Share Files with your Blog Visitors through Embedded Widget

A simple, easy to use, widget from Box.net will allow you to share the files with your blog readers (or your profile visitors in the social networks, like MySpace) a simple and attractive way.

You just need to follow three easy steps to create your own personalized widget, from where anybody can preview video, audio files, and images, and download them as needed.

Example of the Widget:

Access the widget generation page: http://www.box.net/widget/

Remove Label Number (Count) In Blogger

• Log in to your blogger dashboard.
  
• Navigate to Layout >> Page Elements and see if you are having a Label widget (a widget to show labels) there.
  
• If you are not having a label widget already, click on Page Elements >> Add a Gadget >> Labels and Save it. If you are already having a Label widget, read the next step.
  
• Navigate to Edit Html and expand your template by clicking on Expand Widget Templates.
  
• Search for the following code in your template. (press ctrl+f on your keyboard to do the search)

• Now scroll down for the following piece of code. When you find this code, Delete it.
  

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• Now save your template. You are done.
  

This blogger trick will hide and remove your blogger post label counts from the sidebar. From now on your visitors will see the labels only, the label numbers are gone forever!

Blue Diamond Blogger Template

Feature included:

• Elegant and artistic design
• Twitter follow button
• RSS Subscription button
• 125×125 Ads section

You can observe the demo and download Blue Diamond Blogger template.

Free Blogs Templates Creator

There are multiple blogs with the same templates on the Web. Does that bother you that the same template you are using, can be found elsewhere? If that does, you might find interesting to take a look on the free web-based templates self-designer.

Psycho is an exclusive weblog template designer for the following blogging platforms: Blogger (Classic), Persian Blog, BlogFa. It will help you to make the following:

• Create your ever-wished template in less than 10 minutes!
• Walk on the edges of template design without any HTML knowledge!
• Have W3C valid XHTML template, which will bring a higher ranking in search engines and eventually more hits.
• Fix the browser's incompatibility.
• Accelerate the loading time and style of your page.
• Have CSS-Based template: The page can never be lighter and cleaner than it!
• Always be capable to modify and share your template easily by saving your format in the PsycHodrama!

PsycHo is

• An Open-Source project: You can read and even modify thousand lines of its javascript codes under terms of GPL.
• Absolutely free of charge: You don't need to pay for anything!
• Based on a single DHTML page: No submission or lag it has!
• Working offline: Just get the page and hang the connection up; it works yet!

Notes:

• As PsycHo's generated templates have absolutely no warranty, it's strongly recommended to get a backup of your current template before pasting new code and making any modifications. Actually, it is a generic advice that is suitable for anything you do with your template code.
• PsycHo generates Blogger templates only for the old Blogger, and they are not completely compatible with new Blogger. Fortunately you can still use them on new Blogger! Just tell it (Blogger service) that you wish to use an old (Blogger says classic) template in cost of losing Blogger's new features like labels and etc.
  To do that, in template area of Blogger, instead of pasting the HTML code (output of PsycHo), click on Revert to Classic Template link at the bottom of the box. Then, when you went to the classic menu (where Change the NavBar menu appears), paste the code and click "Save Template Changes".
• FireFox is a recommended browser, while creating your template.

Author: Aideen NasiriShargh

Website: http://psyc.horm.org

Automatic posting to Blogger blogs with PHP

Yes, you can autopost to blogspot (blogger) blogs with php, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.

Similar to the way that plugins like wp-o-matic work for automatically posting rss feeds to Wordpress blogs, you can have a blogger blog which is automatically populated with RSS feed content, at intervals that you determine (by a cron job).

Blogger blogs allow the blogs owner to post via email, so we’re going to use PHP’s mail function to post new content, and PHP’s SimpleXML to gather the content before posting.

Firstly, we need to set up our blogger blog to accept emailed posts: We need to go to our settings page in Blogger, and click the “Settings” tab at the top. Then click the “email” button.

You’re now at the Email settings page, look for the Mail-to-Blogger Address. Here you just need to enter a password (in the box before the “@ablogger.com”) that you’ll use in your emails to post to the blogger blog.

Once you’ve chosen your password, write down the email address, as this is the email address we’ll be using in the PHP script to tell it where to post the rss feed to.

Now on to the script:

//Your Blog%u2019s Keyword:
$keyword = %u201Ckeyword%u201D;

//How many articles do you want to grab each time?
$num = 5;

//Get the RSS Feed - In this instance, we%u2019re using a google blogsearch feed based on our chosen keyword
$feed = simplexml_load_file(%u201Dhttp://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&q=%u201D .urlencode($keyword). %u201C&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss%u201D);

//Loop through our keywords
foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item) {

if($i < $num){

//Have a bit of a rest so we%u2019re not posting too fast to our blogger blog
sleep(10);

$title = $item->title;
$title = str_replace(%u201D%u201D, %u201C%u201D, $title);
$subject = str_replace(%u201D%u201D, %u201C%u201D, $title);
$link = $item->link;

$description = $item->description;
$description = str_replace(%u201D%u201D, %u201C%u201D, $description);
$body = str_replace(%u201D%u201D, %u201C%u201D, $description);

//put our secret blogger email address here:
$to = %u201Caccountname.password@blogger.com%u201D;

//ignore this line - the script just needs something in the %u201CFrom%u201D field.
$headers = %u2018From: mail@whatever.com%u2019;

//Send the email / How%u2019d we go?
if(mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers)) {
echo $subject. %u201D - sent
%u201D;
}
else
{
echo $subject. %u201D - NOT sent
%u201D;

}
}
//add one to our counter
$i  ;

}

?>

And that’s it.

Customise the script to suit your purposes, upload to your server, and call it via a cron job.

How to Exclude Selected Pages from the WordPress Navigation

Pages are displayed with the following code, which is generally used in the header, footer, or sidebar.

This will list all of your pages until you add conditions in between ‘()’. You need to use the exclude condition and find out what number ID each page has. The exclude code looks like

You can see that you have added 'exclude=17,38' to the original
list pages code.

Of course, we need to locate the correct ID numbers for your pages.

Go to Manage > Pages and select the name of the page in which you would like to exclude. In the address bar of your web browser will be a URL that looks like the following.

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=96

The number at the end, 96, is the ID number for the page and is the number you will use in the exclude code. You can do this for each page that you want to exclude as long as you put a comma between the page numbers in the code.

Blog Promotion Tips from Darren Rowse

Can you make your blogging hobby a full time job? Really - the job that pays your bill and provides satisfaction from your performance results? While many of you would be skeptical, basing the lack of belief that you will ever acquire such status, there are already professional bloggers, who converted the blogging obsession in a full-time successful career. Darren Rowse is one of these lucky successful individuals, who started his blogging career from scratch in 2002 and became a prominent blogger several years later. His well-known website Problogger is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. You can review his blogging books, like 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook, released in 2009, for example, but this post is not about promoting these tutorials, no matter how good they are, since we dedicated our resources to the exclusively free opportunities. Not exactly free, since you spend your time, which is also cost money…

The strategic suggestions for this post are originated by Darren Rowse posts and summarized by MagikWidjet. And using Darren's name in the title of the blog post actually illustrates one of the promotional techniques.

Obviously, when you write a blog post, you'd love for it to rank high in the search engines. So maybe you optimize the title and the meta tags and the post copy around a keyword phrase. That works, definitely. But you can do much better if you take this a step further.

Think how people search. These days, every time you use Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other search engines, you can quickly be crushed under 185 tons of irrelevant garbage. You have to get very good at search, or you will get discouraged by poor results and waste a lot of time.

So what do experienced searchers do?

Simple. They search terms which REALLY narrow down their results. An experienced searcher would not just search the obvious keywords they are looking for. They would also search other terms combined with that keyword to really narrow down the search and get much more targeted results.

Use this to your advantage:

• Include the source of the information (website, news agency, etc.) in the copy of your post.
• Put exact names of people, products, brands, & businesses into your blog posts, not just content.
• Use bullets (more keyword phrases) to quickly hit every point that you want to illustrate.
• Choose only 1 or 2 social bookmarking links (Digg & StumbleUpon?). Make these links REALLY stand out!

Interesting bit of insight from The Daily Rundown, a website which has disappeared, but which was cited by Darren Rowse:

‘28% of Google searches are for a “product name”, 9% are for a “brand name” and 5% are searches for a “company name”. “Brand” keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords. Not sure if that is for all searches or just consumer-product related searches, but either way it demonstrates the importance of making sure your site shows up on the SERPs for your brand.’

Include these names in your title, your copy, your meta description, your keyword tags, & your image tags. Your blog posts will get much more love from the search engines.