For the past few weeks I have been giving this blog some thought. I went over my old articles. Tried to figure out where this blog is heading and whether I should keep on wasting my time here or move on to do other things. I finally came to the conclusion that I should move on. Blogging about blogging is not for me after all.

I have yet to list this sale at Sitepoint as I want those who are and have been loyal to this blog a first crack at this sale. I do not have any encouraging figures or earnings to show so I do not really know how much this blog is worth except that it has a very brandable name, PR3, an Alexa ranking of 230,803 and more than 120 subscribers at this time of writing. I am sure those who have the expertise and know how will be able to to push this blog to a new horizon so those who are interested, please do contact me using my contact form with your offer. However, I reserve the right to accept any offers I deemed fitting and I shall not be bound by selling to the highest bidder. I’ll close this offer in two weeks where if there are no acceptable bids, place this blog at SitePoint’s marketplace.

Update - 09-05-08

Though I promised to leave this offer here for 2 weeks, I am taking his offer down with immediate effect. Thanks to all that have sent me enquiries about the sale, but I have decided not to sell this blog.

There will be some revamps and new directions for this blog. Postings will resume on Monday.

Gary Conn released a theme that will blow away all other Adsense Themes. Titled as SEOAdMax, this theme is all about Adsense and nothing else and if it wasn’t for Adsense TOS allowing only 3 Ads per page, I think all available spaces will be occupied by Adsense. I really do not know if this kind of theme will be looked upon kindly by Adsense but one thing is for sure, either the user will scare all his visitors away or he will be getting lots of baited clicks.

The moment you open the homepage, you will be greeted with a furore of Adsense Ads taking the entire top portion of the page. When you scroll down a little bit, what you will be stunned to see more Adsense Ads, thinking how come there could be so many Ads in a single page. It will take a few seconds to recover and realise that those sandwiched in between the real Adsense Ads are actually excerpts of posts in that blog. The font size, colors and layout are designed to match the Ads and have them blend in flawlessly.

Two things will happen if I was searching for information and landed in a blog with this theme. One, I will click my back button immediately thinking that I have landed on yet another useless MFA site. Two, if the first Ad I see offers something that I am looking for, I might click on that Ad. So it’s a two way sword.

Some cool features are included like including 7 different header image so users can choose one that suits their niche. The other one is the Privacy Policy page that Googles love to see in these kind of blogs. It would have better still if Gary had included a Sitemap and a Terms and Conditions page.

Can’t say much for the looks as the sole purpose of this theme is to maximise your Adsense and I would not recommend using it in any other kind of blogs other than the secret ones that you have set up to make money from Adsense.

Demo Links And Download Details Here

Lately, I have been getting quite a number of comments that are relevant, yet not relevant and Akismet let them pass through as legitimate comments. If it sounds confusing I’m sorry. I mean relevant in the sense that the comments don’t seemed to be from an automated software but was done in flesh and blood and irrelevant in the sense that the sites that the comments came from are from marketing sites that has no bearings whatsoever. This made my suspicious that these comments were indeed from automated comment spam software, but how did they make it to put in so relevant comments?

In most cases, comment spam software will insert comments like, “HI, Good Site!” or something of that nature. This normally gets caught by Akismet. However in the present scenario, the comments will be concentrated on your post’s topic, which make it seems like the commentator has indeed visited your site and made a comment.

In the first few instances, I was stumped. When I checked on the sites that made the comments, it was some marketing site propagating some products or some foreign language site. Now, I am quite sure the owner of these sites did not come here personally to make that comment and my suspicions was confirmed today when I discovered that there was a software being distributed freely that lets them make comment in blogs in bulk.

The sole purpose of this software is to let the user get easy back-links from blogs that offers “dofollow” links in their comments. Believe it or not, there are still plenty of blogs that uses the “dofollow” plug-in. Now what this software, does is, the user will type in a keyword or key phrase on the kind of topics they want links from. The software will then scrape the Net for blogs that have post concerning that topic. It will return a full list of blogs, complete with their page rank and linking attributes, whether they are dofollow or nofollow blogs.

The user then enters a fake name, a fake email but his real URL into the software. He then makes a very relevant comment that will suit most of the blogs topic. He chooses the blogs he wants to comment, click on it, the blog’s page will appear, he scroll to the comments section, clicks on the “Fill” option and whatever he has filled into the software just now will be filled up in the comments of that blog post. So in short, he comments once, keeps clicking on the bloglist that the software has provided him with and within a short time he would have submitted legitimate comments to hundreds of blogs.

Is it ethical to spam comments this way? The blogs that gets the comment gains nothing except in the number of comments. Their readers gains nothing. The only person gaining is the “spammer”. He will definitely be getting some curious clicks if he word his comments correctly and he might be getting some backlinks from those “dofollow” blogs. I don’t know about you, but I delete every comment of this nature. I rather let my comment number show a big fat zero than let the one way benefit go to the barger.

There was a time when homemakers, mostly mummies, spends their free time after they have sent the kids to school and completed their household chores, sits in front of their computers or their kid’s computers, churning out post after post in their blogs to make some extra pocket money. This habit was brought to an abrupt end for many of these mummies after the big fiasco that needs no mention some many months ago and many mommies found themselves “out of an opportunity”, if I can put it that way.

The company responsible for giving them those opportunities took up the responsibility to see that another such earth shattering fiasco does not happen to their posties again, decided to change for the better by playing the game on a level field accepted by and to the benefit of all. Thus, from a company that gets it’s due from raw sales of links, they started something more in tandem with the Web 2.0 vogue, where socializing is the norm. This new entity is called SocialSpark

Rather than a normal paid post portal, SocialSpark offers their members a place to network and socialize. Taking after the likes of MyBlogLogs and various other Social Networking Sites, SocialSpark allows their registered members to freely mingle and mix with each another and at the same time, make some pocket change for members who likes to write for a little money.

This scenario created a perfect getaway for mommies who do not have the time to socialize. Comminities are being created by members who shares the same interest and ideas are being shared and discussed. The Marketplace offers members who wants to make some money from their blogs by taking on opportunities that are compliant with Google’s terms so they can post and earn with an ease of mind. It has a good concept unseen in any other paid posts portals so far. The system has been refined and personally I feel it augurs well for those who writes for money.

2 weeks after the upgrade of all my blogs to WordPress 2.5, the conclusion I came to is this is one good upgrade and the cool features outweighs the problems I faced many times over. I had problems only with one blog and the rest all breezed through without a hitch. I thought the problem was because the theme was incompatible with the new version but when the problem persisted even after 2 them changes, I knew it has nothing to do with the Themes.

The problem was all my posts were showing like normal, but the pages that I have created have all but disappeared. After Googling for information, I realized that there are also many who had the same problem and in one forum, someone suggested it it may be due to a re-write problem due to the structure of the permalinks. Then it hit me. For that particular blog, I had a custom permalink structure. I changed the permalink to one of the default ones, and like magic, all my pages were there again.

RSS Awareness Day.

Daniel has taken the initiative to declare the 1st. of May as RSS Awareness Day. He will be putting up some buttons so we can paste it in our blogs to create awareness on the advantages of using RSS Feeds.

On the 1st. of May, all of us will write a post about RSS and if Daniel can pull this off with the same effect as the World Environment Day campaign, this is going to be huge. So head over and check it out. Write a post and create some publicity so more will be aware of this special day and hopefully participate in it.