Hi there! Long time no see. I’ve been quite busy last year and almost forgot about my blog. Anyhoo…

The NFL season is starting all over again. Are you exited? I know I am! I just can’t wait to see my favourite team in action…New England Patriots. If we go through the roster, you can see that there’s not much change. All the key players are still there (Brady, Moss, Welker,…). I just hope their running backs will contribute enough for the team. There are still some questions about the defence, since they traded Seymour to Raiders and Vrabel to Chiefs. There’s also retirement of Patriots best linebacker Tedy Bruschi which could leave a big spot to fill. But I think there’s not going to be a problem about linebackers because Patriots have one of the best young linebacker in Jarod Mayo.

I think the Patriots will play in Superbowl this year. I don’t know who will be their opponent, but I personally would like to see Falcons getting to Superbowl.

Atlanta made some key additions to their roster acquiring tight end Tony Gonzales who will be Matt Ryan’s best weapon. Michael Turner is beast and just won’t go down when defenders try to tackle him. Wide receivers aren’t that bad neither. Overall this must be one of the best offences in the league currently. Defence…now that’s a different story. I just don’t think it’s good enough to get them to Superbowl. You know how they say that defence wins the games.

Anyway…I can’t wait to watch first game between Steelers and Titans tomorrow. The only problem is that it starts at 2:30 am here in Slovenia and I’ll have to be up all night to watch it.

p.s.: Is anyone playing fantasy football? I have 5 teams at the moment and looking to join in quality league which has serious owners.

Every blogger has a dream to have enormous count of RSS subscribers to his blog. But with this number they forget one thing that if the subscriber is reading their posts using external feed readers like Google Reader, Outlook, Feedburner etc then very few of them will turn up on your blog and it may decrease your ad revenues.

So how to take full advantage of your blog subscribers?

If you are writing a plain simple post with no internal links then why would a subscriber go to your blog. Even if you add a YouTube video in your post , Google Reader now is able to embed it inside. Basically you are feeding him enough inside the cage, he’ll never try to break it and come out if things are going this way.

In this situation most common solution is that whenever you write a post try to include links to your previous posts. More the number of links more will be the clicks to open those links. There is big percentage conversion of those links to actual hits on your blog. In this situation you are basically leaving some percentage of your subscriber’s delicious food outside the cage. He gets tempted and breaks the cage himself to get out of it.

Another solution which some people will suggest is to have only partial feeds allowed for your blog. Partial feeds are the first few sentences of your post which will be visible to the subscribers. To view whole post they’ll have to click on the link below the partial feed which will lead them to your post.

I’m very much against this practice. By allowing only partial feeds you are limiting your subscriber to view some part of it which may not be as much entertaining as the next part. As you’ve pretty much guessed, in this situation you are feeding them some food inside the cage keeping some of it outside. But the problem arises if he’s dissatisfied with only that much and never bothers to come outside.

How can I link my previous posts in my current post?

Whenever you write a post you’ll associate a category or tag with it. In WordPress you can view posts of particular categories and tags like –

http://www.yourblog.com/category/categoryname

and with tags it is

http://www.yourblog.com/tag/tagname

Before and after writing a post search for your particular tag and category and see what stuff you can link in your current post. Even if something is not very closely relevant, you can give a link explaining to your reader that in your previous post you did this.

Not necessarily, your every post should contain the internal links. There may be few exceptions as you may be writing about some new topic. If you are using wordpress then you must install WordPress Related Posts plugin and check the option in it to enable it inside the feed. This will have few links after your post on similar topic inside your feed itself. For non-Wordpress users, you can manually put Related links after your post if you find nothing relevant to link from within your post content.

Then why are bloggers cribbing about subscribers count even when it is not useful for them?

That’s easy to explain. From the previous example, how would you feel if you tell someone that you daily feed xxxx number of subscribers with your food (posts). Those who want to buy something from you will look at your social status. Moreover, not only this, most of the readers prefer reading data from different sources under one roof. Of course, you won’t like to check any new posts by Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Daniel Scocco and so many other popular bloggers one by one on your browser. Do you ?

Last week two of my articles got few linkbacks from some popular sites like Ayudawordpress and Phpspot in Spanish and Japanese languages. This drove over 5k traffic from those respective languages in the week. I believe many of them tried to read content in my blog and faced some inconvenience with the language. And I got couple of mails also from the visitors saying “Hey Lax why don’t you place a translator option in TechZoomIn ”. So always I listen first to my readers than page ranks or load times or etc…

I found Global Translator as the good and simple plugin to use. It doesn’t effect your blog load time as much as other translator from different sources. And also simple interface with min time to translate to any language.

Cool features of Global Translator:

1. Supports 4 translator engines including Google translator engine
   • Google Translation Engine
   • Promt Online Translator
   • AltaVista Babel Fish
   • Free Translator
2. Supporting 22 languages currently: English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Czech, Croat, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Rumanian and Swedish.
3. Download Global Translator

So what do you think? Just install this plugin and get traffic from other language sites too.

1. You comment on your favorite blogs that are related to your content. If you comment regularly on a related blog eventually those blog readers will take notice and visit your blog and subscribe to it. The key is that it is related to what you are already writing about. No one on a blog about technology will really want to come and read your blog about cats. Well, maybe a few will?

2. You plug into social networks. Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, FriendFeed, Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Buzz, Del.icio.us, and the rest of them. You don’t need to belong to all of them, but pick a few you really like and use them regularly. Many people will be able to find your site this way.

3. You are a contributor to a related forum. Us geeks love forums because we love information. The hottest and most relevant information can be found on forums. If you seem like you know what you are talking about people will find your website and visit it often to get that juicy information you provide.

4. You write great content. All the above assumes you can write and already have great juicy content on your site. There is always a balance, but you are always better off writing a better article then actively trying to promote your site.

5. Last but not least, network with your fellow bloggers. In the “real world” I have gotten a lot of traction in my efforts because I knew some people that could really help me accomplish what I wanted to do. The old cliche is true. Sometimes it really is who you know. If I somehow got a guest post on Problogger it would probably crash my server. So if you want to get traffic, be a part of the community. Go and find a place to write a guest article like this one. (Maybe Marko will let you guest write here?) Sign up for MyBlogLog and join the communities there. Be a member of Technorati, Twitter, or one of the many other great services out there. You can certainly find me on all of the above, and I have already met some great people on all of the above.

So if you want traffic, links, and subscribers, build your site organically. Do the above and I assure you just about everything else will fall into place.

Jeremy Day can be found @ http://www.insightwriter.com where he writes about how we can use this information overload of our modern society to our advantage. He also writes a blog about blogging @ http://bloginsightwriter.weebly.com Thanks for reading!

1. Akismet :Is a spam filter that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.
2. Ultimate Tag Warrior : Best Tag system for WordPress. You can use categories and tag system on one website which is very cool.
3. Exec-PHP : Execute PHP code in posts or static pages. When this plugin is on you can add php code to static pages or even posts.
4. Google Sitemaps : This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
5. No Ping Wait : Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.
6. PXS Mail Form : Creates a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. It is much more easy to contact with website author.
7. Super Archive : Implements a dynamic archive, the best archives system i know.
8. SRG Clean Archives : Super clean archive. Very simple and useful.
9. WP lightbox 2 : Overlay images on the current page for WordPress. You can turn it on and all images are now working with it.
10. fQuick : Sidenotes, short notes for WordPress. You can place it for example in sidebar.
11. CG-FlashyTitles : Nice graphical flash titles for WP. Very easy to install.
12. flickrRSS : Integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. Show flickr photos on your website.
13. Feedburner Feed Replacement : Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.
14. Gravatars : Adds a nice looking graphic next to the persons comments.
15. Get Recent Comments : Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar or where you want.
16. WP Paginate : Create pagination for pages. It is the best plugin for that makes navigation easy with many static pages.
17. wp-notable : Add social bookmark links such as digg or del.icio.us to each blog entry
18. Adsense-Deluxe : Support for AdSense ads and allows you to add ads to posts.
19. WP-ContactForm : A way for people to contact you without actually emailing you, saves time, and great way to avoid spam.
20. PodPress : Got a podcast? PodPress makes it really easy to post podcasts, also includes an inline media player.
21. Related Posts : Link to related posts on your blog, which is based on the content of the post.
22. WP-Cache : An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.
23. Live Comment Preview: Live Comment Preview Plugin is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site. The preview is generated as the user types the comments.
24. Reply to Comments: This plugin creates a “reply to comment” link for all the comments and allows readers to reply to a comment just below the comment itself.
25. Popular Contest / Top Posts by Category: Popularity contest will help you see which of your posts are most popular and the Top posts plugin displays your top rated posts categorywise based on comments or page views.

Play with Plugins! And Happy Blogging!Which Plugin do you like more?

As a web developer and designer my first reaction was: “AAAAARRRRGGHHH!!!! Not another pain in my but!!!!”. I allready have to design my websites for IE6, IE7, Safari, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 (these are the browsers I optimize my websites for). Now I have to optimize them for Chroma too?!

Well, it’s not all that bad as it seems. I played with Chrome for few hours today and I pretty happy with what Google sent our way. Most of you would like to know if Google Chrome follows all current standards for rendering websites. Short answer, it does. But I did find some minor bugs on some websites while browsing with it. But I’m sure these are just glitches from developers point of view. So far I’m pretty happy how my websites render under this new browser.

What about GUI (graphic user interface)?What makes a good GUI? My answer is simplicity, I think Google really came through when you talk about simplicity and user friendly interface. They removed title bar from the browser and put tabs in there. These little change creates more space for actual browser render window. However I wasn’t to happy about missing home button. I’ve set up Google as home page on all of my browsers and I’ve gotten quite used to it. So needless to say I was kind of shocked why did they remove home button.

Don’t worry. You can add home button to your toolbar simply by going to options menu and check the button “Show Home button in toolbar” (I’m translating this text from Slovenian version, it might be a bit different in English version). Anyway, the home button appears in toolbar as it should be. I was trying to figure out, why Google removed it, I guess they just want us to start using address bar as search engine since this is one of the options now. You don’t have to type only web addresses in the address bar. You can type in simple search query and you’ll be redirected to Google search results.

Another great move from Google in my opinion is the alert you receive when you first start the browser. It asks you if you want to make Google your primary search engine. All other browsers makes this choice for you (kreh…IE….kreh). It’s nice to have a choice in my opinion.

Anyway I would really like to hear your opinion about this new browser. What do you like or disslike about it. Do you think it will become popular enough?

Entering the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest is super simple!

• For one (1) contest entry - just reply to this post with a comment. Only one comment per person will be counted.
• For five (5) contest entries - write a blog post about the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest and link back to this post. If your blog post does not appear under the “Pingbacks,” leave a comment with a URL to the post.

The winner will be randomly chosen Monday, September 1st, 2008. We will draw the winner via streaming video from the UBD office.

Here are some rules and dates.

• The contest runs from 12:00AM PST Friday, August 22nd, 2008 to 11:59PM Sunday, August 31, 2008.
• Winners will be chosen Monday, September 1, 2008 through a random drawing.
• Only one (1) comment entry per person and one (1) blog entry per person. The total number of entries any person can receive is six (6) entries.
• Prizes include (1) grand prize of an Apple iPod Touch 8GB ($299 value) and three (3) copies of our new UBD Citrus WordPress Theme ($99 value) - coming next week.
• Contest is open to everyone world-wide.

Good luck to everyone and may the best man win

Beautiful templates

I know many websites that offer great templates but buytemplates.net got me with some original custom web designs. I purchased one of them and quickly set it up. It was just to easy Well, to be fair I have to say I had a little problem with the template but their online support managed to solved it pretty quickly.

Template features

So what kind of templates are they offering? You can find templates features on their website, but here are just some of them:

• Five page templates (homepage and five internal pages)
• Affordable at only $29
• Template membership package giving access to 1000’s of templates at a one time pay
• Flash and Joomla templates
• Great for web designers
• Live chat support 24 hours
• Other services that we offer
• Complete customization of template (design customization and content insertion)
• Custom web design service
• Adding functionalities for ecommerce site (Adding forms, Adding databases, adding shopping carts etc.)
• Hosting

As you can see, buytemplates.net offers more than just templates. They try to provide the whole package. Anyhoo, visit their website and check the gallery of interesting templates. You’ll surly find one for your needs.

Before we go in to dedicated web hosting we have to spill the benefits of shared web hosting which is a common web hosting alternative. What web hosts basically offer is web servers, hence storage and bandwidth. Naturally most web hosts try to stand out from competition by adding more services and offers for their customers. But what it comes down to is an online business that purchases servers and let people rent the server space for a monthly fee. And since internet is expanding every day, with more and more websites, concerning hobbies as well as business, are launched every hour web hosting looks to become a quite lucrative business.

Everybody Shared The Costs – Shared Web Hosting

To summarize the current situation of web hosting we could safely establish that there is a strong demand of web hosting and many different needs to fill. What web hosting costs and how much you can get are two very common variables when choosing a web host. And so web hosts offer shared web hosting. This basically means that rather than only one customer per server many hundreds, sometimes thousands, of web host clients share the server. In contrary to dedicated hosting, shared hosting divides everything amongst the server’s users. And since nobody really likes sharing this option might seem discouraging but before you make up your mind, let’s consider some advantages with share web hosting.

First of all, the price is dramatically lower for shared web hosts clients and this does not have to mean a lower standard of quality. Serious web hosting businesses make sure that the shared web server still delivers what its clients need. Of course you’ll not get as much freedom, space nor bandwidth since you are sharing it with others. But if you have a website of average size and a normal amount of traffic this should not be a concern. The advantage still stands; the fact that you also share all costs that a server generates. This is the cheaper alternative and will satisfy your needs, as long as there are not to demanding.

Need more? – Dedicated hosting

When it’s time to upgrade to a dedicated hosting plan your needs have changed. Your website is drawing more traffic and you’ve had to make adjustments expanding your website further. With a risk of the bandwidth not being enough at the current hosting plan it is time for a hosting plan that is solely dedicated to your website. It is time for dedicated hosting. Depending on what operative system you prefer you can choose e.g. dedicated linux hosting. Linux is a popular operative system often used in web server and is open source based and very flexible. Other alternatives are dedicated windows hosting which has further benefits we won’t get into now.

Dedicated web hosting gives you your own server, its storage space, bandwidth and memory all to yourself. The potential of your website is thus no longer limited from a web hosting point of view. It will cost you more money but you should be able to afford it seeing that your website is growing and more people are visiting. A good way to secure your finances is to expose the steady stream of visitors to advertisement. Online advertisers are often willing to pay good money to advertise on popular websites. A tip is to look further into affiliate marketing. There is a lot of money to be made of affiliate programs and becoming an affiliate for famous businesses and products. A good affiliate website that will give you all information you need about affiliate marketing is AffiliateTips.com.

Your On Your Own

Well not entirely. Your web host company will maintain the shape of your server and often support with back-ups and customer service. But having a dedicated server is a bigger responsibility than being a part of a shared hosting server. It simply demands more knowledge and you might want to consider securing that knowledge before signing up for a dedicated server.

Bottom line

If you’re having a hard time making the decision whether or not to get a dedicated web hosting plan we’ll make it easy for you. A website that is constantly expanding and generating a lot of traffic simply needs a dedicated server in order to maintain online. There’s no idea to beat around the bush and try to find cheaper alternatives. Go with the safest and most secure option and it will benefit your finances. No doubt about it!

I finally got this blog online. I had a lot of problems with transferring the database. I almost lost all of my posts. The blog was updated to a newest wordpress version and that’s where the problems started.

I know you’ll stumble on some errors while browsing this blog, but I hope I’ll be able to fix them as soon as possible. For now, I managed to put all posts back, but there’s still a lot of stuff to do.

I plan to publish some great new content in upcoming weeks, so stay tunned.

Update: I would appreciate if you could post comments here about errors you find on the blog (missing pictures, content,…)

Best regards-

Marko