Entries for August, 2008

For the last couple of days, I have been busy cleaning up the theme of this blog. Incidentally, D$ is using a free Wordpress theme that was designed by the Daily Blog Tips team and I had to change a few things here and there before rolling it out initially. This time around, a couple of changes had to be done based on the feedbacks received from DP and SP forums’ website review sections.

After completing the style changes and reorganizing the components, I did some smoke test based on what I learned during my user interface development times. To my surprise I found that not only my particular theme but almost all Wordpress themes available today do not conform to basic usability guidelines! A simple test of changing the text size (Large, Medium etc) via the web browser options did not have any positive visual impact! Click Here to Continue Reading

I have been reading a couple of posts on other blogs that raised questions whether the bloggers should now start charging their readers for contents that they deliver! As a blogger, the idea came as a shock to me as my concept of blogging in the direction of penalizing the readers, though I still monetize this blog.

Blogging is all about ‘freedom‘ - both for the authors and their readers. This powerful but simple means of publishing content gave unmatched opportunities for millions of people around the world to voice their opinions. The readers on the other hand were able to pick and read whatever they want to at their own convenience. And now the greed seems to be taking priority over moral values as everybody seems to be after money, no matter how it comes! Click Here to Continue Reading

Of late, all my replies to comments in my own blog have been getting caught by Akismet spam protector. A few good blogger friends alerted me that whatever comments I post on their blogs are getting caught by the spam protection as well. Out of frustration, I contacted the Akismet support and the following was their reply:

DollarShower.com was marked as spam - bloggers had marked comments as that. It is removed from akismet for now but I would advise some care in commenting. - Mark

Firstly, a big thanks to akismet support team for having replied to my query so fast. Not many free services providers reply to their customers’ queries and hence this one definitely needs to be appreciated. Next, let me spend some time to dig into what he meant and what I have been doing as a commentator as well as moderator. Hopefully I can summarize my findings as a bunch of best practices towards the end of this post. Click Here to Continue Reading

Earlier last month, I had posted an article titled 10 High-PR High-Traffic FREE article submission sites which was highly appreciated by a lot of readers. While article submission is a great way to improve traffic as well as backlinks, having active presence in certain forums guarantee all these benefits plus a lot more. In this post, I would like to pick top 10 forums that have high Google page ranks, active subscriber base and relevant topics to help boost your blog’s visibility.

How can forums help your blog?

As you all know most forums have sections and discussion threads that talk about a certain domain and related topics. By signing up and leading a reasonably active life in these forums, you can avail the following benefits for your blog or website. Click Here to Continue Reading