This post is to reward regular commenters of this blog by linking good posts from their blogs and sending them some traffic. If you would like to get rewarded too, all you have to do is join my MyBlogLog Community and start commenting regularly on this blog.

I hope you enjoy reading these blog posts -

• Top Ten Firefox Addons to Annoy Advertisers – David Bradley
• Ultimate Guide to time saving for Bloggers – Shankar Ganesh
• How to get your Paypal account verified without a Credit Card -Nuts & Milk
• Lock Folders without using any Software – Madhur Kapoor
• 5 Ways to Attract More Comments – Blogging Experiment
• How I Improved my AdSense CTR by 51% by using AuctionAds – Ashwin
• 7 Blogging Tips for Beginners – Nirmal T V
• Tips and Tricks to Get More out of Your Laptop Battery – Shivaranjan
• WordPress Plugin: Better Comments Manager – Keith Dsouza

Those of you who missed the good news, WordPress 2.3 was released a few hours ago with lots of exciting new features including tagging, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements and much more.

What I liked the most of this version is the new feature to notify users of WordPress and plugin updates, but I wish the plugin update notification could be shown on the dashboard instead since I don’t often check the plugin page.

Though this new version supports tagging, I stopped using tags today and uninstalled Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin as I find that visitors rarely visit my tag pages – all that the tag pages do is create duplicate content!

Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.3 Released’

To get your blog read by a lot of people you need to write original and quality content that interests them and to produce the content you will need to relax your mind and stay away from the things that will distract you while writing a post.

Here are the things I do before writing a post:

1. Close all instant messengers – During the time when I had mentioned my instant messenger IDs on my about page, I used to get a lot of IMs from visitors asking for help and while I have no problem in helping, it used to annoy me when I got IMs while writing a post. I just can’t concentrate on blogging when IMs just pop up. So I made the decision since then to close all instant messengers before blogging.
2. Close Feed reader - While I like my Feed reader (FeedDemon) notifying me of updates in my favorite blogs, I get distracted when it notifies me while writing a post. So I just close it until I finish writing the post.
3. Lower the Music Volume – I listen to music most of the time my PC is on, but I lower the volume while blogging to concentrate more on the post that I write.
4. Close Room door – This is something I always do while blogging to avoid getting distracted by sounds near me, like when my family watches TV.

Continue reading ‘Things I Do Before Writing A Post’

BlogRush has updated the dashboard and gave members statistics on how things are performing. I checked out mine and was really disappointed at the click through rate.

Though I have referred some bloggers and get around 14,000 pageviews a day on this blog, all I have got is 20 clicks!

But I am not the only person who has faced this problem, Darren got only 35 clicks even though his headlines had been shown around 70,000 times!

Continue reading ‘How Is BlogRush Doing For You?’

A new free service called BlogRush has been recently launched to help bloggers get more traffic for their blog from other relevant blogs. This is made possible with a widget that should be placed on your blog.

Once placed on your blog the widget will display 5 blog post titles from other related blogs based on the category you selected while signing up with their service. You don’t have to worry about visitors leaving your blog as clicking the post titles will load the post in a new window.

Continue reading ‘Get More Readers For Your Blog With BlogRush’

Displaying AdSense or any other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programs in your latest posts are not of much use as they are visited mostly by only your regular readers who are mostly adblind, that is they know exactly where your ad is placed and so they will just skip it and read your content.

Hence you may want to display ads on just the older posts as that will make your regular readers happy as well as still make you money as it is the older posts that attract traffic from search engines that are more likely to click your ads.

Continue reading ‘WordPress Plugins To Hide Ads From Regular Readers’

Besides this blog being inactive for some time, the RSS subscribers thankfully still kept increasing and today reached over 2000 subscribers for the first time.

I want to thank all the subscribers for reading my blog, and if you are not a subscriber yet please make sure to grab the RSS feed.

Besides breaking the 2000 mark, another happy news for me is that JohnTP.com is going to be 2 years old next month making me a 2 year old blogger too!

Btw, I updated the blog’s color scheme to blue/white as most of the commenters had suggested it here. Hope you liked it.

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t want certain pages in your WordPress blog from showing up in the main menu? By default all pages and sub-pages you create will automatically display in your menu.

To remove certain pages, find the wp_list_pages() template tag in your blog’s theme and customize it to display the menu the way you want it. The tag can be found mostly in your theme’s header.php or sidebar.php.

Continue reading ‘How To Hide Pages from Showing Up In Your Main Menu’

Last month Text Link Ads (TLA) started using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure it’s affiliate referral links and had asked TLA publishers to update their affiliate links before the end of the month.

I have used my TLA affiliate links in many posts and so I had not updated my posts until I found an easier method thanks to Liew who has explained on how to update all the old TLA affiliate links in one shot (WordPress only) using Mass String Replace in MySQL.

Using the below MySQL query, I was able to update all my posts containing Text Link Ads affiliate links in a few seconds:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE(`post_content`, "OLD_TLA_AFF", "NEW_TLA_AFF")

Please note that OLD_TLA_AFF should be replaced with your old Text Link Ads affiliate URL and NEW_TLA_AFF replaced with the new Text Link Ads affiliate URL.

If you have not signed up for Text Link Ads yet, do try them out and make money by selling links on your blog. Also read my Text Link Ads review and my post on how to make more money with Text Link Ads.

I had been planning to redesign this blog for a long time and also had drawn a rough sketch of how I wanted the new design to look like but it was delayed due to many reasons. But after finding that many of the blogs I read got redesigned recently, I too felt that it was time for me to do the same.

I worked on the new design for a few days and finished with it yesterday and also tested it on Firefox, Opera, IE 6 and 7. Everything looks fine so far but I still have a few things to do like optimizing the CSS, removal of useless plugins and some other things to decrease page load time.

Continue reading ‘JohnTP.com Redesigned’