The above is a nice and cute theme, right? That’s the Birdie theme.

Are you using the Birdie blog theme made by Gis? If you still remember, I did mention 4 Birdie blog template in the list of 22 Beautiful New Blogger Template. Now, Gis, the creator of such beautiful themes, is running a great contest for those who use the Birdie theme.

Image courtesy of Gis

Love Gis’ artwork? Now you have the chance to win a custom header done by Gis for your blog! To enter the contest is very easy. All you need to do is, leave a comment here with a link to your blog (that uses Gis’ template) and subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates.

And if you are the lucky one, you will win yourself a custom header! Good luck!

Tags: blog contest

With the green awareness round, there are lots of ways which we can echo the green environmental issue. Literally, we can also make our blog a “green blog” by using nature theme. I found the nature theme soothing for the eye.

Below is a collection of nature theme for WordPress platform. Downloads are available.

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Tags: theme, Wordpress

Sometimes when I visit some blogs, I encounter the problem of “long” home page (index of the blog). Which means I have to scroll a long way down from the top of the home page before reaching the bottom of the home page. First impression wise, the outcome of such long home page giving the audience a very “imbalance” feel of the entire page layout, in other words, “ugly”.

The “long” home page phenomenon occurs when:

(1) Too many long posts appear on the first page.

(2) Too many widgets along the sidebar.

Such problems can be solved by implementing suitable blog theme / template and arrangement of the blog contents.

For long sidebar content, keep only the essential widgets as too many widgets can also affect the loading speed of your blog. If you must include all the existing widgets that make your home page “long”, it’s time for you to pick another blog theme / template. For instance, switching from 2 columns layout to 3 columns.

For long posts, you can set the number of posts to be displayed in the front page, say 5 to 7 posts per page. Another method is to use the “Read More” or “Click to continue” feature. [...more]

I always encourage everyone to get site updates via the RSS reader. As a blog reader, you can save up a lot of time and just sit down in front of your feed reader, let it grab all the latest updates of your favorite blogs/websites. As a blogger, you can let the RSS feature send updates automatically to your subscribers, keep them up-to-date with your blog.

Now, how are you going to impress your reader to subscribe to your feed (RSS)? Make your RSS icon as attractive as possible, make it obvious to your readers. Sometimes, I find not so straight forward to locate a blog’s feed. Once, I wanted to subscribe to a blog but it really took me few minutes to look for the orange RSS icon.

There are plenty of RSS icons available for downloads. Here is a collection of great RSS icons that I found from the Internet.

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Tags: feed, icon, rss

If you have your own domain, most likely you will have to deal with uploading files to your host. Using control panel such as CPanel, DirectAdmin, etc is going to be tedious if you have plenty of files to upload. For instance, uploading new release of WordPress.org package or plugins. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) will be a better choice in this case. You can install any FTP software like Filezilla, CuteFTP and many more.

If you don’t wish to download any FTP program and want to use a web-base FTP instead, you can install FireFTP. FireFTP is a free FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. Means, you will have to use Mozilla Firefox browser.

Note: The current FireFTP version is not supported in Firefox 3 yet, by the time I’m writing this.

This post will guide you on how to use FireFTP to transfer files to your host. First go to FireFTP Firefox Add-on site to install FireFTP. Click on the “Add to Firefox”.

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Tags: ftp