Xmas Contest: Prize Winners
December 26 is here, which means today I am going to announce the two winners of the Xmas ReTweet Contest.
Each of the winners will have the possibility of choosing one of the Premium WordPress Themes available in the WordPress category at ThemeForest as their prize.
Complete list of participants
Below you’ll find the complete list of participants (39) that had valid contest entries (followed both steps in order to enter the competition):
1. Bloghita - @bloghita 2. Marius. - @Marius__ 3. Radu Panciuc - @panciuc 4. Eugen - @pauneugen 5. Nikolaevi4 - @Nikolaevi14 6. JeremyOLED - @JeremyOLED 7. Aldo - @iFeelanceWeb 8. Kimberly Castleberry - @KimJCastleberry 9. AlexT - @alext_1020 10. Razvan Girmacea - @RazvanGirmacea 11. Cristian VADUVA - @Vaduva 12. Youwei - @Youwei 13. Calítoe.:. - @Calitoe 14. Daniel - @danielpeisar 15. Anand Srinivasan - @knewthis 16. Margaret Ayad - @eracose 17. Nice from Thailand - @SE7ENize 18. Jennifer - @grizzarkhov 19. Dimitry Ekzarkhov - @design_deity 20. Tracy - @mattnem05 21. Dhaunae @Dhaunae 22. Jessica Dooley - @jessicadooley 23. Jason - @jasontromm 24. elmot - @elmot 25. Kat - @simplywp 26. Codrut @ Blog Post Ideas - @CodrutTurcanu 27. Damir - @wisehat79 28. Melvin - @melvinblog 29. Prasanth Chandra - @pcsbox 30. Jacob Yap - @jacobyap 31. Raju - @rajupp 32. naz - @aenaz 33. Suhas - @suhastech 34. Siddanth 35. Slipdisc - @Roadrippersid 36. technbohowl - @technohowl 37. Rich - @fireitup4USA 38. Michael Cannon - @SMARTcutGeek 39. Kushal Chen - @slayershanks
Click here to read the full blog post!
Xmas Contest: ReTweet to Win a Premium WordPress Theme
How long has it been since I’ve held the last contest on Blogsessive? Too long, but since holidays are close, lets have some fun and make two of you folks the owners of a brand new premium WordPress theme from ThemeForest. It is a simple contest and everyone owning a Twitter account is invited to join in!
Xmas Contest Prizes
Two of the contest participants will each win a premium WordPress theme of their choice from ThemeForest. Contest prize selection is restricted to the WordPress category on the previous mentioned website.
The two winners will be randomly picked by me on the day of December 26th. Read the rules below.
Click here to read the full blog post!
Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive
As promised a while back, I’ve finished editing the Corporate Blogging Guide in PDF eBook format. So, today I give you the chapters you’ve had the chance to read online plus a whole new chapter (8. Technical aspects) and some bonus tips to guide you in your corporate blogging adventures!
How to download the eBook?
In order to download the ebook, all you have to do is to subscribe for free to Blogsessive’s RSS feed (if you haven’t done so until now) and you’ll find the download link at the end of each article in the feed.
eBook preview and contents
Here are two screenshots of the book’s cover and the contents page:
Click here to read the full blog post!
10 new WordPress plugins you might want to test
The wonderful community of WordPress developers constantly provides us with interesting new themes and plugins. I have scanned the most recent WordPress plugin releases and came up with a list of 10 plugins definitely worth taking a look at.
Keep in might that these are new releases and so, their stability and status should be considered as BETA. You might want to test them on a backup server before going live. The descriptions listed here are those submitted by the plugins’ authors and do not necessarily express my views.
1. WP Content Slideshow
WP Content Slideshow shows up to 5 Posts in a very nice and powerfull Javascript Slideshow. On the left side of the Slideshow it displays an image for every post. On the right side, there are all the titles (and a small description under the title) of the posts. The Slideshow highlights the active post and repeats automatically after getting to the 5th post. You have a powerfull Administration Area to adjust the category, the number of posts, the width and height, and many colours for the Slideshow!
Download: WP Content Slideshow
Compatibility: 2.6+
2. Sidebar Generator
Now you can create as many sidebars as you need for any page you want. Thats right, page/post specific sidebars. You can easily seperate your site into sections, or make every single page have specific sidebar content on it. Great for CMS sites.
Download: Sidebar Generator
Compatibility: 2.8.0+
3. WordPress Tabs Slides
Tabs and Slides (in post/page) Plugin gives you the ability to easily add content tabs and/or content slides. The tabs emulate a multi-page structure, while the slides emulate an accordion-like structure, inside a single page!
Download: WordPress Tabs Slides
Compatibility: 2.5+
4. Custom Login Page
With the Custom Login Page, you can change the background image of your login page, the background image/color of your login form div, the main logo image of your login page, and add custom CSS. All through a simple interface. Remember to view the Help tab at the top of the settings page of the plugin.
Download: Custom Login Page
Compatibility: 2.0.2+
Click here to read the full blog post!
10 More beautiful websites using WordPress as CMS
Loving WordPress is SO easy! You got thousands of great looking blogs, custom themes, free themes, premium themes and designers go beyond that by using WordPress as CMS for their non-blog projects. A while back I showed you 10 non-blog websites powered by WordPress, and now it’s time to take a look at 10 more!
If you have any additions to the list and wish to suggest a website for a future post, do so by adding a comment.
1. ProBar
2. Krispy Krush
3. The Salon
ClickTale: User tracking and landing page optimization tool
A few days back I was reading this interesting post on BloggingTips.com on how to plug an eBook on your blog and I instantly remembered all those ugly looking eBook sales/landing pages that you STILL find all over the Internet, like we’re still way back in ‘98.
Do you have a good product to sell on your blog? Then why not give it a real chance. Why tell your visitors straight from the sales page that they are either stupid (“Please X, let me buy your book for only $29.99!) or that your have no idea how to make a unique presentation for a unique item!
Yes, I’m sure that almost every internet marketer will tell you how those ugly pages are effective, and how their “call to action” phrases and messages are really effective. Allow me to disagree! I hate them. You hate them. We run away the second we land on them!
A sale is not make by the number of colors and fonts you use on your landing page. It’s not made by the number of screen scrolls a user has to make in order to get to the part where the “call to action” makes him feel small and stupid compared to you, the big internet marketing guru!
A sale is made based on the quality of your products and ease of the (guided) buying process!
Click here to read the full blog post!
WordPress Plugin to Remove ‘Category Base’
Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.
There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.
WP No Category Base
The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.
Click here to read the full blog post!
RockinSEO.com – A Free Keyword Tracking SEO Tool
A while ago I wrote about a cool project that allows users to check how their blogs and websites stack against their competitors, Review My Web. Today, I’d like to present you with another free (and so useful) tool, from the same developer: RockinSEO.com.
Free Keyword Tracker
Yes, that’s what you get with RockinSEO. You get to track your website’s results in Google, Yahoo and the recently released Bing for up to 20 keywords, for free. More than that, for the same keywords you can compare your results with those of up to 3 competitor websites or blogs.
The results are easy to read and interpret as you can see in the following screenshots:
Track search engine keyword position
My Take on the WordPress Themes & the GPL License
There’s a huge hype these days around WordPress and the (infamous?) GPL license. Out of the “big guys”, first Brian Gardner of StudioPress (ex-Revolution) decided to distribute his themes as GPL. Later, iThemes followed, and now it’s time for WooThemes to adopt the license.
The discussion around this always seems to evolve into “open source” versus “author protection”. As Alex King pointed out in one of his posts, theme authors should be aware of what the GPL license exposes them too, while it provides freedom for basically everyone else.
I’m not by any means against freedom and open source. I’ve been preaching about the power of WordPress and the wonder that it is, but what I love more is to see a protection system for those authors that make a living out of releasing quality themes and plugins for WordPress. Somewhere along the way, in our quest for “freedom” we forgot how hard it is to earn our living, how hard it is to learn the things we now use to feed our families.
With all the respect I have for Brian, Adii and Alex who have been more than an inspiration for so many people and their contributions to the world of WordPress changed our lives, I fail to see how this sudden change of heart (or maybe “dictated” by Matt Mullenweg’s recent reactions) will help other developers.
The problem does not reside in the GPL license, but rather in the fact that by using WordPress you have to also release your “products” under this license. In theory the GPL license is an amazing thing that allows people to improve and build upon other people’s work, and thus contributing to the development of a bigger, better product, free or paid.
Click here to read the full blog post!
A Look Into the WordPress Themes’ Options Pages
For a long while the option panels where something that people could only find in premium (commercial) themes, and for a good reason. The pricing of their licenses allowed the premium theme developers to invest more time in giving theme users the ways to do through these panels what they could not do through coding.
With the buzz created around these themes, regular users became aware of what could really be achieved, and thus, those that could not afford the license of a premium theme, became more selective with the free ones. A good-looking theme was not enough anymore, and WordPress developers realized it.
A good premium theme would bring its developer not only a good amount of money, but also recognition in the community, and this is where the free theme developers scored their biggest points. Now that their “turf” was endangered they had to react, and they did. For premium themes like Thesis or WP Unlimited, users have now alternatives like Thematic, Hybrid, Carrington, WP Framework or my own (even if not a framework) Simple Balance.
Why should free theme developers consider adding an options page?
Because being “cool” is just not enough anymore. Theme developers need to learn how to be useful. Free stuff can be either useless and ignored or useful and praised. I’m yet to see the developer offering a free theme without gaining something from it, be it awareness, expertise, backlinks, donation money, you name it! But none of these are achieved through an uncompetitive – even if free – product.
Click here to read the full blog post!
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