“Why should I use del.icio.us?” is a question I got the other day. It seems that del.icio.us provides no search engine love as it blocks the bookmarks with nofollow tags, yet it is very valuable.

What del.icio.us is good for is exposure. Lots of people use del.icio.us to not only store their own bookmarks but find new and interesting websites. I know that sites like LifeHacker sometimes posts on what is popular in del.icio.us too. This then turns in to a very valuable link back to your site.

What you are really doing is trying to create buzz and visibility for an article or a site that you think is interesting. It’s not about spamming link building for search engines.

Lets not forget that del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo and who knows what Yahoo might do with del.icio.us. They could do away with the nofollow tags or possibly use it to influence their own rankings. Only time will tell.

I would continue to use del.icio.us as an avenue for social bookmarking and exposure because it’s the most popular and most used social bookmarking site out there. However, also look into other services too. Sites like Spurl.net are more search engine friendly and can actually dual post to del.icio.us also. Now you are hitting two good sites with one bookmark.

One of the things that bugs me about Wordpress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

This does not work as nice though with services like YouTube that offer Flash elements. Embedding Flash is a bit more tricky. I’ve found it best to use Safari or a browser that doesn’t do the whole WYSIWYG thing. Then putting in the YouTube code works fine.

I’m declaring the 13th of each month as the unofficial blog backup day. Meaning that you should login to your blog software and download a backup of all posts. Also, if you have access to the template files, back those up too.

Avoiding issues are much easier than trying to fix them once they happen. I’ve never seen a blog just delete itself, but I have heard of people’s hosting accounts suddenly having a hardware failure and are non-recoverable. If you don’t have a backup of your files, who does?

Yes, a good host will make backups, but that’s placing your trust fully in a third party. What if their backups are in the same office as your website and they have a fire? All is lost. If you do have a good host, then a secondary set of backups never hurt and you’ll have them at your fingertips at all times.

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

I know it sounds odd, but Macromedia Adobe recently announced Contribute 4 and one of the key features is blogging. Contribute as desktop publishing software? Yep.

According to Contribute’s website, the application now supports MetaWeblog which means it should work with Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and many others.

At first thought, Contribute doesn’t seem like your average blogging application and that’s because it isn’t. Contribute has worked its way into many workplaces as WYSIWYG website editing software. It was a great solution for those that wanted to edit their website, yet steer clear of the technical aspect of a website.

It’s that pre-built user base that makes integrating blogging capability the perfect next step. Teaching clients how to blog can be a challenge. There is a new interface, a new login/admin area and a whole new system to learn. With Contribute, that learning curve is lessened as they already know how to use the software and may already be comfortable using it.

It took me by surprise at first but adding blogging capabilities to Contribute seems to be then ext logical step. Not only are we installing more and more blogs for clients, but we also already use Contribute to let clients control their own content. This is just the next logical step in Contribute’s evolution.

Many search engines have stated time and time again that they crawl pages they can get to easily. Basically, if it takes more than three steps to get to a page, it won’t get indexed as easily or or re-indexed as often. By adding related posts to your blog, you are now allowing a search engine spider to easily get older posts easily.

Related posts are just links to posts that were made in the past. Some may have been posted in the last week, others maybe last year. These posts have a much better change of getting updated in search engines then if they were buried in the archives.

Creating links to related posts can be done in a number of ways. One is just linking back to old posts within new posts as reference points. Another is taking the time to write out three our four related posts at the bottom of all new posts. This may be a bit more time consuming, however they will be most relevant.

One things that blogs lack is an easy way to add an introduction paragraph to the beginning of the index page. However, there are may solutions, including Adhesive.

Adhesive allows the user to create a ’sticky’ post that will always show up as the first post on the homepage. This can then be used for an introduction/welcome paragraph that gives your visitors a bit of an explanation of what your blog is about.

This is especially useful for any blogs that function as a full fledged website. Giving the users a short explanation of what the site is about can be much more informative than just showing the last 10 posts.

If you have a bit of programming knowledge, a little PHP can help you discover and style the sticky post also. This will set it apart from the other posts so it feels like a separate entity and not just a blog post.

If you’ve used other Adhesive type plugins, please share your experiences.

I plan on installing Adhesive in the near future and you can see how it works. Until, then head over to the Adhesive site and check it out.

When creating a new blog, one of the questions that comes up a lot is, how often should I post? Where there is no definite answer, once a day or every other day is good, but exceptions always apply.

Some blogs I read post every day. The posts are usually shorter and quick to read. They give just enough information to keep me interested without giving so much information that I need to take 10 minutes out of my day to read the post. This is a great way for a beginner to start off. Creating shorter, simpler posts are much easier than working out a long, in-depth post.

Those long in-depth posts can be successful too. Some blogs choose to write one longer post a week. The idea is to take all your efforts and make one great post instead of a bunch of small posts. Where this isn’t a bad idea, these posts usually take longer to read and many may just skip over it as it takes to much time to work though. However, if done right, your long posts could get you much more link love than a bunch of smaller ones.