet another Twitter/Facebook app.
• SlingPlayer Mobile for Blackberry - lets you watch and control your home TV and DVR via your Slingbox™ 
• Unity4Life - turns your Blackberry into a garage remote control or TV remote…my favorite
• Slacker Radio - Listen to all of your favorite personalized Slacker stations
• BeanReader - a PDF reader application…Been there done that
• StockStream Mobile – streaming real time market data...isn’t Google financial good enough?

You have to be a real geek to need this one:

• Zeemote - bluetooth-enabled controller for improved smartphone gaming

Read the full article here.

For you non-techies, here’s a quick and easy online image resizing tool (site).

Not sure why you would use it, but if you needed to resize an image and have nothing to use…resizeimage.org

Give it a try: www.resizeimage.org

The name Xobni, is the word “inbox” spelled backwards. Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that saves time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments.

The Xobni toolbar appears in Outlook and your Outlook information becomes easier to manage. When a new email arrives, the sender’s full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar, including past conversations, attachments and contact details. Xobni also includes a blazing fast email search tool.

I’ve been using this tool for the past year and swear by it’s usefulness. The tracking of attachments by contact is my favorite feature.  It does require a bit of memory, so if your computer is at the minimum specs it won’t live up to it’s reputation.

If you are an avid Outlook user, this is a must have.

Vlingo is a (free) voice-powered user interface that unlocks access to mobile phone wireless data services. vlingo for iPhone™ and vlingo for BlackBerry smartphones allows users to speak into their device and have many popular applications carry out their respective functions. This includes dialing your phone, sending an email or SMS, creating and saving a memo or task, opening a web browser and performing a web search, composing a social-networking status message and more.

You can use the vlingo™ software for the following tasks:

• Searching the Web

• Sending Email

• Sending a Text Message

• Using Voice Dial

• Opening Other Applications

• Updating Facebook Status

• Updating Twitter Status

• Creating a Note to Yourself

I started using vLingo and I find it better that the pre-loaded voice command software that comes installed on my Blackberry. I really like the internet search capabilities. By just saying “Google Movies Irvine California”, vLingo launches a Goolge search showing movie results. Starting in 2009, CA law states no text messaging while driving.  I’ll let you know about my experience in a couple of weeks.