Like Our New Look?
Welcome to the new Crenk! I hope you like our new look. The new theme was designed and coded by Adriaan Pienaar of Adii.co.za. Adriaan recently released a modified version of his own actual blog design that he uses on his site and this is what we decided to use.
The new theme has been tested on the latest version of FireFox, IE7 and IE6. If you’re using any other browser, we can’t guarantee it’ll look right. Changes to the blog include a top info section about me and Crenk, more sponsors sections, recent comments, most comments and other stuff that I’m sure you’ll discover as you explore it more.
I hope you like the new look and once again thank you to Adriaan.
If you would like to be one of our sponsors on the new look design, please head over to our contact page. Price is currently $20 per month.
For a couple of weeks now I have been running my own little competition to bid on a banner on my site. The current price is $15 for the month of November. Im guessing this wont go up too much at present because I am currently selling a 125 banner for $20 per month. If you are interested in advertising on Crenk please let me know. More importantly please help me try to keep Crenk Advertising Network Free and purchase some ad space. Thanks.
I have long been playing around with the idea of monetizing Crenk but for all the trouble it just doesnt seem worth it at the moment. Ad networks tend to take the majority of the money and dont really give too much back in return. Hence, i thought i would try an experiment, and go Advertising Network Free!
The aim is to provide Advertising on Crenk from an in-house solution and do it cheap. This way i hope that i can provide real value for money and not just give it all to the middleman (ad network). Hence from now until the end of the year the following prices will stand, no matter what my traffic ranking is (and hopefully that should really increase).
- 125 x 125 Banner Site Wide = $20 per month
- Text Ad Link Site Wide = $10 per month
I really want to try to show people that they dont have to use Ad Networks to make a decent amount of money, but we will just have to wait and see if this is viable!
Do you want to keep up to date with the latest posts on ProBlogger?
We have a number of ways that you can subscribe to this site and receive updates. The main one that our readers use is our RSS feed.
What is RSS?
RSS is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites.
In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.
The problems with bookmarking
- You as the web surfer had to do all the work
- It can get complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once
- You miss information when you forget to check your bookmarks
- You end up seeing the same information over and over again on sites that don’t update very often
RSS Changes Everything
What if you could tell a website to let you know every time that they update? In a sense, this is what RSS does for you.
RSS flips things around a little and is a technology that provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to.
I find the ’subscription’ description helpful. It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.
How RSS actually technically works is probably a lesson for another day but the key today is for you to understand why it’s good and how to use it.
Let me say right up front that I’m not the most technically savvy guy going around – but even I can use RSS. At first I found it a little strange to make the change from bookmarking to RSS but I found that when I started that I just couldn’t stop.
How to Use RSS
Get an RSS Reader – The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.
There are many feed readers going around with a variety of approaches and features – however a good place to start is with a couple of free and easy to use web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines. Either one will do if you’re starting out (I use Google’s Reader) – as I say there are many others to choose from but to get started either of these are fairly easy to use and will help you work out the basics of RSS.
Both of these feed readers work a little like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item – marking the last one as ‘read’.
The best way to learn how to use either Google Reader or Bloglines is to simply subscribe to some feeds and give it a go. Both have helpful help sections to get you up and running.
Note: other options to tracking websites that you might already be familiar with include using pages like MyYahoo, MyGoogle and MyMSN.
Find Some Feeds to Subscribe to – there are two places to look for a site’s feed:
- On the Site
- In Your Browser
On Site Subscription
Over the last few years you may have noticed a lot of little buttons and widgets appearing on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, ‘counters’ with how many ‘readers a blog has, links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more.
Browser Subscription
Many internet browsers now have the ability to find and subscribe to RSS feeds built right into them.
When you surf to a site you can usually tell if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of address bar where you type in the site’s URL.
Here’s how it looks for ProBlogger when you’re using Firefox:
See the little orange icon on the right hand side? Click that and you’ll be locating Crenk’s RSS feed.
To quickly and easily subscribe by clicking these icons you’ll want to set up your browser to do it with your feed reader of choice as by default they will probably subscribe you using the in-browser reader. You can do this by going to the ‘preferences’ to your browser and choosing ‘Google Reader’ or ‘Bloglines’ etc as your feed reader.
Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.
Don’t want to Use an RSS Reader? Email is an Option
If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated for you then please don’t worry. Many sites also enable you to subscribe to RSS feeds via a more familiar medium – Email.
Here at ProBlogger we know that not everyone is into the RSS thing so at the top of our right hand sidebar there is a field where you can enter your email address and get a daily email with a summary of our latest posts. You can unsubscribe at any time and your email will be kept private and not used for any other purposes than to send these daily updates.
Im sorry I havent been posting a lot in the last few days, but been very busy on a few projects that will be launching soon. However this said, I have just been reading a few RSS feeds from a variety of sites and I see that Techmeme has launched a new “leaderboard“. The Techmeme leaderboard shows that frequency of blogs providing main topics on the Techmeme site. I must agree with Jason on this one! Who really cares!
I was an avid reader of Techmeme but in the last few months I have very much lost interest in the site and the service it is providing. As Jason mentions the majority of the links on the site is just from sites that re-post the news and dont actually give their overall perceptions on the news. It is no longer about peoples opinions, just about reproduction and increase reader numbers!
I am trying to move Crenk away from just basic news and stories of the day, and actually providing my views on why sites will or wont work and also help web developers, owners and investors where every possible. I have written articles not to get on Techmeme and get more exposure, but i have never understood why i can get links from sites on Techmeme and never actually show my news on or link to my site from there.
In this day and age there are so many technology weblogs out there, how do you know which ones are worth reading and which arent and dont some of these tech blog combined to strengthen their push power.
I have long been toying with ideas of how to expand Crenk and which areas will actually help readers in the overcrowded space that is tech news. There are a few ideas I will be exploring over the next few months but for the time being I am looking for some writers interested in either Guest Blogging or Lead Writing on Crenk. If you might be interested please let me know via our contact form.
Anyways back to which tech sites are worth reading. There are really 10 or so big tech news sites that are really driving traffic numbers at present, but how does a smaller blog break into the market? Techcrunch, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are all growing fast and they are based around very professional writers and good journalists. Here at Crenk we would like to compete on traffic numbers with the above 3.
If you have a smaller technology blog and would like to help build the next large Technology Blog site, then please let me know and submit your articles or becoming a fulltime writer. With every article you submit, if the material is used you will receive credit for the article and links to your site.
Crenk is auctioning off a 125 x 125 banner spot on this site, and the highest bidder as of midnight GMT on the 30th October, will receive that spot for 30 days! from the 1st November. Bidding starts at $1 and each subsequent bid should be made in at least $1 increments. As always, payments can only be made through PayPal.
Crenk has grow rapidly since the 21st August and I am expecting 30,000 impression on the banner in the 30 days. This could be the cheapest banner slot you ever purchase!
Who will win the very first auctioned ad space on Crenk.com? Will it be you? Let the bidding begin!
On the old Crenk website we profile Lending Club and now it seems that they have been able to secure some funding. Lending Club has closed a round of $10.26 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.
Lending Club provides a peer lending service for Facebook users and now hopefully with this funding it will be able to expand. The site needs to be taken beyond Facebook and expanded on its website and possibly other social networks. The peer-lending and micro-lending market is experiencing quite a boom right now, with companies like GlobalFunder also getting investment for their services as well.
20minutenap.com is a place to head if you are in need of some rest. They want to spread the power and benefit of the 20 minute nap across the globe. The site itself is a music player in which plays soothing music for exactly 20 minutes. Now personally, Im not too sure why someone would come online just to have a nap. Im not totally sure about the full concept but if you have a take on it make sure you let me know!
Gamejump.com has reached 14 million downloads in just over 12 months. Gamejump’s model is based around providing mobile gaming content which is ad supported rather than the normal paid downloads. GreyStripe who ownes GameJump took $8.9 million in Series B funding in May.
Gamejump.com features 800 games by 70 publishers and includes a variety of genres to appeal to different users. Gamejump has seen users download an average of 3.4 games each and the number of females users downloading games has been fairly close to the number of male users.
The gaming market place has seen a interest rise in the past few months with the purchase of Club Penguin by Disney for $700 million.
Hello everyone and Welcome to the new Crenk site. In the last few months we have had a lot of changes and this has culminated with a new blog design!
Crenk reviews Web Apps, Comments and Tech News and more. If you have a new startup, want to submit a press release or breaking news about your product, then make sure you contact us.
Since Crenk has reformed we now have partnerships with Newstex and BlogBurst. Additionally, we have added a new News Tool bar in the right hand column in which you are able to view some break Tech News from around the blogosphere.
In the coming weeks we will also make available Advertising on Crenk. Crenk will be offering 125 x 125 sponsors in the right hand column as well as Text Link Ads.
I hope you like Crenk and what we are trying to achieve and please subscribe to Crenk for all updates.
Crenk Team
