• Easy to insert keywords through the theme option menu.  Adding the page title to these keywords creates an SEO feature that is hard to beat.  I learned this technique long ago from Courtney Tuttle’s Keyword Sniping posts (no longer available on his site).
• Integrated tags to meta keywords.  If it was good enough to tag your post with it is good enough to make a keyword out of
• Advertising Ready
• Plugin Ready
• Post Thumbnails  Thumbnail added to every post snippet.  Blogging in Black and White uses the limit content function to allow you to set the number of characters displayed.  This is more versatile than excerpts.

Download the Theme.

Check out the forum for support

If you use this theme please add your site to our link directory.

In the mean time though enjoy the upgrade and if you have things you would like to see in it when i release it for public consumption feel free to contact me.

6 Ways To Add More User-Interactivity To Your Blog » DivitoDesign

One big difference between a blog and a website is the way visitors can interact with the blog author. Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.

redswish - a web design blog » Increasing and maintaining blog traffic

Use comment sections on other blogs, forums and sites to promote your blog. DO NOT SPAM. Reply genuinely, but include your website URL in your signature. Most blog comment areas will also use your display name as a link to your site as well.

Some of these fabulous posts were showing the spamback with dofollow links, and I am going to have a chat with the owners after I comment. This spam site was initially just a small diversion which took me to some great blogs. Then I noticed he had his Alexa button up, with a huge number of blogs linking in. When I checked that, I hit the mother load of information. There are sites there that can help me, a legitimate blogger as much or more than they are helping this doofus. What I am getting at is the next time you think spam comments are worthless think again. Check who might they are linking too and who is linking in to them. By the end of the day I plan to add another dozen or so links coming into half a dozen of my blogs. Not a bad take for thoroughly investigating a bit of suspicious spam.

I like a three plugin approach for managing comment spam.  The first is WP Spam Free,  This plugin is as good as Akismet for the same kind of spam blocking but takes it a step further.  You can keep using akismet but it seems to take prioority and still suffers from a frustrating number of false positives.  Angering readers trying to make comments isn’t a good way to keep them.  The second thing WP Spam Free does is eliminate the need for any sort of captcha protection.  In fact you should not use one while using this plugin as they can corrupt your install.  This sort of active plugin will also allow you to stop moderating your comments before publication if you like,  making for a more interactive responsive reader experience.

The second anti-spam plugin is WP Comment Remix.  The best part of this plugin for me is the ability to directly reply to and quote other comments.  That isn’t the only feature thought.  If you have commenters who regularly come back to abuse your your nofollow status you can either spam or simply delink the authors link from the comment.  I often times have to do this because authors make meaningful comments adding to the discussion, but link to affiliate and porn sites.  Frankly if anyone is going to make affiliate or porn money from my blog, it should be me.  However providing an active link to those sort of sites is bad for your google ranking and can earn you a reputation you don’t want from certain blogging communities.

The last approach to spam control is the most drastic and not one I use very often.  WP Ban by Lester Chan works wonderfully even if the approach is rather draconic.  You can ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referer url from visiting your WordPress blog.  Used wrong you could end up banning a public hotspot so you need to pay attention to how you use this feature.

In the end if you want lots of comments turn off your moderate comments, add CommentLuv & KeywordLuv and advertise yourself everywhere you comment as yourname @ A DoFollow Blog.  If you do that and add these comments you can become a comment superstar.

A working blog using this theme can be seen at How To Blog.  More color choices will be available soon and expect a new crop of themes in the coming weeks.  So stay tuned to our homepage for all the latest details.

Download: The Other Blog Lite - Red

Preview: The Other Blog Lite - Red

The first thing you will notice on the homepage is the big fat logo image and his featured article.  Also in the opening screen is a box with a bunch of ways to subscribe to his blog.  The last thing you are going to notice when you load up, if you notice it at all depending on your screen resolution is the advertising is all located on the right hand side of the screen.

Here are the things I think work on in the opening screen.  There is instant navigation links at the top of the page.  This lets me quickly skip the home page since I have seen it plenty of times.  The logo has a message and his catch phrase.  You instantly know what the blog is about.  The subscribe to links make it easy for you to get to the meat of the blog on your own terms.  The last thing we see in the opening shot is a featured post which has a video.  This is what Vic sees as some of his most important information, so it gets a prime spot.  The only thing I find that doesn’t work for me, can’t be seen directly.  I looked at the page source and didn’t care for the extensive use of tables.  It has worked for him so far, so all I can say is it is a pet peeve and my problem not his.

Let’s take a look at one of his posts now.  You find the same header information you did on the home page.  All the extraneous information is on the right hand side of the blog while the post takes up a little less than half the page width.  The text itself is broken with graphic elements, which in this case happen to be advertising.  You also find he has bold faced the important keywords of the post.  After the text you get a good list of related posts and then the comments.

Here is where I think the posts go right.  The keywords are bolded for SEO purposes, this is something I am slowly going back and doing myself.  He uses good density of the keywords he wants to promote. The post itself isn’t a long continuous bit of text.  (short posts without breaks are okay, long ones are hard to read)  The post column is also thin enough that it doesn’t strain the eyes moving all over the page.  Once again all the extraneous information is on the right side of the page not interfering with the reading. The second place the post goes right is the inclusion of related posts.  This helps draw readers further into your site.

In the end not only are you going to learn a lot about what does and doesn’t work on a blog by reading it, you can quite easily figure out the best ways to lay your blog out by studying the design of successful blogs.  Vic uses strong language, but fuck it so do I, and so do most people if they are honest enough to admit it.  His blog is still top notch and well worth reading even if you are easily offended.  I’ll go so far as to say especially if you are easily offended, being outside your comfort zone is the best way for you to learn anything.  Keep up the great work Vic.

This is really yesterday’s videopost that scribefire marked as a draft, so sorry for everyone expecting it yesterday.  Darren Rowse of Problogger is one of the best video bloggers about blogging around, on top of being one of the best sources overall about how to blog.  When dealing with other bloggers you never have to answer the most important blogging question there is, what is a blog.  In this video Darren talks about some of the really important aspects of selling yourself.  You can learn a lot from him, I certainly have.

With proof enough for myself that I can still generate enough buzz to bring in huge traffic I am revitalizing this blog and will say for the last time I am done with Entrecard and removing it from my network and every post advocating its use or disuse. The blog and domain are still for sale, but that is a different matter.

Here is what you can expect in the way of a posting schedule for those of you glad to see this blog working again.

• Video Posts on Mondays
• Featured Blog on Wednesday
• Saturday will bring a return to the CommentLuv listings
• Expect a few intermittent post through out the week, and three to four posts a week over at Brad The Blogboy once I rework the theme.

Today’s What Is A Blog lesson is if you aren’t different once in a while or not afraid to speak your mind your blog won’t be remembered. The other part of that is if you piss enough people off you can drive in a lot of traffic even if it isn’t all bringing you positive comments.