You may have noticed that I stopped posting on this blog. That's not because I lost interest in blogging, nor is it related to my laziness. I've actually been working on a new project with my brother.

Less Annoying Software is our new business. To get started, we're going do some general tech consulting. Eventually, we plan on transitioning from consulting to pure software development. The goal is to have at least one online application that we can build our business around.

We're also starting a blog called The Less Annoying Blog. I plan on posting over there instead of on TylerKing.net from now on. I still may use this site to give periodic updates on my life, but you should really head over to the new blog and subscribe to that if you enjoy reading this one. Let me know what you think about Less Annoying Software, or if you know anyone that could use our services.

Well, it's been almost a week since I posted last.  I was pretty busy finishing up that freelance project, but I got it done.  There's still another month and a half of testing, bug fixes, and all that fun stuff, but it shouldn't take as much time or energy as the past month has.

While I was away, this blog crept its way up to #1 on Google if you search for "Tyler King".  This probably doesn't sound that great to you, but it's kind of a big deal for me.  I'd been sitting at number two for a couple of months and I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever get to my rightful spot at the top of the list.

I'm of the opinion that if I'm trying to convince someone that I can make good websites, it doesn't really help my case if I don't even have the most popular result when you search for my exact name.

Anyway, let's turn this into another SEO lesson.  I've read all over the place that the age of a website matters a lot.  Older websites get more respect from search engines.  Sadly, when you're ready to sit down and work on SEO, you can't really do anything about the age of your site, so I basically ignored that piece.  I couldn't figure out why this site was #2.  I tried changing keywords, improving my linkages, changing the structure of my site, etc.

I guess I just had to sit back and wait.  Either that or Google really hates my blog so it rewarded me for taking the week off.

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I checked again and my site showed up at #3.  A DEMOTION!?!  Could someone let me know where my blog ranks when you search for "Tyler King"?  Thanks

I recently took on a pretty big sideproject which will take up almost all of my free time through July 15th and there will probably be sporadic work after that for a couple of months.  Because of that, I won't be able to spend quite as much time on this blog.  My goal is to post 4 or 5 times per week over the next month, but the posts won't be as substantial as they have been (don't act so happy).

This decision comes from one of those 37Signals tips that I love so much.  If you have to balance between scope, time, and cost (or resources), always reduce the scope first.  I still plan on keeping up my normal posting frequency more or less, but the scope of each post is reduced.  See, I'm using all these things I talk about on here.

This blog has been running strong for a little over a month and a half now so I thought I'd spend some time changing some of those little annoying things that make websites less pleasant to use.  Since this process is related to the usual topics covered on this blog, I figured I'd briefly go over what changes I made an why.

New Navigation

The point of this site was to act as my portfolio (just look at the URL).  I thought that this would be made up of a blog, traditional portfolio, bio, and resume.  What I failed to account for is that three of those things only matter when I'm looking for a job.  So now the blog is the home page.  It's the primary focus of the site and the other sections are available through a navigation bar at the top right.

This is a great example of me out-hinking myself.  It should have been obvious from the beginning that this site is all about the blog but I tried to make decisions without actually consider the end use.  Lesson learned.

Email notifications on comments

A few of the posts on this site have led to conversations in the comments.  I'd imagine it's tedious to check back in to see if someone has replied to your comment, so I added a feature that will send you and email to let you know that someone else has chimed in on a conversation you're a part of.  If you want to use this, check the "Email me if other people comment on this post" option when you submit a comment.  This will only notify you about comments for that particular thread and you can unsubscribe to the notifications at any time.

Consistent Tagging

This one won't affect you a whole lot, but it will help me prepare the site for the future.  I've been having trouble using regular tags in my posts so that I can build up categories with lots of content.  My current method of using archives as a navigation tool won't work when I have hundreds of posts, so I need to use some foresight with my tagging system.  I added some features to my admin section to make this easier.

That's all for this round.  I'm sure there will be more to come.

I knew it was just a matter of time before all those annoying spamming robots figured out that they could leave comments on my blog.  Well, they finally started doing what they do best so I had to go on the defensive.

In order to prevent spamming, I've added a Captcha to the site.  For those of you that aren't familiar with that term, Captchas are those annoying things that ask you to look at an image and type in the letters except you can never actually tell what the letters are.  I know they suck, but I can't think of a better way to handle this other than to moderate comments and I'm not really about that.

For those of you rabid commenters that spend all day posting on this site, you can just make an account and as long as you're logged in, the captcha won't show up.  Hopefully the robots aren't smart enough to figure that out.