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I pay monthly. It's just personal preference and the savings I would make by switching are not worth worrying about at the moment.

Good point. I find that the type of reader coming from Twitter has changed over the last 6 months from tech/geek-types to more general readers.

To me a freelancer is someone who makes all or most of their income by working contracts rather than being employed. The dictionary definition is:

A person who sells services to employers without...

I look for design mostly. I think a theme needs to stand out from the crowd (and there are a lot of blogs now), and I also try to pick themes that won't date too quickly. My skills lie in coding so...

Gmail - fast, accesible and feature packed with a good interface

How do people feel about naming and shaming? Unecessary or should there be a "black list" of bad payers? Is a can of worms we don't want to open?

My first host was Media52 because originally I wanted a host that had specific Ruby on Rails hosting and there weren't too many. I'm still using them for ryanajarrett.com but I have tried other...

.com for me is preferable - it's global and people generally try .com first when looking for a domain.

Saying this, I bought My Kids TV because the site is targetted at Kids TV in the UK. This...

There are two schools of thought about ads on a "young" blog - bear with me as this goes off-thread briefly.

Some say you should not monetise your site in it's infancy - it will put off readers...

I agree. My first blog was a personal-type blog, with very little direction and no common theme running through my posts. I just wrote about anything, from music to computing to home life.

It...

I use Twitter for:

News
Networking
Site promotion
Finding opportunities (freelance work)
Asking questions

Linkedin and Twitter

Let me chip in:

Ads when they have a low readership
Spelling mistakes and poor grammar
Background music
Animated gifs and flash all over the place
Poor colour schemes (yellow text on white,...

I find Twitter incredibly useful for finding readers. The trick is to find the right readers. You need to target Twitter users - use the search facility to find the people that are Tweeting about...

Hi,

My name is Ryan. I've been working in IT for almost 11 years, and I've been developing websites and blogging for about 4 years. My two main sites at the moment are ryanajarrett.com and My...