Written on 1/30/2006 at 12:01 am by

Improving the Readability of Your Comments Section

Filed Under: Blog Design

I love it when bloggers get on a ‘hot streak’ with their blogs and write multiple link worthy posts in a short period of time. Rachel’s blog is hot right now in my opinion (I seem to be linking to her a lot) and today she’s written an interesting post on Improving the readability of large numbers of comments which is full of ideas, plugins and suggestions to consider to improve the functionality of your comments section (especially if it’s pretty active). You wouldn’t want to implement all 10 of her suggestions but there are some great suggestions there. Here’s her headings (with more written under each point):

  1. Highlight your (own) comments
  2. Provide visual cues
  3. Show what’s new
  4. Split things up
  5. Newest first
  6. Distinguish Trackbacks
  7. Rate comments
  8. Nested comments
  9. Editable comments
  10. Categorise comments
Written on 1/29/2006 at 11:13 pm by

AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites

Filed Under: Adsense

AdMoolah has put together a useful list of links if you’re looking for sites that allow you to contribute content in return for displaying AdSense ads with your publisher code imbedded into them.

Probably the most well known of these is Digital Point’s Forums which all participants can submit their AdSense publisher code to. The more you post the more chance you have of earning. Of course forums are notoriously hard to monetize – but I know of a couple of bloggers who make a few dollars here and there this way.

Written on 1/28/2006 at 4:55 pm by

AdSense Chinese New Year Ads Reported

Filed Under: Adsense

Dog2-1Best HYIP Investment Program is seeing what could be Chinese New Year Year of the Dog images in their AdSense ads.

I wondering how many other seasonal AdSense ads publishers who have signed up for them will be sing in over the next year cycle. Has anyone else seen any? I’m yet to see them on any of my blogs.

Written on 1/28/2006 at 3:52 pm by

Blogger Cruise Adds Speakers

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

I just checked out the Blog Cruise homepage again and noticed that there are new speakers in the list. Headlining it now is Robert Scoble. Also added since last time I looked are Toby Bloomberg, Dave Taylor and John Nardini. The full list is:

A few readers have asked if I’ll be joining the cruise. I’m seriously considering attending and am just working through whether it’s the best time to be away from home with our family growing to 3 a few months before.

Who else is going? Have you booked yet?

Written on 1/28/2006 at 3:43 pm by

AdSense Maintenance Underway

Filed Under: Adsense

The AdSense login page has been out of action for most publishers for the last hour or so. Don’t panic – this happens from time to time and usually just means they are either doing maintenance or are upgrading some component of their system.

I seem to remember reading somewhere in the last 24 hours that this was a scheduled downtime. When this has happened previously there has been no impact upon earnings as they continue to track your stats – you just can’t see them.

Instead of checking to see if the stats are back over and over it’s a great opportunity to do some blogging – or better still to enjoy your weekend (a bit of self talk here).

Written on 1/28/2006 at 3:26 pm by

Creating PDFs in OSX

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

If any Apple users have any experience with creating PDF files I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve tried creating them through Word vX and it does it fine but am having issues getting the PDF’s to pick up the hyperlinks as live links. All the other formatting seems to work out fine – it’s just the links that are not coming through.

Written on 1/28/2006 at 11:54 am by

Put your Blog on a T-Shirt – SnapShirts

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Image

Here’s a fun service for bloggers who can’t bear to be without their blogs might like to use. SnapShirts is a T-Shirt company that can make a T-Shirt with a word cloud from your blog on it! They also can make them for different book authors.

You have the option along the way to add or subtract words from the cloud that it suggests and to choose the color and style of your font as well as to choose the color of the T-Shirt.

Pretty cool. T-Shirts cost $18 – $21 depending upon the color you choose.

There’s no way of making any money yourself off these (an affiliate program of some sort would be nice) but it could be a good way to promote your blog if you want to extend your blog promotion to ‘real life’.

It does take a little time for them to come back to you with the final design (they say it can take up to 24 hours) which takes some of the fun out of it but it could be something for people to enjoy.

Found via lifehaker

Update: Here is the ProBlogger one I designed.

Written on 1/28/2006 at 10:47 am by

Blog Design Solutions

Filed Under: Blog Design

Blog-Design-SolutionsI’m quite excited to see that a team of talented blog designers (Phil Sherry, Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Michael Heilemann, Drew McLellan, David Powers, Chris J. Davis and John Oxton) have just announced their new book titled Blog Design Solutions.

I’m not familiar with all of the authors but those that I know have great blogs and know what they are talking about – I’ll definitely be getting myself a copy as I’m a complete dunce when it comes to blog design and I can use any tip I can get.

The blurb at Amazon on the book says:

“In this book, a team of renowned web designers take you through the ins and outs of putting together great blogs. They waste no time harking on about the philosophy of blogs, or the community behind them. Instead, they get straight to the practical details, showing how to set up a basic blog in some of the world’s most popular blogging engines — Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and Textpattern. With your blog set up, they then show you how to build great looking, usable layouts for your blog. The last chapter even shows you how to build your very own PHP/MySQL-based blog engine!”

Pre Order your copy at Blog Design Solutions (affiliate link).

Written on 1/28/2006 at 12:31 am by

28 Million Blogs Given Pro Blogging Opportunities

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services

28 million (or more) blogs are about to be given the opportunity to blog for money with the latest updates to MSN Spaces says eweek. The latest MSN Spaces update covers a number of areas as well as the option to run ads with Amazon and Kanoodle. That’s a lot of bloggers about to enter the pro blogging space!

Read about the changes at MSN Spaces official update entry

Found via BlogHerald