Blogging the wrong or right (write) way

In the Feb 2008 issue of Entrepreneur, I found an interesting article on blogging for dollars. Mike Hogan writes, johnchow.com has increased from $353 dollars a month to $25,000 in ad network advertisment just by blogging. Find that interesting?

It only makes sense by blogging you are creating unique content for the search engines to suck up into their databases. This means more traffic to your site which also means more money in your pocket. However, I believe you have to go beyond the basics of blogging. For example, you have to have a clear picture of what your content is going to be about. Some people blog about everything while others stick to a couple of main topics they enjoy as a hobby or business.

I'll be honest (i'm the dummy), I really didn't know how important blogging was until I started my own little personal blog (basically this website). I've been running website services for over 10 years now and it just hit me that this could be a really good tool for anyone to use to increase traffic for website. Yes, I've dabbled in SEO (search engine optimization) and any designer should have your interest at heart when building your website. SEO is very important because without it and proper seo techniques your website will never get very popular. Why, because you don't have enough content and keyword phrases on your website.

This is why blogging is important. Bottom line it keeps the search engines happy in finding new content on your website which in time will build you traffic which does translate to pocket change and possibly thousands a month like John Chow.

If you are looking for blogging software, try wordpress (it's very search engine friendly) and best of all it's free. I also want to comment that I offer script installation services and hosting for your blog should you ever need it. Just click the order web services above but if you have any questions please do give me a call and ask for Chris. (256-348-8461)

Happy blogging!

Today, I'll be working with 2 sql views joined togeather to build a report and a filter page. The problem is both of these views are huge and very slow. I'm talking about about 50 lines of code a piece and a bunch of case statements within it to form calculations. I would love to post the code but it's rather sensitive data. I can say it pulls in roughly 200,000 to 300,000 records, if not more.

The data actually gets pulled in through a DTS (data transformation services) and gets stored in raw staging tables. The views were created early so it's really hard to turn back now without affecting a lot of reports across the application.

The real problem lies within the amount of calculations performed on so many records and the reports are trying to pull the data on the fly. The solution is to copy the records the views pulls in and cache them in a sql table (makes pulling the data 10 times faster). However, since the DTS runs so often, a script (stored procedure) needs to be written to copy the records over to a table. I know it doesn't make sense since that's why a view was built to begin with. However in this case, there is no other way around it (unless you know of a way) without stripping the whole backend database down and doing the backend correctly. However, when working on time contraints and your client is more demanding than ever. Not an option at this point.

Moral of story: If you are using views and you are pulling in large amounts of data, consider caching the view in a table.