When it comes to blogging everyone has a piece of mind that they want to share. If you are blogging to make your living, you should get the right help from right people. There are probably thousands of blogging blogs.  Here is my top ten blogging blogs.

1. Daily Blog Tips

This is probably one of the best resource that a newbie blogger could have.  If you are trying to start off your blog in the right way, this is a blog that you must follow.  Author of this blog is Danial Scocco. Make sure you check out his popular posts. They are just full of good information. He also takes questions from his visitors and blogs about it.  One of the musts.

2. ProBlogger

One of the famous blogger on the web.  Darren Rawse, author of Problogger, posts on variety of different topics. His posts on monetizing your blog is very useful. You will find the right tools in monetizing your blog. He also lets a lot of other bloggers to guest post on his blog. He covers pretty much every aspect of blogging and you will want to his ideas in practice.

3. Copy Blogger

This is a place where you can see different perspectives of blogging.  Their authors make good observations and you will feel like you are in the place.  There are things that you will certainly put them in practice.  Copyblogger is also a great example of a succesfull weblog. From design to content, Brian Clark has put up a great blog.

4. Matt Cutts

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something you need to know. Search engines will probably become your main source of your most visitors and Google is the most used search engine on the web.  So to learn more about Google and search engine optimization, you can check out Matt Cutts blog. He is a software engineer at Google.

5. Dosh Dosh

There are certainly plenty of things you could learn from Maki, author of Dosh Dosh. You can find articles on Internet Marketing, social media strategies. Social media sites, such as digg.com, delicious could take your blog over the hill in no time. It’s better not to disregard these media sites.  Dosh dosh is a good place to learn how you could use them for your success.

6. Blogging Tips

Blogging tips can be useful in couple of ways. First, it’s a multi author blog so you get posts on different subjects from different perspectives. Second, you could stay up to date with all the new tools, themes, plugins and etc for your blog. Blogging tips will give you an overview on blogging and money making through blogging.

7. ShoeMoney

“Skills to pay the bills”. I think motto says it all.  Shoemoney is blog where you can find articles on advertising and internet marketing.  The author of this blog is famous for $132K Adsense check image.  That’s pretty impressive.  It has over 30K subscribers.  Author shares on what he went through on his success. Make sure to you stay updated with ShoeMoney.

8. All Freelance Writing

As you can guess from its name, this blog specializes in web content writing and blogging.  Author of this blog is a PR specialist and there are a lot of things that you can learn from her.  There is also good amount of information about some useful ebooks.

9. Blogsessive

I stumbled upon this site. Blogsessive can be a real useful tool in managing your blog. It has a pretty nice collection of wordpress theme that you could use for your site.  As a newbie blogger, Blogsessive can be the place for you start. Make sure you check out their contests.

10. Performancing

Performancing is the place to keep up with blogosphere in general. They post news from blogging communities.  Keep updated with Performancing if you wish not to miss out blogging goodies.  They also provide online marketing services if you wish to pay.

Compare to the old one, new design has a lot of changes.Nothing very professional though. I think I have gotten better working with CSS and that’s the whole point to me.  So, the reason I’m making this post is that I would like to know what others think about this new look:

Please help by casting a vote

I know there are things that are missing, such as a proper footer.  They will be added or fixed as soon as I find some time to work on this new design.

Design should look okay in pretty much every major browser. Even though I have fixed the major problems in Internet Explorer’s older versions, such as ie6, there are some minor problems.

This blog is best viewed by Firefox, Safari and Opera and IE 7 and above.

Themes Screenshot from GmailBlog

Gmail engineers just released themes for Gmail. To access these themes:

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. If there isn’t already a notice box in your inbox, click on “Settings”, which is located at top right of your screen.
3. Last tab is “Themes” tab, click on them to  change them.

Themes are only avaliable for Newer version of Gmail. If you can’t see Gmail Themes tab, that means that you are using the old version of gmail, which can be changed by clicking on “Newer Version” right next to settings link.

Right now, there are 31 themes available to choose from.  They are pretty nice actually. Some of them really worth a try.  Also, gmail now has a different default skin as well.

• Numerous style improvements and refinements.
• All admin notices now go under the page title.
• PHP Notice fixes.
• Dashboard widget options now properly save.
• Menu fixes.
• New design for Quick Edit.
• Canonical feed URL fixes.
• Walker fixes.
• An update for Hello Dolly.
• Plugin installer updates.
• Numerous font updates.
• Updated login logo.
• Click here to read more….

I gotta say I’m pretty impressed with new design. They are making it better on every release. I can’t wait for the next one.

Ubuntu Logo

So I immediately upgraded my ubuntu to 8.10. Connecting to the Internet(wireless) is always an issue among the users. I should say “newbie/inexperienced users”. I couldn’t connect to the internet because my wifi driver was disabled. Ubuntu the system itself has not provided me with good information to enable it. It tells you how you can check whether it’s enabled or disabled, and that’s it. If it’s disabled, it doesn’t tell you how to enable it. Anyways, you need to go on to their support forums and see if someone has already posted about the issue you are having and chances are someone already have. So next step would be to see if your product matches with theirs. If it doesn’t match, you keep searching on forums and eventually you will have to post your own topic. Sometimes, you don’t even get a response to your post. This literally can take hours.

This is one of the things that I want to see in ubuntu. They should either make ubuntu come with everything ready to work or they should prepare better documentation for common cases.  Anyhow,  here is what I did to get my wireless working again.

Thanks to “Ayuthia” for his helpful posts.

sudo modprobe -r b43 b44 ssb wl
sudo modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
sudo modprobe wl
sudo modprobe b44
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

If you are like me, who doesn’t understand much from linux and ubuntu, you are going to need to search the ubuntu forums to find the right piece of code to execute in terminal. It’s pretty much try and fail until you find the right one.

Those five command lines fixed my problem but everytime I reboot ubuntu, it would require me to execute them again and to fix that problem, you need to edit “rc.local” file in the system. To do that;

You need to edit “rc.local” and add following code at the end.

Open terminal and type this
gksudo gedit/etc/rc.local

and add this just before “exit 0″

modprobe -r b43 b44 ssb wl
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
modprobe wl
modprobe b44
/etc/init.d/networking restart

After you save, you can restart your system. If you need further instructions, you should go ahead and post at ubuntu support forums. Also, here is my product info.
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:0b:00.0
logical name: eth1
version: 01
serial: 00:16:cf:71:b1:f1
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl ip=192.168.1.101 latency=0 module=wl multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg

As said, different devices require different installations. So good luck on searching the forums.

First thing you will notice that ubuntu has a new default background image.  First image is the new background.  Rest are just wallpapers that I found in background folder in ubuntu. This is also an upportunity for me to test Lightbox plugin I just installed.

To see these images in full size, just click on one of them and plugin should should take care of the rest. You can also use your array keys in your keybord to switch one to another.

I must say they have done a great job with this new design.  It looks great. Although, I’ll be missing the old style. It gives you full control on your admin index page. You can customize it as you wish. Unfortunately, they are behind their schedule and won’t be able to release 2.7 on November 10.  It’s been postponed to  the end of November.

One of the new features that I really like is that automatic upgrades. You can now upgrade your Wordpress without downloading the version from the site and upload it to your website. I know this was announced before but it’s good to see it in action.

Firefox Minefield runs a separate system so you won’t have to do anything to your current Firefox installation.  Don’t expect too much in terms of stability, because it’s in its alpha stages… One of the things that people talked about chrome was that how fast it can execute JavaScript.

Google Chrome got popular due to its fast javascript engine. This future Firefox is even faster.  Soon, firefox is going to adapt this new JavaScript engine.

As it says on minefield project page:

Warning: This is NOT A FINAL OR PRE-RELEASE VERSION. This program is provided without any guarantees of stability, so please use it at your own risk. It is recommended that you back up your profile regularly, as there may be bugs that corrupt your data. If that sounds scary, you’d probably be better off with the latest version of Firefox that you can download here.

Minefield is same as Firefox except that it has a new javascript engine and it doesn’t support any of the add-ons that you use in Firefox. Minefield is testing purpose only.  It’s really worth it to install it and check the new javascript engine.

For further info on this project:

• Minefield Project Page
• New Firefox Javascript engine is faster than Chrome’s V8 (Visit here to see actual tests)
• Minefield post at Linuxhaxor

“As of today access to the popular blogging website Blogger.com has been blocked in Turkey with a blocking order of the Diyarbakir First Criminal Court of Peace (dated 20.10.2008 and order no. 2008/2761). The reason for issuing the order ban is unknown but a considerable number of Turkish users are affected including myself who contribute to a popular an anti censorship blogging site at http://sansuresansur.blogspot.com/
I will provide further information as soon as further information is available. As of 01 October, 2008, 1115 websites are blocked in Turkey under the provisions of Law No. 5651. It is however believed that the blocking order issued by the Diyarbakir court is outside the scope of Law No. 5651. The blocking orders issued under Law No. 5651 are executed by the Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) and they provide an “execution notice” when that is the case. However, there is no information whatsoever provided on the http://www.blogger.com pages when accessed from Turkey.
A detailed assessment of the Turkish approaches to Internet content regulation will be provided in an 80 page long report entitled Restricted Access: A Critical Assessment of Internet Content Regulation and Censorship in Turkey written by Dr. Yaman Akdeniz and Dr. Kerem Altiparmak. This bi-lingual (English/Turkish) report will be published during November 2008 and will be made available as a PDF file through cyberlaw.org.uk and cyber-rights.org.tr pages.
[Blog entry by Dr. Yaman Akdeniz]“

Blogger has a decent amount of users in Turkey. How can a government ban a website this big without any information?  Most people in Turkey access these banned websites by using a proxy server or changing their DNS settings.  It has no point whatsoever.  I’d not be surprised if they ban google since it’s a tool to find all these sites.

Photo by Roo Reynolds

Hopefully every week I’ll be able to  post a part of this new series I started. This is a weekly series meaning that every week there is going to be a new addition to the series.

This week’s subject is “Really Simple Syndication (RSS)”

It would not be incorrect if we were to say that blogs have been promoting  usage of RSS. Almost every single blog provides their visitors with RSS.  Watch to  see what RSS is all about.

If you want to see an example of an RSS file, click on “Subscribe via RSS” on right sidebar. It will take you to Tenth Blog’s feed page where you can subscribe to our feed.