Why? Well because I either work from home, or fly, and for those small moments in between, I don't need no car, I'd rather take a train. Ever heard of traffic jams? We seem to have invented those here in the Netherlands, or at least have a serious problem with them. Consider this: we've got longer traffic jams each office day, than that our country is long.

So why a "bakfiets"? Well I need to carry around my two kids sometime, and some beer, and this baby can carry it all at the same time. Ow and, just look how awesome it looks on me:

Now that we're talking about rides by the way, I got my son a new ride too, a skelter:

Is that cool, or what?

Showing off my new ride! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let me show you what's on my desk with me right now:

Travelgear: HyperMac, Mifi and MacBook Pro

To the left is my HyperMac external battery, which is powering and charging my laptop at the moment, and also has an outlet to charge my iPhone, should it need charging. I've been traveling quite a bit with this and found that, when fully charged, my MBP-100 HyperMac gives me about 6 hours of added productivity, which is very useful if you're in trains as much as I am.

On the right of the HyperMac is my Novatel Mifi, which is giving me a great HSDPA connection here in the airport. If you don't know the Mifi, it's a wireless hotspot that uses your simcard, and converts your 3G connection into a wireless hotspot for 5 devices. It's got an absolutely great antenna, giving me the best connection I've ever had wirelessly here in Holland.

Coolest thing about the Mifi? I can use it on the road, for instance while driving. Yesterday I was stuck in a traffic jam, but had to go into a Skype conference call. So I booted up the Mifi, made my iPhone to its Wireless connection, and was able to use Skype on my iPhone to do the conference call, while driving! (Nevermind the safety issues, I was going a maximum of 5 mph...)

I got my Mifi at Henk van Ess's MifiEurope.com, he's also going to be bringing the Eye-fi to Europe, the combination of a Mifi with and Eye-fi must be very good for those who make a couple more pictures a week than I do...

The Mifi and Hypermac both are a bit pricy, but they do help me to spend as much of my travel time working, and thus are well worth their money!

Travel gear… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

On the other hand I do really want Microsoft to keep trying. We need the competition... If you understand Dutch, listen to the interview here.

*Bing* on national radio is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'm also, with this post, submitting this design to the WP WebHost Best WordPress Design Award contest in the "Modern & Elegant" category. I think the new design is worthy of a price :)

The credits for this design go to W3 Edge Web Site Design, where Frederick and his team did an awesome job. Coding it took a fair bit longer than expected, mostly due to me being extremely busy with OrangeValley.

New design (and submitting for a contest)! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Personal note: wedding pictures! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We had an awesome day, and as you can see, Marieke looked absolutely stunning!

If you want something to read in the meanwhile, I have a few suggestions for you:

• Erik-Jan Bulthuis, who recently did some guest posts on B2B SEO on this blog, has his own english blog now, so head over there: justerik.com.
• Rae Hoffman did a nice post: Pimping Your WordPress Theme for Humans, if you subscribe to my WordPress newsletter, one of the tips in there should be fairly familiar :)

Keep watching this blog as well, some guest posts might just pop up!

Just Married! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

About Sociable for WordPress: add diggita.it

That was all that was in there! I wish it was the first e-mail like that, but it wasn't...

Now if you want me to do something for you, the best thing you can do is ask! And I can tell you one thing, thanking me for writing plugin or tool X, Y or Z won't hurt, and adding "please" might be a good idea too.

If you want something done tomorrow, either consider paying me to do it (and I'm sorry, but tomorrow is never cheap), or be really really polite and tell me why you need it. I spend 20-30 hours a week writing plugins, tools and blog posts, and I give all of them away for free. Please be so kind as to reward that with well written and polite emails.

Update: it get's worse, I emailed this lady back with the following single line:

pretty please? :)

And I got this response:

It was not an order, just a quick request. I wrote it in a hurry. :-p

Now seriously, she'll never get anything done from me anymore.

Guide for contacting me is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• Post: New Tool - Simply Advanced Google Search!
• Post: Google Chart API
• Tool: Simply Advanced Google Search

I hope you enjoy them (too)!

Blogging at Google Tutor is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It's pretty darn simple, actually: I had MSN Messenger and Live Messenger installed. Somehow these two kept bumping into each other, so you should remove MSN Messenger, and all works flawlessly again. Follow these simple steps, and you will be cured of the problem as well:

1. Shut down Messenger.
2. Click Start
3. Click Run
4. enter "%appdata%\microsoft" (without the quotes) and press Enter.
5. You're now in your application data folder.
6. Delete the MSN Messenger folder.
7. Start up Messenger again.

That fixed it for me, hope it helps you out as well!

MSN / Live Messenger problems is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

A lot of my time goes into my own company, AlthA Web design, in which I do some WordPress coding and web design stuff.

All the time outside of doing those things goes into my family, first and foremost my lovely Marieke and our son Tycho (see the picture on the right). During weekends, we usually spend a lot of time at her parents and my parents, as both of them live near by.

Lastly, I love going out for a beer with some friends, but to be honest, I've not done a lot of that lately due to an extreme workload...

Now for tagging three other SEO's (and I'll pick people who aren't at conferences this week):

• Dave's new colleague Dan Horton
• SEOIdiot
• Dennis Goedgebuure (that should give me some time to answer your hard questions ;) )

Blog Tag: When I’m not doing SEO… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• Are a good PHP / MySQL developer.
• Can develop an application based on different API's on your own.
• Have ideas on how to improve stuff and can explain them to us.
• Would like to work with a team of young and enthusiastic internet professionals.

Then maybe you should join us in our office in Arnhem (or in Barcelona). Mail me at joost " at " joostdevalk dot nl, and I'll set you up for a meeting!

Developers needed! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Check out my new gravatar is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It's not enabled for me yet, but once it becomes available, I think I'll switch to that instead of my regular IMAP.

That’s it! I’m switching to GMail! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Sorry about that: back to full feeds… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We offer a very, very nice place to work, a good salary,  and colleagues like Roy, Ramon, Arjan & Erik-Jan and me, to learn loads from!

We need more colleagues! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now it has been known for quite a while that MSN censors URL's, as covered here for instance, but I had not ever heard of them censoring out complete TLD's... This is, IMHO, insane... Come on Microsoft, stop doing this sort of nonsense!

Microsoft Censoring .info domains in MSN Messenger is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The company I work for, Onetomarket, has an office in Spain, and it's growing very rapidly. So we need new SEO's and SEM specialists there. If you want to work as an SEO or AdWords specialist, and like the thought of becoming one of my colleagues, mail me, and I'll arrange a meeting for you!

A note to my Spanish readers is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I got a request to do a sponsored review for Bidvertiser for Advertisers. Requests like this are always fun, and this one started off even better, since the people at Bidvertiser really get how this market works. They encouraged me to sign up for their referral program and use the code in there to link to them, because that would give new advertisers a nice $20 in free clicks. Apparently they do not mind at all that I will get paid for that as well, which shows that they really like to be reviewed!

I must say I'm pretty impressed with their interface, it looks nice, reports well and fast and does pretty much everything you'd want it to do. Searching for cars gave me a load of sites on which you can advertise, and quite a few subcategories to do even more targeted niche advertising.

After I had selected a few for my car advertisement, I got the option to set up geotargetting. I chose US only for this testrun, but having the option to target your ads as easy as this is pretty nice. After that I got the possibility to set my bid prices, and what I found really good to see is that they're not inflating expected clicks. If they expect you to get 12 clicks a month from a site and tell that honestly, I'm impressed.

I think that using Bidvertiser you can get some pretty nice exposure if you pick your sites right (there is some crap in there, just skip through that), for a pretty low amount of money. Now what more would you want? So go sign up already!

Bidvertiser.net – Text-Link-Advertising is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

MSN Reporter still buggy is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The future of the internet. is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!