In the 20th century we witnessed armed conflicts that where initiated with massive air raids.  These raids where often launched in stealth during the the quiet hours before dawn and focused on taking out key elements of the enemy infrastructure, such as their ability to communicate.  We even witnessed the surrender of Bosnia through the use of air power alone.

We are now almost a decade into the 21st century and Russia has set the stage for a new era of war, The Age of Cyberwarfare. In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Georgia, Russia engaged in the first Cyberwarfare offensive in history.  During that time Russain Hackers crippled several Georgian Government Web sites and took the entire Georgian Nation Bank offline.

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Benchmarking Your Blog

Ever wonder just how well your blog performs when compared to other blogs and Web sites of similar size and category?  Learn how to analyze your blog’s usage statisticts with Google Analytics to learn exactly how it performs against industry benchmarks.

There are all kinds of Blog stats programs available for the various blog applications.    WordPress.com stats still is the most popular WordPress Stats plugin and many more can be found on via the word press plugin directory by clicking on the WordPress Stats tag.  There are several stats extensions for BlogEngine.Net, yet I have yet to find an all in one stats package for BlogEngine.Net. Web site usage statistics analysis does not only apply to blogs however and the information in this post can be applied to any Web site.

Although these stats programs can help you track various things, such as page load times, referrers, what key phrases your site shows up in search engines, outbound clicks, and downloads, the all come short when it compares your blog or Web site’s performance to other blogs and web sites.  The problem is they don’t really share the data they collect with other installation on other people’s blogs.

Enter Google Analytics to provide the solution for benchmarking your blog or Web site.  For those who aren’t familiar with Google Analytics, it is the industry standard Web site analytics programs and is constantly updated with great new features.

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How Important Are SEO Friendly Permalinks

I recently just wrote my article comparing BlogEngine.Net To WordPress.  During the course of my research I came across a post on Steve Trefethen’s blog where he discussed the possibility of migrating from dasBlog to BlogEngine.Net.  I left Steve a comment stating that I would not even consider the possibility of EVER using dasBlog because its unconventional URL structure.  Steve replied to the tune that permalinks shouldn’t be a consideration in choosing a blogging platform.

Note: If you don’t know what permalinks (or permanent hyperlinks) are you should read up on using permalinks before reading the rest of this article.

I left a lengthy comment explaining the importance of using URLs that are  both user and search engine friendly. Then I decided I would share some of my professional knowledge on the subject with others .  This post should be especially helpful to developers that just don’t have time to keep with the latest search engine guidelines.  I also hope this entry will give you some insight to designing a site architecture that users and search engines can better take advantage of.

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Many developers tend to overlook cross browser compatibility when creating the look and feel of Web sites. These can have negative side effects that directly hinder the performance of your blog or Web sites.  To assure that the HTML and CSS in my web designs render correctly in the various browsers I use http://browsershots.org.  This great tool generates screen shots of my web designs using various versions of multiple browsers on several operating systems.  It then presents my with thumbnails of my Web Pages which I review thumbnails to assure the designs render correctly.

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BlogEngine.Net Vs WordPress

Being an Asp.Net Developer lets just say I wasn’t to happy when I was forced to switch my Blogger.com account over to Google’s platform and lose the blogging features I was accustomed to.  I was so unhappy that I abandoned my Asp.Net roots and headed into uncharted territory.  Reluctantly, I installed MySQL and PHP followed by WordPress on my Windows 2003 server.

Then I learned about an open source blog software written in Asp.Net called BlogEngine.Net.  I was interested in the blogging software being that it is closer to my roots as an Asp.Net developer. But couldn’t really find any good reviews of the features or a comparison to the industry standard WordPress,  so I decided to put together a collection of posts for others to read.

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