BlogCatalog.com has come up with an interesting replacement for the BlogRush widget. It displays your own blog posts (on however many blogs you have registered with BlogCatalog) and some other activities such as Diggs. You’ll see one in the right-hand sidebar of this page.
You can choose from about eight colors, and you set the width (in pixels) and the number of items to display (so you effectively control the height as well). If you have several blogs, this is a great way to send traffic from one to another.
Besides the WordPress version, you can create BlogCatalog widgets that work with Blogger and TypePad blogs as well. It is easy and fun.
BlogCatalog offers four different widgets in all. If you scroll down, you will see their Recent Viewers widget (with dozens of tiny pictures). Those are also highly customizable. You can choose the size, number of pictures, color of the frame and the text, and so on.
Widgets are just one of the benefits of belonging to the BlogCatalog community. You can get great exposure for you blogs there, join groups, make friends, and find many interesting and entertaining blogs. I highly recommend it.
Below that is a similar widget, created at MyBlogLog.com, another online blog-listing community where you should list your blogs if you haven’t already.
As I’m currently updating my old blogs and developing new ones, I will be checking on all the old favorite blog registrars and trying out new ones. I’ll report back here on the best ones I find.
BlogRush, the pioneering blog traffic exchange site, has shut down. I’m in the process of removing the BlogRush widgets from all my blogs.
The explanation given was that BlogRush was not successful enough to justify the expense of running the site. And traffic levels apparently were declining. People had quite clicking on the widgets after the novelty wore off.
I wonder what that portends for other free widgets. What do you think?
Am I the only one who hates the new WordPress widget management feature? I guess it is OK if you have just a two-column theme (only one column of widgets). But this theme, for example, has three columns just for widgets: upper left, upper right, and lower.
The upper left and upper right columns have to be balanced to keep from leaving gaping holes in the layout. So now and then I have to move items back and forth. The old way was slow. The new way is horrible!
You can see all the widgets at once, in a list on the left of the widget management page, but you can only view one column of your page layout at at time. To move a widget from one column to another, instead of just dragging it (the old way), now you have to Remove it from one column, switch column views, and then Add it to the other.
In the old way you could not see how much space each widget would occupy (how many column inches), but you could see how many widgets were in each column, and with a good visual memory you could estimate. You could at least see all the columns at the same time.
Without seeing all the columns at once, I can’t remember what all is in each one (especially once I start moving things around). So now it’s just a lot harder to make even simple changes in the arrangement of the widgets. For me, anyway.
I can’t even imagine why anyone thought this was a better way to manage widgets. How about you?
Yep. Your colors. Your design. Chosen from menus. Easy.
Want the sidebar on the left? On the right? Want two sidebars? No problem.
There is a bit of a learning curve. But have you even tried going through free WordPress theme sites, looking for something that works for you? Yep, that takes time, too.
I haven’t quite mastered it yet. I haven’t quite figured out the trick to adding background images. But I did create a plain, clean theme. Want to see? You can view it here.
So why not give this a try? If nothing else, it’s fun. And you might create the perfect theme for you!
The best blog design in the world is nothing without lots of good content. We know that we need to post often, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We let things slide.
So Eric Giguere has posted a challenge on his blog: Write a page a day for every day in February. And he’ll give you a copy of his $97 best-selling book on how to make money with Google Adsense if you complete the challenge.
You can’t lose with this challenge. No matter what happens, you get a lot of work done that you need to do anyway. And if you complete the challenge, you get a very nice reward.
All you have to do is post a comment with the URL for each day’s post to Eric’s blog for that day. Doing that gives you a free backlink to your blog, which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).
[To clarify, you just make 29 posts in February. For each of your posts, you put a comment with a link to it in one of Eric's posts. Your dates don't have to match up exactly.]
By the end of February, you will have 29 free backlinks from a very popular blog, which helps your Google PageRank. (And his blog readers will see your links and maybe click on them, which could bring you more traffic and word of mouth.)
Plus, one lucky blogger will win a copy of Eric’s super-duper software, PLRSiteBuilder, which automates the creation of web sites built to make money with Adsense ads. How cool is that?
You can sign up till February 8, and you have till March 10 to post the comments with links to your daily pages. Why not give it a try? See Eric’s blog, MEMWG, The Unofficial AdSense Blog, to sign up.
If you don’t want to take the challenge, I recommend reading Eric’s blog anyway, because it’s an excellent blog on how to make money with your blog—and that’s a good thing, too.
As you know, getting links back to your blog from highly ranked web sites is a great way to both promote your blog to new potential readers and raise your blog’s ranking in Google and other search engines (so more people can find it.)
A good source of information on blog promotion and making money on line is a guy named Matt Garrett. I’ve got his ebook Lazy Git Marketing, and I like it.
So I joined his email list. You should, too. There is no cost to subscribe, and he offers some gems of advice.
Although Matt prefers to use html sites, everything he says about promoting web sites and making money with them applies equally to blogs. And he’s a pretty clever guy.
Today, just one valuable piece of information (out of several) from a recent blog post of Matt’s made the whole subscription worthwhile. He has developed a no-cost Facebook application (if you haven’t yet joined Facebook, do) that lets you add links to all your blogs and websites.
If you do not belong to Facebook, you are missing out on an opportunity to promote yourself and your blogs. Nowadays more and more employers and clients expect to be able to find you on Facebook. It is your face to the world.
Matt’s new Facebook application lets you link back to your own and others’ blogs and web sites. It also does several other things. Here’s a quote from Matt’s email newsletter:
Did you know it’s possible to get links to your sites from your
Facebook Profile page?
There’s a new facebook app called TagK that allows you to add links
to all your social site profiles, like MySpace and Flickr, to your
profile page, but the REAL neat feature of this app is if you
invite a few friends to use it as well then you get bespoke links
that you can use for linking to your own sites/blogs…
You might recognise one of the people behind this new app…
you can visit the blog for the app, which includes the link to add
the app, here:
I just discovered this site where you can make a widget of your own blog posts. They call it a “blidget.”
This widget, or blidget, automatically picks up and displays your last few blog posts. It is your very own private BlogRush-type widget, featuring only your own blog!
Others can then get your blidget and put it on their blogs if they want to keep up with your posts (sort of like putting the Digg widget on your blog). Or you can put your blidget on other blogs and/or websites that you own.
Not only that, but when you create a blidget, you can then easily add it to your Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or other site by clicking a button. It’s all very automated and easy.
Here is an example that I made for this blog:
You can customize your widget, and others who get your widget to put on their blog can customize it to suit their site.
Register, and you can store your widgets and have them listed in a blog directory for others to see (and maybe post on their blogs).
Also, by registering your blog, you get a free link back to your site from what is sure to be a highly Google-ranked site as it catches on. (That’s great for getting traffic and helping raise your blog’s ranking).
This is really fun stuff! Go see for yourself at Widgetbox.com.
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in the world is nothing without lots of good content. We know that we need to post often, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We let things slide.
