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 20th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
War is Boring, a political and wartime blog owned by David Axe (an experienced conflict reporter) just keeps getting better and better. It started up a few years ago as a small blog featuring a comic strip of the same name drawn by Matt Bors, based on David’s experiences as a war journalist. Since that time, the comic strips have taken a back seat with a more journalistic approach being adopted.
David began reporting from trouble spots around the globe such as Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan. Money is raised through a donate button on the site for trips, equipment and in some cases to aid fellow journalists in sticky situations.
Every day there is at least two or three new posts so you’re never short of anything to read and feel like you’re missing out if you neglect the blog for a while. The best thing about War is Boring is that’s its not just some armchair general typing about Iraq all day, David actually goes to these places showing dedication and determination – something I found individual and attractive about War is Boring.
Recently, War is Boring underwent some changes including the addition of more correspondents. These include Kyle Mizokami, Bryan William Jones, Jason Reich and Kevin Knodell. These simultaneously cover different topics from around the globe ranging from US Politics, to Somali Piracy to Sri Lankan trouble. This gives the blog a good range in tone and subject matter instead of just following the one reporter. They also have some big trips planned soon such as heading off to Afghanistan and Dubai.
Overall, War is Boring is a cool blog that interest anyone who is in anyway politically minded or interested in warfare. 7/10
If you are a geek blogger like me, you would know that the having a good ranking within the most important search engines it is a big deal if you are trying to promote your blog. KPMRS (Keyword Position Monitoring Report Service) can help you with that by monitoring constantly the page rank you have with Google, Yahoo and Bing.
How to use it is very simple, you don’t even have to be registered to receive any result, you can query and get some instant results about your site and a special keyword. The free registration can also give you: Email Alerts (when position changes or when a competitor has passed you); weekly reports; and monitor for Google’s Page Rank and Alexa.
Here’s a query about my blog with a keyword that I know I have a good ranking about it:
It is pretty cool to have these results and see the differences between the search engines; and of course will be very helpful to you if you are setting up your business to evaluate the status of popularity.
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 
A new study of 
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? 
If you are a geek blogger like me, you would know that the having a good ranking within the most important search engines it is a big deal if you are trying to promote your blog. 
