Antonie loves coding almost as much as he loves food!

Antonie Potgieter is a plugin developer living in South Africa with his finger on the world WordPress pulse. He already has over nine plugins under his belt each one being refined and tweaked with each new version. I managed to catch him today and was able to fire 5 questions his way about who he is and what he does, following is a transcript of the interview.

His software company is called:

Tribulant Software

1. Who is Antonie Porgieter and what is your website URL?

I am a rather young and enthusiastic software engineer focussed on web development specifically. I work as a full-time developer and marketer as the founder of Tribulant Software, a small yet rapidly growing web software provider. The URL of my company website is : http://tribulant.com

2. When and why did you start working with blogs?

My first encounter with blogging software was about a year ago when WordPress gained popularity because of its incredibly powerful plugin application interface. WordPress was still in its earlier stages, probably around version 1.5. The main reason why I started using WordPress was simply due to the opportunity of exploiting the tools of the framework to build useful extensions for other bloggers to use. In addition to that, I used it personally for jotting down ideas and writing journal entries.

3. What are your blogging specialties?

With all honesty, I’m not much of a blogger. At least not in comparison to most of you out there. My specialties lie in the development side of things, specifically focussed on WordPress blogging software. When I do blog, my entries are mostly either news or guidance articles. So the content I write tends to be very rich and useful, though it remains factual and most likely not very creative. So I guess my specialty is in coding and developing plugins, I have recently updated my Mailing list plugin and have just completed a plugin commissioned by a client. Previously I have written a shopping cart plugin, a banner rotator and an FAQ plugin amongst many others, all my work is viewable on my WordPress plugins page.

4. What challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them?

Challenges directly related to blogging in my opinion would be obstacles preventing you (as a blogger) from getting your content out there the way you intend to. These days, with the vast number of powerful and flexible plugins/extensions for blogging software, it is relatively easy to achieve anything you could possibly imagine. A search on your favorite search engine will most likely provide you with a list of plugins to help you do the job you want, the way you want.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for working with blogs?

Every blogger wants as much traffic as they can possibly get. Whether it is from search engines or referring sites, traffic is as good as gold. Always write rich, useful and clear content. Put yourself in the readers’ position and write informative posts that will make as much sense as possible to anyone whom might read it. After all, the more informative and appealing your readers find your content, the more reason they have to either link back to you or tell their friends about it. Additionally, you’ll need to promote your content which you’ve written by focussing on search engine optimization. Do some reading on SEO in order to get a better grasp of what it takes for search engines to recognize you and remember to submit XML sitemaps to search engines.