Free Themes or Premium Themes, which one would you choose? A easy question but difficult to answer. How? Well simply speaking people want to go for free if they don’t have money and its opposite when they have money to waste.

The prices of Premium themes are falling. WP Premium themes now ranges from 10$ t0 well I have no idea. So people can afford premium theme easily. But I do not think money should be a deciding factor. There are far many things to consider when deciding between a premium theme and a free theme.

So what all things we should consider. Obviously one will be the overall design. Then may be color, which can be changed any way. There are many more factors.

They have many similarities like, both free and premium themes are well designed. Remember free does not mean it is not beautiful. I have found many nice free theme which looks attractive than premium ones. They are made compatible with latest version of Wordpress. Both type of the themes are easy to install and can be tweaked manually.

Some points which will make you choose Premium Theme

1. Premium themes comes with added support. It is extremely useful if you do not have any knowledge of web designing. You may contact designer of a free theme but they are not bound to answer.
2. Premium themes comes with specially designed widgets and they include some special pages. Free themes are mostly basic in nature.
3. Premium theme are considered SEO optimized and good for Search Engine Ranking (I have doubt here).
4. Premium theme are considered more well designed. The color used are very soothing to eye.

Some points which you make you not to choose Premium Theme

1. Premium theme are very common in blogging world in comparison to Free themes. Some themes are downloaded by hundreds so you may see the same theme on many blogs. Uniqueness is lost.
2. You have to pay for it. Damn money again.
3. There are lakhs of free themes in comparison to only some 100s of good premium themes. So there is variety and thus more chances of uniqueness.

So what do you think. Free or Premium? Tell us your decision and reason why you will choose the one over other. My answer is free theme but I will not use as it is I will make heavy changes to it. I am now able to make themes from scratches so I now consider making my own theme.

NOTE: Sorry for not posting for sometime. I was unwell for couple of days.

” This is a guest post by Christie at Misc Bytes, where she enjoys life on the internet – with just a splash of science. You can follow her on Twitter @MiscBytes “

Most of us hope to make money doing what we love - blogging, tweeting, or doing other online activities, and often the money is very small. When someone clicks on an ad, maybe we get a few cents. If they buy an affiliate product, maybe we get cents or perhaps a dollar. I once tried writing Epinions, but in order to get the rating that would actually get me that $1 per post, I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time researching each product then rewriting the article numerous times. Obviously that was not a smart way to spend my time, so I deleted my account.

So how can you earn $1 or more in just a few seconds?

Sponsored Tweets will send you straightforward, no-tricks offers to tweet a short ad for a product. You set your own charge per tweet, so of course you can set it for an amount then see if you get offers or not, with the possibility of lowering it or raising it later. I’ve received some offers lately and found it very easy to give the sponsor’s website a quick look, write a nice tweet, and get paid my full amount just for those few seconds of work. You have your choice of disclosure methods – I choose to use #ad after my Sponsored Tweets. One sponsor had asked me to change my disclosure method to that #ad, and I’ve stuck with that ever since.

I have not lost a single follower because these ads are fun and not spammy – they are for real products. You get to select the topics you want to tweet about, so I guess that is why this has been such a pleasant, positive experience for me. Aside from the easy, EASY MONEY!

If you sign up for Sponsored Tweets, you can also get paid for referrals and what they earn on Sponsored Tweets. So you’re earning money by tweeting and you’re also earning money from all the tweets of people who sign up using your link. This sounds too good to be true, but as long as this program is open I’m going to continue to get paid to tweet!

I hope many of you have heard of Likaholix. I did a post Likaholix: It’s about what you like (10 Beta Invites and Win Amazon Kindles) on it in March. Likaholix has been growing since then.

What is Likaholix?

You can think of it as a simple bookmarking site but it is just more then that. It is place where you share your likes. See what other likes and comment on them. Its way to show the world what you like. I have been a member of it since then and quite enjoyed it. I am not very active but its fun.

Why should I give a Damn about it? 

I got my invitation from it from ProBlogger – Darren Rowse who is still a very active member there. There are many popular people like Chris Pirillo, Dave Mcclure, iJustine, Jennifer Van Grove etc there. I know Chris Pirillo. He doesn’t get involved in any stuff if it is not useful.

Should I join?

Definitely, its fun and how you use it to your profit is up to you. Get known in the community. Likaholix is a very active community and growing bigger and bigger. It is not accessible to every one. To maintain their quality it is still invitation based. And also they conduct small contest every month where you can win many cash prizes. Currently 22 contest are still live.

So how to join if it is Invitation only?

Thats why I am here. I am going to share my personal Invite Link with you all. When you sign-up through a invite link, it means you will get accepted to join. Ok enough of chit-chat, here is the Inviation for Likaholix.

A new version/upgrade of WordPress has been released. This release hardens the security of your WordPress blog. This is a recommended update. I have already upgraded to this newer version and you should do it soon too.

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be white listed for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Read more about this new version in the post WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release.

Also the new 2.9 version is available as beta for testing purpose. You can read more about it at Getting involved with the 2.9 beta testing

Whats in the current news. Its Twitter again. Lately Twitter is doing a lot of stuffs . And this time they released two new features. Just few days ago it enabled its users to report Spam Twitter Accounts. I normally used to block spammers but now I can also report about them. Previously if you wanted to report a Spam Account you had to DM and follow the Twitter Spam Watch Account. That was too much of bother but with release of this new feature we can stop the spammers. I believe this is a very useful feature. Whats your say?

In addition to the above feature, Twitter released one more feature called Twitter List. Its a very simple yet powerful feature. Now you can make a list out of people you follow on Twitter. You can group people as you wish. For example you can make a list of all blogger you know on Twitter. You can see the tweets from them when you visit the list. Imagine you make a list of close friends. You will never miss their tweets in the mess of other tweets.

If you have ever used Tweet Deck, then you will be knowing about the grouping feature in it. Twitter List Feature is basically the same thing with an addition of people being able able to see and follow your list. Setting up a list is very simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. Private list can only be seen by you.

On the right hand column of your Twitter homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under your bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.

There is one thing to note, the list you make are not totally public. To view any list you need to be loged into your Twitter account. I do not know why this restriction was made. We will know more in future. I have already started building some lists. Currently they are private but some public list from me will come soon too. What do you think about this feature? Is it of any use to you?