Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Vanadiumitic WordPress Theme is an amazing new magazine type blog theme. Vanadiumitic is a premium theme which features an image slider, dropdown menu, subscription buttons (Twitter, Facebook and RSS), automatic thumbnail resizer, popular posts, featured posts, featured video and a lot more!
Its completely WordPress 3.0 compatible and free to download.
I came across an amazing tutorial on how to create your own custom wordpress theme. This tutorial provides a great step by step guide on creating your very first wordpress theme.
Click here for the full tutorial.
Over at QuickOnlineTips they have put together a great list of the top 50 ways to promote your blog. All of these ways are purely online and they will provide a solid foundation for your blog.
Blog Promotion Basics
- Make blogging easier and navigational.
- Have good looking and attractive web design, so that people revisit your blog.
- Patience is the key.
- Self Motivation is required.
- Have controversial articles and interesting discussions.
- Have positive attitude and don’t frustrate yourself.
- Be sure on your context, which belong to your niche.
- Do some thing to your blog everyday, and traffic is seen. The more you do, the more you get.
- Help out people with blogs similar to your level.
- Be consistent and scheduled. Most importantly plan you every move.
Content is King
- Write more and more unique posts.
- Have more than 150+ resources and articles.
- Guide people about something, teach them something new.
- After you article is indexed by search engines, submit it to various article directories like ezinearticles.com
- Write about Big shots and their controversy.
- Interview big cool bloggers in your niche, and share about their views and ideas.
- Look out for popular content that’s gaining traffic, and write about it in a humorous way.
- Give a press release about unique news, if you have any.
- Pay others to write good articles for you.
- Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs, but let it be worth.
Viral and Social Networks
- Create a Fan page on facebook. Also create a facebook app for your blog.
- Customize the landing page of facebook.
- Start an open group on Yahoo and invite people or have a widget on your blog.
- Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
- Start Stumbleupon promotional ads campaign
- Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
- Have a facebook share and retweet button for every other post.
- Have a squidoo page, as it will get indexed faster in search engines.
- Include hash(#) tags in your tweets.
- Twitter – Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people. And some will follow you back.
Bloggers and People
- Tell you neighbourhood, family and friends about your blog.
- Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
- Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
- Send out a Press release.
- Signup for various communities and be active in relevant Ning.com communities.
- Write some content as a linkbait.
- If your post is relevant to other blogging sites, then try interlinking posts, so as to get deep inbound links.
- Signup for every other social network you can.
- Start a podcast and submit it to various podcast directories.
- Talk to professional bloggers about your post and ask them to review it.
Viral Marketing
- This one’s my favorite, (Funky) Forward a SMS saying “Forward this mssg to atleast 49 people, to get RC of 49 for full TT instantly” with a link of your blog address. And, its viral.
- Install All In One SEO Pack for WordPress blogs.
- Create a theme, that includes a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
- If you are a developer, create a wordpress plugin and release it for free with a link to your blog within the admin area.
- Sponsor some tweets and be an active stumbler to know what stumblers like.
- Use blog search from Google to find fresh blog posts and then leave comments.
- Write a guest post for a popular blog. You may not always get published, but when you do you observe a spike in Google analytics.
- Use Thesis for better optimization and plugins.
- Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting smartly.
- Join a social blog network.
Vandelay designs has put together an amazing list of the top Real Estate wordpress themes. All of these wordpress themes are very high quality and would be perfect for anyone looking to setup their own Real Estate site.
To check out the full list click here.
The WP Mobile Detector WordPress plugin lets users view an optimised version of your WordPress theme for standard mobile phones and smartphones.
The WP Mobile Detector plugin also includes an installer that will configure everything automatically. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin.
Included in this plugin is the Jester Mobile, Anakin Mobile, Casper Mobile, Colbalt Mobile, Mojo Mobile, Viper Mobile, and Bluesteel Mobile advanced mobile themes, all featuring the jQuery framework.
Raju Paliwal, 21 years-old blogger, created some interesting WTF art. 11 images which totally explain the WTF expression, one of the most used in Twitter.
Take a look to the complete work in this site.
Time magazine created a complete list about the most relevant blogs of 2010, not only the most valuable but also the “essentials”, and the “overrated” ones.
I’m pretty sure we can find a blog that was left out in any of these three lists, and some others that did not belong here; but definitely we can find here some of the references in the “blogosphere”.
In the essentials we can find some really cool examples like TechCrunch; but the interesting are the overrated ones, the mentions were for Perez Hilton (totally agree), Fail blog, and a surprisingly Mashable.
Here are the lists:
Best Blogs
- Zenhabits
- PostSecret
- Climate Progress
- HiLobrow
- Hipster Runoff
- Kottke.org
- Cake Wrecks
- The Oatmeal
- S___ My Kids Ruined
- Deadline Hollywood
- Everything Everywhere
- The Sartorialist
- Information Is Beautiful
- The Daily Kitten
- Shorpy
- Apartment Therapy
- Double X
- Strobist
- Roger Ebert’s Journal
- The Awl
- GeekDad
- Engadget
- The Washington Note
- The Consumerist
- Pitchfork
Essential Blogs
- The Daily Wh.at
- TechCrunch
- Gawker
- Politico’s Ben Smith
- Boing Boing
Overrated Blogs
- FAIL Blog
- The Big Lead
- Perez Hilton
- Mashable
- Daily Kos
Can you make your own Top 5?
CatsWhoBlog presents a very interesting and effective option to display an average feed reader value using FeedBurner stats.
There are three facts existing in today’s 2.0 worls about feeds:
- FeedBurner represents, even before Google acquired this company, the preferred service used for RSS feeds.
- All bloggers, web sites and companies, which base most of their strategy in number of visitors; know that having a nice way to show the popularity of your website is a key factor for attracting more loyal visitors, advertisements, etc.
- FeedBurner values change tremendously every day, if you are not publishing on daily basis.
To fix this problem, we can use this code in functions.php which will use the average readers from the last 7 days, a number more accurate for our RSS feed (download the TXT for functions.php):
function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
$ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
$feed_url="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed_id."&dates=".$ago.",".$today;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
$nb = 0;
foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
$nb += $circ['circulation'];
}
return round($nb/$interval);
}
Once done, you can call the function wherever you want in your theme files. Pass your Feedburner feed id as a parameter (download the TXT for this example):
<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode');
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>
You know those trial versions we usually download and install… did you ever wonder what are these guys thinking?
Well, Doghousediaries have the answer:
WordPress.org is very proud about the latest stable release of the most famous blog engine: 3.0. That’s why they’ve created a simple counter to keep track all the download activity.
Today’s counter says over 6 million downloads, and increasing really fast.
But that’s not all; WordPress.org also announced a few days ago that the plugin directory already has over 100 million downloads. Can you top that?
