A very essential part of blog optimization is making it be a comfortable place for your old, faithful readers and even the new ones. I’m sure you agree with me that font size is a tricky part, on the internet, there are different opinions about how big or how small a font should be in order not to cause pain to the eyes.

I came across so many blogs and websites that had some really nice articles which could be a great read, but there was a major problem. The font size was too small for my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything. There were 2 possibilities: copy the text in a word processor and make the font bigger in order to read it without problems or just simply hit the x button and close the window. There are 99% chances that you would choose option number two (closing the window), and that’s exactly what I did. In other terms, this means money loss, high bounce rate, big decrease in the subscribers number, and more bad things for the one who tried to write a good article.

The best thing you can do is to install a plugin on your blog that will display a button on every article, a button that allows the reader to make the font smaller or bigger, according to his tastes. Luckily, if you are on wordpress, a smart coder made a very nice plugin called “WP-chgFontSize” which can be downloaded from here. Once the plugin was download, here are the installation steps, according to the author:

2. Decompress and upload the contents of the archive into /wp-content/plugins/.
3. Activate the plugin on your WP Admin > Plugins page by clicking ‘Activate’ at the end of the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ row.
4. Configure the plugin on your WP Admin > Options > Font Size page.
5. To use it, there are two possibilities:
* If your theme supports widgets, and you have installed the [widget plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets/) or you are using Wordpress 2.2 or higher, add the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ widget on your WP Admin > Presentation > Widgets page.
* Add `<?php chgfontsize_display_options(); ?>` at the place in the theme’s file where you want the font size selection appear.

Regarding step 5, I personally chose the second option and it looks like this (click on the photo to make it bigger):

Again, I really recommend you to use this plugin which will definitely make happy some of your readers. If any problem occurs during installation, feel free to add a comment here telling what the problem seems to be and I’ll be glad to help.

This is a list of some young guys that changed the internet with their great ideas. What would you do without them?

1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin

They made “Google” in 1998, when they were only 24. Their first “desk” was located in a garage, and after a while they became the owners of a great empire making billions of dollars per year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wordpress is making five years, five years of intense blogging! There was a long but beautiful way from the first release - 0.7.

If you want to celebrate this with other bloggers, then you should rush to the wordpress birthday party that will take place in San Francisco at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM.

For more details check this link.

Many thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the genius behind the Wordpress blogging platform!

This is an interesting wordpress plugin. What it does? Well, when you mouseover a commentator name, something will appear, showing you some information about the person. Here’s a screenshot:

I find it very useful because I always like to keep in touch with the commentators of my blog, a blog is nothing without its commentators. Using this plugin, you could actually track their activity on your blog.

Comment info tip can be downloaded from here.

via 

We all know that Google can do miracles for your blog and it’s quite easy to get some free targeted traffic to your blog. I think that many of you heard about the seo plugin for wordpress but don’t use it the right way.

Well, I think that you already know how to install it, just download it, and then upload it on the host in the folder wp-content/plugins. After that log into the admin area, go to “plugins” section and activate it.

Ok, you will notice something new at the “write post” section, under the writing box. Here’s a screenshot:

Now, let’s go a little back, at “options - > all in one seo”. There, make sure that “Use Categories for META keywords box” is not checked.

After doing that, everything is easy. At “Title” you should introduce the title of the article (many bloggers say that writing the title in capital letters may get you a better rank in google, but I personally don’t like all the title to be written in capital letters). At “Keywords” you should write some keywords related to the article, and at “Description” I generally write some keywords too. You can leave it blank, but writing some keywords there may get you a better rank in searches.

I will start with the basics in blogging. These first tips may be boring for some of you who already know these things but they might be very useful for a new blogger. So let’s take it easy.

photo by a trying youth

Blogger

What I do like at Blogger is that is very easy and quick to make your own blog. You only have to sign-up there, complete some details, log in and create a blog. Easy!

What I don’t like at Blogger is the fact that Blogger is not so professional like Wordpress, it’s good for new bloggers but if you really really want to do something good, I recommend you Wordpress. With blogger you can’t have your own domain, and your own host.

Wordpress

Wordpress is awesome, I love it! It’s a fantastic blogging script. Very easy to personalize and there are many themes available for wordpress.

There are two kinds of wordpress. The one that is almost like blogger ( you only have to sign-up and your blog is ready ) or another one that’s a little bit more tricky.

It has a blogging script that you can download for free and put it on your host. It’s easy too, but sometimes it can be tricky. What’s so nice about this script is that you have total freedom!

So final recommendation, new bloggers, use Blogger and advanced bloggers, use Wordpress (but I think that you already use it)!