blogvp

Over the last year Elena, the creative mind behind Design Disease team, has designed a number of free WordPress themes, as the Smashing WordPress Theme we released as a present for our readers during our One-Year-Anniversary in September’07. Afterwards we’ve contacted Elena and asked if it’s possible to design another Wordpress theme for our readers. Elena agreed.

After we’ve discussed the details of the design and the main aims we wanted to achieve, Elena started to do her magic. The result is a fresh, clean, user-friendly and playful Wordpress theme “Dilectio” — a smashing Christmas present for Smashing Magazine readers.

Preview
Download Here

Pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders are all seen as obtrusive advertising that interferes with the user experience of your blog. The last thing someone needs is a flashy ad message popping up everywhere when they are trying to read your blog’s content.

Enter “MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad”, a new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog.

A cool “stripe” appears at the very top of your blog, with a call-to-action to get your blog readers to click on it and be taken to the appropriate landing page.

The ad itself is simple, easy to use, and you can have multiple ads rotating according to your needs.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad 1.2

So they are coming out with something called 802.11n, 802.11b/g is supposedly old news now, but what I’m finding out is that most places can’t even get 802.11b right, with frequent drops, and slow (as in 100-200K) speeds. Maybe 802.11b/g should be fixed first so it works like it should. Or maybe 802.11n is the “fix”. Whatever, just get it right and get ‘er done soon.

802.11n, wifi

Nick writes: “Performancing Metrics is a professional grade blog statistics service aimed at professional bloggers. We wanted to produce something a little better, a little different for the professional blogger, and I think we have.”

Google bought Measure Map, the company that makes pretty blog statistics.

google, analytics, measure, map

Google is giving webmasters more control over what part of their site is index and what part is not.

“Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.”

To emphasize something to the Googlebot, use:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

To ignore add: (weight=ignore) as in:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Of course Google says that doing the above will only influence the ads taht appear on the page, but since it’ll automated you can pretty much guess that it’ll do more than influence.

google, adsense, targeting

It’s 2:10AM as I’m starting to write this and it’s another 1 hour and 50 minutes until my next polyphasic sleeping nap. I wanted to address the issue of 5 Reasons Why Starting a Digital Camera Blog Is A Stupid Idea.

Some time ago, I was reading Darren’s entry on how he became a six figure blogger and I thought: “Cool, all I have to do is start a digital camera blog. Link to all kinds of reviews and sometimes write up my own review and BANG I’ll be a six figure blogger.”

Well, that thought didn’t last long after I realized what it would take to actually pull this off. Why don’t you get a nice beverage and follow what I’m saying here.

5 Reasons Why Starting a Digital Camera Blog Is A Stupid Idea

1. Initial Fire Burns Out Fast - when this idea of starting a digital camera blog entered my mind, I thought it was a huge idea, something like a huge dry forrest of innder fuel to drive me towards the next six-figure blogging success, but that was before I analyzed everything that was involved. And I didn’t try out the idea. Once I did think the whole idea through, and try it out for a week or so, I realized that instead of having this huge supply of energy and drive for this to succeed, my forrest was actually just worth a load of firewood into the fireplace. First realization: I have to make sure that I have enough drive, fuel and desire to at least have me going enthusiastically for six month (after that we can always flip).
2. No Enthusiasm=No Results - I’ve known this before, but somehow it just gets blocked when new things come around. Somehow I thought it would be different with my new digital camera blog. But then I realized that although I loved taking pictures on special occasions and I do own several digital cameras, I wasn’t pumped up enough about digital cameras to be spending several hours per day writing about them. Then I came up with an idea that if I wasn’t going to write about a subject without getting paid for it, I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to continue and shouldn’t be starting a blog devoted to that idea.
3. Too Much Noise In The Market when Darren started his digital camera blog sereral years ago, there weren’t as many blogs about the subject as there are now. The market was not as overpopullated. Now, the digital camera blogs world is oversaturated, with everybody and their aunt thinking they’re going to strike the motherload, but they’re wrong. It’s only a matter of time before they realize what I realized and we’ll have another dead blog. Third realization: research the current field for saturation and potential (without looking through the money lens).
4. Are There Enough Readers? - one of the draw to starting a niche blog in an unsaturated market is that you’ll be the only one or one of the few, so more visitors will come to read what you have to say and interact with your blog and with you. But when you’re starting a digital camera blog, you’re looking at competing with hundreds of other sites for the same visitors. When the visitors visits a niche blog, he didn’t just read the same thing on five other blogs, you’re it, you’re the only provider, so the visitors will be more likely to leave comments and interact with the blogs.
5. Long Term Vision? - Another idea that came to my mind when I was thinking of starting that digital camera blog was if I could see myself running the blog five or ten years from now. I realized that in order to have something that was worth reading and later possibly selling, it would have to be taken care of in the best possibly way, with the long term vision in mind, because if I only thought short term, the product that would come out of it would be somthing I wouldn’t be proud of.

So from now on, whenever I come across a new blog idea, I apply this DigitalCameraBlogCheck before going any further and investing anymore brain power, hope this works for you too.

starting+a+blog, blogging, getting+started

Duncan Riley, a blogger from Australia has been forced to go Pro as a blogger. His full time job just laid him off.

I’ve been reading his blog for a while now. He also heads up b5media. Best of luck to Duncan, especially getting this news before Christmas.

So Google is using themed Christmas ads in Adsense. As you can see the example here. I’ve seen some of them on my sites. But the important question is: How will they performd? we’ll have to wait until after Christmas to find that out.

google, adsense

Grab it here.

I’m installing it one of my tester blogs and will report on what I think about it soon.

wordpress+2.0

Performacing has launched their Firefox extension which basically an in-browser blog editor. It gives you a quick way to add new blog entries to Wordpress, MovableType and Blogger, or any other software that uses their API.

performancing, firefox, extension

IImage Browser is one of the best image plugin for Wordpress out there.

Here’s what it can do:

• Easily upload new images
• Resize images and automatically create thumbnails
• Option of linking to the larger version of image
• Delete images
• Set up different directories for better image management
• Sort/backsort by newest and A-Z
• So far bug free
• Super easy to install

I’ve been using this wordpress plugin for months now to upload images on my other blogs and it works great. There was one issue where I had another image plugin installed at the same time as IImage Browser and they both were not working, so I uninstalled the other one and have not had any issues since.

Download it here.

How to install:

1. Unpack iimage-browser.php to your wp-admin directory and iimage-browser-plugin.php to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Check TWICE if “URI of this directory” of “Allow File Uploads” in “administration> options> miscellaneous” is FULL address like: http://domain/blblabla
3. Activate IImage Browser plugin in administration area.
4. When editing post - you should have Insert Image in upper right corner of your screen or “IImage Browser” button in your Quicktags area. Click on it!

wordpress, plugin, image, iimage+browser

Nick writes:

Aswell as providing support for our Firefox extension, and other tools that you’ll hear about next year, we wanted to address the need for bloggers to have a place, a community in which to ask questions, get advice, and chat with like-minded people.

The forums are located here.

performancing.com, forum

Marketingsherpa has put out a new report for Fortune 500 corporations to start blogging, here’s summary:

There’s a dark note mixed in with the happy buzz about blogging these days. Bloggers have been fired from their jobs for what they thought were innocuous posts. Investor relations departments are having legal nightmares over an innocently-meant blog revealing critical info to the world before it’s sent to investors. PR departments are finding themselves side-stepped by the media who go direct to blogging staffers, instead of carefully prepped official spokespeople.

The genie is out of the box. Now, how do you cope? Here are five pre-launch steps for any corporation considering blogs:

Read the report here.

corporate, blogging

Some study says that 75% of all pings are spam, but this is not the case for me, or at least with the blogs that I run. There is no mention of what makes “splog” or a spam blog, so maybe a little bit more of information on that would be nice.

splogs, spam