I did a post not all that long ago that’s turned out to be one of my top ten posts. I conducted a poll on that post in order to find out whether or not Disqus was actually stopping people from commenting on blogs. To date I’ve had 105 people vote. The question asked was Have You Refrained From Commenting Because It Was A Disqus Blog? to which 55 (52%) replied no and 50 (48%) replied yes.

I find that quite staggering. You can almost say that there is a 50/50 chance that people are not commenting on a Disqus blog. So, if you’re starved of comments at the moment and you’re running Disqus, then perhaps you should rethink your choice of commenting system.

Some like DiTesco commented that they voted no, not because he liked Disqus, but because,

there are too many blogs that I like and belong to friends that are Disqus powered and I am taking that extra mile to comment.

Unfortunately not everyone is willing to go that extra mile. There were a lot more comments that you may find interesting, both for and against, but when you consider those results I’m glad that I decided against Disqus and stuck with the one that comes with WordPress.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

In my last post I talked about some measures that I’ve taken to speed up my WordPress blog and while this is something I have to do every now and again I’m lucky enough not to have to worry about my PC. I used to worry about it some time back when I used to take ages deleting old files and stuff in order to get the old gal to go a little faster but now I’ve got a little utility to do it for me.

The program I use is called TuneUp Utilities and I’ve set it up to scan my computer every Friday. So, every Friday at 5.15 pm it searches the hard drive and corrects any registry problems, removes invalid shortcuts, frees up disk space and optimizes hard disk performance.  As you can see from the following image of the start page although my PC is fully optimized I have one problem that threatens my overall computer health. Clicking on the link tells me that I haven’t checked the hard drive for errors over the last three months and that I should check it for errors using Tuneup Disk Doctor which it’s now doing as I write this post.

I admit it, I’ve been slack because although it does a rudimentary cleanup of the system during it’s weekly checkup I do need to manually optimize it occasionally just so as to make sure it doesn’t delete files that I still need.

What I like most about it is it’s ease of use as everything works at a click of the mouse and whenever it comes across a problem it tells me clearly what it is and gives me a selection of solutions that will resolve the problem that is easy to follow. Just as an example, as part of the optimization process it presented me with a list of programs that were rarely used and upon my order removed them from the computer. A whole lot easier than going through the ‘Add Remove Programs’ Windows option.

So, just to summarize here are some of the tasks that TuneUp Utilities will do for you.

• Secure data protection
• Reliable data recovery
• Dependable registry cleaning
• User friendly controls
• Simple and thorough 1-click maintenance
• Individual Windows styling

If your computer isn’t running at it’s optimum level perhaps it’s time you tackled the problem by utilizing TuneUp Utilities arsenal and what better way than by making use of their free trial offer.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

As far as blogging platforms go I reckon that WordPress has to the the best freaking platform on the planet. If that wasn’t enough for the average run of the mill blogger then the variety and quality of plugins available for WordPress makes it even better!

If I was to compare it to anything I would say that plugins do the same job for a WordPress blog that a turbo charger or any other number of accessories under the hood do for a high performance car.

When looking for a plugin it has to fulfill at least one of three criteria.

1. Make Life Easier: Let’s face it, blogging is a grueling thankless task that can take so much time out of your life that you barely have time to make love to your prospective other.
2. Rewarding Commentators: There are many plugins that do this ranging from commentluv to dofollow and many plugins in between.
3. Make Life Easier For The Visitor: This could include plugins that make it easier for someone to Tweet a post or perhaps it could allow them to leave a link in the comment without having to know html

Before even considering installing a plugin I make sure that it’s able to fulfill at least one of the above conditions. This brings me to OnlyWire for WordPress, a plugin that allows my visitors to select from one of up to twenty social networking sites. Now, I’ve seen several blogs that have four or five buttons at the  top of each post, but let’s face it guys, you gotta admit that does look a little tacky, not to mention rather limiting.

Let’s say you were going to consider OnlyWire for WordPress you would definitely want it to be better than what you already have now wouldn’t you. If you were to scroll down to the bottom of this post you would see the following button.

There are other buttons to choose from but I chose this particular one because it appealed to me. But it doesn’t stop there because if you were to hover your mouse pointer over that button you would get a little surprise, a surprise that would look like this.

Check it out, not one, not two, not even three but up to 20 different social networking sites for them to choose from. How freaking great is that? The actual amount depends on how many of those sites you have configured the plugin to show, but it gets even better and is the number one reason why you should consider installing this plugin. Once installed and you publish a post it will automatically submit that post to every one of those social networking sites.

Some service like Digg may require you to submit a captcha code to finalize a submission but that’s a small price to pay for what this plugin provides. The easiest way to install the plugin is to use WP’s very own ‘Add New’ feature in the plugin menu, just do a search for OnlyWire for WordPress and select the one from OnlyWire Engineering.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been getting some tweets, emails and comments on my blogs as to the difference between Flexibility and the FlexSqueeze theme. For those of you who don’t know, Flexibility is the free version of FlexSqueeze.

Anyway, I’ve been mistakenly telling everyone that it’s basically the same and that the only difference was that you could replace the codes in the footer with your own.  

How stupid am I, there’s got to be a lot more to FlexSqueeze than that otherwise why would you want to upgrade to the full version? In my defense it’s been a long time since I’ve upgraded and I’m so used to FlexSqueeze I’d forgotten what the differences were.

Some of the differences include some

major theme enhancements such as custom search box text, more flexible tag and category options, more font style choices, enhanced sub sidebar widget code, built in pagination navigation, new theme skins and much more!

There is also one other major difference, the ability to build your own squeeze pages. Personally I’m not sure that I would ever use one but it’s nice knowing it’s there in case I ever change my mind. Even so, I was wandering if I could use it’s capabilities to design a sales page for my online stores.

This is what my shopping page used to look like.

Yeah, pretty boring right? Well now let’s have a look at Sire’s new Shopping Mall. I don’t know about you but I reckon that is a remarkable improvement, and the whole thing was done in WordPress’ own HTML editor.  I haven’t even used the options available in the FlexSqueeze Theme Option Section. That would enable me to change the width, header, font color, background image, well I think you get the general idea.

While I’m still going to play around with that page when I get more time, before I leave I would like to mention one other very important feature of having your very own FlexSqueeze theme and that is it makes you money. To date it has been my number one income earner. That’s not at all surprising when you consider people can see how excited I am about the product.

So, now you all know the difference between the two themes.

Edit: FlexSqueeze has just received an update which makes it even easier and more versatile. I’ve written a post about it which you can read here.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

I’ve noticed lately that quite a few people have been doing weekly updates of what they’ve found interesting while surfing the net. Someone who is quite proficient at this is Kristi of Kikolani with her weekly Fetching Friday posts. She calls it her resources mashup and features the best articles that she’s stumbled throughout the week. Kristi will normally break them up into categories and each link is the title of the post.

Then there is Ditesco’s Weekly Echo, where he also does a weekly round up of blog posts that he’s found to be interesting, fun or informative. I feel that the reasons for doing these weekly posts goes beyond the valuable link luv that the bloggers have extended to those whose posts they’ve enjoyed so much. It’s also a great way to share those same articles with their readers, articles that they feel the readers may well miss out on were it not for their weekly posts. These posts take a lot of commitment and dedication because, if done properly, they would take quite a bit of time to put together.

If I was going to tackle something of this nature I would want to do it in such a way that it minimizes the time and workload needed to write a post that is full of good articles and not just a pile of crappy links. If it was all too hard I would probably get sick of the whole process within a couple of weeks.  I would also want my posts to stand out from all the other weekly compilations.

So the question I asked myself is what is the most efficient way to put one of these posts together? What I plan to do from now on is to have WordPress open as I go around blog hopping. Every time I come across a unique post that I think my readers will appreciate I will make an entry giving a link and a short description of the post. Naturally you will save the post as a draft ready for the following day.

By the end of the week the post is almost complete and all that is required would be putting the links into categories if so desired, and short introduction and conclusion. I reckon this is a whole lot better than waiting to the end of the week to write it, where you spend most of your time scratching your head as to what posts you liked and where the hell to find them again.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!