Marcus Hellberg

I’ve gotten off to a good start with my new blog in my opinion. The hardest thing about blogging in the beginning is thinking of things to write about. I’ve had a few websites before, but all of them ultimately grew stale without any new content. So the most important thing is to just start writing and keep up a steady pace.

But what should I write about? Sometimes it feels difficult to think of things to write about, while at other times there are many things in the news or that have happened that are worth blogging about. The solution I have for this problem is that on days that I have many ideas, I create a bunch of posts with only a heading and save them as drafts. This way I can always choose a ready idea if I’m out of ideas when I want to write.

Another type of buffer that I use sometimes is the delayed publishing feature of WordPress. The feature lets me write complete posts and schedule them for publishing at a later date. This way I can spread out posts written on one day over the next few days if needed. From a search engine perspective, it’s important to keep a site regularly updated to keep robots indexing the site at regular intervals. These are a few tips that can help you keep your blog alive and active.

Have any own blogging tips? Let me know in the comments!

Now that I have code highlighting working, I thought that I should still look into getting some easy way to display mathematical notation. Turns out that WordPress once again delivered, there are in fact several different LaTeX plugins available.

The plugin I settled for is WP LaTeX, since it allowed me to use  wordpress.com‘s LaTeX server. This was an easier alternative, as Dreamhost does not have dvipng installed. On a side note, I’m impressed that they have LaTeX installed by default.

Now I only have to insert the following to create a nice looking equation:

H(z) = \frac{1}{1-2 cos(2 \pi k / N) z^{-1} + z^{-2}}

Bonus points for anyone who can identify the transfer function

Everything seems to be moving along nicely. I really like WordPress, it was very easy to set up and start blogging. I currently use ready made theme that I found, which I think suits my blog very nicely. I may build an own theme some time in the future, but I’m sticking to this theme for now.

Dreamhost is still working very nicely. The biggest issue I have encountered is that I can’t access the stats page of my domain because WordPress’ .htaccess file tries to map the url to a page within the blog.

I have a lot of ideas for posts, so stay tuned!

//Marcus