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Best posts on Niche Blogger Today from Feb 2009

• Checking For a Domain Name Safely
  Posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 in domain names – Comments: (1)
  When it comes time to brainstorm what domain you’d like to choose for your niche blog, it’s a good idea to use a safe domain checker. Why?Though it’s frowned upon, some domain registrars monitor when people check for available domains and if they think it might be valuable enough, they’ll snatch if before you have a chance to register for it.
• Drupal Monday: Clearn URLs in Drupal and Godaddy
  Posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 in Drupal Monday – Comments: (1)
  I like Go Daddy. I know many others out there would rather get their teeth pulled than deal with them, but they’ve worked out all right for me. That may change in the future.Despite a good relationship with GoDaddy, sometimes things can be a little maddening. Like when you try to turn on Clean URL’s in Drupal and it just won’t work.
• Drupal Tips Monday: Make CCK Nodes Look a Little Prettier
  Posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 in Drupal Monday – Comments: (2)
  Being inexperienced with the ways of PHP and hardcore Drupal modification, I needed to do one simple thing, make my CCK node title all H3 headers.It took lots of head banging to figure this out.There are Drupal modules that can supposedly template a CCK node, such as Contemplate. After days of messing with it, I could not figure out how to use it.
• Google AdSense Tips from ProBlogger Darren Rowse
  Posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 in Advertising – Comments: (2)
  Darren Rowse is a blogging Rockstar and is someone that every up and coming blogger should listen to and learn from. He runs the hit blogs, Digital Photography School and Problogger. He also recently launched Twitip for Twitter tips and tricks (I recently had a guest post on Twitips about Marketing a Niche Site on twitter).Darren recently did an interview for Google Adsense, giving some of his own tips for creating higher conversions with Google Adsense.
• How to Ban IP’s and Users in WordPress
  Posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 in Blogging – Comments: (4)
  As my blogs become more popular, spammers are becoming more and more of a problem. Their bots are becoming more and more bold in their crawls of my sites and the content that they generate in comments.Recently, one blog article I wrote called “Guide to Building Backlinks Through Blog Commenting” started to get a lot of traffic. I figured it would, that’s why I wrote it, so I didn’t think anything of it.
• How To Choose a Good Hosting Service
  Posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 in Blogging – Comments: (2)
  Image from FlickrThe website hosting industry is EXTREMELY competitive right now. Hosting services are becoming as important as regular utilities. They’re the engines driving innovation on the web from the latest website ideas to the hottest blogs.So, how do you get in on the action? How do you choose the best host for your blog or e-commerce business? As I’ve written about before, if you want to be taken seriously on the web, you need to have your own domain name on your own hosting.
• Niche Blogging 101 Series: How do you find your Niche to Blog About?
  Posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 in Niche Blogging 101 – Comments: (1)
  This is part two in an ongoing series about how to start your own Niche Blog. To read the rest of the posts, check out the Niche Blogging 101 page.This is the most important decision you will make as you begin the journey of developing a niche blog. How you make this decision will guide how interested and passionate about your blog and what kind of content it will have.
• Please Don’t Write Blog Posts in Word
  Posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 in Blogging – Comments: (2)
  It’s second nature to write with MS Word. We’ve been trained to use it our whole lives. And that’s fine. But blogging is a different medium and it does not play well with Word.Many of my guest bloggers and pretty much everyone else, automatically write everything in Word. This is fine and all. But the problem with this, in a web environment, is that Word puts a lot of crap in it’s text formatting that does not play well with HTML.
• Technical Thursday: Manually Inserting Ads into Your WordPress Theme
  Posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 in Technical Thursday – Comments: (1)
  Getting ads into your blog is the most important aspect of monetizing your blog. There are countless plugins that attempt to make it easier for you to place your ads into your content. While most of them work, a lot of them don’t do exactly what you want. So, what’s the solution Place your ads yourself directly into your theme’s template files.
• WordPress Wednesday: WordPress Contact form Solutions
  Posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 in WordPress – Comments: (1)
  In order to help your blog grow, people need to be able contact you quickly and easily. When I first started out, I had a simple contact form that quickly got deluged with Spammers submitting bogus information, filling up my e-mail box.I discovered the WordPress Plugin Secure Contact and used that for the last year. The problem is that I never really tested the thing myself, I just assumed it worked.