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WordPress Lightbox Plugin for Your Images

If you use a lot of images in your blog, you’ll definitely want to have a Lightbox plugin to jazz up the previews and display of your images. To give you an example of how this works, click on any of the thumbnails below and you’ll see the lightbox preview window, with the ability to browse all the images. To do this effortlessly on your WordPress blog, you need to download the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress, and upload the entire folder to your plugins directory. Read more

Network Blogging Tips

Do you blog for someone else? A blog you might want to subscribe to is Network Blogging Tips written by bloggers Jennifer Chait and Deborah Ng (both experienced bloggers blogging in blog networks).

“Here we’ll share tips, advice and ideas for those who blog for someone else. We’ll offer commiseration, jobs tips and even occasional leads.”

Disclaimer: Both of these bloggers are bloggers at b5media (the network I co-founded) - however I never realized they were doing this til I saw David blogging about it.

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Wikio, News Aggregator and Top 100 Blogs

I will be frank here, I think that the marketing rep of Wikio.com emailed me about 10 times on the last month to let me know about their new blog ranking system (as you can see perseverance pays off…). But I am not writing about them only in the hope of stopping the harassment: I also think that they have an interesting service. Wikio is a kind of news aggregator, but with an interesting slant: surf and subscribe. That is, they feature a bunch of news and stories from around the web, but they also give you the possibility to subscribe either to local RSS feeds or to the direct feeds of the sources. The Top Blogs section is particularly useful. Basically they have a Top 100 list for several niches, from business to celebrities, from technology to sports. If you are trying to find some quality blogs on a certain topic, for instance, you could go there and browse around, and even subscribe to their RSS feeds directly from the Wikio website. Read more

Amazon Associates Program Introduce Carousel Widget

The Amazon Associates program have announced a new widget in the last day or two - it’s called the Carousel Widget. You can see one in action below with six blogging books. Amazon.com Widgets The unit above is a ‘carousel’ format (horizontal) but they also have a ‘ferris wheel’ format (vertical). Each come in different size options.

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7 Principles of Effective Icon Design

Before approaching icon design there are some guidelines and principles that are worth studying. If you want to create effective icon designs, then you should take a holistic approach to issues such as: audience, size, simplicity, lighting, perspective, and style. This article gives you a good starting place for creating icons that work well together and fit seamlessly within your designs.

1. Approach Icon Design Holistically

Icons fit within graphic systems. Whether they are designed for desktop applications or websites an icon is one of many graphic elements that need to work together harmonically. Carry this logic across icon sets as well. Icons can be appreciated for their esthetic solutions individually, but they don’t function alone. Evaluate your icon designs relative to the graphic system your using them in. Make sure that each icon differs from surrounding icons, while still working together as a whole. In the article Designing an iconic language over at Turbo Milk the author Yegor Gilyov states, “If you need to draw several icons, you need to think over images for the whole set of icons before proceeding with illustrating activities.” This is one of two major points made in this article on icon design. He goes on to explain how failing to plan how the whole set of icons will work together from the beginning will ensure a huge waste of time, as redesign will be inevitable. Read more

Pikaboo new website

We are launching a new website. We wanted a simple and efficient website. Using mootools, flickr and twitter and quicktime !

10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less

This is a guest post on improving blog traffic from Courtney Tuttle. Courtney writes about marketing online at Court’s Internet Marketing School.

1. Create link clusters within your blog

A link cluster is a group of links that you can point at a post or page to improve its search engine ranking. Let’s say you have a post that’s ranked for ’stupid business ideas’. Edit 10 of your other posts to create links (using ’stupid business ideas’ as the anchor text) to the ’stupid business ideas’ post and you will surely move up in Google for that keyword. This process can be implemented in about 10 minutes and can be used for any keyword your site ranks for or is trying to rank for.

2. Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts

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Why Do You Write?

In this post Muhammad Saleem asks why do you write? Muhammad is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on many social sites. image by mezone

Why Do You Write?

Sounds like an odd question at first, doesn’t it? The reason why you write actually has a big impact on how you write and what you write about, and understand that identifying this reason can actually help you write better and work faster towards achieving that goal. For example, when I first started writing online, I was writing a personal diary of sorts. Since I was writing it more as an outlet for self-expression and not as something for public consumption, the blog didn’t look very pretty, it was unstructured, and I didn’t care much about editing the content or writing regularly. However, when I started writing my first social media blog, I approached the matter very differently. What changed? Read more

Why Bloggers Should Have a Privacy Policy, and 9 Points to Include in Yours

This is a guest post by Aditya Mahesh. With the way technology is evolving these days, it is no surprise that people are worried about online fraud, identity theft, and the misuse of their personal information. They need to be assured that sensitive data will be protected when using technology, and this applies to web surfing as well. One of the easiest ways to fix this problem is the creating a Privacy Policy. After all, most major websites have privacy policies, so why shouldn’t blogs? This is especially true when many readers will give you their e-mail address and other personal information to interact with the website, whether it be by posting a comment or signing up for an online newsletter or e-mail RSS feed. Creating a privacy policy isn’t too difficult. The document should be unique to your blog, but there are a number of issues that all privacy policies should include: 1. Explicit that you won’t sell or give away any user’s e-mail addresses. This is self-explanatory, people don’t want their e-mail addresses to spread across the web, so don’t release e-mail addresses. Read more

Stay Inspired With the WordPress Timestamp Feature

Do you have moments of total inspiration when everything falls into place and your blog writing just flows? I bet you do, we all do at some stage or another. But unless you can take advantage of this without losing unnecessary time, you will have to go back into your WordPress admin and publish the posts a few days later. Not so with the timestamp feature. Instead of saving a draft post and then having to go back to publish you can stager future posts at your peril. This is especially useful when you are going on holidays. Instead of worrying about keeping up with your publishing schedule, why not prepare some posts ahead of time and then publish them to be released every other day, or whatever your posting schedule might be. You can find this feature in the right hand side of your posting screen. Just change the date to a future date and the adjust the time if you like and then hit publish. If you forget to click on publish it will only save the post as a draft and unless you go in manually and click edit, then publish it won’t be live. Read more

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