Blue, Modern Theme

BlueBreak is a well designed, blue theme with one column containing the main content, and a bottom section containing archives, categories, pages etc.

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The design is very “boxy” and modern, using blues and greys with a header image of an aerial shot of a traffic jam. The theme is bold and would look great in almost any blog, although it looks better in lower resolutions.

Clean, Modern Theme

Brajeshwar is a simple, modern theme with three columns. It features a large RSS feed icon and bold titles and navigation. The colour scheme is simple with mostly whites and blues.

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The theme is not yet widget friendly – but it is on the agenda for the next release.

Plugin: Next of Kin

Next of Kin is a slightly tongue-in-cheek (I hope!) plugin which will identify a person of your choice if you don’t visit your blog after a certain period of time. A safety measure, to make sure your blog can carry on, even if you die.

The plugin tracks your visits to your own blog and will send you an email if you cease to visit after a number of weeks (customisable) to warn you, if you’re still alive. If, after this you still fail to visit your blog, the plugin will send an email to your chosen person, informing them that the worst has happened. This email can be customisable to suit your needs. Thank you to whoever wrote this plugin, for really brightening up my day.

TypeTester – Comparing Fonts Before Using It

Still can’t choose which font to use on your blog site? Using a good and easily readable fonts is the first step to building a accessible website/blog and it could well be the deciding factor as to how much time visitors spend on your blog.

TypeTester is an online tool which lets you compare fonts right on your screen before you use them in your blog/website.

Some points about Typetester :

  • You can select three different fonts and compare them at the same time to see how they will look.
  • You can set the size, leading, tracking, alignment, color, background and decoration of the font.
  • Fonts from user’s system are pulled into a web page, so you will never miss out on your favorite fonts.


After finalizing which font you want to use, Typetester goes a step further to give you the CSS code to implement the font on your blog/website.

This a truly a useful tool to use, especially if you are just about to launch your blog.

Check it out.

Vizu Answer – Monetizing Your Website Traffic

If you have being looking for ways to monetize your website traffic, than Vizu Answer might just be the answer.

Vizu Answer claimed to be the first internet research network, where it allows clients to conduct custom market research quickly, easily and at a affordable price. For publisher, Vizu Answer is a great and easy way to monetize your website traffic.

Vizu Answers Poll Zone is a CPM(cost-per-thousand page views) advertisement. You do not need to have clicks or leads to get paid. The more page views of Poll Zone, the more you get paid. Vizu Answers share 50% of your revenue.

If you are looking for a few good tips to implement this, check out:

Too bad Vizu Answer don’t have any associate program to follow.

Click here to get started now.

Amazon's New Context Links

Have you heard of Amazon’s latest secret weapon? Some says it might be the end of Google Adsense in contextual advertising, or maybe another strong rival to Vibrant Media’s slick IntelliTXT and also Kontera.

Well, although this new Context Links System could prove to be another legacy invention, still it’s one of the coolest things Amazon’s done in years.

According to Amazon, Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your website and monetize your content, where it will automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon’s products, unlocking new ad inventory and saving you the time to manually create links.

You can add the links to your pages in minutes, and they will provide a wealth of options to customize how they are displayed.

Context Links is basically just a single line of JavaScript you include at the end of your web pages (exactly the same way how Kontera is implemented too).

There are a variety of tweaks you can make, however, which can make your links more effective and useful, notably “Match exact product names”, which should increase the accuracy of its links unless you accidentally use product names in sentences.

As you can see, you can choose to use a dashed underline link style.

Next thing worth customizing is what information is included in the actual pop-up window when your visitor moves the mouse cursor over an Amazon Context Link hotspot:

For this I’m sure that you’ll get better results by choosing “match exact product names” :)

Finally, you can choose which categories of products you would like to associate with your site. I suggest that you pick the categories that best match the kind of content you produce, personally. For testing purposes, I’ve left everything selected

When everything is done, you would end up with something like this…

For your information, unlike the Cost-per-click (CPC) ads offered by Kontera, you can only earn from Context Links when someone clicked on your ads and buys something on the other side. It is best to implement this type of ads when you want to personally and honestly recommend a product.

I’m sure context links can prove to be another powerful source of income if manage and implement properly. To my thought, this is actually much better than the existing Amazon’s associate program.

One good tips that I can recommend is to use program like Kontera on the link within your content while putting the static amazon’s affiliate ads on the side. We should expect a revision in the Google Adsense policies though it should be fine since COntext Links works just about the same with Kontera which complies to Google Adsense.

Here are links to a couple of the closed Beta users:

More details can be found here.

Business Friendly Theme

RockinBizRed3 is a new, three column theme with red accents, perfect for business use. The columns are widget friendly and the header is easy to personalise, allowing you to customise the theme exactly as you want it.

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Key Features:

  • Great contrast between white background and red accents
  • Large customizable header to help you make it unique
  • 3 columns, great for adsense and other sidebar options
  • widgetised sidebars for easy sidebar additions
  • Great for businesses wanting to have a professional free design

Bright, Sunflower Theme

Sunflower Gold is a new, three column theme with a bright, sunflower header and bold middle column in dark green.

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The theme has strong accent colours of gold, green and red giving it a nice summery feel. The columns are widget friendly.

Plugin: Spam Karma Update

Unknown Genius has just released the latest version of Spam Karma 2 – Spam Karma 2.3.

Changes in this version

  • Miscellaneous bug-fixes
  • A few small changes in the modules
  • Important updates to WordPress Database schema in order to try and improve its sluggish loading time

Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. Spam Karma 2 is the proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code.

Requirements

  • WordPress: SK2 requires WP 1.5.1+
  • mySQL: 4.0 or up is strongly recommended

Dark Brown Theme

Brownish is a new, dark theme with a brown look to it. The theme has three sidebars- two at the side of the main content, and one below, giving a very modern and stylish look.

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The theme is well set out and nicely design, and the XHTML and CSS is all valid.