The last few months have been spent writing articles for others, in an attempt to get some quick cash for an emigration to America sorted, alongside with a marriage and a new apartment. I hope to be picking up my posts both here and at my other Gadget News website in the near future, however life is hectic.

Most of my recent work has been on Hubpages, where I have been earning a rather nice income of around $1000 a month, if you like to write then I strongly suggest you check it out, you might be able to make a nice little stash of extra cash every month!

If you do join up to Hubpages feel free to check out my profile at This is Oli!

In the meantime, I have just updated the version of wordpress which has been running this blog for the last 5 years or so.  It definitely needed doing, and I have not seen any major glitches YET.

If you do find any problems please tell me as soon as possible so I can get them fixed!

Oli

This blog is powered by WordPress and so are many other blogs out there, one of the good things about WordPress is it’s templating system or as they called it – Themes.

Themes makes it easier for anybody out there to change the look and feel of their site in an instant.

There are tons of free themes out there, but today i’m posting about WPTP2, a2 column widget ready WordPress Theme.It has a simple and clean look and would be appropriate for all types of bloggers.The fonts and layout seemed pretty good and i must say this is one of my personal favourite theme.

Check It Out

I quote:

You can guess that at his point I was getting skeptical about the usefulness of the tags. In order to get a more clear picture of the situation I decided to research about the Top 100 Popular blogs on Technorati, and here is the results I gathered:

* out of the 100 most popular blogs only 7 were using tags in blog posts
* of those who did, 4 were using internal tags (i.e. Tags linking to internal pages)
* only 3 out of 100 were actually using the Technorati Tags (i.e. Linking to Technorati)

Full Article

But i’ve you have just upgraded your wordpress to 2.0.6 than you will only need to upgrade this file from 2.0.7:

* wp-admin/inline-uploading.php
* wp-admin/post.php
* wp-includes/classes.php
* wp-includes/functions.php
* wp-settings.php
* wp-includes/version.php

For more info click here

That’s the beauty of the internet and tools for publishing i guess, when i was 12 i was still coming to terms with hair that i spotted in perculiar places, but not this boy because he is already making a healthy $500 a month from his tech blog – Techzi which is powered by Blogspot.

The enterprising David had roped in two of his buddies (one is 12, the other is 11) to help him write his blog and they are currently raising funds to transfer their blog to the WordPress blogging platform.

[via Problogger]

Here’s what’s new:

* The aforementioned security fixes.
* HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
* Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
* Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

It’s time to upgrade your WordPress powered sites with 2.0.6, you can download here

You can follow the developing news at TailRank.

There’s a cool new theme by WPboard.com for the month of December and it’s called infonightly.

You can find out more about the theme and download it at WPBoard

Also take note of some of the cool themes (premium) by WPboard, i’m a member there and i can say the themes are pretty good.

The Wonderland 1.0 wordpress theme is a simple, narrow, 2-column theme.

The header of the theme potrays the season with a christmas tree and some snow but that’s basically it and some deco on the sidebar would have been nice, but hey it’s free so i ain’t complaining

Download Now

The buzz on the net right now (besides Spidey 3 trailer) is ReviewMe.com and one of the reasons it’s ‘buzzing’ is because there’s a contest going on to celebrate the launch of the site, and the prize is $25,000.

At first i thought they were giving out $25,000 to an individual but futher investigation proved that they were giving out that amount in total to bloggers that would post about reviewme.com which means i am now making money by posting this on my blog and if you must know i’m making a modest $30 via Paypal.

$30 ain’t that bad for a single post especially since i know of bloggers who struggle to make the same amount in two months with Google’s adsense!.

What in the word is ReviewMe?

This is not rocket science, ReviewMe.com exists to connect advertisers to bloggers and vice versa, in it’s simplest definition bloggers will have the chance to make money whenever they review a site, and the amount a blogger makes per post depends on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics as ReviewMe.com uses an algorithm based on it.Blogger payments range from $30 – $1,000 per post.

In short: Advertisers, Get Buzz. Bloggers, Get Cash.

The creator behind it is none other than the same people behind Text Link Ads.

Ok, i’m a blogger and i want some cash now…what do i do?

It’s really simple as pie, a big credit to the creators of the site for making the site easily navigated and making it big..i’m talking about big fonts and they even proclaim to have created the world’s biggest RSS buttons, so even a half blind person should find any info they need on the site with ease.

If your a blogger all you got to do is Sign Up (it’s free) and submit your blog(s) and you will instantly know how much you could potentialy make per post (minimum is $20).

I couldn’t find anything about their acceptance method but i strongly believe pagerank, traffic, rss subscribers, alexa and technorati rankings play an important role in how ReviewMe.com ranks a site and how much to pay per post per blog.

Basically ReviewMe shares 50% of your revenue and you will get your cash at the end of the month via check or paypal (you choose).

But i’ve seen a similar site before…

Yes, you are probably thinking payperpost.com, the difference between the two sites is that ReviewMe demands it’s bloggers to convey to it’s readers that they are making money from their review ie “The following is a paid review:” “Paid Advertisement:” “Sponsored Post” etc while PayPerPost doesn’t stress the need for that.

The other thing to take note is that even though you will be making money from your review via ReviewMe.com your post doesn’t have to be positive as in a positive review, PayperPost requires you to post positively but that’s not the case with ReviewMe, if you feel a product or site ot whatever your reviewing is not up to par than you can even post negatively about the said review,,you have the choice and that is really good!

At this moment the $25,000 is still going on so you would be wise to take your opportunity now and Sign Up to get the ball rolling.

Yet another way for bloggers out there to make some cool cash.

Download 2.0.5

Andy Beard of WPplugins.info has created a snowfall plugin, and the plugin does exactly what it says adding a falling snow effect to your WordPress powered blog(s).

According to Andy:

It is based on code from DynamicDrive.com thus I had problems with writing a license that comply with the original authors requirements and those of WordPress which is under GNU GPL.

You can download the plugin here or visit the Author’s Site.

*P.S : you can view the demo of this plugin at the author’s site.

WordPress is one of the best (if not the best) blogging software out there, and best of all it’s free and really easy peasy to install.

There are many plugins and themes out there that can help you achieve the function and look you want for your blog, but of course WordPress is such a sweet script that many have called it a CMS (Content Management System) and have used and modified the script to be more than a mere blog, so it’s really up to you to mesh and mix.

Well this post is going to focus on the theme aspect of WordPress (will be called WP from now on), to get started let’s view some beautiful looking WP powered sites:

exibit5a

Kitta

PhonoPhunk

Rebel Pixel

Binary Bonsai

Sidesh0w

Simplesis

Of course these sites are just a very very small fraction of WP powered sites out there.

FREE THEMES

FREE, just the mention of that word turns a whole community into a frenzy, WP is no different so here’s a list of sites that have compiled free themes to be downloaded by people like you and me

PREMIUM THEMES

I’ve also come across sites that charge a fee for themes, and some fof these are very professional looking indeed.

Template Monster

WPBoard

Rocket Theme *soon*

If you know of any other site please comment below so i can add that to the list.

Thanks

*P.S: If you liked the thumbnail theme used in this post you can download the theme here