Though launched a few weeks ago, the guys from Feedburner announced just now a new feature, the possibility of transferring your feed to another account. Every time someone changes the ownership of a blog he can do it now by a simple transfer, instead of the hard way.

Until now, people had to delete the feed from their account, and tell the other guy to create it on the other account fast, before someone else takes it.

It’s much easier now and anyone that wants to sell a blog will understand why. Here’s how the transfer works:

Just provide the email address of the person you wish to transfer this feed to and FeedBurner will send them a transfer request email. The recipient clicks a link in the email and then creates or signs into a FeedBurner account and accepts the transfer on-the-spot. The transfer itself will be completed immediately, moving the feed from your account to theirs.

PHP Speedy is a very nice script that you can use to speed up the loading times of your WordPress pages. It’s free and it can be downloaded from this location.

It works by Gziping page components, making fewer HTTP requests and minifying Javascript, HTML and CSS.

Here’s an image of a test done before PHP Speedy is implemented (14 requests in 4.44 seconds):

And this is an image of the test done again after PHP Speedy was installed (4 requests in 1.1 seconds):

As you can see, the number of requests was reduced by 10, and the loading time was four times slower. If your blog is on a slow server, you can remain on it for a longer time by using this script. It should prove wonderful when experiencing the Digg effect as well.

Using PHP Speedy on WordPress:

1. Copy PHPSpeedy to your blog’s root directory
2. Change mod the PHPSpeedy config file to 777 and then go to http://www.yoursite.com/php_speedy to configure PHPSpeedy
3. Choose which options you want to use. Once done PHPSpeedy creates a test page to check that everything is working ok
4. If it is, then add the following the code as instructed by PHPSpeedy at the TOP and BOTTOM of your theme’s index.php file

Download PHP Speedy

You want a nice, simple, clean, adsense ready theme? Try this one.

Download | Demo

WordPress have just launched a new security release, version 2.3.3. It’s recommended that you upgrade immediately to the new version.

A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs. If you are interested only in the security fix, download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php. Otherwise, you can get the entire release here.

The absolute easiest way to upgrade your WordPress installation is to use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. It takes care of everything and all you have to do is click a few buttons. Database backup, downloading the latest version, cleaning up the installation files, everything done with just a few clicks. You can upgrade 10 blogs in 10 minutes with this plugin installed.

One of the problems that many people encounter when it comes to making money online is that they don’t know what keywords to cover. Knowing the hot and the long tail keywords can make a huge difference in the make money online business.

Imagine a major event like a world cup in soccer, followed on TV by hundreds of millions of people. Take a piece of paper and write all the possible topics that people will search online in this case.

Let’s see what we can come up with:

Country Information - people will look for information on the host countries, the stadiums, the weather and the cities that will host the matches.

Travel - tickets, hotels, rental cars, clubs and probably the price of beer, are things that people will be interested in for such an event.

Betting - another widely searched area that has a huge number of searches during important events. Keywords specific for certain matches, information on what players are missing or the teams history are all hot in the days before a match.

Teams And Players - the main focus of this event, this area will see a huge increase in searches.

Matches - while these happen just one time, and the searches for them die soon after that, they can still bring a huge boost in visitors for a few days.

There are a lot of opportunities for getting visitors in major events, and you have to look at the entire picture in these cases. As you can see, in a world cup these is so much more then just the matches.

It would be best to have a site or blog that is focused on that topic though, so look for major events in the area covered by your site. Writing about a World Cup when you have a gadget blog will not be very effective.

One of the constant goals in the life of a blogger that is trying to make money online, is gathering backlinks for his articles. Improving your authority should be natural in the best case scenario, but you can still give your blog a nudge in the right direction, by using social bookmarking sites.

All you have to do is create a user account on one or more of these social bookmarking sites, submit the url of the article you want to promote, add a description, a title and some tags that are related, and submit. That’s it. The search engines will index the links and your backlinks count will grow.

Many of these sites will also bring you visitors, so it’s a double advantage. More people from the search engines as your authority increases, extra visitors from social bookmarking sites, all this will help with your RSS subscription numbers and your monetization efforts.

Reaching the frontpage of Digg.com can bring 50,000 visitors in 24 hours and get you backlinks from other blogs. I’ve seen articles that got 80,000 visitors from StumbleUpon, if they were of high quality and were submitted to a popular category.

This method can also be used to index a new site or blog very fast. Writing a few quality articles and submitting them to different social media sites can get your site indexed in 24-48 hours.

Notepad Revolution theme for Wordpress is specially designed for those who want a nice looking profesional theme. Everything is placed just in the right spot and each color is user friendly and makes you want to never leave the page.

The theme works perfectly under Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and other major browsers.

Demo | Download

While many start blogs to make money of them, most understand that the way to reach that goal is to increase the RSS numbers. There are a number of ways that you can optimize the blog to gain extra RSS readers, though your absolute best bet is to create great content:

• use both RSS and Email Subscription links. Depending on the niche you’re in, you will see the readers use either one or the other more. I’ve seen niches with 3-5% email subscriptions and others with 90%. The more technical the niche, the better the chance that the reader knows what RSS is.
• put them above the fold in a place that can be seen easily. Don’t hide those subscription links. The reader shouldn’t have to go looking for them.
• put reminders in your posts. Probably better at the end of a post, telling the reader that if they enjoyed reading that article they can subscribe and get them regularly.
• create a page where you explain what RSS is and link to it from the front page.

By the way, you might be interested in subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed

Though WordPress is a superb CMS when it comes to blogging, you might find yourself looking for an alternative. There are plenty of options out there, as you can see below, so all you need is check them out and see if you’re interested in anything.

Before checking them out, you should know a few things that you need to look for:

1. if it’s secure. Look in forums and reviews, search with google for any information about hacked blogs that use that CMS
2. if it’s supported and still worked on
3. how active is the webmaster community behind it. New plugins and themes are made by the community, so you need to have an active group that support the software.
4. make a list of pro’s and con’s of the software when compared with WordPress
5. test it yourself on a sub-domain

Here are a few possible WordPress alternatives:

• b2evolution
• boastMachine
• Dotclear
• Eggblog
• LifeType
• Loudblog
• Nucleus CMS
• sBlog
• Serendipity
• SimplePHPBlog
• Simplog
• Textpattern
• WB News
• Wheatblog
• WikyBlog
• ZompLog

Enjoy the search!

New bloggers tend to believe that all they need to be successful is good content or plenty of promotion to become successful. However, for some reason people don’t actually do what they think it’s necessary to succeed.

A good tip when starting a new blog is to choose a topic that you can blog about for years to come. If you’re not passionate about the subject, the chances that you’ll be able to write hundreds of posts on the matter are low.

There are plenty of mistakes new bloggers do, but here are 5 that are more common:

1. Not being original - repeating what others say in a different form is a common mistake for bloggers. That might happen because they either don’t put in the time to write original content, or because they don’t know enough of the industry to write in-depth articles.
2. Afraid to speak their mind - this can come in hand with the lack of originality. Just because the majority has an opinion, it doesn’t mean bloggers should be silent if they feel different. As long as it’s based by facts, it goes hand in hand with what blogging is all about, conversation.
3. Promoting a blog before it’s ready - a common enough mistake, where people start promoting their blogs before they have enough content to show. Having at the absolute minimum 5 posts (preferably more then 10), allows any new visitors to get a feeling of what the blog is about, and to subscribe if they enjoy the content.
4. Not being focused - when looking to attract a certain crowd to your blog, it’s best not to overwhelm them with topics they’re not interested in. For example, with a technology blog, talking about cars can prove boring to some of your readers. So, instead of having the full potential to be interesting, you’re dropping the percentage.
5. Growing a blog takes time - if you’re giving up after just 3 months, then you’ve wasted a good portion of your life. A blog can take a year or more to take off, so patience is the key, and consistent blogging.

Mistakes are done by all new bloggers. What’s important is that you learn from them and you don’t repeat them.