Very often, we will try to look for great themes for our blogs and maybe do some customization to fit our taste. Or if you are a web designer, you will start designing your own theme from scratch. During customization of your blog theme, you have to consider a question: Is my blog browser compatible?

You may be developing your blog theme in Mozilla Firefox browser running in Ubuntu Linux. But your visitors may be viewing your blog in Internet Explorer or Safari on different Operating System. Your blog may look pretty good in your development platform but it may turn out to be “distorted” in other browsers, which makes your blog not browser compatible.

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Tags: browsers

Either you just launched a new blog or you already have owned a blog for some time, the things that you will always want to gain is traffic to your blog(s).  You possibly need blog traffic for the following reasons:

1. You want to be heard, someone to appreciate your hard work.
2. You want discussion on the topic you post.
3. You want to find new friends with similar interests.
4. You want to generate some revenue. (this should always be the last to consider)

There are many ways to boost your blog traffic. One of them is to join blog directories.  If you are a blogger from Malaysia, here is a good blog directory that you should give it a try.  It’s new but the community is growing rapidly. It’s BlogMalaysia, a bloggers directory for Malaysian bloggers.

The founder of BlogMalaysia is Kho King from Malaysia but currently reside in Japan.  All the blogs submitted to this BlogMalaysia will be manually reviewed by the admins before listing into the directory, to revoid spam blogs.  Hence, blog quality assurance.

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Tags: blog directory, traffic

When you think of starting a blog, you might think of starting it out from Blogger or the free Wordpress.com just before you go further on buying a domain and host your own blog with your favorite CMS (Content Management System) / blog software.

Although there are several popular CMS other than WordPress, such as Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, etc.. WordPress seems to be the most widely used platform in the blogosphere.

That derives a new problem. People tend to get jeolous or start to cultivate mischievious ideas when you are getting popular. Wordpress, naturally became the target for hackers. It doesn’t mean that other blogging platforms is far from hackers. WordPress, in this case, has a higher percentage of being targetted by hackers.

Now, a question for you as the title suggested:

How secure in your WordPress blog? (if you are running your blog under Wordrpess)

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Tags: plugins, security

Previously, I have listed some very nice Wordpress themes for download. Still, we cannot ignore bloggers who still have their blogs hosted in Blogger (blogspot.com). If you are having a blogspot.com blog, and is using the xml new Blogger (previously known as Blogger Beta), here is a list of beautiful, nice, neat XML templates that you may want to try them out.

Before listing those templates, I would like to remind you that, please backup a copy of your current Blogger template. Just in case you want to change back to your current template later. And also please bare in mind that once you have upload a new template, all your widgets data configuration might be lost. So do whatever backup that you need to do before upload and try out the new templates.

How to upload a new template? (in XML new Blogger)

1. Download and unzip the template file.
2. Login to your Blogger Dashboard.
3. Go to Layout > Edit HTML.
4. Browse for the XML template file that you have just downloaded and unzipped.
5. Click on the Upload button.
6. Save template and you’re done.

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Tags: Blogger, theme

Did you buy a domain and get your Wordpress blog hosted there? It is always a nice idea to also make your computer a local server, and install Wordpress in it. I always encourage my blogger friends to have Wordpress installed in their local computer.

Why? Because you can easily customize your theme, test out plugins and other features of Wordpress, before you upload the whole thing or implement the plugins that you are going to use, to your host. You can see the result almost instantly, as localhost connection is always faster.

If you ask me how do I customize my blog theme, I will tell you that, I have a local server installed in my computer which is not open to public and I can just preview any changes I made easily without disturbing my current online blog theme.

All you need is a web server application, Apache, MySQL database and PhpMyAdmin application.  There are several open source all-in-one web server application you can choose from. I would suggest you to use WAMP or XAMPP. [...more]

Tags: tool