Blog design is my priority, but let’s face it. We all have to be constantly on the lookout for good ways to promote our blogs. Especially quick, easy and free ways.

So I was thrilled with the idea of BlogRush.com, and I told you about it a week or so ago in a post called Promote Your Blog Instantly With BlogRush. No Charge!

At the time, the service had no track record. But I was betting on the brilliance of the concept—and of the founder, John Reese, who has made many millions on the Web. The results are in. It works! It is especially good for younger, less-well-known blogs, like this one.

The only thing I didn’t like was the widget itself, which was ugly. It really clashed with some of my blogs, but I used it anyway.

Early on, John promised colors, or “flavors” of widgets, and I could hardly stand the wait. Now they’re here! And they are beautiful, well-chosen colors.

I’ve chosen a conservative dark blue to blend with this blog, and various other colors for my other blogs. (Feel free to go look, please.) Talk Like a Texan got Ice (pale gray) to go with the colors of oaks, bayou and spanish moss.

New Health Ideas got a Plum widget. Art Fun Cheap got a Watermelon (emerald green) widget to match the accent color of the WordPress theme. And so on. It was so much fun.

And here’s (almost) the best part. You do not have to cut and paste any code/scripting/whatever to change the widget Flavors. Let me say that again: No cutting and pasting. No wp-admin.

Once you’ve registered and added your blogs, you can just go to the BlogRush site, log in, and apply whatever flavors you want to. Anytime. It all happens remotely.

Sheer blog design bliss! It’s my favorite new toy!

And the widget works with other blog engines. I have put one on a Blogger blog, Tengsha.com, and it works great there, too, including changing widget colors.

As far as the service itself goes, I’m delighted. There have been problems with cheaters lowering the overall click-through rates, but I’m confident that those will soon be sorted out.

BlogRush is truly a fantastic service! And it is free, quick and easy—three of my favorite things.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Sometimes the quickest, easiest way to accomplish a design task is to “cheat.” Instead of editing PHP code for example, you can adjust the space above or below a WordPress widget in a couple of simple ways.

1. Go to Presentation > Widgets, and click on the text icon on the widget to open it.

Note: Some widgets won’t open and can’t be edited,
but usually the widget above or below them can be.
In that case, pick one of those, or rearrange widgets.

2. If you know the widget is a text widget, but the text icon is not visible,
even when you click on it, you may need to drag the widget out of the sidebar,
replace it in the unused widgets area below, and then drag it back. The text
icon will then reappear.

3. With the text for the widget displayed, add an empty paragraph or two
above or below the existing text. For example: < p > < / p >

Note: The example has spaces added between parts of the code
so it will show in Wordpress (instead of WP reading it as actual code
and inserting a blank line in this post). When putting the code in your
widgets, do not use the spaces. (Remember that if you need to show code.)

4. Close the text box and Save Changes.

5. Click on the View Site link.

Now there should be extra space wherever you added a line < p > < / p >.
If not, go back and add a period ( . ) between the < p > and < / p >.
For example: < p > . < / p >

6. Save your changes again. Click on the View Site link again.

7. Check to see if the spacing is what you wanted.

If not, add or delete lines (by adding < p > . < / p > for each new line)
until you are happy with the vertical spacing (or it’s the best you can do).

The periods are hardly noticeable on screen. If you scroll down and look closely, you can see one above the BlogRush widget, where I added an extra line.

You can make these changes very quickly. More important, you can make them without really knowing PHP or HTML.

As of today, there is a terrific new way to get more readers to your blog at no cost. It puts a list of related blogs (in your chosen topic area) in a widget on your blog AND lists your blog on other related blogs.

The idea is to get more readers, and you get and more links (relevant links!) to your blog at the same time. To go sign up, click here

I’m very excited about this. I have listed four of my WordPress blogs and one self-hosted Blogger blog so far. To see how the little list widget looks, look in the sidebar area to the right, and scroll down. You can put it anywhere in a sidebar.

I do wish they had a category just for blogging. But they do have a lot of categories. I had no trouble finding good matches for my other blogs.

In the grand old tradition of alphabet lists (A is for Apple, B is for Bear, …), here are 26 blog design principles, from Audience to Zones:

Audience—Who are you writing for? What do they like? Don’t imitate the sites they frequent, but be aware of the kind of look they like.

Blog engine—The WordPress blogging engine, hosted on your own domain, is by far the only way to go for flexible design, prestige, a wide selection of free ready-made themes and plugins, and search engine optimization. There is also a wide selection of tutotials and instructional videos for WordPress these days. Many are free.

Color—Color conveys meaning. What are you saying with your blog? If your links are pale gray or pale blue or some other unreadable color, you are saying I don’t care whether you can read this or not. And most people cannot. So you will annoy and lose potential blog readers.

Design principles. Do you know the basics of good design? If not, either learn them or hire a good blog designer. Design matters. It helps convey your message to the right audience. It helps you get and keep readers.

Elegance—Strive for elegance in the mathematical sense: simplicity and directness. No matter what your audience and topic, make sure your blog is optimal for that audience and that topic, with no extra gimmicks or clutter.

Focus—What is your blog topic? Again, who are you writing for? Focus your design on communicating with that audience about that particular topic. Context is everything.

Graphics—The style of blog graphics should match the style of the blog—and each other. A ragbag collection of ads, free widgets, and fuzzy photos (not to mention crappy clip art) is worse than no graphics at all. If you plan to fully monetize your blog, it’s worth paying a pro to get the riight look if you don’t have a trained eye for graphics yourself.

Headlines—Make sure the headings are easy to read. You’ve written them to be catchy and include keywords relevant to your blog topic. (Haven’t you???) Now make sure people can easily read them.

Ingenuity—Even the best theme has limitations. Experiment. Innovate. A little ingenuity can solve design problems and make your blog stand out. For example, did you know that if you run out of text widgets, you can put two scripts into one WordPress widget? You can.

Read the rest of this entry »

Viral Reciprocal Carousel is a great free way to raise the ranking of your blog with Technorati and other opinion leaders while getting new blog readers and helping out other bloggers. Sound great? It is.

This system has resulted in great success for many bloggers. Now that it’s starting up again, this is a great chance to join in. After all, no matter how good your blog design is, people have to know about it before they can read it.

Here’s how the Viral Reciprocal Carousel works:

Read the rest of this entry »

Your blog may not seem hard to read to you, because you already know what it says. But if it makes your visitors’ eyes tired, they’ll leave. Using these 6 tips can make your blog easier to read and more appealing and can help turn casual visitors into loyal blog readers

More: continued here

The story at the top of this page is displayed via RSS feed from another site. So far, so good.

However, before setting up the feed, I had published a story at that site on hurricane supplies, not realizing that it would show up on the feed to this blog, where it is clearly off topic.

But I had also published the two blog-related stories that I wanted to use here, and I didn’t want to duplicate that content. What to do?

As an experiment, I tried editing the blog story (the other one is still being processed) after the feed was displayed here, and I deleted the off-topic story. I also added keywords in WordPress, since they don’t come across in the feed—and it worked!

I suspect that the hurricane story will show up again when the next cron job refreshes the feed, but at least I can correct the problem. I could even set the cron jobs very far apart…or maybe turn them off, and keep things as they are till the next time i place a story.

Hmmmm. Time for another experiment?

As you can see, my RSS experiment worked. I was able to edit the stories after the feed displayed them on this site. That meant I could delete the hurricane story without disrupting the feed. So all is well.