A website’s “visual appeal” is one of the most important factors when it comes to first impressions. Visitors make nearly instantaneous judgments that influence their decision on whether to stay and the site or bounce out of it right away.

When it comes to creating aesthetically appealing websites, you might be interested in taking a look at Wix. If you haven’t heard of Wix.com yet, let me introduce you: it’s a powerful Flash website builder that enables you to create and publish your own stunning custom Flash websites, mini-sites and other Flash content for free. More and more bloggers have also come to understand the importance of a well designed site. Many are now using Wix to add more dynamic designs into their blogs and also, to create their own custom standalone websites into which they add their RSS feeds. The connection between Wix and Bloggers couldn’t be more natural.

Similar to the Wordpress platform, Wix offers a powerful free web design solution.

At the heart of Wix is an intuitive drag and drop builder and an impressive range of fully customizable Flash templates. You can choose from templates or create Flash web content from scratch. All with a simple click, drag and drop. And then publish or embed in seconds. And you have the extra bonus of not having to do a single line of programming!

But don’t be fooled by its simplicity. In a bold innovation, everything created and published with the Wix Flash platform is search engine friendly. Their premium packages also offer you a way to connect to your own domain rather than be hosted under the Wix builder. And you can integrate Google analytics, remove Wix branding and much more.

Wix is great for everybody wanting to make a dynamic high quality web content - from designing Flash headers to mini-sites and sidebars, to websites. But combined with the skills of a blogger – it’s an all powerful solution waiting for your creativity!

To save you from the hassle of hunting around on the Internet for icons (free and usable) to use in your projects, I have made a list of my all-time favorite icon sets freely available for download.

LED Icons

• Number of Icons :- 500
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download LED Icon Set
  

Developpers Icons

• Number of Icons :- 105
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
• Download Developpers Icon Set

Function Icons

• Number of Icons :- 128
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download Function Icon Set

Fugue Icons

• Number of Icons :- 2,095
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Fugue Free Icon Set

Circular Icons

• Number of Icons :- 100+
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Circular Icon Set

Vaga Icons

• Number of Icons :- 60
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Vaga Icon Set

Silk Icons

• Number of Icons :- 700+
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
• Download Silk Icon Set

Quartz Icons

• Number of Icons :- 90
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Quartz Icon Set

Twotiny Icons

• Number of Icons :- 118
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Twotiny Icon Set

Weby Icons

• Number of Icons :- 100
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Weby Icon Set

In total, all the above sets contain a total of 4000+ icons which should be enough for you to pick and choose the right ones for your project. Don’t forget to leave a comment !

The theme is compatible with the latest WordPress 2.8, fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.

Using the theme

Download, extract the zip and place the theme folder in your wp-content/themes folder. Activate the theme and it will be ready to use. For the featured post on top, you will have to set up the category through the Bookish admin options. For the image, you will have to use custom field called “featuredimage” and upload an image of size 240×160 pixels with your featured post.

Test & Download

Today, while browsing the WordPress website, I noticed that WordPress 2.8 Beta was available for testing. So, I decided to download it and give it a test run. Here is a list of major changes that make this release a bit different from the earlier versions.

Manage your Tags

A new sub-section has been added to the Posts section called “Post Tags” that contains all the tags that have been used so far in your blog. Just like categories, you can change the Tag name, Tag slug and also add description for your tags.

Manage Themes Better

When managing your themes earlier, you had to click on a particular theme’s screenshot and then activate or discard it from the enlarged theme preview screen. This has been changed to something efficient now. You just have to click on the “activate” link and the desired theme gets applied directly without showing you a preview (the preview sometimes used to get stuck in case a theme was broken or if a required plugin wasn’t installed). This feature can indeed save a lot of precious time. Additionally, you can also delete any unwanted themes from the same screen by clicking on the “delete” link.

Browse New Themes

This cool addition in WordPress 2.8 will let you add new themes for your blog right from your admin section. All you need to do is go under Appearance -> “Add New Themes”, and from here, you can search for a theme by any keyword you want. It also lets you apply different filters based on colors, columns, width and subject. So, now you can go theme hunting at full steam

Improved Widgets Section

The best and most wanted change that’s been done in WordPress 2.8 is the revamp of the widgets section. Refreshingly, all your sidebars are visible at once (just like old times) and you can drag and drop the required widgets into them. So unlike WordPress 2.7.1, you don’t have to press the silly “show” button anymore to bring up your individual sidebars. As soon as you drop a widget into a sidebar, it will pop down the widget’s properties automatically which can be modified and saved.

Edit Individual Post Comments

While editing a post, you can now see the existing comments that have been made till now in a separate box section at the bottom. You can unapprove, spam, delete, edit, quick edit and reply to the comments right from the post edit screen.

And, here are some other minor changes that might appeal to many WordPress users :-

• WordPress doesn’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• You don’t get notified of your own comments
• You can autosave posts/pages when pressing Control/Command+S
• Support for more than one gallery on the same page
• You can now edit all the files of a particular plugin
• WordPress now allows case-insensitive logins (username)
• You can have multiple instances of a widget now

Read further on the changes…

What is Adobe AIR?

If you haven’t heard of Adobe AIR yet, let me introduce you to this technology provided by Adobe. Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a cross-platform environment that enables you to have your favorite web applications with you all the time. Since applications built for Adobe AIR run on your desktop computer without a web browser, they provide all the convenience of a desktop application. AIR allows existing Flash, Actionscript or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct traditional desktop-like programs.

In order to run these applications, you need to first install the Adobe AIR environment in your computer (Just like you install Flash player or JAVA runtimes). You can download the latest version freely here :- Get Adobe AIR

My 10 Favorite Adobe AIR Applications

As I use many of these AIR applications almost everyday, I have made a list of my favorite ones. These are quite handy and I am sure that you will find them useful too. I have made a folder on my desktop where I keep all the shortcuts to my AIR applications. So, here they are :-

• Font Picker :- If you have too many fonts installed on your computer, it can get very hard when you have to choose the right font type for your projects. This AIR tool shows you all the fonts installed on your computer and helps you choose which one is most suitable for a particular project.

• Shrink O’Matic :- Shrink O’Matic is an AIR application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs. Simply drag and drop images and they’ll be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats.

• Imagesizer :- ImageSizer is an application built to resize, optimize and rename a batch of jpg images producing a zip file containing the images. ImageSizer also allows users to resize images that are greater than 2880px by 2800px, however the resized images cannot be greater than this size.

• Pixus :- This is a measurement tool to measure the screen objects in pixels using both mouse and keyboard control. It also lets you preview your design with skins and presets. Too cool!

• Desktop Color Finder :- This nifty little app helps you to search colorlovers.com’s entire database of nearly 1 million named colors and more than 300,00 user created color palettes. Very useful if you are a designer and need to research color schemes. You can even have output based on different object names (just like tags) and the app will give you color themes based on that (for example, the term “forest” will give you all the color schemes related to a forest).

• Polaris :- Polaris is one of the first Adobe AIR applications to be built using the recently released Google Analytics API. With this application, you can track your visitors and all other statistics that is provided by Google Analytics right from your desktop. Very convenient indeed!

• Moderator :- Moderator is a WordPress Plugin and associated desktop application, built using Adobe AIR, that allows you to view and moderate comments from your desktop. This app lets you view unmoderated comments, accept, delete and spam comments and also shows the Gravatar icons for each comment.

• WebSnapshot :- The application is simple but effective, type a URL then take a snapshot using one of the three sizing methods; Thumbnail, Browser or fullpage view. The sizes that are used for each setting are configurable via the preferences menu for both scale and actual pixel sizes.

• Snippely :- Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize “snippets” in one convenient location. What is good about Snippely is that it uses a syntax highlighter so you can have more meaningful looking snippets.

• Doominow :- Doominow is a small application that lets you create your own lists of To-Do tasks. The app has been designed from the ground up to stay out of your way and out of your browser. It has all the features you use, and none of the ones you don’t. Create, edit, set reminders, and keep archives of your old tasks.

Affiliate marketing in an internet based marketing concept, where merchants offer commission to affiliates for selling their products or services. The merchants would require affiliate software for this purpose, which can be purchased online. Though purchasing this software would require a one-time investment, it is worth the money spent. Once the software is installed, there are no additional costs involved. This type of marketing is cheap and gives instant results. There aren’t any advertising expenses, since commission is paid to affiliates after the sale is processed. Therefore, the pre-selling costs are ZERO. This online marketing strategy should be used with various channels available on the internet. Essentially, an affiliate marketer should explore all the means of promoting sales like, SEO, keyword optimization, Pay Per Click, Pay Per Performance, Pay Per Email, Pay Per Action Adwords and so on.

Choose The Right Affiliate Tracking Software

There is a variety of tracking software available on the internet. Most of them have common features like customer service, report generation, recording of sales, alerting merchant about the sale, web page for registration of affiliates.

Omnistar Affiliate offers all these features and more. It offers a number of ways for the affiliate users to advertise your products and services. For examples, they have peel pages, light boxes, banners and text ads. Omnistar Affiliate has too many features to list. You can take a look for yourself at:

http://www.osiaffiliate.com

They are offering our readers a 20% discount. You can use promo code:

blogohblog

at checkout to receive your discount.

If you are a WordPress theme designer, here’s your chance to win a cool sum of $300! Participate in this contest, show off your design skills, and earn some easy money (plus bragging rights as the theme designer). All you have to do is design and code the best WordPress theme that enters this contest. There is also a runner-up prize of $100 for the second best entry. Excited? Go ahead, read the rules :-

How to Participate

Once you have finished your theme design, you should send it to me at bob[at]blogohblog.com in the form of a zip file. You should also send me your name, contact e-mail address and your PayPal address (in case you are the winner). The subject of your e-mail should read :- “April 2009 Theme Design Contest”. If your theme is complete and meets the following eligibility criteria, you will be considered as a valid participant in the contest.

Eligibility Criteria

• The theme design must be unique and should not be submitted anywhere else on the Internet.
• Theme should be complete with all the required WordPress files and work seamlessly.
• It should be compatible with the latest WordPress version.
• You can use plugins but their use must be limited.
• Use of JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Prototype etc. is allowed but just like plugins, use restriction.
• A single participant is limited to a single entry, so make your best efforts.

Winning Criteria

• The winning themes will be based on the beauty of their design, efficient coding, flawless functionality and overall appeal.
• As the host of this contest, the winners will be decided by my sole discretion.

Contest Closing Date

The closing date for this contest is 13th May 2009 (around 15 days). All your entries should be submitted before this date.

The winning themes (winner + runner-up) will become the property of Blog Oh! Blog as soon as the prize money is delivered to the respective winners.

Let me know how you like it…

When we speak of social networking, what are the few things that come to our minds? Facebook…? MySpace…? Twitter…? Orkut…? I think there is an endless list of such social networking websites. If I start listing them one by one, it will take up all my hosting space. So, do you think social networking is limited to a few neat looking websites who want to know everything I do from the morning until the moment I sleep? What happened to the times when people physically met and socialized? Every new day, a new social app/website is being created.. to do what? To make our already plugged lives more bizarre? So what is this concept of social networking? A fad, trend or just another bandwagon to hop on? I know that networking has its own advantages, but do you think that telling my friends what I ate, what I am reading, or how much I slept will make any difference in their lives? Oh yes, it will certainly make a difference to someone who wants to steal my information.

When I was little, I used to be very shy of making new friends. I used to tell my mom if I wanted to befriend someone in the neighborhood, and then she helped me out. But what now? Anyone can just sit on the computer and add a thousand friends to his already long list of the so-called friends, without even knowing that there can be a stalker, a murderer or even a rapist in that queue. But hey, its all part of the social networking gimmick! Isn’t it? Let me socialize some more and one fine day..oops.. I am dead.

Don’t you think that we are already missing our lives between e-mails, cellphones, blogs, Internet, instant messaging that now we have to resort to these lame social networking websites. Now, we have more ways of getting in touch with each other but we are spending less time in actual communication. Someone comes along every few months and launches a new social networking website. For heaven’s sake, aren’t there too many already? I played around with Cell phones a lot when they first came out. You know what? I like to be unreachable. Gather up your thoughts and send me an e-mail, please.

To actually quote the benefits of such social networking websites, let me describe them to you. I do not have accounts on any social networking websites except Orkut where my intent was to find my old school friends as its a website specially targeted for Indian audience. I did manage to find some of my old school friends but guess what? After a few scrap exchanges and acting surprised (I can’t even say if that surprise was genuine), everything came back to ground zero. To add to my misery, I even thought of calling up one of my “very good” high-school buddies. So, when I called him, he was busy in some very important meeting with his client. He did recognize me, so I expected at least a callback for courtesy sake! But nothing. And this is what I learned from this incident - Life goes on and I am a fool! Now, I am even planning to delete that account which I hold on Orkut. I’ve never felt anything missing in my life without these social networking websites. Then again, I’m a person who likes privacy and it seems, these days, I am greatly outnumbered.

A new trend that is developing nowadays with every social website copying each other, is the use of applications. So, what are these applications? Stupid flash games, countdown timers, IQ tests, chat applications… No thanks! I guess I will just watch the grass grow in my lawn or maybe look at a wall all day. To my amusement, I recently found out that people are making a lot of money developing and selling these retarded applications. So why don’t you give it a try? Maybe this is your path to the hall of rich jerks!

You think this is a rant on social networking websites? You are right. It is. I have even made a new category in my blog called “rants”

Update : While constructing the picture for this particular post, I went to Myspace.com website to steal their logo and what do I see? They have a corny header graphic on their homepage that says :- Sign-up just got shorter! See for yourself, how desperate they have become (do they have any members left anymore?? And.. what is that white splash.. LOL) :-

Wordpress is growing to be the most popular blogging platform today and since lot of people are using it, it’s quite possible that your blog looks like just another blog in that pool of 1000’s of blogs. So, to make it stand out amongst the crowd, here are some Must Do’s for your Wordpress blogs.

Highlighting Author’s comment

If you have a blog that gets large number of comments, it might be difficult for readers to separate the author’s comment from that of the visitors. I am sure you yourself must have faced this problem a lot. So a good way would be to differentiate the author’s comments by highlighting it and make it stand out from the others. Here’s a simple and easy trick to do so. (However there are many ways to do it and you can find it by yourself. Just ask your friend - Google!)

Logically, what you will have to do is just make the wordpress identify that the comment is from the author and then highlight it. For identification we will be using the userID.

A] Editing the theme to add an “authcomment” style:

Edit the style.css files located in your Appearance > Themes > Your theme and add the following code to the bottom:

.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

Note: If you want to change the color to suit your theme/background, just edit the color code in the above code and that will do it!

B] Edit comments.php file to add the a little more code:

The file is located in Appearance > Themes > Your theme and in that file look for a line called:

<li class="<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>" id="comment…

Change it to this:

<li class="<?php
/* Only use the authcomment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = "authcomment";
echo $oddcomment;
?>" id="comment…

That’s all. Now your author comment has background color different from others and hence can be easily identified!

Speed up your Wordpress Blog

No matter how fast your internet connection is, there are still times when it takes long to load a website and you get irritated by it. Also there are probably more than 30% people in the world today still using 256kbps or lesser speed internet connection! (Sounds like Dial-up days isn’t it). So it’s really important that you optimize your blog to load faster. Here are some tricks to take care of.

• Always update your wordpress to newest version whenever they are released.
• Disable (or even better) delete unused Plugins, themes and media files from your wordpress blog
• Decrease ‘whitespace’ or ‘freespace’ in your code. This surely helps a lot!
• Try avoiding placing tons of scripts in your header and index files and instead use as much as external scripts as you can.
• Minimize PHP and database queries. (If you don’t know about this, wait for another post of mine or just Google it!

Notify users by IM

Retaining your user base is perhaps, the most important and difficult task that any blog/site has. Hence it becomes even more important to make sure that your readers are up to date with the content on your blog. There are many ways to send them notifications such as RSS Feeds, e-mail notifications and SMS notifications (though not many people would go with the SMS notification for privacy concerns.) There is also an IM notification which I think is the fastest of these and the best way to notify your users. They are bound to check them! It’s very difficult however to make it work but I will explain you in the simplest manner to make it easier!

• Go to: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/notifixious-plugin/ and download the Plugin. It’s called ‘Notifixous’.
• Configure it as per your needs and voila! It is up and running. Yes, it’s that simple! (You really thought that it was difficult, huh! )