BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

I just signed up at a new site for blog advertising, social networking and getting paid to post: SocialSpark. Register your blogs there and let advertisers find you.

Meanwhile you can make friends, who can vote your blog up or down in the rankings. You can also add applications to your profile page, just as you can on Facebook. (There are already hundreds.)

You also get a set of tools for tracking traffic and other stats on your blog. To install the tools, so you can view the stats on your SocialSpark dashboard, you paste a code snippet into the theme code of your blog (not into a widget). But you have to add code anyway to claim your blog.

The service is still in beta testing, according to the site. But registration is open now, and there are already over 1000 blogs listed.

To get ads from SocialSpark, your blog must be over 90 days old and have at least 20 posts. So what are you waiting for?

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.