I was really frustrated when this happened to my personal blog.

It looked so ugly and unattractive. And this somehow affected my mood on updating my blog!! I’ve been searching for solutions for days. I finally found a solution that works for me and thought I would like to share it here as a reference for those who encounter similar problem like me.

WordPress theme which has the thumbnail feature, is using the TimThumb script. Most commonly renamed as thumb.php in the theme folder. To solve this problem of thumbnail not showing up, all you have to do is to access your FTP, browse to your wp-content folder, change the mode to 755. (aka chmod 755) Also change the mode to 755 for the thumb.php (depends on how the author of the theme name it).

Voila~ Thumbnails are up and ready!

Enjoy.

[ Source ]

It’s beautiful, fast and flexible! The best thing is – version 2.7 allows you to upgrade your WordPress blog with the one-click-upgrade feature, like what you have been doing while upgrading plugins in the previous version.

I’m going to upgrade all my blogs to WordPress 2.7 now.

Download the latest WordPress version here.

This is a very simple plugin for all WordPress blogs! Unlike the traditional Javascript snowflake , all you need to do is:

1. Download the Let It Snow plugin.
2. Upload the let-it-snow folder and its contents to your blog’s plugin folder (wp-content/plugins).
3. Activate this plugin and you’re done!

If you encounter any problems, click here for support.

If you are using Blogger (blogspot) classic template, perhaps you would like to read this for adding Javascript snowflake to your blog.

Let your blog snows, spread the Christmas feel and have a great holiday season. ^^

A lot of people think that starting a blog can earn money easily and almost immediately. This is a wrong mindset. Earning money through blogs is not as easy as it seems. A lot of studies, consideration as well as effort is needed before you can successfully make your first buck online. Nowadays, you can find a lot of money-making blogs which actually “teach” you how to make money online. Most people will be disappointed of the results as they are comparing themselves to the money-making blog authors.

First thing first, if your objective for starting a blog is to make money online, it’s gonna be very tough and probably might fail in the end. This is also a very common advice from almost every problogger or bloggers who make money online.

When is the best time to monetize your blog? In my humble opinion, you can start monetizing your blog when:

• Choose a potential niche for your blog.
• Your blog is at least 3 months old.
• Your blog is active and with an average potential traffic.
• Your blog can attract targeted audience for targeted advertising (depends on your blog’s niche).

Some think that to monetize the blog right from the start is the best. The reason: If you wait until you have traffic, you are risking on chasing readers away when you suddenly introduce ads in your blog which there were none before.

But like what I just mentioned, it is better to let your blog be around for some time in the blogosphere (get indexed, traffic) before putting up ads.  You can start by putting just one ad in the beginning and make sure you do not clutter your blog with full of ads as it may stop your potential readers to revisit your blog in the future. Start experimenting more into monetizing your blog (with more than one advertiser) when your blog traffic grows.

However, do not forget, it takes a lot of time and effort to let your blog grows.

Here is a list of useful articles for further reading on monetizing your blog:

• Can you really make money blogging?
• 10 ways to monetize your blog
• How not to monetize your blog

It seems that my schedule is a bit tight lately. My last update was on the 5th. I should have spent a little more time on weekends to do some scheduled posts.

Have you notice some changes made to Blogging For Novice? All these changes were made after I received a kind blog review from IGTB. (Do you still remember I mentioned about getting your blog reviewed for free?)

Here is a list of suggestion from Raivyn, author of IGTB.

• Moving the list of recent posts up above the tag cloud and perhaps even above the categories.
• The AdSense block could be designed better – matching it to the page (white background and border, blue links, grey/black text) and moving it up a bit (move tag cloud below ad block).
• Tutorials that are a little more ‘meaty’, and expand on some of what has already been presented.

I tried to improve this blog’s visibility base on the suggestion above and I think it turns out even better and more clean and neat comparing to the previous setting. (Thanks, Raivyn!) And for the content improvement part, I will have to spend more time reading and of course, to spend time writing them. As for the time constraint now, I’m unable to come up with any ‘meaty’ tutorials.

By the way, today (26th November) is Blogging For Novice’s one year anniversary. Oh wow! Time flashes!! As this is my secondary blog, I am not able to update it as frequently as my personal blog. Since, it’s a one year anniversary, I would love to make more improvement. I’m open for any suggestions as i believe Blogging For Novice still have room for improvement. Your comment(s) will be most appreciated. ^_^

Another thing that every blogger or webmaster must take note is the expiry date of the domain. A week earlier, I have contacted my host and renew the domain ownership. Do not make the same mistake like what Advertlets had done before.

Nice slogan, eh? However, 9rules do not open for submission all the time. Hence, I call it the “Big day” for bloggers who wish to submit their blogs to the 9rules community.

Question is “How to let your blog has the ?”

• Sign up an account for FREE in 9rules.
• Submit your blog today! (5th November, 2008. EST 12.00am)
• Wait for approval.

Read more about how to join 9rules here.

If you want to join 9rules, remember that it only open for submssion at certain time. Now is the last chance for you to submit your blog in this year. If you miss out this day, you’ll have to wait for the next round, probably next year.

9rules do not accept submissions outside of the 24 hour submission period.

Once the submission period closes, 9rules do not accept submissions. The submission period opens at midnight Eastern Standard Time on 5th November 2008.

Are you in the different time zone? Check out the actual date in your country with Time Zone Converter.

For those in Malaysia, the submission period will start from 1pm of 5th November 2008. I’m going to try submit Blogging For Novice to 9rules and lets hope it got approved.

Have you joined 9rules?

Update:

I’ve submitted my blog to 9rules. You can submit your blog to 9rules at http://9rules.com/submit/

So, I will have to check 9rules blog for approval announcement. You can also follow 9rules at Twitter.

I’m a BlogRush user. I joined BlogRush as early as November 2007 when it just started launching. Few months ago, I removed BlogRush widget in my personal blog, as I think it’s not performing well for a mixed content blog. I kept the BlogRush widget here in this blog as I thought it could attract readers with more similar topics or bloggers from similar niche.

Sad to see that BlogRush failed its objective. Here is a quote from BlogRush.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)

Another sister project known as TrafficJam dies together with BlogRush. It’s sad that BlogRush is never out of BETA and has to be shut down now.

Are you a BlogRush user? If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it. It’s no longer working now. It will show an empty space at the location which you have placed the widget code. I’m going to remove mine once I finish this post.

Wish John Reese all the best in his future projects.

Introducing TwitterFeed…

To make this work, you need the following:

1. A Twitter account.
2. An OpenID.
3. Your blog RSS feed / feedburner URL.

Once you have all these three things ready, all you got to do is to associate all these in Twitterfeed. Login to Twitterfeed with your existing OpenID. (Haven’t have an OpenID? Find out how.)

Then start to synchronize your feed by clicking the “Create new twitter feed“.

Fill in your twitter account information, follow by your RSS feed URL and configure how often should your feed be updated. It’s quite straight forward and I believe you have no problem understanding it for the rest of the configuration.

Once you hit the “Create” button, you are done! Just sit back and relax everytime you publish a post. Let Twitterfeed do the rest for you.

Besides Twitterfeed, you can also try Feedlr. It works more or less the same like Twitterfeed. You can sign up an account in Feedlr or just use your OpenID to access the site! (See how useful is OpenID now?)

Do you use microblogging to promote your blog? What do you think about microblogging? Do you think it’s helpful to draw traffic to your blog?

No doubt that a lot of blogging platform like Blogspot, WordPress, etc has its own built-in feed feature. But why should we even border to “burn” our feed? Because you can customize how your feed content be presented to your subscribers and you can get more benefits like getting your feed stats.

I hereby pinpoint some great features you can get once you add your feed to FeedBurner:

• Easy-to-remember feed URL
• Get number of subscribers
• Get live hits statistic (readers geographical location)
• Know your readers preference via popular item (blog post) listing
• Show feed count widget on blog
• Allow email subscription
• Customize how your feed content look like in feed reader
• Customize how your feed content look like (color, styling) in email
• Associate your Google Adsense account to monetize your feed
• Make it easier to promote your blog (will talk about this in the next upcoming post)
• and many more..

Ready to burn your feed? What are you waiting for? Get FeedBurner now, it’s FREE. Also check out the quickstart guides on how to setup your blog feed with FeedBurner.

The most common place that you will see OpenID enabled is a blogspot.com blog. Just imagine if you have an OpenID account, you can just post comments with that single identity that represent you. Maybe you think this is not neccessary, but OpenID will come in handy when you want to sign up an account in a site that supports OpenID.

There are nearly ten thousand sites from different categories that support OpenID.  You can check out a list of sites that support OpenID here or here. You may even already have an OpenID if you are using the following services:

• AOL
• Blogger
• Flickr
• LiveDoor
• LiveJournal
• Orange (France Telecom)
• SmugMug
• Technorati
• Vox
• Yahoo
• WordPress.com

Sign up for a FREE OpenID and with a single identity, you can login to many web services! Doesn’t it sound great? To find out more about OpenID or how to get an OpenID, please visit OpenID official website.