05 Sep 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 25 Comments

Cool bytes from around the internet

A couple of these are not even recent, but they are really cool so I wanted to share with you. What I call “real life” below, some of my local friends might instead call “Geek Life.”

Real Life:

10 Reasons Why Geeks Make Good Fathers

Watch Movies and TV Online for Free

Learning From Your Mistakes

YikeBike : Cool way for City Commuting

DontEvenReply.com E – mails from an asshole
 
Fractal World Gallery

Funny Commercials – Images

How to Lose a Job Via Facebook in 140 Characters or Less

How to Secure Evernote on a Shared Computer A must if you share a computer or use Evernote on a computer that belongs to the company you work for!

Blogging:

Thesis Tutorial – Adding header images to sidebar widgets An excellent Thesis tutorial to customize your blog

43 Do Follow Blog Images Great looking images to tell the world you’re a DoFollow blog

 Blog Me This You Blogging Fools Another great poem by one of my favorite Southern Gentlemen, Sire.

Girlfriend Went Crazy With Logo And eBook CoverWhat happens when your loved one is bored, has your logo and ebook cover, and is a fan of your BLOG!

Adsense Generator A fun way to generate an Adsense report showing that you made as much money as you want – by Stefan at Ducedo

Use the Snipping Tool to Capture Menus This one saved me from buying SnagIt!

Keyword Optimizer SEO Plugin Cool plugin that will save you lots of time, if you don’t have Thesis.

Please Tell Me When I Have Something Hanging From My Nose Help your fellow blogger and send a quick message when you see a little mistake he/she must not know about.

Owen consulting’s Site of the Week! I’m honored to say that Site of the Week is Misc Bytes this week!

16 Social Bookmarking Plugins to Promote Your Posts If you’ve wondered what that cool social bookmarking plugin is you see on another blog, check this out!

Famous Bloggers Club A nice way to get to know 100 bloggers a little better

Photo credit: maveric2003

29 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 39 Comments

Kinda creepy – Twitter stalking

Most of us use Twitter as it was intended – to @reply to people who talk to us, or to @reply to someone when we see a keyword we can respond to. But you know you can follow your friend’s vacation drive from Spokane to Miami or any other fascinating updates anytime you want by looking at their single Twitter stream by itself. Like, if you want to know what Ashton Kutcher is up to, just go look at his Twitter stream. Apparently Twitter stalking is something that is done these days, just another way life in the last few years has changed things for us, even legally! Look at this Tweet from Penelope Trunk:

So – you can stalk someone manually by going and looking at their stream by itself, or there is a Firefox addon called TweetStalk, which allows you to follow someone without them knowing you are doing so. You can see their Tweets but they don’t know they have a follower. I have to say, I really don’t see the value in this. I mean, why not just create a Twitter account with some oddball name and put a strange picture up there and maybe an innocent Tweet, then follow your friend all you want?  TweetStalk does allow you to create an RSS feed of your stalkee’s Tweets, but so does

Twitter itself!  Just go to the person’s profile page and look at the very last thing on the right – below the thumbnails of people they are following. Grab that RSS feed and a few more, and you can make yourself one very creepy educational Google Reader!

I don’t know who would spend time doing this, but I guess it’s important to mention once again, if you are Tweeting under your real name, be aware that employers, exes, in-laws, and the world can stalk you any time they want. 

Photo credit: ~Sage~

27 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 21 Comments

How to start a website

The following is a guest post by Jenny Dean.  I’ve known Jenny online for about a year, because we linked to each other’s cat sites last fall.  Her sites are of  wonderful quality and full of excellent content, and I always truly enjoyed reading them. You’ll find that Jenny is a great person, so if you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments or email her.

I’ve been building and operating two sites for almost two years now and have learned a tremendous amount of information.

My sites, www.floppycats.com and www.antioxidant-fruits.com were created from my passion for cats and fruit. I build the sites through Site Build It! (SBI) .

As a first time website builder two years ago, I was looking for a company that would teach me how to optimize my sites for Search Engines as well as teach me other tricks of the trade.

Benefits of Site Build It! (SBI) :

• Sites can be built using templates or HTML code
• Has a 10-day Action Guide to Help You Build Your Sites with Proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Helps You Build a E-mail Following
• Allows Visitors to Post Their Own Stories, like Your Ragdoll’s Story on Floppycats.com or Your Fruit Recipe on Antioxidant-fruits.com which helps to build content and drives traffic

Other important items I have learned from following bloggers:

• To help traffic, leave good quality comments on people’s blog with a link to your website.
• Post on a consistent basis. Decide when you will post, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly and be consistent. If people are following your blog, they will continue to follow if the postings are consistent.
• Give yourself a time limit. For example, on my SBI sites I want to have 300 pages before year’s end. I am currently at 171 and 117 on www.floppycats.com and www.antioxidant-fruits.com respectively
• Integrate Google Adsense and other programs to help make revenue on your site
• Welcome any comments, whether negative or positive on your site. It simply means people are reading and are interested! It helps drives traffic to the site as well.
• Be passionate about your topic, because if you are not, then you will not want to keep your website going.
• Brand your website or blog and be sure to have a hip logo, which you can get from Logonerds – $27 Logo Designs.
• Use URLs that have meaning, like http://www.floppycats.com/how-to-start-a-website.html instead of http://www.floppycats.com/website.html people want to know where they are going when they click on a link
• Connect with your readers via social media like, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Always thank your readers for visiting your site!

There is much I have yet to learn, but I believe websites will be forever evolving; therefore there will always be a lot to learn. When I doubt what I am doing, I just build more content, as I know in time that will be the most helpful thing for my sites. If you have any questions for me, please don’t hesitate to
Send Mail.

27 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 18 Comments

Thesis Theme discount – some things to watch out for!

Becoming a Thesis theme affiliate seems like it would be a super way to make money once you have a lot of traffic, because the Thesis affiliate program is very generous, giving a 33% commission on all sales. Due to the generous commission, affiliates have a lot of leeway to give purchasers a discount – any portion of that 33% we want to give. There are a lot of affiliates who offer discounts on Thesis theme, and I would assume giving a discount helps us to sell a lot more Thesis licenses. Just to make sure I wouldn’t get into any trouble doing something like this, I emailed the DIYThemes Affiliate Program to make sure that giving a discount is not against any terms of service, and I was told that it is not. So that is great! We can give discounts on the Thesis theme and most likely sell more of it. But – there are a few things to look out for before you send a refund to someone who tells you they purchased Thesis from your link.

1. The first of course is just that the purchaser could have already clicked on someone else’s Thesis affiliate link before the day they clicked on yours and then told you that you now owe them a refund for the discount you promised. This is from the Thesis Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions:
When a visitor clicks through your affiliate link, a cookie is set in their browser that contains your affiliate ID. Also, their IP address is tracked in the database along with your affiliate ID. When this person decides to buy a membership or product from DIY Themes, the script will look for this cookie and try to match their IP address to identify the affiliate who will be awarded the commission. Visitors sent through your affiliate link may make a purchase later in time and the commission will still be awarded if the cookie is present in their browser and/or they are using the same IP address as the one logged in the database.
Now that is very sweet if someone clicked on my link then later just decides to buy Thesis from some other place, perhaps I’ll get a commission out of it! But to be safe when people want to consciously click on your affiliate link in the hopes of getting a refund of the discount from you, be sure to warn visitors to clear their browser cookies before clicking through from your site and ordering.

2. Another issue is that some sales don’t get captured in the affiliate system because a customer doesn’t redirect to the home page after a sale. The DIYThemes Affiliate Program has a back up system for this, but it is a manual one. So if someone tells you they bought from you and you are not seeing it in your affiliate control panel, you can email DIYThemes Affiliate Program and they will check on it for you. But until you see that sale recorded with credit to you, hold onto your wallet (or rather, your Paypal).

3. Currently the program pays out at the end of the month for the previous month. I was told that if you have a sale on July 30th, they will pay you on August 1st. But there is a 30 day refund policy for purchasers. So you could get paid and then have the money refunded if someone asks DIYThemes for a refund within 30 days. I don’t want that, so I intend to wait 30 days before sending discount money back to anyone. I have seen one site that will give refunds within 24 hours, but knowing about this 30 day refund policy, I am too afraid of getting bitten. I would assume we are giving these discount/refunds at our own risk, and I’d hate to try to collect my money back from a purchaser if someone gets a refund from DIYThemes and I lose my commission.

These are things I was made aware of while communicating with DIYThemes Affiliate Program. I still don’t have my site fully customized but am in the learning phase of all of this Thesis stuff. Do you know of any more “gotchas” to share with fellow bloggers?

22 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 14 Comments

The simplest way to put a clickable header image into the Thesis theme

There are plenty of sites that can tell you how to add a clickable header for Thesis using an image, but this is the quickest, with no code for you to think up on your own. This will take a matter of seconds. This quick fix is only for people who have not already done a lot of customization to your custom.css file – more specifically to the #header or its sub-elements, #logo and #tagline, because it may not work as expected when you already have a lot of references to those things in your custom.css.

Clickable Header Generator

1. Find out how long and how wide your image is. If you don’t know, use Photoshop or GIMP or at least Windows Paint. Write down the dimensions.

2. Upload your image to a folder in your domain and write down the absolute URI where it is. Don’t use a relative path. Example – my header’s URI is http://www.miscbytes.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_151/images/miscbytesheader.png. See, when you go to that URI you can see my header. So make sure you know the path for your header image.

3. Now the fun part! Go to the Clickable Thesis Banner CSS generator provided by DoubleMule. Enter the dimensions of your header image plus its URI into the generator and get your code!

4. In WordPress, go to Appearance – Thesis Custom Styling and paste the code from DoubleMule into your custom.css file. (Hey, just for fun, make a backup copy of custom.css before you do that).

5. Once you click the Little Ass Save Button, you now have a clickable header that is your image! If you want to refine the alignment (default is centered) or distance from the header image to the Thesis code that follows it, here is some additional information from DoubleMule. My own header image is 900 x134, and I think it fits great.

Bonus: Move Nav Menu Below Header

Now your header is done, but the navigation tabs are at the default position of above the header. To get them below it without writing any code for yourself at all, be sure you have the Thesis OpenHook plugin, then in WordPress go to Appearance – Thesis OpenHook. Select a hook – Before Header and put a check in both boxes. 
When you put the check in the box to Remove Thesis Nav Menu, some code will be generated.  Copy that into your After Header as you see in the picture and put a check into the Execute PHP on this hook. Click both Little Ass Save Buttons. Don’t forget that part!

You now have a clickable image header with the nav menu below it!

Last Wednesday evening when Ching Ya sent me my final header image, I knew that I didn’t have a long stretch to sit down and get involved with finding sources online and copying and pasting code and possibly getting everything screwed up. I only had a few minutes but I wanted to see my header NOW! I found the DoubleMule tutorial and got that header up there in just a few seconds. Then the OpenHook plugin with its wonderful checkboxes moved the nav menu and I was done. I wanted to share what I found in case some of you have your header image already and just don’t feel like getting into a lot of code.

Photo credit: PaintMyWordspaintmywords

18 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 41 Comments

When is it worth outsourcing something?

Some of us think we are doing everything ourselves and not outsourcing anything. After all, I mop my own kitchen floor! I mow my own yard! I built my own computer! But really we are not doing everything without paying anyone else to take care of something for us. Unless you are grinding grain into flour then baking your own bread, growing and processing all your own food, making your own shoes and clothes, you are outsourcing something. The trick is to know when you benefit more by doing something yourself vs. outsourcing. There are two reasons for outsourcing that I can think of immediately:

One thing is, how much is your time worth? If you are a freelancer who gets $xx per hour, then why on earth are you pulling your own weeds or scrubbing your own floors, unless you love it?! Instead, hire a kid in your neighborhood (or maybe a stay-at-home mom who could use some cash) to do that while you either drum up some more business or at least go relax and recharge somewhere. In my case, I have a full time job and of course this blog and a couple of niches in the works. So in some ways I could make an excuse to hire someone to clean the house, but on the other hand for now anyway I am dreaming up blog posts and thinking of other blog to-do items while I mop and dust. My mind isn’t on idle just because my hands are doing something that’s not earning any money!

The second and most convincing reason for me to outsource something is when it’s something that would affect my image or safety if done incorrectly. I am not going to try to do something complicated to my own car (safety) and I am not going to cut my own hair (image). Those things are best left to someone who knows what he is doing! Likewise, the amateurish header or logo I could probably come up with might look good to me, but… well really they wouldn’t look good to me. I want my blog to have a good professional look, so I hired a professional designer, Wong Ching Ya, to create the header and logo for MiscBytes. I certainly want and need to learn how to do all sorts of customizations for my own blog eventually, and I will probably do that slowly for the niche sites, but there’s no way I could have created the original design in that header if I’d had all the time in the world.

Is there something you’ve started outsourcing? Is it because you hate doing it, or because your time is better spent elsewhere, or because you believe a professional can do a better job for you?

Photo credit: gadl

17 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 25 Comments

Why aren’t my trackbacks working?

I read a lot of blogs throughout the week, and I notice that even the biggest of them often show their trackbacks in a little group near the comments. But when I linked to a couple of blogs last month, I went back to the blog I’d linked to later to see my trackback (OK, chalk it up to the excitement of a beginner), and there was no trackback from me! I decided that they must have decided not to show my trackback for some reason. Perhaps they thought I was a spammer! It happened several times though, and one time I linked to someone I know online and asked him – did he get my trackback? He did not. And he tried linking to me – and I did not receive his trackback either. So in case you are having the same problem, here’s what I found in my own WordPress settings:

1) Make sure the top box is checked in WordPress Settings - Discussion – to attempt to notify. I guess I had thought that would happen automatically some other way, so mine was unchecked!

2) For any posts you had previously linked to someone, you are going to have to open them for edit, and update the post before the trackbacks will happen. I tried this with ChrisBrogan.com and with HowToMakeMyBlog.com, looking at the post I’d linked to, and the trackback from me did not appear ’til I re-saved my own post.

I don’t think trackbacks are going to be a big traffic source for me, but I do want to notify others when I link to them. The biggest bloggers probably get too much input from readers already and may not care, but others may like knowing that their post was appreciated enough to be referred to and linked to.

Photo credit: Dylerpillar

15 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 32 Comments

How Google Wave is going to change your life – and maybe your blog

Google Wave should be available to the public in just a few months. Then it should change the way we communicate online, giving us communication with real-time views of character by character typing. Users will be able to add all kinds of content to conversations,

14 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 32 Comments

GoDaddy’s Twitter integration helps you with branding

Now when you log into your GoDaddy account and look at your domains, you have a new Twitter icon beside each domain name. By clicking it, you can see if the same name is available on Twitter. If the name is available on Twitter, you are told that and you get a link to go to Twitter sign up. If it is not, there is a box into which you can put

11 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 46 Comments

The ugly truth about who’s hiding behind that avatar!

You can talk to someone for years on a forum and only imagine what they look like. That cool avatar or artistic picture promises so much! Here’s a hilarious look at what those avatars really mean!

References:

About a week ago, I found this table on this forum but don’t ask me how I got there. Maybe a friend sent me the link? Anyway, I actually joined the forum to send a direct message to the person who posted it, asking her permission to post this on my blog, with proper credit to her. She never answered!  Well tonight I was searching a little more and found this link where a guy had posted it in 2005, two years before she did.  And his last activity on that forum was 2007 so I didn’t bother to email him. If anyone reading this created this originally (or if your ancestors did), please let me know so I can take it down or give proper credit. I just found it so hilarious I had to share!