Matt's Blog

My brother was showing off his new iPad 2 the other day. He was most impressed with his latest purchase, and it is easy to see why. It was the first time I had been given an opportunity to play with the latest version of Apple's revolutionary device, and I give Apple full credit for transforming computers from dorky, esoteric devices into something cool and fashionable. And then 5 minutes later I was over it. I have to admit at this point that I own a Motorola Xoom - one of the first true Android tablets. I have had it for a good 9 months now, and in that time I have struggled to justify its existence, or the existence of any tablet for that matter. For me tablets sit in the murky middle ground between a laptop/netbook/ultrabook (or whatever the kids are calling them these days) and a good quality mobile phone. Tablets do have advantages over these traditional form factors, but there is one glaring oversight that makes tablets almost useless in every situation:...

A few years ago I started writing for a startup called Brighthub. They offered a simple revenue sharing model that allowed me to make a few bucks sharing my programming experiments with the world. I had fun, I made a few dollars, and I posted some in depth tutorials with information that was not (and still is not) available elsewhere on the web. I know, because there were times where I gave up Googling and just worked it out for myself, and then blogged the results. I learned a few things doing freelance blogging: Read contracts carefully, because you are probably just one email away from being dumped and control of your content being taken away Don't take it personally, because for every anonymous coward who slams your work under a nick like "LinuxGuru", there are 10 others who found some value in your post Minimum word counts suck, because they just lead to  lots  of empty words SEO sucks,  because it just lead to  lots  of empty words And, m...