Building a site is so much easier these days with the help of CMS and blogging platforms. Among these platforms, WordPress is used by a lot of site for all the right reasons; it offers superb flexibility with user friendly interface, making building and maintaining your site a lot easier. If you are using WordPress for your site and you are looking for a nice theme to use, you should really consider Thesis Theme for WordPress. Thesis Theme for WordPress may not look much out of the box — design-wise that is — but its powers are hidden under its hood. By far, Thesis Theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme with a lot of optimization and efficiency options to boost your site’s performance. You can easily customize Thesis Theme for WordPress’s design to suit your needs and wants; Thesis’s wordpress dashboard options allows you to change the structure of theme at a click of a button, without even meddling with the code. The Thesis Theme for WordPress also excels when it comes to SEO features and its ability to display information-rich HTML quickly. Site owners who are using Thesis as their WordPress theme also stated their satisfaction to the theme. Several testimonials can be found at Thesis’s testimonial page confirming how easy it is to use Thesis to build and maintain a site, including this one:

What an adventure. I literally did not know a single thing about blogging or WordPress two months ago. I’ve lurked on here for awhile and picked up the coding knowledge I needed. Thanks for the (affordable!) design and amazing functionality. — Michael | ICM-Bot.com

The Thesis option panel is designed to help you control aspects of your site easily even when you have no coding skills. The developer of Thesis Theme for WordPress also made changing the structure of Thesis that much and can be done from WordPress’s Dashboard. The level of design customization is virtually endless; you can see showcases of customizations made by other users to see the limitless potential of Thesis Theme for WordPress. Plus, you will also enjoy the built-in drop-down menu other added features that will surely make your site a lot more enjoyable. Thesis Theme for WordPress will make creating and maintaining your site that much easier.

Personally, I have used Thesis on a couple of blogs of mine and I can’t ask for more. The internal SEO in the theme has made by Google rankings soar by atleast 60 % within 1.5 months of installing the theme on my blog.

• See the Thesis Demo
• See killer customizations from the Thesis community
• Buy Thesis Theme Now!

Update: Check out our latest huge discount offer on Thesis Theme. (That’s a $36 discount – the highest discount available for Thesis.)

Check the video demo in action below:

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Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up on a news that BecomeABlogger – an online  coaching programs for bloggers – is LIVE now. The doors are only open for 5 days and then they will shut it again for the rest of the year! 

Last time they opened doors, they were bombarded with a flood of new members signing up, and they had to close the program to the general public for a few months to take care of their new members.
It’s one of the best and is recommended by dozens of professional bloggers around the world. Go see for yourself over here . You can also read our review here.

[PS: In case you are still confused take a look at this detailed free report and this free video to find out whether this program is suitable for you or not]

• Interested in blogging but don’t know where to start?
• Have already started blogging but don’t know how to move your blog to one level up?

If you fall in any of the situations above, read on…

BecomeABlogger.com is the brainchild of Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick who have made significant gains in the field of professional blogging. This is an online coaching program that proposes to put budding bloggers’ blogs on steroids – that is to drive crazy traffic to a blog, to the extent of getting ranked as one of the top blogs on the internet. This program was first launched in 2008 and saw a huge success. They are re-opening the doors to this program for a short period, now it going to be re-launched on 29th/June/2009. They will keep the registration site open only for 5 days after which it will again close for probably a year.

If you are serious to make a mark in the filed of pro-blogging, I would recommend you to check it out. To find out whether this program is really suitable for you or not, first go through this detailed free report. This report includes details on how to successfully market a blog and make a whole lot of money from it.

Here is my brief review of the report:

They have categorized the strategies to become a successful blogger into individual milestones and provide with easy methods to achieve them:

• The first milestone according to BecomeABlogger.com is to discover the true passion with yourself and work towards it. They suggest connecting with people over public platforms such as Facebook and making use of Skype towards achieving the same.
• This process is followed up with an attempt at reducing the time spent on information gathering mechanisms by making use of popular tools such as Google Reader which helps you to collect information from various sources at a single most comfortable location. Information related to your area of interest can also be obtained by making use of two very different kinds of search engines that are human driven such as Mahalo.com and Clusty.com. These search engines differ from Google and other popular search engines in that they do not make use of any complex algorithms and are mainly concentrating on providing results that most other users are looking for.
• The third milestone towards becoming a successful professional bloggers is to test out the niche that one is planning to work on. According to them, such a niche check can be done to by making use of search engines such as Seesmic.com.
• Once you establish that the niche indeed suits your blogging needs, you can make your blog more attractive by adding interactive content on your blog and promote it on platforms such as Twitter.com etc.
• Apart from these methods, there are more methods that BecomeABlogger.com intends to share. Those details are available to users at the Premium Member’s Area on the website which will open on 29th/June. The premium member’s area provides instructional videos at affordable prices which are indeed helpful to all budding bloggers.

If you want to see more details on the points discussed above, get this free report.

[Update:

BecomeABlogger has just released one of their premium content videos to the general public (no cost)...Check this link for video.

Inside the video, Yaro talks about what he calls "Impact Marketing Techniques" - the kind of tricks he's used himself to drive hoards of new traffic to his own 6-figure income blog.

Now, what makes this video so special?

Well, normally you'd have to pay for it.

But not today...

You can watch it at no cost right now, without one of those silly optin forms - nice for a change really. I just thought I'd let you know about this powerful video, because no matter what you do online, you can never know enough about how to drive crazy amounts of traffic to your blog. Here is the link again]

Akismet is a proven way to prevent comment spam in wordpress powered blogs. It does a great job of sifting spam comments and redirecting them to the spam folder.

There is still a problem with this. Though spam get redirected to the appropriate folder but it unnecessarily clogs our MYSQL database. Moreover there is always a chance that among the hundreds of spam comments there is one good comment and unknowingly you might end up deleting that good comment as well, while cleaning up the folder.

I did some analysis on my spam comments (wordpress dashboard > comments > spam) and found that they mostly originate from 2-3 common IP’s. If I can get some way to automatically delete comments coming through those IP’s my problem would be partially solved(other spammers would still be there…grrr).

Here is a simple SQL script I wrote to do this:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments`
where `comment_author_IP` = ‘66.159.18.9′ OR
`comment_author_IP` = ‘84.19.188.218′;

Keep on adding the spammers IP’s that you see from your wordpress dashboard.

Now you can set up a  cron job that runs every night or every week or every fortnight (depending on your requrements). All your spam comments would get deleted automatically at a given interval.

Gozar!

After seeing a recent blog post on Adsense Blog, I thought of experimenting with inline ads on one of my blogs hosted on blogger. I liked the tip about making the adsense inline with your blog post instead of putting it under the title or above the title.

Here I am reproducing what I did to my blogger hosted blog to make my adsense ads left align and wrapped around my content, the same way as can be seen on this blog post. THERE IS NO CHANGE TO ADSENSE CODE, SO NO NEED TO FEAR ABOUT GOOGLE TOS VIOLATION.

1. Trust you already have adsense code set up below the post title. If not, follow instructions carefully on this post to add adsense below the post title.
2. Now, to put the ads on left side of your post. Add  <div style=’float: left;’> and <div style=’padding-right: 3px’> before the adsense code. Don’t forget to close them with the </div> tags. Here is how it should look like.
   
3. Now, to put the ads on right side of your post. Add  <div style=’float: right;’> and <div style=’padding-left: 3px’> before the adsense code. Again, don’t forget to close them with the </div> tags. Here is how it should look like.
   
4. Wondering why I have added padding-left or padding-right? This will ensure that your ad is separated by a safe distance from text. You can increase/decrease the pixels as per your requirement.

Also see, how to safely test adsense ads?

Adsense below the post title is known to give good CTR(Click-Through-Ratio). Here is how you can add adsense ads below every post title, only on inner pages and except the home page of your blog. [Yes, in a safe way!]

1. Go to Dashboard > Edit HTML.
2. Click on ‘Expand Widget Templates’.
   
3. Search for <div class=’post-body’> and place your adsense code below this line.
4. This is the most important step. Inside your adsense code’s <script type=’text/javascript’> and </script> , replace every occurrence of
   • < with &lt;
   • > with &gt;
   • “ with &quot;
5. You should NOT change the < and > around script type=’text/javascript’ and /script.
6. To show your adsense only on the inner pages and not on home page, add <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;’> before the adsense code and </b:if> after the adsense code. You can also add <center> tags to center align your ads.
7. The final code should look like this.
   

Regarding code changes that I have done, no need to worry about Adsense TOS violation. I have asked my Google adsense representative and according to her as long as any page’s source shows the same code as you copied from adsense account there is no problem. You can verify this by going to your page where you have put adsense. Right click and View Source (in IE) and View Page Source (In Firefox). Of course if you want to double verify this, you can always check with your adsense rep.

For those interested in testing and knowing which ad unit would perform best for them, can refer this excellent post on A/B testing from official adsense blog.

We had released Recent Comments Widget sometime back that turned out to be an instant hit. We were overwhelmed with the responses we received. There were a lot of requests for a similar Recent Posts widget. So, today, we are releasing Recent Posts widget for BlogSpot users.

How is it different from the other Recent Posts widget?

1. The problem with other widgets is that the source code for them lies with the widget author and the authors often integrate it in within their own site. If because of some problem their site is down, the recent posts widget will not work.Here, I am releasing the source code so that the logic would reside within your blog itself and hence you can do away with dependency on 3rd party site not under your control.
2. You have a number of control and customizations options available. With this widget you have the option to show:
   1. Posts Title only.
   2. Posts Title with Date.
   3. Posts Title with excerpt.
   4. Posts Title with Date and excerpt.

Why should we use this widget when we can use you the feed option provided by blogger itself?

Well, for a number of reasons.

1. Blogger limits the recent posts to 5.
2. There are a number of customization options I have provided which you might not find with the internal blogger system.
3. [Trivia] The URL that appears in your Firefox bar (below) when you hover the mouse over the link, contains your feed URL and not the actual URL.

How to install Recent Posts widget for blogger?

1. Login to the blogger dashboard.
2. Go to ‘Page Elements’ tab
3. Click on Add a Gadget. Select HTML/JavaScript widget type.
4. Now this is the most important step. Download the corresponding code given below and paste it in the widget box you have just opened above.
   1. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title only.
      
   2. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title with Date.
      
   3. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title with excerpt.
      
   4. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title with Date and excerpt.
      
5. Scroll down to src=http://xyz.blogspot.com and replace xyz with your blog’s name. For example if your blog’s URL is http://abc.blogspot.com then the code should become src=http://abc.blogspot.com DO NOT TOUCH any other part of the code or else it might create problems.
6. You have the option to increase/decrease the number of posts displayed in your widget. Go to var numposts = 5; (3rd line from the top, in the code you have downloaded). Increase/Decrease the number of posts. By default 5 posts would be displayed.
7. If you choose to show excerpt for your posts, you have the option to increase/decrease length of the excerpt. Go to var numchars = 100; (6th line from the top, in the code you have downloaded). Increase/Decrease the number of characters. By default length is set to show 100 characters.
8. You are done! Lastly please do not remove the footer credits*.

Please let me know if you face any problem implementing the code above.

If you like the above widget. Consider donating and encourage us to come up with more such widgets.

*The code is released under the condition that footer credits should remain intact.

You have a lot of blog posts on your wordpress self hosted blog where you refer to a particular URL. Now somehow that URL got changed and you need to edit your posts. To change all those URL’s, one way is to go one by one, open and edit all your posts. Not a smart way.

Other way would be to use MySQL and batch edit them at a click of a button. No need to be a techie, anyone can do this.

This was useful for me when recently I made a move from blogger to wordpress. There were about 25 posts where I needed to change a particular URL. Here is how I did and you can do this in under 5 minutes.

1. Log on to PHPMyadmin. [Your webhost should have provided the URL to access it.] 
2. Select your database name from the drop down given on the left hand side.
3. In SQL tab type UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘OLD CONTENT’, ‘NEW CONTENT‘); and hit GO.

The above SQL statement replaces all the occurrences of OLD_CONTENT with NEW_CONTENT inside the content(post_content) of all posts(wp_posts). Make sure that wp_posts is indeed the name of your posts table. On shared hosting the name of this table is different sometimes.

For techies: Here is the syntax of MySql Replace function REPLACE(str,from_str,to_str)

No, I am not talking about any black-hat method. It’s completely legitimate, just making use of all the resources at disposal. Let me show you how this trick worked for me and how it can work for you too!

I assume that you use Feedburner as your RSS aggregator

1. Log-in to your Feedburner account.
2. Under Analyze tab , click on Subscribers. Scroll down a bit and you will see “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”. Expand that link and you will see “Manage you Email Subscriber List”. Click on it.
3. Next page you will see Total Subscribers. Did you notice something? The total subscribers count is different than Feedburner Email subscriptions count given on the previous page. The reason is – Total subscribers count shows you the number of people who opted to subscribe to your RSS by Email while Feedburner  Email subscriptions count shows you the number of people who opted to subscribe to your RSS by Email and have also activated their subscriptions. This is where lies the whole trick. We will now find those people who have opted to subscribe but for some reason have not activated their subscription
4. Click on Export CSV. Save this file to your desktop. Double click to open it. You will find data in 3 columns namely Email, Subscribes and Status. Click on this row.
5. Go to Data > Filter > Auto Filter. You will get data in dropdowns. 
6. Click on Pending Verification under status column. All the email subscribers with status as Pending Verification would be shown. In my case there were about 850+ entries.
7. The task is to send a gentle email to all these subscribers reminding that though they have opted to subscribe but have not yet made the final confirmation.

Did I say 3 days?

Well, I use Gmail as my email service provider. It has a limit of 500 mails to be sent per day otherwise Gmail account might face a temporary ban. To be on the safe side, I sent mails to 300 people per day.

After 3 days, there was a increase in more than 600 subscribers. [Normally, I get only 20 subscribers per day].

Easy, right? Let me know if this worked for you.

Gozar!

Here I assume that you are using the blogger beta and not on the classic one. It’s been a long time now that blogger has moved to beta. There is no reason for you to remain on classic version now.

You want to show adsense ads on sidebar of the home page of your blogger blog and not on the other pages OR you want to show adsense ads on all pages except the homepage of your blogspot blog. Here is what you can do-

1. LogIn to the blogger dashboard. Go to Layout. Say you want to show ad on the left sidebar top. Click on “Add a Gadget” on LHS of layout and enter your adsense code. 
2. Now go to Edit HTML. Scroll down and locate left sidebar. You will find something like this-
3. Copy the name of the first widget. In my case it is HTML6.
4. Now click on Expand Widget Templates (given on top right) and search the name you have copied in the above step.   
5. You will find a similar code except what is in the red box above. Copy and paste  <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;’> and </b:if>, EXACTLY at the same place as shown in the image above.
6. If you want to show ads on all pages except on the home page then copy and paste this <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != &quot;index&quot;’>

Save Template’ and you’re done.

Gozar!