Entries for the Blog Design Contest.

1. Were WP.
2. UBSN.
3. Rarst.
4. Aravind Jose.
5. Gary Viray.
6. Tech Buzz.
7. Smart Blog Tips.
8. Yield To Pedestrian.
9. SE7ENize.
10. Thou Shall Blog.

I would like to thank all the participants for taking their time out and entering in the competition. It has been a great experience and all the entries definitely a must read for everyone. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I couldn’t leave a comment or reply to the emails which you guys have sent, however I’ll ensure that this will be certainly taken care of. You may not see any posts for couple of days or may be 3 days, as I’ll be going out of town. However, I’ll try my level best to publish few posts.

Apart from the updates, the winners will be announced on 8th December, as the entries will be judged by our wonderful judges -

1. David Peralty.
2. Jeff Chandler.
3. Alex Cristache.

I wish good luck to everyone of you and may the best entry win

inLinks is doing nothing new at the moment as this particular service is available through Text-Link-Ads anyway. Now, one may ask the question that if they are already selling these links through TLA, then why are they coming up with a new brand? The answer to this question is that they will try to to come up on the Google with that particular brand name as TLA’s Domain is banned on Google at the moment.

Amit has suggested that these links will surely be tough to detect, however Google also keeps Cached copies of all the websites they crawl, so they may ban your blog if they compare the old copies with the new copies.

Most of the A - list bloggers suggest that one should not sell the links on their blogs as this may result in ban from Google. Honestly I know many bloggers who sell links from their blogs and nothing has happened to their ranking in Google, rather they are doing too well even with those ads running at the moment.

What’s my suggestion on the use of inLinks ?

I’ll say that its your call. Your blog is your real estate and you are the best judge of what needs to be done with it. I can suggest that you may go for the service, however if you depend on Google then don’t blame me, if they ban your blog. If you generate good enough traffic from Social media then I think you can easily take the risk of selling the links.

Here’s the excerpt from the email which I got from Google -

Please rest assured, this change won’t disrupt your current feeds service. As part of this migration, all of your existing FeedBurner feeds will automatically redirect to Google feeds. You won’t lose any of your current subscribers in the process nor will this affect any email subscriptions.

Although, I’m not quite sure if this will really happen. Honestly, I’ve lost faith from Feedburner and I’m not sure if there is any other decent service apart from Feedburner which can help me track the number of subscribers I have.

Gravatar Support

Gravatar is as service that hosts your avatar so you can have the same avatar on the various communities you visit. It also allows you to centrally update your avatar and have it show up all over the web. You just sign up on their site and then enter your email address you registered with Gravatar in IPB 3.0’s settings area.

This is indeed a wonderful addition as most people prefer to use one particular email address while signing up at forums and thus they will be able to avoid the upload of avatars in various forums, not that uploading of avatar is daunting task, still it reduces one silly step of uploading the avatar every now and then.

It sure is a boost for Automattic Inc as well, their extra services like Akismet, Gravatar are also stepping up the ladder of success just like their core software i.e. WordPress.

Thanks to Gravatar Blog.

1. All in one SEO plugin.
2. Google XML Sitemaps.
3. No Self Pings.
4. Popularity Contest.
5. Database Manager.

The coincidence is that these plugins are those which I would also love to see in WordPress as default features. Apart from that I would like to mention few more plugins which can surely be part of WordPress as default feature and here are they -

1. WP Super Cache - I don’t understand that why exactly WordPress doesn’t come up with this feature by default. Caching of pages will ensure that users will be able to display the webpages faster and the load on the server will also be less.

2. WPvideo - By default, WordPress has a good image manager as Media Gallery feature. However, there is no default method of including the videos or embedding them from various other services. When WordPress.com can have that feature then why exactly not in hosted WordPress version?

3. Similar Posts - This plugin generates the list of related posts and thus it allows bloggers to display their old articles to the new visitors, who can become their potential readers. Again, this feature has been included in WordPress.com version, however WordPress.org version is still not equipped with this feature.

4. cforms - I’ve never seen such an advanced form plugin for any CMS. This plugin is capable of creating some very powerful and highly configurable forms and CMSes by default needs powerful form creator.

5. WordPress Newsletter Plugin - WordPress as a blogging engine generates RSS for the visitors, so that they can subscribe to the content. However, it’s a proven fact that there are people who still prefer email subscriptions and so, it will be wise if this plugin comes as the default feature.

I’m sure there will many more plugins like these which can be made as the default feature of WordPress. I would request you to share those with us.

Jermey Herve has submitted the first entry for the contest and has written a wonderful article on Blog Redesign - “10 steps for a perfect blog redesign“.

I would love thank him for taking part in the contest and guess what, if no one else takes a chance for the contest, then he’ll be the winner of all these great prizes -

1. Custom WordPress theme from us & Blog consultation from Kevin of Blogging Tips.
2. Premium WordPress theme from Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips.
3. Blog consultation from me.

We still have around a week left for the contest to get over and I can just say that come up with some quality articles on the topic of “blog design” and you’ll have the chance to win the above mentioned prizes as well.

Apart from that, I would like to thank everyone who helped us in spreading the word around -

1. Kevin Muldoon.
2. Alex Cristache.
3. Keith D’souza.
4. Mani Karthik.
5. David Peralty.
6. Kyle Eslick.
7. Jacob Share.

In case I missed your name, please ping me and I’ll update the list here and will continue to provide the link back in future posts as well. Thanks once again for all your support guys.

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Just three words, in case you do get such kind of humble request - Don’t Do it!

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