In my last post, I shared with you the reasons why I wanted to start a new blog. However, I forgot to mention that the major impetus for grabbing the qualitysoftwarematters.com domain name came from my participation in a free blogging course provided by John Sonmez of simpleprogrammer.com.

If you haven't heard of him, you should definitely check out his blog. I have found a wealth of advice on a lot of topics that should interest all developers. And even though I've had a blog previously for many years, John really helped me by giving guidance on focusing my efforts.

In six email lessons, I have learned:

• Why having a blog can help me in my career
• The importance of specialization and theme selection
• How to:
  • Host my own blog
  • Generate ideas for blog posts
  • Be consistent
  • Market my blog

If you haven't started your own blog or your efforts have waned with an existing one, I highly recommend that you sign up for this free course. It has really fired me up!