I got curious. There’s a constant debate right now: Which AI actually writes the best content? Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a favorite. And everyone is usually defending the tool they use the most. So instead of guessing… I went straight to the source. I asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini the exact same question: “Based on 2026 evidence, which … Read More
Winning the Search War, Losing the Answer War…
I spent the better part of this morning running recursive audits on some of the biggest tech brands in the world. On paper, these companies are winning. They own the #1 spots on Google for their most expensive keywords. Their SEO teams are probably high-fiving in the breakroom. But then I looked at the “Answer Engines.”
Google vs. AI: “Here are your options” vs. “Here is the answer”
If you want to understand why the search landscape is shifting so violently right now, you only need to look at one thing: the difference between an option and an answer. For twenty years, Google’s job has been to say: “Here are ten blue links. Good luck picking the best one.” It was a choice engine. But in 2026, the … Read More
Technical Project Management: Should Technical Project Managers Be Technical?
This is a question that challenges many technical consulting companies: Should technical project managers be technical? In other words, if you are managing a technology project, do you need to be well-versed in the technologies of the project or do you just need to be a great project manager?
A Career in Technical Training: Is It For You?
Not everyone is cut out to be a great technical trainer. In fact, the industry is littered with sub-par technical trainers who do little more than recite text from a book. The industry needs great trainers, but is it a career that is right for you? There are two characteristics that make someone a great technical trainer: Most trainers have … Read More
Richard Cummings – Writing Portfolio
Greetings everyone! Below, you will find 20 sample articles that I have written on SEO, marketing, and beyond. If you would like to hire me as a web content producer/writer, just fill in this contact form and let’s have a conversation.
PHP: Return First Character of a String
In this quick post, I will tell you how to return the first character of a string in PHP.
Convert External CSS to On-Page (Inline) CSS for Emails
If you are looking to convert your CSS to on-page (or “Inline”) CSS for use in email campaigns, I will tell you how I did it. The Problem: Effective HTML in Emails Most websites now-a-days use CSS to style their web pages and, in doing so, they typically call an external style.css file. Ideally, you could then structure all of … Read More
PHP: Capture Referring URL And Truncate It To Domain Name
This is a quick technical post on how to use PHP to capture a referring URL and truncate it to a domain name. In other words, we want to determine the exact domain name from which our visitors arrived. The reasons for doing this are numerous. Many use this referring information for statistical analysis while others use it to perform … Read More
Google Panda Webspam and Exact Match Domain Searches
There are a couple of new updates to the Google algorithm that have just been released, one a Panda update and the other labeled the “Webspam” update, and these latest algorithmic changes are affecting several sites that use exact match domain searches…among other things.