Crenk » Blogging

TIME Magazine launch TechLand

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:06:01 +0000

The folks behind TIME magazine at TIME Inc. have just launched their new technology website dubbed Techland. The new website has many old faces from TIME on its masthead including their Tech editor Lev Grossman who’ll be a regular contributor.

They’ll cover the more ‘user orientated’ area of the market with much of their categories revolving around products and less about news. These categories include Gadgets, Gaming, Culture and Videos.

Overall, it looks like a good website from a reliable bunch however the design is a little sloppy and I’d imagine they’ll be tidying things up a bit as the site grows. The ties with TIME are still evident with many of their information pages such as ‘Contact Us’ leading directly to TIME’s customer services page.

Create Your Own Wordpress Theme

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:12:04 +0000

Don’t like having the same theme as everyone else on your Wordpress blog and can’t find one just right for you? Well then just create your own – no coding necessary. WPTheme Creator is an online web app that allows you to generate your own custom Wordpress theme by simple entering in things like how many columns you want and what colours you would like certain aspects to be.

As you can see in the screenshot, the options are fairly basic but they return good results when you really put some thought and effort into creating your new Wordpress theme.

The generated themes will run on Worpress programs up to the most recent one – 2.8 right the way from the fairly ancient 2.1 Wordpress release. One you have finished creating your theme you simply click ‘Save’ and then download it as you would any other theme. Then, go to ‘the Appearance tab in the wp-admin screen of your Wordpress blog and upload the theme, then click Activate once it has finished installing. Your new generated theme will be active on your blog.

Feedly: The Best Browser RSS Reader

Dean Sherwin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:22:24 +0000

I though I’d share with you guys an RSS reader that I started using recently called Feedly. Basically it’s and add-on for most browsers including Chrome and Firefox which combines all your RSS feeds into one incredible place that by far surpasses generic readers such as Google.

Here is a screenshot:

What I like most about is that it also combines other services such as GMail and Twitter into the same package so you’re getting all of your information in the one place instead of having several tabs open.

It’s free and its easy to set up once you have installed it as an add-on. Click here to download Feedly.

Digg Launches Trends. See What Are The Hot Topics on Digg

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:35:04 +0000

Twitter’s Trending Topics is a great way to see what’s buzzing, what’s going one and what’s happening in the world. Often, big stoies are made publicaly aware on Twitter trends before they hit mainstream news. Several times I’ve watched BBC World News when the presenter used Twitter trends as a source.

Now Digg are launching a new trends experiment which will follow in the footsteps of Twitter. However it’s not just a carbon copy.

The trends feature will display stories that people are digging fast but only recently. The idea is to catch big stories in their initial phases before they hit mainstream media.

Here is what the official Digg blog reads about the new experiment:

Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.

How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:

The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible.

Arthemia: Best Free Wordpress Magazine Style Theme

Dean Sherwin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:56:30 +0000

“Come on now Dean. Ryan was nice enough to share it with you. The least you can do is share it with the loyal Crenk readers!” – said the little angel on my shoulder.

“Feck ‘em! Sure can’t they find it themselves, boy? Arrr ark ark ark” said the little devil on my opposing shoulder. (For some reason he’s an Irish pirate). I flicked him away… I hate pirates.

Okay, so I’m going to share with you guys the great WP theme that a colleague of mine directed me to for my new blog. This theme incorporates the minimalistic feel while still having all the functionality of a highly strung WP theme packed with plug ins.

Her name is Arthemia.

As you can see from the screenshot below she’s a beaut. Great menu bar across the top, followed by a headline section with a scrolling ‘Featured’ slot to the right. Below this there is a categories bar with cool animation when you hover your cursor over a category.

Then, below all of this magic we have the posting area with a sidebar to the right. Amidst all of this there are two premium ad placements; one square in the sidebar and another to the right of the title.

It’s available for free (although there is a slightly pimped out premium version available) right here. Seriously, for any WP user who has been finding it difficult to locate the right theme for their blog that says “I don’t take myself too seriously, but my blog? That I do.” – it has to be Arthemia.

Let us know your thoughts and opinions about the theme in the comments!

W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin That Provides a Transparent Content Delivery Network

Steven Finch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:21:31 +0000

W3 Total Cache is a new wordpress plugin that improves the user experience on your blog by improving your server performance. W3 caches every aspect of your site and helps your server to reduce download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

W3 Total Cache plugin remedies numerous performance reducing aspects of any web site going far beyond merely reducing CPU usage (load) and bandwidth consumption for HTML pages alone. Equally important, the plugin requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to reap the benefits. Setup is easy.

HackaDay: One Of The Best Blogs for Gadgets, Hacks and more

Dean Sherwin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:14:39 +0000

HackADay.com is a cool blog that I found featuring cool things that will keep you busy all day long. Unlike other hack blogs such as LifeHacker, Hack a Day focus more on the kinds of things you can build in your garage and use every day – well, sort of. I mean you’re not going to use a homemade spot welder every day but you might use a homemade iPhone keyboard everyday.

The main section of their blogs covers their antics and those of their readers. It’s mainly features stories of some of the cool electronic gadgets that they built on a rainy afternoon. This section is updated daily so they must have their fair share of free time!

Probably my favourite section is the ‘How-To’ section. This is the section with step-by-step guides that demonstrate how to build cool toys, gadgets and as I mentioned above – highly experimental homemade spot welders. This is updated weekly (although there hasn’t been much activity over the past month or so)

For cool hacks other crazy gadgets visit www.hackaday.com .

Theme Grade: Free Wordpress Themes Graded by SEO Quality and Overall

Steven Finch — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:51:52 +0000

Today I came across a great new theme directory which really tries to help users and not just show the basic themes. The directory is called ThemeGrade and instead of just showcasing the themes it also rates them in terms of general quality and seo.

Features include:

User-friendly Theme Search

The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page!

Theme General Test

Each and every one of the Wordpress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme.

Theme SEO Test

The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass, the score will be added to the SEO test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the SEO test score of the theme.After you get the general and the SEO test score, the total score of a theme can be calculated. To do that, first, take the general test score and multiply by 0.6 and the SEO test score multiply by 0.4. Sum up the two number and you’ll get the total score of a theme.

Different Ranking Status for Themes

What makes ThemeGrade so special is the ranking system. Quality themes will be awarded either a Gold, Silver or Bronze status. The themes with the highest standard are those which score more than 90% and are awarded with the GOLD status! Ever since I outlined the details of each test, I have found out a few things that I could improve for my themes especially the SEO part.

Two New Themes will be reviewed Daily

Selecting good quality themes and reviewing them in such details take a lot of time.

Art of Manliness: A Great Blog for the Man in You!

Dean Sherwin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:16:42 +0000

Being a man is tough; all that shaving, working, grunting, analysing football results, drinking competitions, acting like a gentle man and being the strong silent type. Like I said; tough work.

One of my all time favourite blogs is the Art of Manliness. Basically, it’s a blog/online guide to being all the man you can be. When I visited there most recently thy had article on shaving with a straight razor, the 15 best buddy films and physical benchmarks every man should reach in order to save his own life.

It’s satirical at points but entertaining always. They use plenty of retro images and articles to get their point across; often drawing on the 20^th century stereotype of a man being hard working, rarely smiling whose best friends is a horse who will.

Basically, if you’re in the mood for a bit of man time without all this crap about being modern, rich and having more girls than fingers you should check out the Art of Manliness – a truly fantastic blog.

Category and Page Icons Wordpress Plugin

Steven Finch — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:04:25 +0000

Using Category and Page Icons WordPress plugin, you can add icons (images) to sidebar of your site or blog into section of categories and pages.

Icons automatically appears at the sidebar, after assigning them to the pages or categories at icons admin menu. You do not need to insert some special code for inserting icons. Icons automatic inserting also during using these functions: wp_list_pages, wp_list_categories.

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Divine – Create websites from Photoshop to Wordpress

John Steppens — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:00:16 +0000

Divine is a clever little tool that allows you to make Wordpress pages using your pre-made Photoshop works, allowing you unlimited customization right down to the smallest details. All this can be done with minimal knowledge of site creation assuming you know how to use Photoshop but that’s a separate issue.

Yes, you are only as good as your Photoshop template. You see, the idea behind this is to design the perfect visual template within Photoshop then to upload it to Divine, adding all the interchangeable information within Divine. It works surprisingly well and at the moment it is absolutely free however because of this they have limited the number of functions.

It’s clear that a lot of effort has been put into the project and the example that have been put up look great. Ease of use is the key term here, the website not only offers a simple tutorial to Divines use but it has a guide to installing wordpress.

I’m impressed, with features including Built-in FTP-client, Supports for all Photoshop filters and Encoding support the internet could be well on its way to being neater and more stylish, well in terms of Wordpress websites anyway and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.

Twittorati : Where the Blogosphere and the Twittersphere meet.

John Steppens — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:57:21 +0000

The Internet moves at a staggering pace. In a single day it gains more news, blogs and twitters than you could read in a lifetime. Fads come and go over night and it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep track of what is relevant. This is where Twittorati comes in.

From the guys who brought us Technorati, one of the top blog search engines on the net, Twittorati aims to sift the gibberish from junk, tracking tweets from the highest authority bloggers and posting them in a way that’s meaningful and easy to follow.

It’s all about ‘authority’ and what determines a blogs authority is the number of unique blogs that link to that blog. The technology for this is the same as Technorati. In fact Twittorati incorporates blogs from the Technorati Top 100 and promises to include “many more of the web’s most influential voices.”

It’s certainly a good idea but after a brief look on the website I couldn’t actually find I was genuinely interested. Sure it’s all convenient, at any time at anytime I”m only a few clicks away from the highest authority blogs and tweets on the net but therein lies the problem.

There are no rare gems, no cult hits and no must know info-bites. Having a high authority does not mean it’s a good blog. Take a quick look at the front page, how much of that do you actually care about? Very little I bet. Well it’s not all bad and it really depends on how much you care about tweets in general.

WordPress Worm and How to Prevent Data Loss

Augusto Alvarez — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:43:02 +0000

If you work as a webmaster and maintain several blogs, or if you just maintain your own hosted somewhere, you would know that it has some extra management costs. WordPress represents the most used platform around the web, which means that vulnerabilities will appear constantly. And the last one it’s making a big impact around the blogger platform.

This vulnerability that appeared recently attacked thousands of WordPress self-hosted blogs (WordPress.com blogs are excluded), and it’s giving a lot of users a big headache. But the good news is for those that upgrade their platform regularly and have already the latest WordPress 2.8.4 are also immune.

Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) wrote a few days ago about this incident and extremely recommending an upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4. This is of course what we would recommend to you to apply as soon as possible.

How do I update my WordPress platform?

You didn’t have the chance to do it already? Here’s a short video (1min 20seconds) about the entire process:

How Can I be certain that my Blog will always be safe?

Simple: You can’t. You can never tell when these vulnerabilities will appear. We can recommend to you this:

Keep your platform updated. Don’t wait until attacks are being public and in massive proportions, use always the last WordPress build.
Keep a daily backup. On a previous post, we mentioned about Blog Backupr, a great and free tool that automates all your backups. Give it a try.

Twitter Logos: Free Twitter Badges, Logos and Images for your Site or Blog

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:53:48 +0000

Many of us have blogs, websites or at least a profile or two on a few social networking sites, right? And many of us are also on twitter. So instead of just posting a link saying “hey, follow me”, you could have a cool, professional looking twitter logo or cartoon for people to click on to go to your Twitter profile.

TwitterLogos.com is a collection of free twitter logos submitted by hundreds of graphic designers for our disposal. On the homepage you can see all the latest posts. Most of them are really good. You have the well-known chubby bird but I also found some new faces…or beaks such as a kind of pelican bird, a cheerleading bird and randomly enough, a can of twitter beer.

When you have found the series that you like, simply click on it and download the file. There will be instructions on how to use the Twitter badges in the .zip file.

These are easy to insert into blogging platforms such as Wordpress or into text for a profile on Facebook, MySpace etc…

MacPress: Free Mac Inspired Wordpress Theme

Steven Finch — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:00:14 +0000

Our friends over at Sizlopedia have released a great new free Wordpress theme that is worth a look. The theme is called MacPress and is actually being currently used on the Sizlopedia site itself.

Here you go with some of the features of MacPress:

Compatibility – It is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress.
Elegant Design – Much like Leopard, the theme has a eye-catching UI of its own.
Theme Options – The theme also comes with a built-in Options panel.
Validated Code – From the XHTML to the CSS, every bit of codehas been validated.
SEO Friendly – It bears a fine code with SEO friendly tags and structure.

And some of the features planned for the future releases:

Styles Chooser – The Options panel would allow the user to select a pre-defined style.
Magazine Layout – A switcher between normal/magazine layout modes.

Demo: Sizlopedia

Download: MacPress.zip

9Rules Acquired by Splashpress Media – I Still Dont Really Understand Why!

Steven Finch — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:54:00 +0000

It was confirmed last week that 9Rules the premium blogging network was purchased by Splashpress Media. 9rules has to be one of the longest running network of blogs, but for a long time now they have just been completely pointless. 9rules profiles the best blogs in each sector, well thats what they claim to have but in reality they have pretty much have none of the top blogs within their network and just seem to promote the blogs they like.

This leads me to Splashpress Media which has a good number of blogs in their network that seem to make some decent money, however I dont really understand why they would purchase 9rules. Obviously the purchases didnt disclose the amount and it doesnt seem like 9rules was purchase because of their earning potential, so Im not too sure why Splashpress did the deal.

How is Splashpress Media going to improve 9rules?

They need to get the actual top blogs in each sector on board – Sites like Regator provide much better quality in terms of content and 9rules are just so far behind its not funny.
9rules needs to move away from just aggregating posts – Instead of just profiling blog content they need to have a different angle. 9rules would be a great platform to develop an exclusive advertising network. They could sign the top sites and sign them to exclusive advertising deals.
Revenue model – currently 9rules doesnt make any money and hasnt done for quite a long time.

27 Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes

Steven Finch — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 09:37:03 +0000

I have been after some great social media icons for a long time and I have finally come across a great set. All icons are circular and of the highest quality. Icons include AIM, Bebo, eBay, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Ning, Orkut, Twitter and more.

Download: Social Media Icons Pack 2.0 (.rar), Social Media Icons Pack 2.0 (.zip)

Great Digg Promotion Algorithm Flow Chart

Steven Finch — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:45:36 +0000

I have thought for a long time now that Digg isnt really a place any more for small to medium size blogs. Here is a great example of Digg these days.

Meme will Challage Twitter in a World War

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:36:23 +0000

It appears as though Yahoo! may be the first real competitor to Twitter. Other companies such as Facebook have tried to draw people away from micro-blogging back to social networking. But there has been no real competition on the actual micro-blogging front.

A while back, Yahoo! stealthily rolled out Yahoo! Meme in the Portuguese language only. Nobody was all too sure why they did this because as business goes, you’re supposed to promote, promote, promote! Now their reasoning is clear.

It was a test. To see if it stood a chance without causing the company any embarrassment if it failed. They are now tackling Twitter on the global front by launching the micro-blogging platform in the second biggest language in the world; Spanish.

While people all over the world do use Twitter, studies have shown that services are received better by the public when they are tailored specifically to their needs – in this case their language.

While I can’t see Meme over running Twitter on the English servers I can see the new Yahoo! service picking up steam in South America, Mexico, West Africa and of course Spain.

40% of Twitter is Pointless Babble

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 05:22:45 +0000

A new study of Twitter, more specifically the ‘Tweets’ on Twitter, found that 40% of all communication on the popular micro-blogging service is pointless gibberish, spam or people babbling about stuff only they would understand.

The company who conducted the study are called Pear Analytics and say that 40% of the posts on twitter are things such as ‘Only Eight Hours to go’ which would mean nothing to the average user – only a small inside circle would understand.

Another kind of tweet which make up the rest of this babble is SPAM; our beloved old nemesis.

You realise your followers has gone up by fifteen in a few days so your check them out. Then, your bubble is burst when you find that all they only followed you so you’d “check out their vids”. Hmm…perhaps not.

“We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last,” the report read, “since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the new source of news and events.”

Anyway, I wasn’t too surprised by this. Often, when I scan tweets on my Twitter homepage I ask myself “Now what in the world could that mean?”. But then, I’m guilty of it myself with some of my tweets reading like this; “No, I shouldn’t have done that. It was a baaaaad idea”. I suppose it’s good to have a number to put on all those useless tweets though.

4o%, remember that.

Google Analyticator: Free Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress Blog

Steven Finch — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:13:08 +0000

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It includes a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches.

Download here.

Crenk’s Top 10 SEO Blogs Worth Subscribing To

Steven Finch — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:28:24 +0000

Our friends over at DailySeoBlog have put together a great list of the Top 20 SEO blog feeds you should follow. We have decided to show you our top 10 SEO blogs worth subscribing to.

SEO Moz

Online Marketing Blog

Matt Cutt’s SEO blog

Search Engine Watch Blog

SEO Book

Dave Naylor

Search Engine Guide

Michael Gray Wolf’s SEO Blog

SEO Round Table

19. Blog Storm

The Best Twitter Avatar Backgrounds

Steven Finch — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:00:15 +0000

World of Twitter is a series of mosaic tile wallpaper created with thousands of Twitter avatars as background and Twitter logo as foreground. These mosaic artworks are generated with Mac’s MacOSaiX and further refined with Photoshop and resize to fit as wallpapers. These desktop wallpapers were developed by HongKiat.

Twitter Logo

1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1280×1024 | 1680×1050

The Blue Bird

1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1280×1024 | 1680×1050

iQ font – When driving becomes writing

Steven Finch — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:09:40 +0000

This has to be one of the best ways to design a font. Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien / plmd.me ) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car. The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman. ( openframeworks.cc )

Download the font here: nl.toyota.be/iqfont

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Today.com: Get Paid to Blog for Free

Dean — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:16:21 +0000

Getting paid to blog is a distant dream of most bloggers. The initial high hopes for Google ad sense will have vanished after just a few weeks, even days. So what is one of the fastest, easiest ways to get paid to blog? Today.com seems to have the right idea.

The service allows you to establish your own blog as a sub-domain of Today.com. E.g. Myblogsname.today.com. You can then customise using the Word Press tools and begin blogging as you normally would. I tried this out and my third post was featured on the international homepage within hours of it going live. This got my page quite number of views as I’m sure you would imagine.

Today.com do pay you, however, it’s not a set rate or pay per post (at least for most bloggers – there are some who gain popularity and get a pay per post). Instead they pay you depending on how many impressions your page gets. For each impression you, $0.002 is added to your account ($2.00 CPM). This may seem minuscule but if your blog gains popularity you could be earning hundreds each month.

Today.com is different from other blog providers as they actually publicize your blog on the homepage rather than just leave it to it own devices at the mercy of the search engines. Users can search for terms on Today.com and your blog will appear if appropriate.

All in all, it’s a good service that is a step above the rest with the highest industry payout. However, the blogs themselves are always kept looking similar to Today.com and as such you can only really customize basic features such as colour etc…

It could be a good earner for bloggers but keep in mind – to get regular readers and thus impressions you have to blog regularly (one or twice per day) and also publicise your blog. 6/10