Gerard McGarry

I installed a dual-boot configuration during a system rebuild recently and stuck the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu 8.10 on a sizeable partition. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm constantly questioning whether Ubuntu Linux is a viable Windows replacement.

One of the key things for me in making a transition of this magnitude is finding a desktop blogging client compatible with Linux and it also being as fully featured as Windows Live Writer - my blogging client of choice and perhaps the leading blog client software. The thing is, the latest version of Live Writer Beta has some pretty hot features, including a link gloassary which allows you to autolink to a page previously linked to: you enter the last anchor text as previously and it automatically creates the link for you.

There isn't a single other blog editor that I know of that can replicate that functionality.

If you've ever installed the TinyMCE module for Drupal (or indeed the WYSIWYG module which seems to be the preferred way forward), you'll have noticed that the default font size is miniscule. My first concern as a web designer is usability. How hard is it to read and edit?

About two years ago, I decided that I wasn't going to SEO this site. Admittedly, I've deviated from this strategy subtly in the intervening time.

For a start, I ditched the Garland theme in preference of my own design, which uses XHTML, is easily crawlable and very semantically correct. I noticed the other day that somewhere along the line, I installed the nodewords module for Drupal - possibly in testing for another site - but I'm not complaining about the individualised meta tags it creates.

I haven't made much fanfare on here about becoming self-employed.

Oh, in my head I wanted to write a sermon about how good it feels to be achieving a lifelong dream. The last few months at Howden, I was becoming more and more aware of how bogged down in paperwork we were becoming. It's hard to be passionate about something when you can't move for filling in forms.

So yes, leaving to work on my own business has been a great feeling. Liberating. Empowering. Lots of big motivational words like that.

But I'm a realist too, and I don't want to pen some high and mighty words that'll come back to haunt me later. It's a fact of life that the online advertising market is contracting at the moment. Revenues so far have been fine, but you'd be a fool if you thought that money just comes flooding in when you've got a website that's doing well.

I use the wp-shortstat plugin across all my WordPress blogs to track visitors and show me where my visitors are coming from.

However, Shortstat has its problems – it logs everything, resulting in a massive database size on your server. The more popular your site, the more this lumbering beast of a database slows things down. In fact, in one instance, the database grew so large that Shortstat couldn’t display the stats anymore.

I have many reservations about the sheer amount of crap professional bloggers talk. Someone will proclaim Twitter the next big place to promote your blog, and off go the ADD masses looking for the next batch of hits for their wee blog.

I've been working on websites for years now (since University days), and my toolkit has changed quite a bit since those early days of hand-crafted Notepad HTML.

These days I'm using a combination of free and paid-for tools and FireFox extensions that help me code, design and troubleshoot my web pages. Here's the line-up: