Net Covered Blog

Miscellaneous by admin

Hi folks! I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been very busy lately. But today I’m bringing some great news. Google has updated public toolbar PageRank. So everybody go check your websites’ PR and you might be surprised. This blog has jumped from PR0 to PR2 which is pretty good taking in consideration that the domain is only about 2 or 3 months old. Though I’m little bit disappointed about number of backlinks which has dropped to 2,127. The reason is that I have cancelled all payed banners and links at other blogs and I have decided to build the PageRank on my own.

Of course, this is just a small achievment but it’s a great starting point. My next targer is PR4 so I’m looking forward to writing a similar post in three months.

To celebrate this little “victory” I’ve made a new theme. Hope you like it. This is the first time I’ve tried a combination of dark red and dark grey colors.

Miscellaneous by admin

Today’s post will be partially just for my own reference but I’m sure many of you will find it useful and potentionally use it at your websites. There’s a little useful JavaScript function that clears input field once you select it. Imagine you want to have a search input field at your website that says something like “To search type and hit enter” or similar but you want it to clear up once you click at it. It’s pretty simple. Add this to the header:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function clickclear(thisfield, defaulttext) {
if (thisfield.value == defaulttext) {
thisfield.value = “”;
}
}
function clickrecall(thisfield, defaulttext) {
if (thisfield.value == “”) {
thisfield.value = defaulttext;
}
}
</script>

Ok now move to the form where the input field is located. For example, my search form here at Net Covered looks like this:

<form method=”get” action=”<?php bloginfo(’home’); ?>/”>
<input type=”text” name=”s” id=”searchform” value=”To search - type and hit enter…” onclick=”clickclear(this, ‘To search - type and hit enter…‘)” onblur=”clickrecall(this,’To search - type and hit enter…‘)” />
</form>

The trick is that all three values (I have bolded them) must be the same or else it won’t work. See? That’s it. Now you can try it at your website.

General Blogging, Miscellaneous by admin

The best thing you can do to become a more successful blogger is to watch your “enemies”. You should have a list of your favorite blogs and read them regularly or even better subscribe to their feeds. You should choose blogs that are popular and well established. Secondly, you should also watch over blogs that you enjoy reading even though they are not so famous yet (might be your future rivals). By doing this, you will have a greater chance to keep up with the top dogs within your niche and it will drive you to get better and better each day. With this kind of motivation you’ll become a more persistent as well as resolute blogger. OK, enough of the theory - here’s a list of my most favorite blogs and reasons why I like them:

Big Square Dot

Big Square Dot is probably the absolute winner of my list. It’s mostly about modern webdesign and wordpress - that’s why I find it very useful and inspirative. It has helped me with developing my own wordpress themes and I’ve learned tons of useful webdesign lessons there. You should really visit this one, especially if you are a designer.

Cypher Hackz

Cypher Hackz (I always tought it was “Cyber Hacks”… the typo is almost invisible) is one great technology resource for designers and wordpress developers. It’s been around for some time already and there are hundreds of returning visitors and email subscribers. No wonder there because Cypher Hackz publishes only very relevant and informative articles.

Life Is Colourful

Life is Colourful might seem as an ordinary general blog trying to make some money online. But the truth’s it is a place full of great content and interesting posts. It’s updated almost every day and there’s a big community of loyal readers (I’m one of them). Really recommended.

Dosh Dosh

Dosh Dosh blog got pretty unusual and unique name. That’s not the only reason I like it though. It’s full of internet marketing and social media news and articles. It’s updated on a daily basis and every post is very comprehensive an full of useful information. No desperate posts just for the sake of update I tell you.

John Chow Dot Com

Probably the most famous webmaster blog out there. It’s really amazing what John Chow managed to achieve with this blog. In two years it has become one of the most popular “make money online” blogs and it’s probably the most profitable one, too (over $30,000 per month is really amazing). This blog is a great source of inspiration and ideas for all young webmasters and entrepreneurs out there trying to earn some money online.

Miscellaneous by admin

Just a shorter post for today… I’ve just came across this really interesting and comprehensive article. It consists of long list of tips and tricks on how to effectively spread the word about your freelance services and generate new client leads. It explains very well how to get more potential work. If you happen to be a freelancer or if you are considering starting a freelance carrier, check it out!

Miscellaneous by admin

Are you up to a great challenge? I mean a blogging challenge. When you succeed, your blog will rank better in search engines, you will gain hundreds of backlinks and a dramatic increase in quality traffic. Are you interested?

What am I talking about? I’m talking about 30 days full of hard work. However it will pay off greatly after your initial one month time investment and the results will last much longer after that. Where did I get this idea? I’ve came across a very interesting article and it really captured my attention.

The core of this challenge is to make at least one post each day for a month. But that’s not all. You must also leave at least one quality comment at other blogs with similar niche every day (no spam comments of course). It’s a brilliant way how to get your blog more popular. There are few reasons why it will work. Firstly, it will get you noticed by search engines and readers as an active blogger. Secondly, you will gather up bunch of a great content and many quality backlinks from well respected blogs within your niche. Finally, you will train your writing skills and become used to periodical posting.

If you don’t give up, you’ll see wonders. There’s a nice graph at Affiliate Confession - that blog used this method and the number of daily visits came from 5 to 180 in just 24 days!

So, are you up to this? It won’t be easy but it will pay off. I’ve already decided to take this challenge in a near future. Not from this day but soon. I will make a post with official announcement once I start it off. Meanwhile, I hope you will consider giving it a try and joining me in my ambitious effort.

Miscellaneous by admin

Hello everybody. If you have already visited this blog before you must have noticed some big changes going on around. I have created absolutely new design. I have kept the previous color scheme though I’ve smoothed the colors to be easier on eyes. In addition, I have tried to make the content more organized - reduced number of categories and more comprendious sidebar. Hope you like it. You can download my previous theme for free here. Enjoy!

Secondly, I have started to use the Entrecard in order to exchnage relevant traffic with other bloggers. You can see it in the “Featured ad” box. I’m also planning to make better comments template. Something similar like at this blog. There are more upcoming changes and few really great ideas in my head so be prepared.

Miscellaneous by admin

What would you say if I told you that a very simple trick can save up to 75% of your bandwidth, visibly make your website load up to four times faster and make your visitors more satisfied? The data on the web is forecasted to grow exponentially over the next few years. In addition, even today the number one complaint among web users is lack of speed. The answer to this challenge is HTTP compression.

HTTP Compression?

The basic idea is to compress data being sent out from the server and have the browser decompress this data on the fly, thus reducing the amount of data sent and increasing the page display speed. The data is being compressed dynamically on the fly so you don’t need to upload any pre-compressed files. Read the rest of the article

Making Money Online, Miscellaneous by admin

Many of you are already probably familiar with the story of John Chow but for those who aren’t I’m writing this article. Long story short, he is one of the most successful bloggers out there. John Chow is the owner of the famous site John Chow dot Com with his miscellaneous ramblings of a dot com mogul. He makes money online by telling other people how much money he makes online. Despite his struggle with Google, he’s making tens of thousands dollars each month just with his blog.

Back in December 2006 John Chow started a very aggressive backlink campaign, in which he would give a link back for every review of his blog when the text anchor ‘make money online’ was used. He managed to get 870 links from various sites as a direct result of the campaign. This turned out to be very successful for him as in just two months from the beginning of the campaign his revenue has almost trippled. His blog income has grown very fast from $352.94 in September 2006 to $7,011.05 in February 2007 (increase in revenue is amazing -> $6,658.11). Read the rest of the article

Miscellaneous by admin

First of all, the last week was deadly for me. I was struggling in college, trying to get enough credits to pass the exams plus I had to take care of about a thousand other troubles. There are still few problems ahead (driving license exam on Wednesday…) but at least the college stuff is all gone for few weeks.

Secondly, I have suddenly (I was planning to wait for few more months but somehow couldn’t wait) switched to Wordpress 2.5. That’s right folks, this blog is running on completely new engine now and so far I like it. I haven’t encountered any problems while switching to version 2.5. Just copied all Wordpress files into my blog directory (without wp-config-sample.php and wp-content directory of course) and upgraded the database (one click process) and that’s it.

Honestly, the whole “switching process” took me about 2 minutes. I’d like to thank all Wordpress developers for their hard work and especially for making the jump from 2.3 to 2.5 so smooth and fast. Thank you!

Oh and one more thing. Check out my new logo and give me some feedback. Personally, I think it’s awesome but my opinion is very subjective and maybe biased…

Miscellaneous by admin

SearchMe is a new interesting search engine and it seems like it could become a serious player. But how is it different from other search engines like Google or Yahoo? It offers visual searching.

Right. Once you type in what you are looking for, instead of ordinary list of related websites you’ll see the actual screenshots. That will help you decide whether the site is relevant to what you’re looking for or not without clicking on any link. Additionally, as you start typing - categories appear that relate to your query. That can save some time, too. Of course besides visual searching you will get also standard text search results.

They have already around a billion indexed sites. That’s good start - it’s negligible compared to giants like Google but remember it’s still in beta. We’ll see if it will pull off. I’ve already signed up for a private testing and I’m awaiting invitation within next few days. I will be then able to give you more information.