Saturday, April 29, 2006

Round the blogosphere

Here are some funny posts from friends, news about blogging in general and some great tips on professional blogging from Darren. Enjoy!

Rocketboom - Amanda Congdons 3 minute daily video blog is huge - I'm a fan!

Kristyk posts the funniest story about her husband Mike and their boys and pretty girls butts!

A diagram of my heart was published on the Blue Sloth.

Unofficial Offie Stuff has some fantastic Windows XP FAQs

Robin Good posts about the blogosphere's growth via Technorati CEO Dave Sifry.

"The blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace." wrote, Technorati CEO Dave Sifry, almost three months ago, when his leading blog search engine, Technorati, reported to be tracking over 27.2 Million weblogs.

How do you build Blogger Credibility? Darren Rowse has written a great series.
Here is number 4 titled Blogger Credibility. Links to the rest of the series can be found there.

Courtesy of Doug from Reality Me comes this fantastic picture of a "car"!

The Register continues to write awesome satirical BOFH posts.


Posted by: Jethro | 3:52 PM |

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Link Dump

Expertise builds blog credibility
Ultimate Boot CD - I used this recently to test my SATA disks for errors
Heidi Computers Support Forum
Ranish Partition Manager
TCPIQ - tools for serious internet surfers
Impressive Air Raid Siren
Oz forex web site
Google Reader - a web based RSS reader I am now using - its great!
Computer Alliance - great buys on PC gear
Internode - awesome ADSL and ADSL2 internet service provider
Internet Usage and Population Statistics for Oceania. New Zealand is leading the way with 76% of the population on the net.


Posted by: Jethro | 9:57 PM |

Thursday, April 20, 2006

10 Blog Tips to Reduce Blog Trouble

John Hawkins of Right Wing News writes an informative post on things a blogger can do to "make life easier":

  1. If you have a comments section, make sure people have to register...
  2. If you ban someone from commenting on your blog, don't turn him/her back on, don't respond to his emails, and don't acknowledge the fact that he's been banned on your blog. ...
  3. Don't ever tell your readers where you work. ...
  4. Don't send out emails from your work address or post in another blog's comment section from work. ...
  5. Have an unregistered phone number and don't mention where you live...
  6. Don't post other people's email addresses or phone numbers...
  7. Don't post the email addresses or IPs of people who send hate mail to you. ...
  8. If a small blog says something nasty about you, don't get all upset and think you have to respond to them. ...
  9. Don't write about anything on your blog that you couldn't deal with people in the "real world" finding out...
  10. Once a post is published and other bloggers run across it, you're going to have to live with the consequences. ...

Be sure to read the full article. The article is great! The comments section is worthless.

[Source]


Posted by: Doug McCaughan | 4:54 AM |

Friday, April 14, 2006

Leave spaghetti to the Bolognese

From Unofficial Office Stuff

Tom Fadial has an excellent web site mostly exploring philosophy.

The seventeen year old University of Buffalo student also has a collection of tips about how to make sense of the mess that CSS can sometimes appear.

Here are five headings, be sure to go to his site to see the documentation.

1) Indent descendant (sic) and related rules.

2) Use shorthand properties to keep all parts of a style type on a single line.

3) Clearly divide your stylesheet into specific sections.



4) Define the basic rules for each area only once so that the same default value is not being rewritten in every rule. If you know that all of the h2's will not have a margin or padding, define that on the top level and let its effect cascade as it is supposed to.

5) The easiest method is to combine all of the tips above to move the base styles for all elements into a separate section of the stylesheet or a separate stylesheet altogether.


Posted by: Jethro | 3:11 PM |

Twisted Knickers

Darren over at Problogger had another blogger ask him an interesting question about monetisation.
Danae owns a blog called Knickers. (Not necessarily worksafe as it is about lingerie). She wants to know how best to monetise it.

Here is her question from Darren's site:

Knickers is a product weblog that features beautiful lingerie with advice about what to wear, etc., and also has an ongoing interview series with lingerie designers and other professionals within the industry. I started Knickers because there was no resource like it on the web, no ‘lingerie heaven’ where women could go to find beautiful lingerie and learn about bra-sizing, and what suits their body type.

Knickers has been running for nine months now, and it’s getting to the point where the weblog needs to start monetizing properly, or it’s not going to be worth the amount of time I put into it. The main sources of revenue just now are Google ads and affiliate links, neither of which performing beautifully. I’m now seriously considering sponsorship for Knickers, but am concerned about the implications ‘will I lose credibility? Will I alienate other designers? Will new readers be confused as to whether I’m owned by the sponsor?’

I’ve looked around quite a bit for pro-blogging articles about sponsorship, but it’s usually only mentioned as one possible revenue stream, i.e. ‘or, you can get a sponsorship.’ I’d be really interested to hear from other bloggers who have done sponsorships, and to learn how they decided a price for the sponsorship, what their terms were, and how it’s working for them. I think an ideal sponsorship would be one that brings added value to the readers of the weblog, and would love to hear of creative ways bloggers have teamed up with sponsors to benefit their readers.

Thanks in advance for your insights!
There are a lot of very useful comments from other problogger readers. If you have a similar site then you may find some helpful tips here.

Or if you are able to add some advice or help Danae in ayway, I am sure that she would be grateful. Comment on Darrens post or directly on Danae's Knickers weblog.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:15 PM |