blogvp

Over the last year Elena, the creative mind behind Design Disease team, has designed a number of free WordPress themes, as the Smashing WordPress Theme we released as a present for our readers during our One-Year-Anniversary in September’07. Afterwards we’ve contacted Elena and asked if it’s possible to design another Wordpress theme for our readers. Elena agreed.

After we’ve discussed the details of the design and the main aims we wanted to achieve, Elena started to do her magic. The result is a fresh, clean, user-friendly and playful Wordpress theme “Dilectio” — a smashing Christmas present for Smashing Magazine readers.

Preview
Download Here

Pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders are all seen as obtrusive advertising that interferes with the user experience of your blog. The last thing someone needs is a flashy ad message popping up everywhere when they are trying to read your blog’s content.

Enter “MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad”, a new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog.

A cool “stripe” appears at the very top of your blog, with a call-to-action to get your blog readers to click on it and be taken to the appropriate landing page.

The ad itself is simple, easy to use, and you can have multiple ads rotating according to your needs.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad 1.2

So they are coming out with something called 802.11n, 802.11b/g is supposedly old news now, but what I’m finding out is that most places can’t even get 802.11b right, with frequent drops, and slow (as in 100-200K) speeds. Maybe 802.11b/g should be fixed first so it works like it should. Or maybe 802.11n is the “fix”. Whatever, just get it right and get ‘er done soon.

802.11n, wifi

Nick writes: “Performancing Metrics is a professional grade blog statistics service aimed at professional bloggers. We wanted to produce something a little better, a little different for the professional blogger, and I think we have.”

Google bought Measure Map, the company that makes pretty blog statistics.

google, analytics, measure, map

Google is giving webmasters more control over what part of their site is index and what part is not.

“Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.”

To emphasize something to the Googlebot, use:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

To ignore add: (weight=ignore) as in:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Of course Google says that doing the above will only influence the ads taht appear on the page, but since it’ll automated you can pretty much guess that it’ll do more than influence.

google, adsense, targeting

Duncan Riley, a blogger from Australia has been forced to go Pro as a blogger. His full time job just laid him off.

I’ve been reading his blog for a while now. He also heads up b5media. Best of luck to Duncan, especially getting this news before Christmas.

So Google is using themed Christmas ads in Adsense. As you can see the example here. I’ve seen some of them on my sites. But the important question is: How will they performd? we’ll have to wait until after Christmas to find that out.

google, adsense

Grab it here.

I’m installing it one of my tester blogs and will report on what I think about it soon.

wordpress+2.0

Performacing has launched their Firefox extension which basically an in-browser blog editor. It gives you a quick way to add new blog entries to Wordpress, MovableType and Blogger, or any other software that uses their API.

performancing, firefox, extension

Nick writes:

Aswell as providing support for our Firefox extension, and other tools that you’ll hear about next year, we wanted to address the need for bloggers to have a place, a community in which to ask questions, get advice, and chat with like-minded people.

The forums are located here.

performancing.com, forum

Marketingsherpa has put out a new report for Fortune 500 corporations to start blogging, here’s summary:

There’s a dark note mixed in with the happy buzz about blogging these days. Bloggers have been fired from their jobs for what they thought were innocuous posts. Investor relations departments are having legal nightmares over an innocently-meant blog revealing critical info to the world before it’s sent to investors. PR departments are finding themselves side-stepped by the media who go direct to blogging staffers, instead of carefully prepped official spokespeople.

The genie is out of the box. Now, how do you cope? Here are five pre-launch steps for any corporation considering blogs:

Read the report here.

corporate, blogging

Some study says that 75% of all pings are spam, but this is not the case for me, or at least with the blogs that I run. There is no mention of what makes “splog” or a spam blog, so maybe a little bit more of information on that would be nice.

splogs, spam

This is a pretty nifty extention, it allows you to see what people are writing in their blogs based on the website you visit. Although it only pull the comments from blogger.com, which is a way that Google is trying to limit people to using their blogging platform, which sucks.

I don’t think I’ll be using it a lot unless they allow all blog comments to show up, and not just from blogger.com.

blogger.com, google, firefox, extension

On one of my blogs, some leecher was sucking my content dry. In less than 10 days he was able to transfer around 600 Megabytes, just from this one blog. I’m not sure what the leecher was doing, but it was using up my bandwidth pretty quickly.

Solution:

I noticed when I was checking stats that it was just one IP address that was responsible for this. Because I run cpanel, they have a nice feature called “IP Deny Manager”, I added the leechers IP address, and it stopped.

What happeneds now, is that when that IP address comes to the site, the server denies everything to it. I’m glad, it has solved my bandwidth issue with him.

You might consider using this if you see just one IP address sucking up your bandwith.

ip+deny+manager, spam, lechers