If you followed this post over from Blogging For Noobs, then you know this mornings story.  The summation is I found a potential spamback link in my comments at the Celebrity Rumors and decided to follow it with due diligence before allowing it.  it was a spamback, but it had links to a wealth of good sites worthy of showing you.  Here they are.

While not the most important thing in a theme, the color scheme is certainly the first thing noticed by a visitor to your blog. This handy little color scheme picker will help you come up with an appropriate scheme quickly and easily.

I also found this three part series on usefull css code snippets. Part 1, 2, 3.

This is a nice graphically based use of rounded css corners complete with free graphics and code. The size they give you could easily work as a background image for your blog page.

This Web 2.0 Generator link page had a lot of great links for theme builders as well as just general bloggers.

Sadish Bala had some interesting links and advice of his own on his blog.

Emily Robbins hasn’t updated her blog, How To Blog, in along enough that I consider it abandoned, but that doesn’t stop the old stuff from being worth reading.

Design Disease has some great themes of their own for free.

I also found a really nice site, Web Designer Wall, with some recent articles on using large image backgrounds.

My limited programming knowledge didn’t make the next site very useful to me, but the more I am learning about Wordpress code, Devlounge’s article on how to write a wordpress plugin is where I am going to start reading.

Sorry about the mess everyone.  I am making some changes around here this weekend and will looking at a few different theme designs to decide what I like and don't.   If the theme changes on you mid read sorry for any disruption.

The current theme is the Freemium Theme by Ptah Dunbar.  Feel free to tell us what you think of it.

Brad

Update:

10-8-2008: We should be bck online here later today.  If you run a site about blogging I encourage you to check out http://www.bloggingfornoobs.com/topsites/

Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves.

When big name Blogger X loses a lot of credibility by saying remove the nofollow from your comments, but doesn’t do it themselves. I am taking a stand. Nofollow is gone from all my comments as of now. I am not stupid enough to not moderate my comments, but I am going totally nofollow free in the comments. This is step one. I recommend the nofollow free plugin for WordPress. I also recommend using the nofollow from home and nofollow those dupes to keep Google juice flowing the right direction from there.

Secondly give back to your commentators. I not only have I made the link to their blog nofollow free, but using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv the link to their last post is nofollow free. This will pass along some serious Google juice when you are indexed.

The third thing I am doing is providing subscribe to comments by email. Your commentators will know when someone else posts a follow up comment. Last but not least I am using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. Commentators will be able to respond to each other. If you run a political or religiously minded blog you will probably want to be careful how many levels deep you let that one run though.

Lastly I intend to do a better job than most of the big guys when it comes to interacting with you. This is another area you see top name blogging gurus telling you to be social but never have anything to do with the people commenting on their own blogs. I can promise you this if you comment and leave your site I will at the very least give your site a visit, which usually will translate into an ad click or comment of my own if your subject interests me. Also be sure to check out the weekly CommentLuv Link List posted every Friday at Blogging For Noobs.

5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart.

The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio.

4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times.

3) Starting out with a free blog is the way to go. This might be true if you are just keeping a private journal, but if you ever want to make money on your blog, this is not necessarily the best advice you can get. Less than $20 can get you started right here on Zyon. After a month you will know if you going to give this up or keep at it. The longer you are established on your own server the better it is for your rankings. The longer you are on freebie blogs the harder it is to make the switch and the greater the detrimental effects to your blog there are.

2) Posting Frequency Doesn’t Matter. Unless you are writing a personal vanity blog detailing your life posting frequency does matter. Do you have to post every day? No. Do you need to post a couple of times a week minimum? Yes. In order to achieve any real following you need to post with some sort of frequency. If what you said in one post is interesting, but don’t have any sort regularity I might be kind and add your feed to the more than a two hundred and fifty I subscribe to, but if you don’t pick up the pace you will get relegated to the lowest priority folder, the check once a month if I have time category.

1) Only Write the Highest Quality Posts and Never Write Filler. This is fine when you have 25,000 daily feed readers, but when you are starting out regular posting is essential to getting momentum going. This is not to say write a crappy post, you shouldn’t do that either. When it comes right down to it, you should be able to come up with at least one good idea five times a week and knock out a few hundred words worth reading.

Filler posts may not be the best idea you have ever had. That doesn’t matter so long as you put some thought into it, made it readable, and did a good job with the SEO. There are many ways to come up with good filler posts, many of which are some form of linkbaiting. Trips Around the Blogosphere, Daily Del.icio.us Updates, or Twitter Digest Posts are just a few examples of this.

Not every post is going to interest every reader that is just a fact of life. Snobs will say a post is crap simply because they didn’t get anything out of it, but if you the blogger got something out of writing it, then you can guarantee someone else will to.

Remember to take good advice when you see it, but don’t be afraid to question the motives of those who are giving it to your.

The question of whether you should make theme adjustments is always a difficult one to answer. It is even be harder to do and not negatively affect your onsite readers. That being said here are my thoughts.

• Limit major theme changes to no more than once a month. Anymore than once a month clearly defines you as a noob. A complete theme change is sometimes necessary especially as you are learning, but should be done with caution.

• When building or choosing a new theme make sure that it is easily tweaked later on. Having a CSS class that will allow the quick insertion of more banners or advertising will save you countless hours of work down the road.

• Work out all changes before hand on a test blog with actual posts and pages. I prefer to run a local server using Apache, mySql, and php management on my windows PC

• Make changes when the fewest people are reading your blog and with a very clear head. A pot of coffee by your side while making these changes isn’t a bad idea either. Only make the changes to your real blog after you know they work perfectly on the test blog. Upload the entire theme under a new name if it is a variation of your current theme. If you need to switch back to your old theme quickly, because the test blog and the real blog had some difference or something got distorted in the FTP transfer having your old theme will save you a lot of time, panic, and cursing.

• Make minor tweaks as necessary, but keep them small and do them one at a time. As noted before always have a backup of your current theme or you can really screw yourself.

With these tips in mind you should be able to make changes with the smallest possible impact on your readers. Good luck and never stop improving the functionality of your blog anytime you can.

We all know it and we all hate it, and believe it or not we have all participated in it to some degree as internet noobs. There are several ways to deter spam on a blog. First is the use of plugins, I like Askimet WordPress. it works really well and used by most of the big name bloggers so that is good enough for me.

The second place to deter spam is with email. if you are a pro blogger you need to have your contact information out there. It is your internet business card and people need to access it. There are some nice forms that will do, but those are only a partial solution, because unless you are able to program it to accept attachments, links, etc it doesn’t have the functional range of email. Posting your email address openly though is a call for spammers, and while many companies like Yahoo and Google do a good job at filtering it for you others don’t. I have found the javascript code below however works very well and keeps bots from collection your email, yet displays it just like it would a normal link.

var name = “your_name”;

var domain = “your_name.com”;

document.write(‘<a href=\”mailto:’ + name + ‘@’ + domain + ‘\”>’);

document.write(name + ‘@’ + domain + ‘</a>’);

// –></script>

I didn’t write the code but I have been using it for years and can tell you that it does work when it comes to bot harvesting. it doesn’t stop assholes from giving it out and listing it elsewhere but nothing does and you just have to live with that if you want to play this game.  Check the header and you will be able to see it in action.

I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this:

Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on.

So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web based readers like Google or into your favorite reader program. I personally like MS Outlook for this since it is what I read my email from several a dozen different sources, have my daily calendar and so on and so forth. So the question is why would you want to subscribe to a feed when I could just go to the website. The answer is pretty simple time. You are already opening a program or going to a single site for your email, so adding one more thing to check saves you time. If you are a voracious feed reader like me, I can quickly check to see if over a hundred blogs I read have new posts in just a few minutes. I can decide if I want to go and comment read the full article if it wasn’t posted in the feed, or just skip on by. I literally save several hours a day by using a feed reader.

So which is the best method to use a program or a website? That is really a personal things. For me it is a program, because that is how I check my email and it is open all the time. If you are on the go and want to check it from any number of computers or cell phones, then a website reader is probably better. Can you use both? Sure, though if you check as many as I do regularly you would probably only want a small list in for going mobile.

That is the long and short of it. Syndicated feeds are good for people who surf blogs, which means as bloggers you should learn to make the most use of them. Secondly you can get a feed of comments posted to your blog which is extremely helpful for bloggers who want to respond to comments on their blogs.

A new feature for me is a link to another great blog post about blogging. Today’s goes to, Sara at the Pajama Professional with How to Develop Mad Skills and Market Insight

You can have the coolest blog layout and even more impressive content, but without readers it is merely a vanity project.

We all want lots of Google traffic because as everyone knows it is king of the search engines. The fact is when you are a noob Google traffic is going to be hard to come by unless you did something really stupid and have your blog associated with it. Having a podcast of you and your sister doing it on the desk would probably get you noticed. Frankly if she is hot enough that you want to fuck her and she is horny enough not to care about incest good for you both, That will likely get you noticed, but it won’t get you the kind of traffic you want in all likelyhood. Face it you are a noob. you need to worry about the technical aspects of getting listed on Google, but you should not worry about if your traffic is coming from their. Get your traffic in play and Google will eventually pick up on you.

So where does that leave you to get it?

1) Use free link exchanges like the one I have listed here.

2)Post to You Comment I Follow blogs with relevant comments. I do mean relevant, nothing pisses off your fellow bloggers like posting inane babble on their hard work. Read the post and comment appropriately.

3) Keep writing good copy.

WordPress 2.5 seems to be more particular than early releases to coding errors.  One possible result is the loss of sidebars and footers.  Elezend asked about this very problem on Lorelle on Wordpress, then again at Brad’s Tiny World.  Elezend’s footer which contains MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog displays just up and disappeared upon upgrading.  Personally I think upgrading on day one of any software upgrade is a bad idea, but that is from years of going WTF and looking at frozen computer screens.

This is going to be a multistep fix and some trial and error So lets get started.

1. The first thing I want to try to make sure this is not a general theme problem is to remove the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog coding
2.