Did you ever wonder why people like us usually have tons of spare time? Drinking coffee, wandering around the office, etc.? Take a look:
No, seriously, we do not have any spare time, at all… well, maybe I did use the “It’s your problem now” once or twice.
Via eviljaymz.com
ECwid is a web app which allows you to easily create your own store which you can integrate within your website in minutes. Basically, it’s like Amazon Associates (mostly because it’s powered by Amazon) except this has much better easy-to-use tools installed and is also easier to use for novice users when it comes to integrating your ecommerce store within your website.
Once you have created an account you just select what products you would like in your store, tailor the layout and colour scheme to your tastes and then click ‘Finish’. You’ll then be given HTML coding which you can copy and paste into a page on your website to embed the store. This will then act as your very own store on your website as though your developed and integrated it yourself.
The program also allows you to track invoicing, customers, accounts and other such important data to see how your store is getting on and how it can be improved.
It’s a well-known fact that employers tend to Google prospective job candidates’ names before they hire them. This is in an effort to weed out people who they may no want affiliated with their company. For instance, say you tweet all the time about how you’re out getting wasted and you’re hung-over every Monday. Do you think you’ll get the job then? No. So many professionally (especially web workers) are pimping out their online presence to make themselves look better. One of the most basic ways to do this is to spice up you blog and combine it with other areas of your social media.
Here are three widgets every professional should have on their blog:
1. A Twitter Feed. A real-time widget featuring your personal twitter account is definitely a good idea; it shows employers that you lead a good, lawful life (if you only tweet the good things, that is!). You can download one here.
2. A Summary Widget. These can be created using the text input features. While they’re not the most flashy – employers always read them. Details listed in a casual manner such as your previous employment, interests and personality are all great topics to summarize here.
3. LinkedInABox. LinkedIn is the professional social networking site which many use to house the best-of-the-best of their portfolios. So why not spread some of that love to your blog? Here is a link to the widget.
So do you think it’s time you gave your online presence a makeover?
A few months ago, everyone was saying “Oh! Blogging is dying on its feet” or “This time next year blogs will be dead and gone”. For a second or two, I started to believe them. After all, micro-blogging was flying up like a firework and blogs were the first victim – no matter how hard bloggers tried to integrate them into their blogs. And for someone like me who just started up their own blog – this was bad news.
But it appears as though Twitter is slowing down and blogging is on the rise once again. The chart above illustrates the recent trend. The orange line represents Twitter and as you can see it grew alongside WordPress (blue line) between February and June. Then it took off by itself leaving WordPress in the gutter. But from September onwards, Twitter simple flattened out and WordPress went back on the rise.
I don’t think Blogs and Twitter are really in the same league. After all, people like information and entertainment – and squeezing that into 140 characters is too much of a task. Looks like blogging will be around for quite a few years to come.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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!
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 .
