Hello friends and with a bit of delay, Happy New Year to each and everyone of you! Back in December I wrote a post letting you know that the activity on Blogsessive will be slow in this period and it has.

I cannot tell you how hard it has been to stay away from blogging, especially when so many interesting things have happened in the past one, one and a half month, but it was a really necessary time-out for me. I needed to focus my maximum attention on my recently started design studio and also to spend some quality time with my family (something I’ve failed to do in the past months).

Today, a post published back on January 10th on MastersOfSEO.com caught my attention and even if I planned my comeback for the following Monday, I really felt the need to write this post earlier.

As I said before, the time out was required in order to give my 100% to some other things that needed to be sorted out in my life, but that’s only half of the real reason. The other half of the truth is that, as many of you already know from your own experience, blogging and constantly delivering good quality resources can be a very exhausting task. Such a task proved to be fatal for some fellow bloggers, despite their enormous followship and appreciation.
Click here to read the full blog post!

Dear friends, first of all, I’d like to apologize for the slow rhythm of updates in the past two weeks. In the activity of a design agency, December is a pretty busy period, and pretty short too, as everyone goes on vacation after the middle of the month and project need to be finished before that moment.

The past weeks have been crazy for me and my partner at QBKL Media, trying and succeeding at ending this year in a good state with all of our projects and clients.

Due to this, Blogsessive has suffered, but rest assured, I’ve been here everyday, reading and answering emails and comments. From the next week, things should get back to normal, and, just to get in the holiday spirit, I’m going to release a ‘Christmas’ color scheme for Simple Balance.

Thank you for remaining loyal to this blog through better or worse periods of time!

You rock!

The last time I did this was back in May, when Blogsessive had ten times less subscribers and definitely less awareness. All this time, I’ve tried to write quality posts and give back to my community resources like the Simple Balance theme and the Feedsessive free RSS Icon set.

With each post, I put a small piece of me out to the world. Every reader can find out more about Blogsessive and me and I really love reading your emails, even it they are simply “Hello” emails or in need of advice.

The downside of it is that while concentrating on delivering quality through my actions and posts, I did not get to know more about you, the readers of Blogsessive. And I mean YOU. Who are you, are you a blogger? What do you blog about? What do you do for a living? Even personal stuff that you want to share. Feel free to ask questions, I’ll be happy to answer.

As I’ve said about a million times: my full respect and attention goes to my community, and a community is made out of real people, people just like you, the one reading this lines. So, give me 2 minutes of your life and let’s sit back to a friendly talk.

PS: First time commentator? Don’t be shy, join in! That’s how we become friends!

I’m sure that those of you who have been following my posts for a while, know that I’m a pretty passionate blogger, enthusiastic and always looking to try new things and experiment.

I take pride in what I do since it’s what I love to do and wouldn’t want to do anything else, even more whenever my experiments and efforts are successful.

Today, Blogsessive hit another milestone in its journey in the blogosphere. This happened:

According to Technorati, Blogsessive has become one of the top 10.000 blogs in their system, and considering the millions of blogs they watch, that’s a huge achievement!

My friends, thank you! It would have not been possible without your loyalty and friendship!

This post has been edited but kept for those coming here from different links.

The reason why I edited this post was to prevent the idea of it turning into a personal vendetta. It was not my intention and I’m only interested in helping out my community.

After rethinking the situation I decided that from this moment on, Blogsessive will focus solely on providing helpful advice and resources to its community and I’ll let aside any other matters that are not of interest to you, my loyal readers and companions in my online journey.

Once again, I apologize if you came here expecting to read something else, or if reading the original article has created a discomfort with you.

Thank you for being here during the past, the present and hopefully, the future of Blogsessive.

Alex

A few days ago, Codrut Turcanu of Remarkable Blogging contacted me asking if I was available for a small interview, which we did.

Today, Codrut published the interview with me and you can read it here. A PDF version is also available for download.

Enjoy reading, and if you have additional questions, I’m looking forward to reading them in the comments section!

Here it is folks, Simple Balance 2.0 – a free, simple WordPress theme with enough options to make it “premium-like”.

After launching the first version (1.0) in July, I’ve decided that the next release should not be an intermediary version, but rather a real, meaningful update. And that’s how Simple Balance 2.0 was born.

Simple Balance 2.0 is launched under a new slogan: “More Power. More Style. Your Style!” Why? Because that’s what it has to offer! More control over it’s options, advertising space, layout and color, and with each future update you’ll be able to tweak it more and more to your own style!

Let’s take a look at what Simple Balance 2.0 has to offer

Many new options have been added, most of which you can adjust through the theme’s brand new “Control Panel”.

• An extensive and inclusive theme control panel;
• Widget-ready sidebars;
• Top advertising space (468×60 pixels);
• Sidebar advertising space: Up to 8 small square banners (125×125 pixels);
• Individual settings for each banner you add:
  1. Custom banner URL;
  2. Do Follow / No Follow witch;
  3. Title and alternate text;
  4. Open in a new window or same window
• Master switch (on/off) for every Ad Zone;
• Variable layout structure:
  1. Centered content;
  2. Right-aligned content;
• 5 new additional color schemes (more released monthly);
• Option to display the default left sidebar image, use a custom one or hide it;
• Custom feed URL;
• Valid cross-browser tested XHTML and CSS;
• SEO smart coding;
• Works with WordPress 2.6.2 (tested starting with WordPress 2.5);
• Any many more options that I’ll let you discover.

Click here to read the full blog post!

As some of you might recall, last week I’ve promised to launch a contest today. Unfortunately, there are 2 more little things that need to be set straight regarding the jury (yes, there will be a jury this time) and I find myself in the position of asking for you patience until tomorrow.

And, to repay your patience, tomorrow I’ll also make public something I’ve been working on lately that should sweep some of you of your feet. Don’t ask what it is – it’s a surprise – but if you’re following me on Twitter, you might have already guessed what I’m speaking of.

Until tomorrow and enjoy reading Blogsessive’s past articles in case you’ve missed something!

This is a question that probably some of you want to know the answer of. Lately, the posting activity on Blogsessive has fallen to a slower pace. Fear not, Blogsessive is not “shutting down”! I’m around and have been all this time, communicating with those that asked me different questions or simply wrote me emails.

Before saying anything else, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Hendry Lee of Blogbuildingu.com for his wonderful guest post published last week: Research and Dominate – How to Strategically Plan Your Blog for Success and to Eric Brantner, who’s guest post you’ll be reading a few hours later. I’m not going to spoil the surprise of his post so make sure to check back later and read it.

Back to the publishing flow on Blogsessive, the last two or so weeks have been a total madness. After 9 years of working as a full time employee in the web industry, I’ve finally decided that it’s time to set my own terms of business and to make sure that if I’m going to win, it’s because I did what I did and also, if I fail, it should be based on my OWN decisions. So, from August I’ll have time to dedicate to my projects, including and focusing on Blogsessive. Also, even if it’s a bit early to say more about it, I’m in the middle of setting up a blogs network with a couple of Romanian friends that write for the international audience. I’ll let you know more about this when the time is right.

Other smaller things have come in the way of my regular activities, such as being invited and getting ready for one of my dearest couple of friends’ wedding and also taking time to look for a new motorcycle, which apparently it’s quite time consuming.

All has been put behind and activity should be back to the regular flow. Thanks to each and every one of you who came here and left comments and emails during this period, to all those who have subscribed to the feed or that did what they do daily, being loyal Blogsessive readers! Thank you!

Today I’m starting a little experiment in which I would love to include you, Blogsessive’s readers and subscribers. I’ve always said that experience is the best teacher, so lets share a bit of our experience and try to create useful topics and guides out of our knowledge.

Since this is a community debate, the topic I have in mind is:

Is it the uniqueness of content, the author’s writing style, the design?

I’m looking forward to reading your answers in the comments section, after which, I’ll summarize the whole debate into one post that could make a useful guide for start-up bloggers and why not, even more experience blog owners.