Internet Center Simple Theme

Internet Centre is a clean and simple, two column, fixed width theme ported from a design at Solucija. It features a pale blue and green colour scheme and has been tested for WordPress 2.0 and 2.1 in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The theme is WordPress Widget ready. I particularly like how it displays the current date in the top hand corner- gives a very professional feel.

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Widget: Display Favourite Beers and Pubs

The Coastr Widget is flickr for the drinking within you. Using the frankly brilliant idea of Coastr it allows you display a list of your favourite beers and pubs on your sidebar.

The latest version has been improved to make sure that it handles beer names correctly, and so won’t cause problems for validation.

Widget: Display Last.fm Album Art

Run For Cover shows cd covers on your WordPress weblog. It connects to last.fm and grabs the list of cds you listened to recently — and tries to find the cover images at Amazon. To speed things up, it only fetches these data once a day and keeps a local copy for the rest of the day.

The widget is very customisable, allowing you to change the period of songs which the plugin uses, the number of albums displayed, the thumbnail size, the text when there are no images are available, where the link points too and much, much more.

Plugin: Preview Comments

Filosofo Comments Preview is a WordPress plugin that lets you preview comments on your blog before you submit them. It’s easily configurable from the admin control panel, including optional CAPTCHA and JavaScript alert features.

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The plugin, which works with WordPress 1.5 and higher, is completely configurable within the WordPress admin section, and will display the preview comment exactly as it would be published, with smilies, profanity censors and HTML as they would display.

Plugin: Community To-do List

To-do List Plugin is a useful plugin which allows all members to create, edit and delete entries to a community to-do list kept under the manage tab of the WordPress Admin. Using it, members can share ideas, tasks and problems easily and swiftly- making the running and using of your site a lot easier and smoother.

The plugin is built for information sharing within a team of people who trust each other, all members who login can see, edit and delete all to-do item’s and there is only a record of who made the last change to the list, not who first created the item.

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Plugin: Another Threaded Comments Plugin

Yet Another Threaded Comments Plugin is a great alternative to the immensely popular Brian’s Threaded Comments and, unlike Brian’s Threaded Comments, does not require javascript for users to post comments. Another big advantage of this plugin, as far as I can tell, seems to be that it should work with most themes, again unlike Brian’s which many themes have trouble with. The plugin provides customisable (via CSS), out of the box threaded comments which work with both WordPress 2.0 and 2.1.

There are a few known bugs, the main one being that it hasn’t been testing in Internet Explorer which could pose as quite a substantial problem (anyone who’s ever attempted to develop anything to work with IE will know what I mean!) Also, the comments cannot be limited to a certain depth, so if you tend to get many comments you may find that they become very thin. I can’t find any examples of the comment being used anywhere, which is a shame, but I could see this plugin being very useful for some blogs.

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Myspace Sues Spammers and Ad Networks

The new is in that Myspace is suing over 20 affiliate networks (especially CPA networks) that are promoted by spammers on their network. [via Wired]

If I understand correctly, these spammers use illegal methods of sending out Myspace bullettins using other members profile, with some of them using phishing tactics in emails.

Since it’s difficult to go after spammers, Myspace is probably taking the easy way out by going after th networks whose affiliate programs are being promoted.

According to Tech Blorge, the main target is one guy, Scott Richter.

MySpace alleges that Richter sent millions of promotional “bulletins” from MySpace users’ accounts without their permission…

Richter has previously been successfully sued by Microsoft for spamming. He had to cough up $7 million in that case, but that obviously that wasn’t enough to encourage Richter to change his ways. There must be a lot of money in spam!

Saved by Firefox Phishing Alerts

Ok, I’m an Internet marketer and I should know how to distiguish between a real email from Ebay and a phishing scam mail, right?

Well I guess we’re all gullible sometimes. Especially when you’re tired or sleepy, you mind doesn’t really pay attention to details.

That’s when Firefox saves my day.

Firefox Phishing

The anti-phishing feature in Firefox works, and it works well.

Blue, Aquatic Themed Theme

Fishy is a simple, blue, two-column theme. The header image is an underwater fish image with the blog title over it and the navigation on a coloured strip below it. The theme is widget friendly, includes archive.php and search.php files, supports posts which span across multiple pages. If a post has sub-pages, they are listed at the bottom of the page and there are clear definitions for ordered lists, unordered lists and blockquotes.

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Joel Comm, Adsense and Video Marketing

Trivia: What do they all have in common?

Answer: This video, created and published by Joel Comm for his Adsense Templates product, and marketed via YouTube.

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Now I didnt’ buy Joel Comm’s Adsense Templates so I can’t comment on that. Maybe someone who HAS used it can leave a comment below.

However, here’s a popular opinion that was circulating at the time of launch:

Why needs hundreds of Adsense templates? You just need ONE that works, and multiply it a hundred times on your websites.

That makes sense to me.

The same goes with Blogger templates or WordPress Themes. You only need one that works, and you can customize a header and colors for all your other sites. Of course by using every variation of RGB colors you make much more money selling templates :)

But that’s not the point. This post isn’t really about Adsense Templates by Joel Comm.

The point is that video marketing via YouTube or Google Video is a massive opportunity to get more exposure for your business.

Joel’s Video is polished, professional and persuasive. And I do believe that’s his real voice… damn!

Video blogging is also big, and if you have a blog Liz Tomey’s videos will show you exactly how it’s done.

I’m starting 2 video based membership sites, and I’ll be looking into video blogging as a serious source of traffic for them.

What you can do:

  1. Get a video recorder (digital is better) or Camtasia Studio
  2. Record yourself speaking or what’s hapenning on your screen (focus on content)
  3. Make 10% – 20% of your videos (the best) available for free on Your Tube
  4. Make an offer, mention your website URL in the free versions, and make it visible on the video itself
  5. Study YouTube to see what keywords bring up the most amount of videos with the most amount of impressions
  6. Use those keywords as description, and upload your videos

Well, that’s about it I think.

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