Thank you for supporting VCritical in the latest round of vSphere-land top virtualization blogs from Eric Siebert.

I am very pleased to be voted into the #12 slot among a huge selection of talented professionals, moving up one notch from my previous position at lucky #13.

The message is clear — I will continue writing about VMware and competitive topics and I very much appreciate your ongoing support!

Best regards,

Eric

Related posts:

1. Vote VCritical — for change
2. vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen!
3. Got Gravatar?
4. First year of VCritical

On WordPress blogs, these images are generally made possible through a service called Gravatar.  Most of the Top 20 Blogs at vSphere Land use WordPress — if you plan on commenting on the VM blogs, why not take a moment to set up a Gravatar for yourself?

I’m pointing this out in case folks are under the impression that they must have a special account on VCritical to display an avatar next to their comments — it’s all handled by Gravatar.

Do you have a Gravatar?

Related posts:

1. Thinking about blogging?
2. First year of VCritical
3. VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
4. Twitter Century Mark

Here is a quick synopsis of the series:

How to Start a Technical Blog – Part 1

• Why start a blog in the first place?
• Set your expectations
• Get a good name
• Be yourself and blog regularly (but not on certain days; read to find out why)

Part 2: WordPress and How to Configure It

• If you are serious, you want WordPress, period
• Configure WordPress just right
• Get yourself found by Google

Part 3: WordPress Plugins

• Get Feedburner and other necessities up and running with little effort
• Easy database backup solution — you need this

Part 4: Wordpress Themes

• There are tons of themes to control your look and feel
• When you find one, customize the customizable but do not think about editing the code if you have a day job that doesn’t involve writing PHP and CSS

Part 5: Blog Etiquette

• Give credit for content, but respect individual privacy
• Don’t burn your bridges, your writing is somewhat permanent online
• Allow visitors to comment

These are some of the highlights, not a table of contents for Brent’s fine series.  Even if you are a field-hardened and crusty old blogger, I bet you will find something useful there.  Check it out!

Here are a couple tips of my own that I would add:

• Be prepared to deal with SPAM comments and trackbacks; as with email, it’s sort of an arms race
• Use the “more tag” in longer posts so that only a portion shows up on the homepage, otherwise the homepage can become very, very long
• Most plugins take computing resources: CPU, SQL queries; moderation is key
• Set up a test blog to try out new plugins, themes, or ideas without disrupting your live site
  • I did this by setting up a subdomain with a second installation of WordPress — it doesn’t cost anything extra with the host I use
  • Be careful: recently I sent pingbacks to another blog from my development site by accident, doh!

Related posts:

1. Incoming Google Traffic: Introduction
2. Upgraded to WordPress 2.7
3. Introduction
4. Got Gravatar?