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Recently I bought myself a Nikon D90 Kit, and this is my new hobby when I am not in front of my computer. To publish my amateur photography, I have decided to use my change my personal blog into a Photoblog. I have did some research for free Wordpress Theme for Photographer and found this five great theme.

Grace Photoblog Theme (Demo : Download)

This is a simple designed photographer theme that have a 900px rotating picture in front. Very nice size and method to present your photos.

Monotone (Demo : Download)

This theme changes width accordingly to your picture width and it also changes the background color to give a different look for each visitors.

Fullscreen (Demo : Download)

This is simply cool. Mouse over the picture and you will get what I mean. It is not Free yet, but they claimed that it will be given away free soon, so signup and wait.

Reflection (Demo : Download)

Create a reflection on all your photos with the help of YABP photoblog software.

Photo Blog Wordpress Theme (Demo : Download)

It gives you picture a great deal of focus, mouse over the picture and you see the description. Also click on the blog info to get the archive, blogroll, pages and category.

Bonus: Zack 990 (Demo : Download) – Found it last minute

This gives your pictures collection a very organize way to browse. Few method of displaying pictures as you can see from the screenshot below.

If you are a photographer and would like some wordpress theme that would enhance your picture layout, this is definitely for you. This theme are also suitable for videographer blog. The best thing is that they are free.

If you are a web designer or especially a rookie web designer (like me), you are sure to get into a situation whereby you are stuck because all the colours you picked does not matched. All you need is just a main theme colour, enter it to the RGB section on the bottom right towards the circle colour chart.

This is an example of the website screenshot. It is definitely very useful for designing logo, websites, name cards, and I guess every design work if you are not good at colour matching. It is a great help for me as I have used them for quite a while before they moved to this new domain.

Remember to click on the sample design, of light design or dark design. You can get a picture of how the matching of colours without guessing them.

Not to forget that you can also save your design, like my above design is using orange as the main colour. You get the colour scheme here.

Website: Color Scheme Design

As always, whoever pay us more we like them right? This is partially true because Google Adsense is still my highest earner. Previously I did started well with Kontera but income slips to cents/day altough traffic does increases and I felt trap because my earning is at $50.00+ but the payout is only at $100.

Chitika is a totatly different advertisements system, a little similar to amazon ads and having some inteligent to detect the source of the traffic from search engine by showing relating products or services. Chitika is pretty fair because they do not appear if there is no related ads and if the traffic is coming from non-paying region, the advertisements does not appear as well.

The ads look like this but they have quite a lot of different sizes and different type of advertisements that you could do try out on your blog.

Best of all, minimum payout is only $10.00  (via paypal) and $50.00 (via Check). I am using paypal because I could use them to purchase domain and pay hosting easily. Anyway there is method to withdraw from Paypal if the money starts piling up in Paypal. Payment is okay, one month after you accumulated the trashold (USD10 if you are using paypal).

So far, Chitika is not earning as much as Kontera as I have receives my first payment from Kontera, but Chitika was only installed one one of my blog and Kontera is actually installed on 2. With this rate, I am sure that Chitika will pickup pretty quickly.

If you are a blogger who wants to earn some small money for domain and hosting, you should check out Chitika.

p/s This is my personal Chitika Review, you have have a different experience.

My Top 100 Malaysia Blogs list is now 2 months old and I have ran the updating script on Monday night. This is actually my second time updating the list and it seems pretty succesful. There is a chance that it fails to pick up the latest ranking from Technorati or Alexa ranking. In this case, it will use back its previous ranking. But I will try to update it as often as possible like every 2 weeks so that the data are updated (meaning at worst, the data is 2 weeks back).

Chinese Blogs

I have also included 2 first Chinese blog since their rankings are simply great. Unfortunately I could not display them in Chinese Character due to the database setting (I think) and I am trying to figure out methods I could change this. Duller and Xiawa.my are the two chinese blogs.

Other Rankings

I have receives request for other matrix to be included and currently my concentration is on google Page Rank to be included. This is given priority to others and will move on after that. Thanks to all who requested but note that each different ranking have different API to comply in order to get the information, and I will need to study them.

This list will constantly be updated base on the latest ranking, therefore it is quite accurate to say that these blogs definitely are very influential and are popular amongs Malaysian or even overseas visitors.

My first Facebook Pages was actually created by accident. It ended up pretty good as a method to do Marketing via Facebook. The main reason is that you could collect fans and admin them over at the page. Rather than creating a whole new facebook profile, whereby you will need to have a saperate login.

Publicise Feeds

With pages, your feeds are published at the page where user login. This is also the page where everyone tries to keep up with their friends status update. As you can see from the screenshot below.

Message to all fan with just one click

Compare to having another profile, you will need to type the username one by one. What if you have more than 100 friends, or if you have 1000 friends. Are you going to send one by one? With pages, you can just send message to all fan.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On top of all that, your page is indexed by Google. Search for Malaysia Classifieds Listing, you will see my page third on Google. And it actually have a PageRank with it too (although mine is not high).

I believe the three reason on top is more than enough to have you creating your very first Facebook Page and to market your website right after this.

I have actually succesfully done this by making a Malaysia Classifieds Facebook Page whereby friends could add them as Fan. (you should too if you want classifieds updates on your facebook). So far, I had 147 fan, which is not bad, and I will be expecting more to join. So here is how you can make your own Facebook Page.

Go to Application on the bottom left corner, look for “Ads and Pages”

Click Pages

Then you will come to a blank pages if you have not created one before, click on the “Create Page” on top right corner. Then you continue with the name of your pages.

Now you have you own Facebook Pages. But you are not done yet, because you want to use it to market your feed. And here is how you can add your feed into Facebook Page. Look for the Edit Page on the left panel below the image.

Scroll down, then look for notes, click edit.

Here is the magic that will import your rss feeds into your facebook pages.

You should know the rest after this, there is only 2 steps left, one to write your feed and another to confirm.

It is recommended to at least include some information on your facebook page, also a picture would be decent too.

I have just stumble upon a website selling their “Twitter Profit House” kit, that claims that you could make money twittering. Personally I have not tried it and will not be interested to try it because I strongly believe that it is mainly spaming others. With twitter, we could batch follow and batch unfollow, meaning that you can easily expand your follower to five figures with minimal time and minimal efforts. This is the reason I recomended Tweet Later, so that you can control who you are following, and even block those who are annoying.

This make money twittering website looks pretty professional and it even has the linke “As seen and trusted on…” CNBC, USA Today, CNN and abc.

If you are wondering how other twitter users direct message you when you follow them, it is because there is an automated method to do this. I found this website TweetLater, which is great in managing new followers. I would say that it is a must have for all twitter users.

Their features include:-

• Direct Message New Follower
• Posting Future Tweets
• Vet New Followers – control if you should follow back base on updates/followers/twit image
• Or you can do Auto Follow features
• Manage multiple twitter accounts
• Keyword Alert via Email
• Also some nifty paid service – but the free version is already superb

I have used it for a few months now and I am pretty satisfied with the controls I get on my twitter. This is the best Twitter Application so far compare to those I compiled some a year ago on Twitter Application.

Website: Tweet Later

Also, remember to follow @8dee

I first use Wordpress was on April 2005 (Wow, that was long and I don’t even remember that). Like any relationship it has its ups and downs, I stopped blogging for a while until I started again on September 2006 then it eventually diverted to Riceblogger as my favourite blog.

One important thing about wordpress is that it is not simply a blogging platform, but it is a CMS. With plugins, you can transform wordpress to a very powerful and SEO friendly website. For example, you can use wordpress as a Forum, as a social networking website, as a Membership Only Site, as a Review Site or simply a corporate website. This is how powerful Wordpress script is.

Most importantly the enormous amount of free wordpress plugins and free wordpress themes that will cost you nothing to start a website/blog. The community running wordpress is large and contributors are doing a great job adding plugins and templates.

Not to forget that Wordpress is actually making me some money for me and my family.

To be honest, I am writing this for a wordpress contest by wpwebhost as I think the prize money would help me out and other prizes would improve my experience in using the paid wordpress plugins for new projects. In the event that I am selected, I hope that I would get support from my readers. In return, if you need support when I am not selected but you are, feel free to drop me a comment here.

p/s How do you like the Rice + Wordpress logo?

I have actually encounter some problem getting pagerank for my Malaysia Top 100 List because some website are having different pagerank for www (http://www.domain.com) and without www  (http://domain.com). Tried doing the script for hours and for a break I decided to do a logo for those who are in the Top 100 list.

So here is the banner to be added into your blog:-

I am okay okay only with designing, so bear with me.

Here is the code to add this logo to your blog:-

<a href="http://www.riceblogger.com/top-100-malaysian-blogs/" alt="Malaysia Top 100 Blogs"><img src="http://www.riceblogger.com/rice/malaysia-blogs-160.gif"></a>


It is a 160px width logo that would fit into quite a lot of sidebars, if needed you can download them and edit it to the needed size.

I know this is a little back track but I notice that there are actually quite a lot of blogs that are pretty good in terms of alexa ranking, pagerank and also commentators but do not have technorati ranking. So I would like to educate others to do this as you may actually deserves to be in the Malaysia Top 100 Bloggers list.

Here is the steps:-

1. Click on “Claim your blog” button like the screen shot below

2. Then enter your url

3. The only tricky part is to get the code, you can actually copy the code and make a blog post under HTML view, or you could add a link.

For wordpress the name would be “Technorati Profile” and the Web Address fields would be something like “”http://technorati.com/claim/[code here]"

As I only have 2 different counters to make my list, I cannot just simply not take technorati into account. Until I get my pagerank script to work, we will have to bear with this at the moment. Moreover, I think technorati is a good ranking to judge a blog ranking.

p/s: also you could claim your twitter account by twitting the link. But don't feel that there is much use to that.

A recently new Bing search engine by Microsoft that is suppose to compete with Google and Yahoo! for a bigger market share. Just notice that even Live.com is redirecting to this new Bing Bling. Nevertheless, I think that the searches is pretty quick but they have not face the full force load since not much people know about this new search engine.

Also, I like the integration of newer technology like the mouseover to take a peek on the text displayed on the target homepage. Everything happens quite fast and smoothly. Not to mention that the results is pretty good and relavant. It is weird that I kinda like the result from MSN searches, but do not visit them often for references. I notice they updates pretty quickly and might be that they do not have a sandbox like Google that do not rank new (recently registered) website highly.