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.

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!

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!

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

I reckon ever since my famous post on why I will no longer link on A list blogs people are starting to realize how important my commentators are to me. I’ve actually done a whole heap of posts on the importance of commenting, inluding, Do You Want More People Commenting On Your Blog, Commentators, How Do I Reward Thee, Let Me Count The Ways and I’ve even done a post on the importance of Commenting Etiquette.

Those were just a few of the many posts that I’ve written on how important it is to not only get comments to your blog, but also how to treat those very special people who take the time to leave a comment.

The trouble is that not everyone is getting as many comments as they would like and this post will expose the top 7 reasons why people are not returning to comment on your blog.

1. Your Blog Sucks: Sorry, but if you’re not going to spend the time going over your posts to make sure that it’s concise, makes sense to the average reader and is free of grammatical errors then people are’t going to comment. What’s that, you have comments? Then you are a dofollow blog and they’re only there for the link juice.
2. You’re Not Comment Friendly: This applies to all those people who insist on having those impossible to read Captcha plugins. This also includes those people that insist you have to log in to leave a comment. Honestly if your content isn’t up to par do you honestly think people will jump hoops just to leave a comment.
3. You Insist On Having A Blogger Blog: Ever since my post on why I Don’t Comment On Blogger Blogs I’ve discovered I’m not the only person who feels that way. If you have a blogger blog with lots of comments, imagine how much better you could do if you had a REAL blog? Don’t believe me, as some of those bloggers like Ching Ya who have made the move.
4. You Don’t Reply To Comments:  Who the hell do you think you are, some snotty nosed A lister that you expect people to comment on your blog and yet you won’t take the time to reply to their comments. People love interaction and if you’re not giving them that don’t expect them to come back.
5. You’ve Given Them Too Much Information: There are some blogs that I’ve read that are so long and tedious covering every point imaginable, that by the time I’ve finished reading it, if I haven’t dropped off to sleep, I’m too damn tired to leave a comment, even if there was something left for me to comment on. Honestly, it’s a whole lot better to leave your post open so that people have an opportunity to comment. In essence a there are times when less is best.
6. You Don’t Use A Subscribe To Comment Plugin: Come on guys, wake up and smell the cyber roses. People are so busy commenting on other people’s blogs you don’t honestly believe that they are going to remember which blogs they’ve left a comment on? This plugin is a must as it will enable commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of any subsequent comment. A plugin of this sort is absolutely essential. I actually use the WP Threaded Comment plugin which allows you to edit the message sent to those who have left a comment.
7. I’ll leave this one up to you:  What do you think is keeping people away from some blogs, or what keeps you away?

So, what do you think? How many of these apply to you, and if they do what are you going to do about it?

  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!

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

I would like to thank Rose for her post Christmas Holiday Themes For Wordpress, as it motivated me into giving WassupBlog a Christmas theme. This would be my third theme modification, as I’ve already made one for Easter and Halloween. Naturally, the FlexSqueeze theme makes it all so easy that I actually look forward to playing around with it to blend it in with the holiday seasons.

The first thing I had to do was to find a suitable header. I finally decided to borrow one from another theme as I felt it set the right mood. Then I reduced the width of the blog so that it would display the Santa image that I chose for the background.

Adding An Image To Comment Box

I thought it would be pretty cool if I could jazz up the comment box a little by adding some snowflakes so I had a little look at the CSS file to see what I could do. For those of you who were wise enough to purchase the FlexSqueeze theme I thought you might like to know how I did it.

You will need to edit the ’style.css’ file and I strongly urge you to make a backup before playing around with it.

First find the following lines;

#commentform input, #commentform textarea {
padding:5px;

Below that add the following;

background: url(images/bg-snowflakes5.gif);

Substitute ‘bg-snowflakes5.gif’ for whatever file you want to use as your background, remembering that the file has to be uploaded first in order for it to work. This is a cinch using the upload feature that comes with FlexSqueeze!  I suggest you use a very light colored file otherwise people will not be able to see what they are typing.

Adding An Image To Your Post Background

To add to the Christmas look of the blog I decided to change the background of the post area, and for this I chose a lovely snow scene. If you would like to do something similar to your blog then once again you will need to add a little bit of code to your ’style.css’ file.

Find the following lines;

#content {
width:935px;
position:relative;
float:left;

Just below that enter the following line.

background: url(images/bg-snow-scene.jpg);

Once again substitute ‘bg-snow-scene.jpg’ by the image you’ve selected.

It is important to remember that these modifications to the ’style.css’ file of this  theme will most likely not work on your theme. These modifications can still be done on most themes but you will have to find the right areas that need to be changed.

Apart from these style.css changes all other changes were done via FlexSqueeze’s option page.  The images were all obtained from Free Web Images And Clipart , except for the header which I got from leadcamp.com.

Oh, one last thing. In case you are wondering how I got it to snow, it was by using the Let It Snow plugin.

EDIT: I’ve deactivated the plugin as I noticed it caused a bit of drain on the CPU, and possible made the blog somewhat slower. Even so, I reckon the blog may still remind people of Christmas.

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!

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

Most of you who know me and have read my posts know how I’m always stipulating the importance of hosting your own blog. Knowing this you are probably wondering why this post is promoting Andy Bailey’s Comluv Network?

In case you’re wondering, the  Comluv Network is another of Andy’s projects, and like all of his projects he has his commentluv members in mind. If you are one of the smart ones who has already joined the movement and registered your blogs then you can also have your own commentluv blog. Why would you want to do so? Well here are a few reasons for giving it a go.

1. You have a Wordpress blog that is ready to go that is not using any of your own resources
2. It gives you another link to all your blogs and sites via the blogroll
3. Already commentluv enabled.
4. Increased exposure, by highlighting certain topics via this new avenue
5. Your helping Andy out which is the least we can do considering all that he has done for us ;)
6. Adsense enabled so you can earn as you blog

Anyway, considering it’s free I figure I would give it a whirl and so I have started yet another blog, Top Software Online! Man am I a glutton for punishment LOL.

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!

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!