Have you got a copy of the ProBlogger book yet?

I’ve been overwhelmed by the numbers of people who have emailed, Tweeted and IM’d to say that they got one. A few people have even sent me pictures of them with the book. Thank you to everyone for buying the book and for your excitement about it!

What I thought might be fun is to have a little ‘project’. Here’s how it’ll work:

1. If you have a copy of the book - take a picture of yourself with it and post the picture somewhere (on your blog, flickr, zoomr or some other image hosting site).
2. Then leave a link to the picture in comments below. Also include your blog’s link in the URL field so I can link back to your blog.
3. If you’d also like to leave a one line comment about the book that’d be great. Chris and I are hoping to use some of these on the book site in the ‘quote’ section.

I’ll collect all of the pictures up at the end of the week and make some sort of a collage of them. If more come in after that week I’ll do another one later (so there’s still time to order and be included).

I’d love to see people getting creative with their pics. Show us where you read ProBlogger (I can imagine where some of those shots will be taken)!

Prize - as a little incentive, I’ll be choosing my three favorites to win a free book from Amazon. I’d offer a free copy of the ProBlogger book but to win one you’d have to own it already. You can always select to receive another copy to giveaway on your blog but I’ll let you choose any book to the value of $20.

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15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.

This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.

• GMail: Without a doubt my one most used tools online. I returned to GMail a few years ago and cannot imagine my life without it. Add other services such as Google Reader and Google (outside of google search, without which I would be completely lost, at least for a few days) is indispensable to me.
• WordPress: I would pay for it undoubtably, but I think the allure would be gone if I had to pay. Whenever I think WordPress, I think GPL and Open Source and I just cannot imagine the two apart.
• Firefox: This was a tough one. I would pay for it, but look at #2. I would however, be willing to pay for the Web Developer Toolbar extension, the colorpicker extension and a few others that I use everyday.
• Akismet: I do pay for Akismet. The service has caught 3,263,951 spam on this blog since I first installed it.
• SlickDeals: I am an addict. If I had to pay to be a member, within reason, I would pay for it.
• StatCounter: Their free service is great, but if they started charging for their basic service, the switching cost of years of accumulated data would force me to pay.
• Techmeme: Nominal, yearly charges would be fine by me, especially if it removed those sponsored posts. I use it too often.
• Skype: Again, nominal yearly charges would be acceptable for the basic PC to PC calling. I already keep my account topped off for when I call international phones once in a while.
• Craigslist: If I had to pay a small fee for the listings, if the charge was only initiated for items that are sold (which I understand would be hard to monitor), I would pay for it. Craigslist is a much better place to buy and sell everyday used items than eBay and I have made better deals via Craigslist than any other online selling venue.
• Woopra: I am getting addicted to the Woopra fever. As I have expressed in the past to JohnP, Elie and others, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for it.
• Various WordPress Plugins: I have paid and have dontated to the developers of various WordPress plugins that I find extremely useful and which have become completely indispensable after I have installed them and used them. They include OIOPublisher, Ozh’s Who Sees Ads, Mark’s Subscribe to Comments etc.
• Feedburner: Now another Google service but Feedburner reduces the traffic load from feed readers and I would have paid for the service if it were not free.

What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

Since the 2.x release of WordPress, the blogging platform has more and more been praised because of its versatility. Obviously, WordPress is mostly known as a blog platform, but depending on your creativity, you can do much more with the very flexible platform.

No limits are set and over the next weeks we will dig a little deeper into some of the ways WordPress can be used, helping you with the (coding) basics to use WP as more than a blogging platform. For now I will list the different options WP can be used for. This list is not limited.

Blogging Platform

Blogging obviously is the main usage of WordPress.

Photoblog

Because it is very simple to upload images with WordPress soon users started to regularly post photos, using WordPress as a photoblog. Until the release of WP2.5 photobloggers had to use the custom fields to upload thumbnails for the archive or to create a filmstrip in the footer. With the new media uploader in WP2.5 this is not longer needed. WP now automatically generates a medium sized and a small thumbnail. Thumbnail sizes can be specified in the settings and used for the archives display or a filmstrip.

There aren’t many photolog themes for Wp and even less generate the photolog feeling with only one picture on the mainpage and a click on the picture goes to the previous entry. With the arrival of the Monotone Photolog Theme for WordPress theming in this area soon make become more popular. AFAIK Monotone officially is only released for WordPress.com, but can be retrieved from the SVN Directory.

Tumblelog

Tumblr is a popular platform, perfect for quick blogging items people stumble upon. I mentioned in my previous entry that Chyrp a great self-hosted platform is for your own tumblog (?!), but also WordPress can be used as tumble-engine.

Using WordPress as a tumblelog is not difficult: there are several themes to make your Wp blog more tumblr-alike and there’s even a Quick Post plugin for WordPress, providing the blogger with bookmarklets to easily submit content to their WordPress powered tumblelog.

Start tumbling with WP in the true self-hosted spirit!

Magazine

Since several months there has been a rise in the number of premium themes for WordPress, many of them focusing on providing a newspaper, magazine alike look for WordPress

Revolution by Brian Gardner was one of the first really popular ones, together with Mimbo, which initially was released under the GPL and later evolved into a Mimbo Pro version, with custom image uploader.

Magazine themes for WordPress rely heavily on the usage of Custom Fields and Conditional Tags.
Most magazine themes have featured posts, use many thumbnail images on the main page and display recent entries from different categories. The success of a magazine theme IMHO heavily relies on the quality of the top navigation bar.

Online Shop

The real success of WordPress isn’t just the blog platform software, but the whole community around. And the great plugins. WP-eCommerce is one of the more extensive plugins, powering a complete online store front-end, based on WordPress. The competition in the eCommerce area is heavy with options such as the hosted Shopify platform or the well-known open-source osCommerce software., but when it comes to ease of use and features the WP-eCommerce plugin can compete with all of them and according to the plugin homepage even powers more shops than osCommerce does.

Contact Manager and Customer Relation Management

Both Design Intelliction’s WP-Contact Manager and Slipfire’s WP-CRM plugins prove that there really aren’t any limits to WordPress’s versatility.

WP-Contact Manager is a theme for WordPress using several plugins, Wp-CRM is a full-blown plugin, inspired by WP-Contact Contact Manager and 37Signals’s Highrise.

With both options it is easy to maintain, publish your contact list online.

Twitter Platform

The excellent Prologue theme for WP offer every blogger a Twitter alike platform:… without the 140 characters limitation.

Use it for your company, with your friends or just for fun!
The theme is slick, fast loading and depending on what you tweet… fun! Prologue even allows comments. I reckon FriendFeed Comments is the perfect addition to this theme.

Other Usage Options

As shown so far, there really are no limits set to the way Wp can be used. I use this blogging platform as a personal wiki, tumbling interesting topics. Other bloggers, developers use WordPress as a CMS, although it isn’t entirely clear to me what Content Management System really means in this matter. Smarter navigaition? *Nuke alike left sidebar or is every blog per se a CMS?

I am sure with time more and more ways to use WordPress will appear.

Franky writes in his free time at iFranky and can be followed on twitter. Be warned, his twitter account is heavily G&T powered!

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Getting creative is part of our job. Whatever project we are working on, at some point we need to come up with some nice starting point — some fresh idea which we could explore further, build upon and refine until we have a polished, perfect result. Although having an idea is at least as important as implementing it properly, without inspiration and innovation you just can’t get anything done.

And this is where it sometimes gets messy. In fact, drawing inspiration is not as easy as we used to think of it. Inspiration is not just observing something, analyze it and implement it in one or another way in your work. Inspiration is much more: there is a fine line between inspiration and imitation which is easy to cross and as easy to mix up.

Inspiration means captivate an idea and develop it further. Imitation means identify an idea and use it. As a professional when getting creative, you need to make sure that you pick the right path to follow.

Noell Hyman draws inspiration from magazines; stick-it-notes contain some ideas she might want to work upon later.

So how do you actually come up with new ideas (apart from reading Smashing Magazine, of course)? Where do you draw inspiration from? Do you have some bulletproof approaches against creativity blocks?

We would like to hear your opinion. Let us know in the comments!

Where do you draw inspiration from?
( polls)

Last week in my 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence post John suggested that an additional strategy to grow your follower numbers in Twitter is to target bigger Twitter users for conversation.

The logic behind this is that if you can get them to reply to you and even have a multiple part conversation with you then you increase the chances of some of their followers following you also.

This is actually a strategy that works very well - however I didn’t include it in my previous post because it can also be a little risky and lead to two main problems as far as I can see.

Let me explain the risk of TweetBaiting

1. TweetStalking - The first problem with TweetBaiting a bigger Twitter user is the danger of putting them offside. I’ve had a few people target me for this type of thing in a way that I’ve found particularly annoying.

I do enjoy people engaging with me genuinely and attempt to reply to people but when it becomes more of a TweetStalking thing I tend to block people. I’ve even been tempted to call them out for it publicly (something I’ve seen others do). If you engage in spammy/annoying tactics in any medium you need to be prepared for the consequences.

The take home lesson is to engage Twitter users whether they be big or small in a way that adds value to their lives, is genuine and on topics that they’ll be interested in. If you do this you’ll find most are happy to engage in conversation.

2. Unfocused Followers - The other more subtle problem is that you can end up with followers who are less interested in what you’ve got to say. I’m going to talk more about this later in the post but I personally would prefer 500 followers who shared my interests and were focussed upon the things I talk about than 5000 followers who don’t really like what I’m talking about.

For example, lets just say I successfully TweetBaited Heather Armstrong from Dooce. Heather has 9111 followers at the moment so she’d be logical to attempt to engage in conversation however if you look over her Tweets they cover a real range of topics - just like her blog. As a result she’s attracted a followership who are interested in what she’s wearing, how much she pays for bourbon and what songs she hears on the radio. Now I personally enjoy Heather’s tweets and do follow her - however I’m not sure that her readers would necessarily be interested in my tweets on blogging, social media etc.

Sure there will be some overlap - but if you’re looking to effectively use Twitter to grow your profile in a niche then if you’re going to do a little TweetBaiting then you’ll want to target those you ‘bait’ carefully and preferably find those who would have a similarly focused group of followers to you.

Take Home Advice about TweetBaiting

While interacting with larger Twitter users can accelerate the growth of your own Twitter follower numbers it is something to approach with caution. I’ve never strategically done this. While I occasionally interact with a few of the bigger Twitter users I’ve only done it when it’s natural, on topic etc (as I would with any Twitter user). My advice would be just to use Twitter in a natural way. Interact with lots of Twitter users (big and small) and you’ll find that as you do your follower numbers will continue to grow.Have you TweetBaited anyone? Did it work? What would you add to my advice?

PS: there’s another type of TweetBaiting that I’ve seen also. It’s where you ‘bait’ interactions with other Twitter users based upon…. well getting them angry, personal attack, insulting people etc. Of course the risk associated with this is looking like a complete fool and/or getting blocked by those you go after.

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Here at WeblogToolsCollection, we see quite a bit of WordPress theme releases coming through our inbox and I’ve noticed a trend. Hardly any of them include printing support. The question I’d like to have answered is why? Is adding printer support to WordPress themes too hard? Does adding this feature take up time? Or is it that this feature is barely any use to anyone?

For those wanting to add this type of support to your theme, you can install WP-Print. WP-Print picks up where most theme authors have left off by providing printing support in such a way that end users can print either articles or comments, depending on how you have configured the plugin.

In fact, doing a search on the plugin database for the keyword of “print” brought up two pages worth of search results. Another solution for you theme authors out there is called Bunny’s Print CSS. This plugin provides two files, print-css.php which is the plugin file and print.css which is the print stylesheet.

A link to the print stylesheet will be placed in your theme’s header, providing it uses the wp_head() function/hook. An admin panel is added to the Presentations menu and it will allow you to edit the stylesheet if you make print.css writeable. You probably want to edit the stylesheet provided to your liking, though it will hopefully do most of the job if your theme is sandbox-based.

This method takes most of the hard work out of creating a print.css file, even though theme authors would most likely have to modify the stylesheet to make it compatible with their theme.

For those who would like to manually create the style sheet, there is an article on the Codex entitled “Styling For Print” which covers all of the basics necessary to make a pretty, yet functional print stylesheet to include with your theme/themes.

I hope that by linking to the Codex article and bringing this issue to light, we will start to see more themes being released with built in printing support. It’s not a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather see themes that support this feature than those that don’t. My personal opinion is that, printing support is a nice finishing touch to round off any theme, and having it built in allows me and a number of other users to stop using another plugin.

Now it’s time for you to sound off. Is this a trivial issue, or is there anyone else out there that would like to see this feature in more themes?

Are you a serious domainer who is looking to sell or buy quality short domains? BQB.com has just launched an eBay style auction website where you can buy and sell short domain names (6 letters or less).

Win My Sony Cybershot Digital Camera!

To promote the launch of BQB.com I am giving away this digital camera.

For a chance to win… simply register at BQB.com and type in “DotSauce” in the “Referred By” text area. After you sign up, post a comment here with your username. That’s it!

Just let them know we sent you and you are instantly qualified to win a Sony Cybershot Digital Camera.

Again.. to be entered to win this digital camera you need to:

1. Sign up to join BQB.com for free!
2. Enter “DotSauce” into the “Referred By” text area.
3. Leave a comment on this post.

The winner will be chosen at random. End date yet to be determined! BQB.com is looking to have 1000 members join and we want to help them reach their goal. This post will be updated with more details and possibly more prizes as the BQB Marketplace continues to grow.

This article is from DotSauce Magazine - The Domain Industry’s HOTTEST Publication!

BQB Domain Marketplace Contest: Win My Sony Digital Camera!

Today I was reading the Mozilla Developer News blog and I saw that they are done with the Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 source code. They should put the RC1 version available for public download later this month, so hopefully the final version will come up in June.

I am a Firefox fan. Not a faith based one, but a rational one. I tried most browsers out there, including all the versions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Flock and Konqueror. Some were as fast as Firefox, but none had as many plugins and add-on.

Truth be told, I do have some memory leak problems with Firefox 2, resulting in frozen screens once in a while. But it looks like they manage to fix it in the third version of the software.

Anyway all this browser thinking got me curious about what browser you guys use. I know that many of you will need to use more than for work purposes (cross browser testing, Internet Explorer applications, etc), but what is your favorite browser for surfing the web, blogging and similar? Below you will find a poll, but feel free to drop a comment explaining why you like a certain browser over the other as well.

Sponsor: Monetize your traffic! Join Neverblue Ads and access 1000’s of high quality, high converting offers.

Here’s another question from webspear for some discussion:

“How do you keep yourself motivated, when your blog is not attracting much traffic.”

Staying motivated is a massive issue for bloggers. Without it a blog really suffers.

How do you keep yourself motivated? Do you have systems or practices that help you? I hope this discussion will be helpful to us all as blogger apathy, burnout or bloggers block is something most of us go through at one time or another!

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