When you blog about something on your website, you want people to know about it. The more people that know about it the better. And the more blog search engines that know about it, the better it is for your search engine optimisation (SEO). This post describes one way of increasing the exposure of your blog using a simple Umbraco package called PingXMLRPC.

I had a couple of problems on the new Web Garden Umbraco v4.0.1 with Windows Live Writer 2009 integration. In this blog post I describe the issues that I had and the solution to those issues.

At last I have gotten around to upgrading the Web Garden site to the latest version of Umbraco. Here are the details of some of the packages that I installed, including site compression, image caching, google sitemap, new blog package for Umbraco v4 and some other features that may be of interest.

I previously blogged about a simple Umbraco helper class to get Umbraco data into your usercontrols, but since then I've updated it quite a bit. Due to ongoing efforts to package up my code into more easily re-usable chunks, I've created a new class library, WebGarden.Utilities, that I just add to each new project. It gives me access to a number of handy functions, a few of which I'm going to share here (the more general purpose ones).