 Blogging Sueblimely
Becoming part of the Australian Nuffnang Ad Network Glitterati
 I have succumbed to curiosity and temptation to become a Nuffnanger. I don’t think I need explain Nuffnang - the rather large ad in my sidebar says it all. Blogging Sueblimely has become monetized; at least until I come to the conclusion that I am not making any money from it or the size of the ad block is too intrusive for me to stand any longer.
You may be wondering why I have Nuffnanged after I have so far resisted urges to join other ad networks; this blog has not previously been blemished, (or should that be embellished) by even the tiniest adsense block. So am I - if anyone has any idea I would be pleased if you let me know 
Maybe the name Nuffnag appeals to me or the fact that it is the first all Australian ad network I have come across or maybe that ad content is meant to be matched to a blog’s content and readers - all three of these combined perhaps. I have never been keen on advertising products or services that either have nothing to do with what I write about or would be of little interest to readers.
Then again it is probably pure avarice - I want the money, as the lure of visiting family in England again is getting stronger - seems to be a kind of 7 year itch with me. Nuffnang bloggers will also be able to enjoy exclusive discounts for various goods and services. If I resist buying products I don’t need I may even be able to add some more cents to the piggy bank.
The company has been doing well in Malaysia and Singapore and its advertisers, to date, include Nike, Citibank, Nokia, F&N, Walls, AirAsia and Honda. Prizes are to be awarded too - perhaps for blogging about Nuffnang? Maybe I should delay this post until there is a prize within reach - no I don’t win them anyway.
As I write this I have been trying to answer my own question. Why did I join Nuffnang. What was it that that tipped the scales in its favor? The answer is Community - I am a sucker for sites that aim to develop a social community. Nuffnang is going to either fully pay for or substantially subsidize blogger outings, get togethers and events. Some movie nights are already in the pipeline. I likely won’t attend but the idea appeals to me.
Nearly forgot to mention - if you have no ads from any other Asia Pacific ad network you automatically become part of the Nuffnang Glitterati. This is appealing to me not only because Glitterati Nuffnangerswill earn more and be eligible for preferential treatment but because I have never been part of any “rati” before.
I will be curious to see what ads start appearing in my sidebar and, if nothing is forthcoming, I will choose the option to show charity ads as a placemarker, rather than the current default ad for Nuffnang.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Becoming part of the Australian Nuffnang Ad Network Glitterati
Blogging Benefits - Diversifying
My lack of regular posting recently has not been due to any lack of motivation or ideas, rather a lack of time. Part of the reason for this is a consequence of blogging itself which has led on to other activities. Even the social networking aspects have had to take a back seat lately. I concentrate on Stumbleupon as a voting site, diigo for my bookmarking and belong to a few active Ning groups and forums. Digg has taken the back seat. I never really did enjoy using it so never put in the time necessary to make it work for me. One aspect I have regretted having to neglect is visiting and commenting on blogs I enjoy.
This blog has become my base in the online world, a world that has expanded greatly in the time it has been running. Membership of social networking sites aside, running and moderating forums, developing and customizing Wordpress themes, starting up and running blogs for business and non profit sites and an increase in my website building jobs have been the main consequences of being a relatively long term blogger.
I look forward to expanding my involvement even further; making money from blogging itself is on my agenda too although this has been in the ideas and planning stage for quite a while now and I have yet to take more than a few tentative steps towards this. I resigned from my last remaining accounts job recently, a remnant of a former life, which means I must rely on income from web design and blogging. Wish me luck
Please let us know if your blogging activities have led to extra activities too, on or offline.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Blogging Benefits - Diversifying
Flexible Customizable Wordpress Themes
If you are not confident adapting Wordpress themes but cannot quite find one that is ideal, you may like to consider using a a free flexible and customizable theme; where changes are made via an admin dashboard theme interface. There is no need for you to touch the code at all, with theme options built into the admin area. Some of these type of themes are also ideal if you want to easily take advantage of the capabilities of Wordpress to create something a little different, do not want to go all the way with a magazine type theme, or want to use your site for more than just a blog.
Here are a selection of such free WP themes. They vary in the amount of customization available; all are widget ready. Another advantage of all of these themes is that there is more help available. The theme designers have gone the extra mile to provide you with with help pages, forums, tutorials or wikis.
Dkret2
- An adaptable theme with its own options in the admin/presentation area for choosing which stylesheet to use - either one of the included styles (or if you are feeling adventurous one you have created or modified yourself.
- A dashboard theme page for making adjustments
- Up to five Sidebars including 3 "footer" sidebars.
- Choose from one of the supplied style schemes or add your own without the need for editing the base them files.
- Includes Guestbook Events and Todo templates. and the ability to have no Sidebar,
- Uses AJAX for comments and has a built in AJAX comment preview
Download from Wordpress.org
Documentation
Forum
Making Schemes Video
Mandigo
A customizable theme from onehertz which among other features allows you to choose from 7 color schemes and determine the placement of sidebars.
- Dashboard Themes Option page for easy customization
- 38 languages .
- Two widths 800×600 screen resolution or 1024 pixels.
- One or two columns, right or left side selected selected from the Theme Options page
- Per page or random header images
- 7 Color Schemes - blue, red, green, pink, purple, orange & teal.
- Schemes can be selected from the Theme Options page, or switched randomly by enabling the random scheme feature
Download from Wordpress.org
Wiki
Royale
Another customizable theme from onehertz with layout and color options and an unusual feature of changing link colors.
- A fluid-width layout
- Two or three-column
- 3 column layout - side by side or right/left sidebars
- Choose the accents (link) color from a 360-color palette or make colors cycle automatically, which means that the color of links will change smoothly as your visitors read your blog.
- Translated into thirty-eight languages.
If you do not like the black background color this is reasonably easy to change.
Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
onehertz also has a customizable theme based on Nintendo’s Mario Bros although you could change the background image to your liking - smw theme
Starscape
This theme has a large range of customization options and the creator MillaN has added more and more features over time. StarscapeII in the pipeline.
- Theme Control Panel
- Inbuilt ready to use themes of different colors.
- Customize header logo and background
- Control the rendering of menus and sidebars,
- Sidebar customization - left and right or just one -
- Sidebar width options
- A footer ’sidebar’ for 3, 4 or 5 widgets.
- Icon customization
- Date Button for Posts and Pages
- plus even more features
Theme Control Panel
A selection of the built in styles
Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
Tutorials
Tarski
by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson.
This theme comes with different styles and layouts and a choice of stock header images.
- Tarski comes with a choice of several stock header images but you may prefer to add your own.
- You can choose from with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly or add your own custom style.
- There are a number of different sidebar options
Theme Homepage
Download - Wordpress.org
Documentation and Help
Forum
Ikarus
Finally one with over 2,000 options configurable from your admin dashboard area. Here is but one example of the layout and colors available.
- Theme options page and help page in admin
- Live theme preview in admin area
- 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
- Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
- Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
- Many sidebar features built in without the need for additional plugins - popular content rating, recent posts, comments and feedback, tagcloud, Social bookmark tools
- 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
- 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
- 3 Columns, Widgets 2 columns
- CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
- MooTabs slider box
- Featured YouTube Video post
- Custom typography styles
- and more …,..
Download - Wordpress.org
Homepage and Demo
I have created a list on diigo for this type of theme and will add to the list and this post as I find more of interest. I will be continuing with this series of posts to bring you details of unusual themes, niche themes; free and premium.
Please let me know if you use any of these themes or know of more themes that allow for easy customization.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Flexible Customizable Wordpress Themes
Revolution in WP Themes
Premium Wordpress themes and theme sites have been springing up over the last couple of years, often catering for the increasing popularity of magazine style themes. Free themes have not always measured up to premium themes in design complexity and, at times, in their coding accuracy. The additional support offered with premium themes is also a draw card.
Theme Directory
For personal bloggers the cost of buying themes tends to outweigh their advantages. For those who are making money or promoting a business with their blog the price is less of a factor. The good news for those who do not want to spend money on themes is that the new Wordpress theme directory not only has a huge repository of themes but, to be eligible for inclusion, themes have to meet certain standards. This means that anything downloaded from the directory will work, without any coding glitches. That is the theory; although I would have thought that there are bound to be the odd few that fall through the net. Despite this we can feel much more confident downloading themes from the WP theme directory than from sites we don’t know and trust.
If you do want a magazine style layout you may still have to consider paying for a premium theme. The WP Themes Directory only has two tagged as “magazine”. There is however more good news, hence the title of this post. The site that brought us the premium Revolution Theme is going open source (under a GPL licence) as from 1st November. The themes will all be new (as it is not fair to offer the Revolution Theme itself after many have already paid for it). There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things (not yet specified) but the themes themselves will be free. More details can be found on the site of Revolution’s creator Brian Gardner - Revolution Going Open Source.
WP Limits is following the lead with some soon to be released free themes, including a “never before created knowledgebase theme”.
I have spent some time researching magazine style themes, free and premium, and have a post in the pipeline showing you my findings.
For Blogger users, there is a list of blogspot template sites on my Blogger blog.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Revolution in WP Themes
Google Gmail Gets Mail Goggles
"If you drink then email , you’re a bloody idiot" (to misquote a popular Aussie ad slogan for drink driving). Google seems to agree and has kindly provided us with Mail Goggles, for Gmail, a way of attempting to help stop us sending emails which we may later regret.
Its method: prompting us to answer some maths problems at designated times - by default Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as "this is the time that most people are likely to need it",. You can change the timings; which is handy if you are prone to long drunken lunches or are an alcoholic.
If your math skills are lacking you can use your windows calculator, if you can find it in your state. If you are really determined to send the email you can, and live to regret it - unless you forget you have sent it. In this case you may live forever in ignorance or wonder why someone is no longer talking to you, has deleted you from SU/Digg friend, is leaving you nasty blog comments …. or the opposite: arrives at your place with all their worldly possessions, asks when you are going shopping for rings…
If you get the maths questions wrong then a new box appears with new questions with the comments “Water and bed for you. Or try again.” If you are too slow in answering the message is “Oops, looks like your reflexes are a little slow. Try again.” I bet they had some fun trying to think of the messages to use here and some of them would not have been quite so politely phrased.
Can you tell that I find this feature amusing? When I read about it I had to remind myself that it was not April 1st and even then go into Gmail to make sure Mail Goggles really existed.
You can turn on Mail Goggles via the Labs tab in your Gmail Settings and then customize it via the General tab.
If, like me, you receive your Gmail via POP mail and have not visited the Labs Tab (how long has it been there I wonder?) there are a few other interesting and useful features that you can enable for Gmail. For example,
- Email Addict which lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat. I wish they could come up with a way of blocking my desk inbox (or the pile of things in front of me that need doing) and let me email and chat for fifteen minutes.
- Old Snakey game - for when you want a break from everything.
- Forgotten Attachment Detector which prevents you from accidentally forgetting intended attachments by prompting you if you mention attaching a file, but have not done so.
- Quick Links which adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. It can be used for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, etc.
- Quite a few other ways to customize and improve your Gmailing experience.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Google Gmail Gets Mail Goggles
Advantages of Receiving Blog Comments
When I read about ways to reward those who comment on blogs I always enthusiastically try them out. I see comments as the life blood of a blog, providing a distribution system for so many other aspects of blogging. Their are plenty of blog posts around about the benefits of leaving comments but what of the benefits we gain by receiving them?
Benefits of receiving comments:
Communication Needs
- Comments are a concrete way of showing that your blog has readers, particularly interested in your blog, rather than just passing trade. The passing trade do comment too but you can distinguish these from your regulars. A hello and thank you to my regulars.
- Satisfaction - Stating the obvious - no one wants to run a blog that is not read by others, for whatever reason we blog. - stats may indicate visitors and readers but figures do not provide the same sort of personal satisfaction.
- Motivation - to keep writing posts and to keep going with the blog itself - many blogs are abandoned (probably too early) because of receiving few or no comments.
- Egos are stroked - a natural human need to one extent or another (not because bloggers in general need ego strokes more than anyone else)
- Social advantages/Social Networking - we get to know others, we develop contacts outside of the blog itself, we can develop friendships, contacts can lead to more contacts and more friends who also come to comment on our blogs - the Blog Loop.
- Networking - again to develop contacts but done for business, professional or money making reasons rather to satisfy strictly personal needs.
- Networking + Social Networking - those who start blogging for the above reasons often find it is the social aspects that motivate them to keep on going.
The Blog Loop and how it goes wrong
This post is not just an off the top of my head type now - it has really got me thinking and I even created an image. Do some of your blog posts develop along these lines?
Feedback
- This includes the pat on the back type comments that help with the motivational and ego stroking needs mentioned above. We know deep down that some of these type are not sincere but how many of us ignore this and choose to appreciate them anyway? This does not include the "nice post", "well done", "I am not adding saying anything else because I just want you to visit my blog" type. These are just a drag and for delete or the spam folder. I notice some of these have snuck into some of my older posts - they will be ex-comments soon.
- Learning which of our posts are popular with our readers. It does not necessarily mean posts that draw the most comments but also those which elicit the more valuable comments - what is valuable depends of course on your own particular blog and your own blogging needs. Being aware of which posts fit these criteria is an enormous help in showing us how to improve and meet the needs of our readers. By aware I mean not just knowing which posts they are but thinking about why they are popular and how to reproduce the success again. Looking at our unpopular posts can be similarly helpful.
Research and learning
- Finding other blogs in our own niche areas can advance our learning of the particular subject we cover. Blogs tend to beget contact from similar blogs. Following your comments and the comments left on their author’s blog can be a source of valuable knowledge.
- Even if you blog on a particular topic by following comments you can find wonderful blogs to interest and entertain you; to satisfy leisure and personal learning needs.
- Comments that give us information, add to the topic, or add things we may have missed are a valuable learning tool (the latter is only of positive use for perfectionist types who do not beat themselves up about missing something.). And to prove that I am not a perfectionist I am going to end here and ask you to add any other positive things you can think of - (Ok the truth - I don’t particularly like missing things but I ran out of steam and ideas and I even like getting comments that tell me what I have missed, as well as ego stroking ones.)
Benefits of Leaving Comments
Simple - just take account of the benefits you gain from receiving comments and bestow these on others - not only will you feel good about yourself you will receive backlinks, kudos, recognition for your own blog, more visitors, readers, increased page rank and all the other stuff you can read one of the many blog posts already written on the subject.
I started this post only intending to tell you some news relating commenting tools but not wanting to lose your attention I will write about these next. I have a real talent for (problem with!) getting completely sidetracked.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Advantages of Receiving Blog Comments
Blogosphere News Sept 27th
Reading
- Your turn - if you have written or have read something that may interest readers here or come across a new site worth a look at let me know; by leaving a comment here or via my contact page. (The latter may be best if it is your own post so that others do not perceive it as being spammy) I will only publish comments that include links if the links are relevant and useful. (covering myself here in case I get spam!).
If you are a regular reader you will know I try to feature posts from some of the lesser known blogging blogs and those who write excellent posts about blogging but do not have that as their main topic.
You likely check out the more popular blogging blogs yourself but I do also include links to these if the content is of particular significance.
News
- I know a lot of my readers are mums so Moms Group Manual may be of interest. - this blog is a "Mom’s Guide to Connecting with Other Moms" both online and in person.
- Google is partnering with newspaper publishers to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online. Millions of pages of news articles will be digitized. These will be searchable by using Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. This may come in very handy for research purposes for some bloggers. Read more on the Official Google Blog.
- Come On In The Web Is Fine has started a campaign to encourage sites not to play music on loading. I was recently asked by a client to add Christmas music to their site this year and I had to politely say "no way", that is not a good idea. I feel a post coming on about this topic so will say no more for now.
- 8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3
Cyclo.psis a stock photo site search engine that "brings the results of the most popular stock sites to one location". Search once. See it all - no binocular vision on this site folks Joking, I think the name clever.
Social Networking
- Sweetcron- I am looking forward to get onboard with Sweetcron, a new lifestreaming application. Similar to Friendfeed in that it collects together your activities on sites such as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg. The difference is that you install and run Sweetcron from your own server and in a graphical format. A good example can be found on YongFong’s Sweecron site - not surprising as he is the application’s creator. Cha Cha France gives more details at Sweetcron | The Best Automated Lifestreaming & Blogging Software
- CMS Wire discusses whether Jaiku, which now allows its members unlimited invites, has missed the boat in Microblogging with Jaiku: Too Late to the Party? I must check Jaiku out again. If anyone wants an invite let me know, seems I can now invite anyone I like.
- Dwigger - threaded conversations and voting for Twitter. The idea sounds promising although the content does not show this as yet - No breaking news here. Top voted tweets today being largely about Talk Like a Pirate Day e.g." talk like a pirate day? shit, i forgot."
Blogger
Wordpress
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Blogosphere News Sept 27th
Productivity Tips - Downloads
If, like me, you download themes or templates for future reference or while deciding on a theme for a new blog or planned update, keeping track of them can be difficult. I always create a separate folder for each theme I download and make sure there is an image of the theme in there too. It is a quick easy reminder of what the theme looks like. Rather than using the little thumbnail images that are often included in a theme I save a copy of an image from the download site or do a screenshot of a demo page. I save this image as folder.jpg which, on windows XP, gives you a good preview of the image when looking at the folder in thumbnail view - This is not so useful in Vista which hides most of the image.
When you download a theme, add on (or any other software for that matter) where extra instructions are needed (for installation or usage) create your own text file and copy and paste the information from the site into this. Give this a distinct name so you know it is your own file. (I used to call all mine sue.txt but this was a real problem when I had to restore all my files from a disastrous reformat. I had hundreds of files called sue.txt and had no idea where most of them belonged.) After this I started adding the name of the application too. I only tend to do this when I may forget where I downloaded the files from - otherwise it is as easy just to go back to the site for instructions.. To quickly create a file In Windows - right click in a blank space in the explorer file window, click on "New" and then on text file (or Word or Excel etc depending on what you want to record). Name your file. Open it and copy and paste the information you need to record then press Save and you are done. It may be enough just to add the url of the site to go to for the instructions.
I use the Firefox Download Status Bar extension. A bar at the bottom of your browser window shows the files that have been downloaded. You can open files from here (to view images, unzip, install etc) and right clicking gives you the option to go to its containing folder. This makes it easy to quickly go to the folder where you installed a download to do what you need to do with it and to create a text file as mentioned above.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Productivity Tips - Downloads
The Wordpress CMS Site is Launched
 The website that has been taking up my time and my passion, to the extent that I have not been posting here as often as I would like, is launched. The Fragile X Association of Australia now has an interactive site built around Wordpress.
From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it - despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.
As well as standard Wordpress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.
More technical aspects:
I chose Wordpress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and Wordpress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.
I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the Wordpress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.
My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.
A request
Please visit the site and have a bit of a read - your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item - it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask - or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.
Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
The Wordpress CMS Site is Launched
Bloggers can have a powerful voice
I have had to return from my self imposed (need to get a website finished) blogging exile to let you know about Ivy and show how bloggers when they join together in one voice can have a powerful effect.
Today has been an emotional day for me. The relief of having found out that my son has been accepted into our first choice of adult day centre for next year was great. I was over the moon. He has a disability and I was so concerned about his future in an adult world, post school.
Tonight I read about Ivy, a poor little mite who has suffered so much in her first years of life. I have been following her story on Tiff’s (her mum’s) blog, Three Ring Circus, always hoping to read that she is improving, but her auto immune disease rarely seems to let go of its grip. Ivy was being denied a drug that could improve her life, reduce her pain and allow her to do things and go places like any other 2 year old.
A petition was organised by Veronica of Sleepless Nights and I was intending to write about this to gather your support. In fact, feeling outraged and sad, I had already jumped right in and started to write this when I read, with delight that Ivy is now being allowed to have the medicine she desperately needs. I was so pleased I went back and altered the “is” to was as I still wanted to share this with you.. The voices were heard! Isn’t it wonderful news?
Now I am returning to the depths of a Wordpress theme but hope to find my way out again very soon, although I then need to delve further into the database - if I am missing for too long please send out a search party. I hear it can be scary in there and I may be hiding behind a table.
Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Bloggers can have a powerful voice
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