For the time being, although the themes collection is new, you’ll find in there 8 or 9 themes which Diana and I have developed and we decided to give them for free download.

If you are a web designer and you develop Wordpress themes which you’d like to give away for free, you are invited to submit your themes to our directory.

We only want to give useful tools and insights to those who want to earn from blogging and don’t know where to start from.

The latest news are that we started releasing free Wordpress themes which already include advertising space. The first theme in the series is Green Money, a two-column, widgets-ready theme WordPress 2.3.3 compatible. It also works with 2.2.2 version. The GreenMoney Theme is valid CSS and XHTML.

The Green Money Theme archive contains all necessary instructions for a quick and hassle-free install.

If you download it, we would appreciate your feedback. Thank you.

However, not all freebies are good in all situations. Let me tell you this story:

I’ve become a fan of Microsoft Live Writer after I read a review on a blog. For those of you who don’t know what’s this about, Microsoft Live Writer is a free blog publishing software. You download and install it in your computer, then you input the details of your blogs, and that’s it! You write and edit your drafts locally, using the same tool for all your blogs, then you publish them directly from Live Writer’s interface. The text editor is better than the Wordpress one, the saving speed is much bigger, as you don’t have to wait for the server all the time you hit “Save”, and you can easily insert pictures, tables or videos in your posts. Besides, the Publish button is not close to the Save Draft one, so it’s difficult to miss and publish an unfinished post by mistake.

But my countless attempts to make it work failed invariably. Two days ago I remembered about this software, and I set myself the goal to make it work. (That’s so funny, my resolutions for 2008 cost me so far the losing of all my emails and addresses and the death of my wireless network card).

I installed Windows Live Writer (the 3rd attempt was successful), but when I tried to post the post draft to the blog, I invariably got this error message:

The response to the metaWeblog.editPost method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server

I checked the blog, and the draft was not there. I tried to edit the .htaccess file, I treid to figure out who this XmlRpc server was, I gazed into the xmlrpc.php file for hours, I even thought that it could be Dreamhost’s fault (they have some protection settings for their servers which caused some scripts not to work on other occasions).

Then I started to disable plugins on my blog, one at a time, with no success, until I hit the Google Sitemaps Plugin. After disabling this, it worked (and I wished so much that this plugin’s name would have started with an “a”).

The simpler way (which I thought afterwards) would have been to Google for the error message, case in which I would have found the same solution, but without putting my mind at work for two days.

As a conclusion, in case something goes wrong with your blog, try first to disable the plugins and see if this fixes your problem. You might get it done very quickly.

Before disclosing the results, I want to mention that I advertised my contest on ContestBeat, a professional site dedicated to announcing blog contests. They were kind enough to write an article about my contest, and all I had to do was to send them a request for inclusion, in which I described my contest.

And the winners are …. (drums…)

Well, for the first time in the history of blogging, I awarded the $100 prize to myself, for the following achievements:

1. None of my other readers was willing to give it a try. I would have given the prize to anyone who would have been willing to step out of the comfort zone and send me some plugin (even if it were not useful, I’d have tried to give it a creative use)
2. I discovered that the AdSense Deluxe Wordpress plugin can be used to put any kind of ads on your blog: instead of inserting the AdSense code in the respective box, I inserted an affiliate banner code from NeverblueAds, and it worked: the post where I included that block displayed the respective banner.

So, I can define ad blocks for all affiliate programs I’m interested to promote, I give them different names, and every time I write, let’s say, about making money online, I choose to insert the ad block which displays the Beach Bum guy who makes money while laying on the beach, while others buy his book.

For this new original way of using an old Wordpress plugin, I proudly awarded myself $100.

(applause)

These being said, look what I’ve just got myself with the money I earned by winning my own contest (please ignore the cat, she’s just jealous because she cannot type, so all blog contests are forbidden to her):

Conclusions:

1. If you want people to participate in your contests, don’t ask them to do something, and more important, don’t ask them to think. Life is already tough, so why make it even tougher? Give them instructions that are so precise, that all they have to do is copy-paste.
2. People won’t participate in any contest simply for the monetary prizes, especially if the entry barrier is not very low. There is something more sought after, which only a small number of blogs can offer, and this is fame. Do you remember the poetry challenge in the Problogger anniversary contest? Even those who totally sucked at poetry gave their poem (it was really a great laughter for me, I’ll remember it for a long time). I wonder if Darren asked them to write a Wordpress plugin, how many would have sent him their trials?

How was your experience with hosting contests on your blog? Can you tell us some of your learnings?

I’m also using it since the beginning, and I’ve been pleased with the way it behaves: I think it got only one or two comments which were not spam, and it learned after I de-spammed them that those IP addresses are OK.

Over the past week, it seems that the Akismet monster got really hungry: it is eating all my comments on all blogs, including the Reader Appreciation Project, where I’m one of the authors. For a while, I just wrote the authors of blogs where I commented a small note, asking them to check and de-spam my comment, hoping that Akismet will learn, and my further comments will be OK. But it seems the monster never learns, it just doesn’t like me (or maybe it likes me too much, and this is why it’s attempting to eat me alive).

The result is that I stopped commenting, because I don’t want to embarass people, but I feel like I’m mute. Does soembody know what can I do to get rid of this (except from changing my internet service provider or using a free proxy)?

If some of you wonder why am I not commenting anymore, no, I’m not upset, I’m just chased by the hungry monster.

If you are in this situation and you fear your feed readers may be offended by your paid reviews, you can choose not to show them these posts.

All you need to do is add several code lines to the functions.php file in your theme:
function myFilter($query) {
if ($query->is_feed) {
$query->set('cat','-5');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','myFilter');

In the above code, you need to replace category number with the correspondent on your blog (for this purpose, you’ll need to define a category for all paid reviews you are going to write).

Source of inspiration: Zeo

I don’t know what could be the use of such an information, but who am I to judge? I’m not a hacker after all.

Try to type in your browser http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins and tell me what you think.

There are at least two ways of preventing this:

1. Create an empty index.html file and upload it in your plugins directory (tip sent by Pearl from Fresh-Perspectives.net, who also told me about this issue. More tips on Wordpress security are available via Online Tech Tips). A very nice implementation of this solution can be seen at JohnCow.com.

2. In your ftp program, change permissions to the plugins folder from 0755 to 0750, thus denying public to be able to read your files. By doing this, curious readers will be shown your 404 page. If you use FireFTP, right-click on the folder, then select Properties, then change the figure in the next window and press OK.

Later update: following Jeff’s comment, I’d like to make an additional note: change only the permissions for the folder itself, not for its content. Otherwise, some of your plugins may not work properly anymore.

One-day-after update: one of our loyal readers, LGR, pointed to a third solution, which is by far the most elegant of all: Disable Indexes using .htaccess. Add a line to your .htaccess file: Option -Indexes, thus preventing browsing folders which don’t have an index file.

Can you guess whose plugins I’ve just seen before writing this post?

Why bother people with useless ads?

Like this one, for people referred here by Google:

Welcome google.com user
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed
Thanks for visiting!

Actually my blog does this for single post pages, thanks to a Wordpress plugin called RThanks, which displays the above message to people arriving on All Tips And Tricks either from search engines or social networking sites. Installation is easy, you will find all necessary information on the plugin’s site. If you want to see it in action, do this Google search, then click on the first result.

Another new Wordpress plugin I’m in love with these days, is Recommendit. Discovered via Bluehatseo, it provides more interactivity to this blog, allowing loyal users to recommend posts they like, for the new readers. You can see it in action if you look at my sidebar (”Are you new here?”) and you can try it by clicking on the special box at the bottom of this very post. One special note: when I installed it according to the specifications, I got some errors. Then, I moved the code which was supposed to be added to the index.php file, in the header. After that, it worked just fine. If you don’t like the default messages, you can edit the plugin to customize it as you wish.

What else do you use on your blog for more interactivity with your readers?

I found it very easy to install and to set up. It is active and working in this very moment and you’ll never guess which links I built manually and which links were built by aLinks.

Use it once and you’ll never want to live without it again. It is the same feeling I had when I got my first pair of born shoes and my best hot kicks: no matter how many other fancy sandals, shoes or boots I bought after that, my Born shoes were always on my mind.