Yesterday I had a little problem with one of my blogs, which was running on the famous platform wordpress but on a outdated version, wp v2.3.2 . Actually the blog was hacked with an exploit, because I am too lazy to update and backup my blogs, plus the entire mysql database is messed up and I can’t recover it.

Why am I so lazy to update my blogs? Well as you all know updating takes a few minutes and if you have five or more blogs, the all process could take you at least one hour (not that it’s hard to update and backup wordpress, but sometimes, time is more important).

The solution! After a few minutes of research and a nervous breakdown, I found some interesting wordpress plugins which make the all process easy and less time consuming. I really recommend that you backup and update wordpress anytime you have the opportunity so that you don’t end up like me, with a blog hacked and a broken mysql db.

Plugins that should save your time and a**:

• 1. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – this plugin is fantastic! Why? Because it reduces the time you spend updating to at least one minute/blog. It will allow you to update to the newest version of wordpress, backup your database, de-activates all your plugins, maintenance mode and much more. You can see more info about this wp plugin here and a little demonstration bellow.
  Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.
• 2. WP-DB-Backup - is another unique plugin that allows you to backup your wordpress mysql database in a nice way, ajax style. It shows you a progress bar, it allows you to backup the database on your FTP, gives you a download link or sends a direct email with a zip file attached.You can see a little demo bellow in the second part of the movie.
  Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

[See post to watch Flash video]

I hope this post helps you. That’s all!

It is two o’clock and I finished watching an interesting movie called “Untraceable”. Thought it is not a good movie to watch at night, it was fascinating because it includes some interesting topics like Internet, hacking, FBI which I enjoy, excluding the part with killing people and video streaming the crimes online. Here is a little summary from imdb, you can read more about this movie here:

“FBI agent Jennifer Marsh is tasked with hunting down a seemingly untraceable serial killer who posts live videos of his victims on the Internet. As time runs out, the cat and mouse chase becomes more personal.”

Unfortunately some people enjoy watching on the Internet gore and disturbing content and in my opinion they are lunatics, but that is their problem as long as I don’t meet them on the street . The fact is that this movie, “Untraceable”, was promoted and is promoting a website called killwithme.com. In the movie this website is the place where the psycho hacker was broadcasting live his crimes and in the real world, this is the website that promotes the movie (the official website), with an interesting marketing strategy. As you can see bellow in the alexa ranking charts, killwithme.com has two periods of time when it was highly browsed, on 25 January 2008 when ”Untraceable” was released in USA and this period of the month (April) when the movie was released in other countries, on DVD’s or blu-ray rips especially.

As you can see the traffic and alexa rank for this website is increasing and a funny thing is that most of the users come from the United Kingdom and not from USA where all the action happened and where the movie was released. Maybe the United Kingdom has more psychos, just joking!

It is interesting how a movie like this is able to create buzz, based on the fact that somewhere out there, there is an audience interested in a specific topic, prepared to spread the “news” worldwide. This method is called word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and it is great if you know how to use it. I have an idea and I think I’ll develop a website soon; don’t worry, I am not a killer lol .

Overall “Untraceable” is a great movie and I recommend you watch and analyze it, because who knows, maybe you’ll get an idea for a new website and just remember this: you are a web developer, not a killer.

Because my inbox is full of emails with suggestions to update my latest wordpress theme, acosmin v3, well a miracle has happened today. I am not lazy so here is acosmin v3.1 which has some bugs fixed, the desired wiget ready option (with 4 spots to place your widgets) and a new color scheme.

Acosmin v3.1 blue – wordpress theme | Live demo

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.
Acosmin v3.1 orange – wordpress theme | Live demo

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.
Hope you enjoy them! Now I must make acosmin v2 widgets ready!

PS It works fine with the new platform wordpress v2.5

Here is a new free wordpress theme which has a simple design, specially made for those who want to make money online because of the unlimited options of placing ads. The name of this theme is Simple THEME and it has the following features:
sIFR

• sIFR for more personalized headings
• The font used is SF Speedwaystar v1.0 and it can be found in the font folder

Simple to modify

• You can modify the css file very simple
• A psd file for the logo you can find in the PSD folder

Tabs

• I added some simple magazine style tabs, using the javascript code from barelyfitz.com
• Go to his homepage to see how you can add more tabs or how to mode them

Ad spots:

• in the header 468×60px banner
• in the sidebar 160×600px ad
• special sidebar for 125×125px ads or 120×600px banners

You can see the demo here and you can download it from:
UPDATED VERSION (no wp-admin error)
Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

I am working on a new wordpress theme right now and I hope it comes out well, because grunge is a new style for me. The name of the new wp theme is Grunge Sensation and at this stage I am trying to make the header look nice by changing colors and adding new stuff to it. You can see a sneak preview of the header bellow (click on the image to enlarge):

Also with this occasion I wanted to ask you, because it’s a free wordpress theme, how would you like the sidebar, so here is a little pool:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

There is an old saying in internet marketing that “Content is king” but bloggers nowadays have a big problem with getting information, so some of them give up writing articles for this particular reason (I am talking about niche blogs). I had the same problem a year ago, but today I can say that there are so many ways to stay informed and you can blog about anything, because you only need a main idea and a few more resources to write a great article for your niche blog. So from my experience here are a few methods to keep up to date with the new information from your niche.

Google news or blogsearch – great tools in combination with any feed reader

Yes, google news because it provides fresh information every hour, day and in combination with a rss feed reader you are ready anytime to write on your blog about anything. All you need is a keyword in which you are interested in (from your niche) and the fresh news will be brought into your reader. I made a little video tutorial so you can see the exact steps for this method though it’s really simple:

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This method with only one keyword rss feed can be used also with all the social bookmarking websites like digg, propeller, technorati etc and the good part about it is that you can keep in touch with blogs from your niche.

Article directories provide relevant content for your niche

There are so many article directories on the internet that you can use thought almost all of them have the same content, but there are a few that make a difference. So you can use the entire article because it is free, but I don’t recommend this because your readers will consider you a copycat. If you don’t want to have this type of problem you should only take the main idea or some paragraphs and modify them so that the googlebot doesn’t consider your content duplicate and penalize you.Another great thing about article directories is that they have rss feeds by category, keywords or by author so you can subscribe to them.

Here is a little list of article directories:

• Ezinearticles – here you can find the best articles out there for free
• Articlesbase– my personal favorite because it has a lot of options
• Articleseen is my personal article directory, in beta version for now. You can find more info about the script here
• Articledashboard – another great article directory that also provides the script that is used for this website.
• Goarticles – also has some original articles

Forums related to your niche – best source for new topics

I am really addicted to forums because I can find interesting opinions about the topics I am interested in and I can find very easy ideas for my articles. For example I like digitalpoint and sitepoint’s forums because I can learn new things and it really helps in internet marketing to find out what people are searching for. Who knows maybe the person who started the topic will come via google on your blog because you wrote an article with your own opinion about that particularly topic. The idea is you should search for as many forums related to your niche and make new friends, I assure you that this helps you a lot and will also grow your traffic.

In conclusion I think you should test all the websites that provide content and information for your niche and most important, don’t despair!

Now you have to see this, it’s a vid dedicated to Valentine’s Day. SO FUNNY!

By the way Happy Valentine’s Day to you to!

A month ago I wrote an article about my technorati authority and rank increase from 0 to 85 and 300k to 81k, respectively. Now after releasing two more wordpress themes, my authority has increased to 250 and my rank to 21k, even thought in the last period I was a lazy blogger with only a few posts on this blog.
Now most of you will say that the technorati authority and rank numbers are not so important, but you should take them in consideration. Why? Well here’s why:

Potential sponsores for your blog
Because a lot of potential sponsors first look at your alexa rank, then at your google pagerank and after at your technorati rank and authority; at least that’s how I would do if I was in search of reviews or ad banners for my products or blog.

Technorati drives traffic to your blog
The higher your rank and authority is, the more chances you have to get your blog exposed in technorati searches. This means that you have a chance of getting traffic from them. I remember a year ago I had a celebrity blog (it has a new owner now) and because I had the habit to use technorati tags with common names like Britney Spears, Parish Hilton, I’d received a lot of traffic from them, around 100-200 visits.

More rss readers for your blog
From my experience a lot of the people that come from technorati, convert into rss readers because most of them look for blogs that are in the same niche as them. It is a fact that Technorati.com is the second tool after Google’s blogsearch and I confess that most of the blogs I am reading now via google reader, I’ve discovered them with this tool and I think that bloggers do the same.

So above you have a few of the benefits, now here are a few methods to increase your technorati rank and authority:


Free wordpress themes
You can use my method with wordpress themes because it’s tested, it works and gives results very fast. Also with this method you don’t need to post articles every day and it brings you more benefits like a higher pagerank, increased SERPs and much more. I’ll write in a future post for those who don’t have an idea how to create wordpress themes, what you should do and for those who are addicted to make money online an article with a few tricks to make money with a little investment.

Quality content that generates buzz
Another great way to increase your technorati numbers is to write targeted content that generates buzz. Valuable content makes people link to your blog thus generating more traffic, more technorati authority, better SERPs…

Use WTF to write articles
No, not the word wtf (you know what it means ) but technorati wtf (where’s the fire) an interesting tool that lets bloggers say which topics are on “fire”, hot at the moment. Just take a look and you’ll see how many topics are great. In this way you’ll have topics to write about.

Finally - Use tags
At last use technorati tags. There are a lot of plugins out there that display tags for technorati, here is just an example on wordpress.org. Also you should do a simple research for tags. Go on the front page of technorati and in the sidebar you have a section called “Tags from what’s rising”. Write about those topics and you will see some results (it’s like on google trends).

At the moment I am working on a new wordpress theme for a blog called Blog of Romania (project by Bobby Voicu; this blog is a place where bloggers from my country post their articles so that we can give you an impression of how beautiful Romania is) and I would like to announce that in the near future I will release two more free wordpress themes, one for tech blogs and one that is based on simplicity.

I am not so good at logo design at the moment, but here is a sneak preview (beta )

I managed to buy a few domains in the past few weeks and with this occasion I realized that this industry of buying, selling domain names is very interesting, especially if you are an old guru with a huge portfolio of great domain names.
Now as I was searching some forums for some brandable names, 80% of the topics were made with the purpose of selling four letter domains (.com of course) and the majority of them were no sense words, just a list of four letters. For those who don’t know this year there is a trend to buy domain names with 4 letters and from my little experience, I can list you a few of the reasons why people are in search of such domains:

First of all because all the three letter domain names were discovered and bought in 2005-2006 and nowadays they are so expensive that you can buy a new car or house with that amount of money and as we all know money influences everything, especially our pour minds and all the guys who are in search of making money online very easy with a small investment are a lot, so in 2007 all the four letter domain names were sold and now we see the results.

Secondly, they are a bit stupid. Why? Because a person who buys domains like ykqx.com for example with 100-150$ and after builds web directories or parks them on sedo is damn stupid. Domains like the one above are useless, no keyword, unpronounceable and hard to keep in mind. Instead of buying such domains you should search for names that are pronounceable, brandable and are much cheaper.

I don’t see any practical reason to buy such domains, only if you want to dream that one they you would be able to sell it at a doubled price (only dreams). Don’t be stupid and waste your money on such domain names only because people say so.

Also from my experience I know that a great domain name creates a good impression online and makes you influence people and eventually they will buy your products if you are selling something (this is the main reason why bloggers should buy their own domain). Here are a few advices you should take in consideration before buying a domain name:

Domains should represent something
Search for something that makes sense, if not search for something that is easy to pronounce, memorize and of course, is brandable.

Google loves your domains
Search engines love keywords so you should try to add a keyword or two keywords from your niche in the domain name.
A big mistake is to copy, avoid duplicating domain names with different tld extensions. You risk getting sued if we are talking about the name of a big company or it can rise against you.

Everyone hates copycats. Don’t become one!
A big mistake is to copy, avoid duplicating domain names with different tld extensions. You risk getting sued if we are talking about the name of a big company or it can rise against you.

Domains with premium letters are expensive
If you want a domain name which has four, five or six letters you should take in consideration premium letters.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T premium letters.
J, K, U, V, W less quality
Q, X, Y, Z are lower quality

This will add value to your domain and it will make it easier to pronounce and remember.

That’s all! I hope this article is useful!