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I’m please to announce that one of the most popular resources for new bloggers is reopening its doors to new members for 5 days only!

If you are serious about becoming a better blogger, then I highly recommend signing up for this “Become a Blogger“ program. Not only is the content amazing, but Yaro and Gideon (who are very well known and successful bloggers themselves) explain things in a non-technical way so it’s easy to understand for anyone.

It’s one of the best, if not THE best blogging courses out there at the moment, and is recommended by dozens of professional bloggers around the world.

Yaro and Gideon are very talented at explaining things in layman’s terms and have put together this amazing online video course based on their very popular Become A Blogger video series. They’ve already had over 100,000 downloads for their blogging tutorial videos. If you read the Roadmap to Become a Blogger, then you know the quality of Yaro and Gideon’s work.

The resource is broken down into 8 Modules over 6 months – with a number of other bonuses. Here is what’s covered:

• Get Your Blog Up And Running Fast And FREE
• How To Optimize Your Blog For Maximum Search Engine Performance
• How To Create Powerful Content For Your Blog, Consistently and Without Fail
• How To Use Images On Your Blog To Make You Stand Out From The Crowd
• How To Create A Different Dimension To Your Blog By Adding Audio
• How To Breathe Life Into Your Blog Using Online Video
• How To Create Multiple Streams of High Quality Traffic To Your Blog
• How To Make Money From Your Blog

Bonus #1 – How To Use The “X-Factor” Strategies To Put Your Blog Into Super Drive!

Bonus #2 – A range of other bonuses including a 10 part audio series on “Master the Mindset” – access to the Become a Blogger Forums and special members only Teleconferences.

But don’t take my word for it, go read more about their program here.

They are keeping doors open for ONLY 5 days, and then they will shut it again for the rest of the year! Crazy I know! But they said that they needed to limit the numbers somehow.

Last time they opened doors, they were bombarded with a flood of new members signing up, and they had to close the program to the general public for a few months to take care of their new members. But I just wanted to make sure you get in this time.

Previously Become a Blogger was $77 a month and it sold out within days. This time they’ve dropped the price to $47 which is a steal for the value! You can either sign up on a month by month basis or invest in it up front for the 6 months get a discount.

They only allow a limited number of students so they can focus all their time and energy on a select few. There is also a money back guarantee so if you’re not satisfied with the results, you can simply ask for your money back. How can you go wrong with that?

Head on over to the Become a Blogger site and read more about their program now. There’s not much time so I recommend doing this sooner rather than later otherwise it might be too late!

Signup for Become a Blogger now.

written by Writter

We had a student at our Cambridge class who put me on this trail of this … apparently British Telecom are rolling out Joomla for nearly all of their customers’ websites. With the exception of e-commerce,it seems to be their default system for building customer sites. For those of you not familiar with BT, it is far and away the biggest telecom company in the U.K.

British Telecom and Joomla

• BT’s main web services area is http://websites.bt.com. They have example websites and every one, except for the e-commerce sites, is built in Joomla. They’ve also written Joomla video tutorials.

• A Google search turns up at least 2,700 sites with credits showing they were built by BT.

• BT seems to be hiring Joomla developers.

• Price start at £999 or $1600 per site. It seems that they actually do original designs, rather than using stock templates. Oh, and they’re smart enough to add JCE for all their customers. Also used are Joomap, SW Menu Pro, Simple Gallery and Phil Taylor’s Forms Component.

• From the student’s experience, the build process and follow-up support were both pretty good. I asked him to contact them about a particular issue and he had a detailed reply within an hour.

Do you have any experience with customers or friends using Joomla services from BT or other large companies?

written by Writter

A website’s “visual appeal” is one of the most important factors when it comes to first impressions. Visitors make nearly instantaneous judgments that influence their decision on whether to stay and the site or bounce out of it right away.

When it comes to creating aesthetically appealing websites, you might be interested in taking a look at Wix. If you haven’t heard of Wix.com yet, let me introduce you: it’s a powerful Flash website builder that enables you to create and publish your own stunning custom Flash websites, mini-sites and other Flash content for free. More and more bloggers have also come to understand the importance of a well designed site. Many are now using Wix to add more dynamic designs into their blogs and also, to create their own custom standalone websites into which they add their RSS feeds. The connection between Wix and Bloggers couldn’t be more natural.

Similar to the Wordpress platform, Wix offers a powerful free web design solution.

At the heart of Wix is an intuitive drag and drop builder and an impressive range of fully customizable Flash templates. You can choose from templates or create Flash web content from scratch. All with a simple click, drag and drop. And then publish or embed in seconds. And you have the extra bonus of not having to do a single line of programming!

But don’t be fooled by its simplicity. In a bold innovation, everything created and published with the Wix Flash platform is search engine friendly. Their premium packages also offer you a way to connect to your own domain rather than be hosted under the Wix builder. And you can integrate Google analytics, remove Wix branding and much more.

Wix is great for everybody wanting to make a dynamic high quality web content – from designing Flash headers to mini-sites and sidebars, to websites. But combined with the skills of a blogger – it’s an all powerful solution waiting for your creativity!

written by Writter

These days a blog is easy to start for just about anyone. After you get your blog going, the next challenge is how to be successful and achieve your blogging goals. Up until now, there was no roadmap or plan showing you how to be a blog master or let alone a blogger.

Fortunately world famous blogger Yaro Starak just sent me a note today about a powerful report he released. It’s the blogger’s guide you’ve been waiting for to give you the direction you need. The guide tells you step-by-step on how to become a professional blogger and the best part is it’s free!

>> Download it now <<

Inside This Amazing Report you’ll learn things like:

• How to ethically exploit the biggest wave in technology since the invention of the telephone
• Use the “X-Factor” For Blogging Success, and how it turned upside down everything we thought we knew about blogging
• Why not deploying the “X-Factor” in your blog could cause your blog to crash and burn, never to recover
• 7.4 million reasons why your blog will fail, unless you know how to take advantage of the intersection of two huge Internet trends
• How a new way of using video, images and a blog turned a penniless actor into an Internet Superstar!
• 13 secret strategies to attract traffic to your blog like bees to a beehive, turn your competitors green with envy and provide you with multiple streams of passive income
• And much more!

If you are interested in squeezing the most out of your blog and becoming a super successful blogger, this may be just the information you’ve been looking for. Check this out - The blogging report has now been downloaded over 20,000 times! That’s gotta tell you something about the quality of the report. I mean, heck, 20,000 downloads?

The report reveals a step-by-step guide that takes you from absolute beginner to blogging pro in 5 easy milestones.

And once you have it all set up, you’ll also learn some extremely powerful “X-Factor” strategies for driving truckloads of traffic to your blog using a range of multi-media tools and the latest social media tactics.

And of course, you know what that means right? The more traffic you get, the more bucks you can make online! But you should really check it out for yourself and see why so many other people around the world are raving about this report…

Download the free Become a Better Blogger Roadmap and quickly learn how to master your blog.

written by Writter

I am always looking for new and unique free icons to use in my WordPress theme design and web development work. Although there are a lot of free icons sets available on the Internet, but my favorites are those sets which have icons for almost every aspect of theme design, e.g., categories, tags, comments, RSS feed, e-mail etc.

To save you from the hassle of hunting around on the Internet for icons (free and usable) to use in your projects, I have made a list of my all-time favorite icon sets freely available for download.

LED Icons

• Number of Icons :- 500
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download LED Icon Set
  

Developpers Icons

• Number of Icons :- 105
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
• Download Developpers Icon Set

Function Icons

• Number of Icons :- 128
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download Function Icon Set

Fugue Icons

• Number of Icons :- 2,095
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Fugue Free Icon Set

Circular Icons

• Number of Icons :- 100+
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Circular Icon Set

Vaga Icons

• Number of Icons :- 60
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Vaga Icon Set

Silk Icons

• Number of Icons :- 700+
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
• Download Silk Icon Set

Quartz Icons

• Number of Icons :- 90
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Quartz Icon Set

Twotiny Icons

• Number of Icons :- 118
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Twotiny Icon Set

Weby Icons

• Number of Icons :- 100
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Weby Icon Set

In total, all the above sets contain a total of 4000+ icons which should be enough for you to pick and choose the right ones for your project. Don’t forget to leave a comment !

written by Writter

My apologies for not updating the blog for so many days :). To make it worth your wait, I am launching a brand new free WordPress theme called “Bookish”. This is a small sized (80Kb) theme that comes in four color variations - Blue, Red, Green and Black. The theme comes with admin options that allow you to switch the color theme, change post text alignment (left/right), Twitter ID, change the featured post category and finally an option that lets you set excerpts or full posts on your home page.

The theme is compatible with the latest WordPress 2.8, fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.

Using the theme

Download, extract the zip and place the theme folder in your wp-content/themes folder. Activate the theme and it will be ready to use. For the featured post on top, you will have to set up the category through the Bookish admin options. For the image, you will have to use custom field called “featuredimage” and upload an image of size 240×160 pixels with your featured post.

Test & Download

written by Writter

My apologies for not updating the blog for so many days :). To make it worth your wait, I am launching a brand new free WordPress theme called “Bookish”. This is a small sized (80Kb) theme that comes in four color variations - Blue, Red, Green and Black. The theme comes with admin options that allow you to switch the color theme, change post text alignment (left/right), Twitter ID, change the featured post category and finally an option that lets you set excerpts or full posts on your home page.

The theme is compatible with the latest WordPress 2.8, fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.

Using the theme

Download, extract the zip and place the theme folder in your wp-content/themes folder. Activate the theme and it will be ready to use. For the featured post on top, you will have to set up the category through the Bookish admin options. For the image, you will have to use custom field called “featuredimage” and upload an image of size 240×160 pixels with your featured post.

Test & Download

written by Writter

Finding a place to park your web images is fairly easy to do these days. The problem is there are dozens of sites out there so how do you know which one to use? If you pick the wrong one, you will usually find out pretty quick. After you spend hours uploading all your images and then linking to them from your website, all of a sudden your image links break and your site is broken with no images.

Most free blog template sites let you download their template but fail to mention anything about the images that go along with it. Some people don’t even realize that images need to be hosted somewhere in order for the template to work properly. They install their newly downloaded template and it just works. Other templates don’t host the images and include the images in a folder which you need to find a place for them to live. People get confused and don’t know what to do.

If you are one of these people or just want a place to drop off your images, then listen up. I’ve been using a great image hosting site called Photobucket ever since I started eBlog Templates. You can use their free service which is great for small sites with not a lot of bandwidth needs or upgrade to their pro plan which gives you unlimited bandwidth for around $25/year.

Here are some other great features of Photobucket:

• Keep all your pics and videos in one place - room for up to 10,000 photos and hours of video!
• Share with everyone you know by email, IM or mobile phone.
• Make slideshows and mashups with music, special effects, captions, and more.
• Link to your profile, blog or website. One-click posting, direct to your favorite sites.

I recommend at least setting up an account since it doesn’t cost you anything. Then upload a picture or two just so you’re familiar with how it’s done. If you are currently using a Blogger template that you downloaded for free, it’s probably a good idea to start moving all your images over as well. If you don’t, you’re leaving your images in the hands of someone else and they could delete, move or even put up adult images on your site by just changing the images on their server. Not good.

written by Writter

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
"Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever's happening with us"
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople."

Lyrics from Fear Not of Man by Mos Def

Read more...

written by Writter

I'm always on the lookout for business trends in our industry and I've spotted a significant new one in recent months. Increasingly CMS companies are supporting different platforms. The choice for each company is different, but the trend seems real:

Examples of Joomla Companies Supporting Other Platforms

• Rockettheme: Joomla and phpBB3
• Joomlart: Joomla and Magento
• JoomlaJunkie: Working on iTemplater.com and building for Joomla, Drupal and Magento
• JoomlaPraise: Working on CMSMarket.com
  
• CMSExpo: Started with Joomla and expanded to all kinds of Open Source CMS

Read more...

written by Writter