You can never get too creative when it comes to your blog. There are so many ways you could tweak it. If you like experimenting with colors, go ahead and try these sites. You could find so many color schemes that could suit your taste and the overall theme of your blog.

Colourlovers
Colourlovers is an awesome site! You could get all sorts of ideas for your blog because there are palettes available. You get to see new palettes, new colors and the hexadecimal values of these colors. Makes it easier for you to customize your CSS. You could check out the most loved colors and color schemes too. There are not too many articles just yet but nevertheless this is a pretty good reference.

ColorToy2.0
Another amazing color scheme site, you could easily see what colors go well together. With just a few clicks you could figure out what goes well with #5BD938. It is a pretty straightforward color scheme generator so it should be easy to use.

Daily Color Scheme
Looking for a fresh set of colors everyday? If you are, look no farther than the daily color scheme! It is nice because you basically have one per day and you could easily see the different values on the screen. On the sidebar, the top part of it, you could see the different ways you could import the color scheme, save it into different formats and use them when you need to.

Playing around with your blog is one of the fun things you could do to show your individuality and creativity. There are actually many different sources of color schemes but these seem to be really nice and easy to use whether you are a beginner or a pro. You could even complement the images that you have on your blog layout with the right colors. As some people say, there’s something about the way you present things that make them even more palatable. Ask any chef about it They sure would be able to relate.

Static Pages

These are pages that are more or less stay as they are. They are more often than not pages that contain the information that you would like your visitors to have access to. The information could be about you and or your blog.

What could you use static pages for?

1. About page
   Give more information about you, your blog. Writing a nice page to introduce your blog and yourself is great but wouldn’t it be better if you have that kind of information accessible right away? Sometimes people get really interested and it’s best if you give them what they’d like to see.
2. Contact page
   You could have a page wherein you have a listing of the different ways to contact you. You could even include a contact form, if you want it. Sometimes it could be awkward for your readers to leave a comment which is off-topic from the rest of your posts but still related to you or your interests.
3. Portfolio
   If you are a writer and you would like to showcase your talent, you could have a listing of the works you got published. You could also have a gallery there. You could even post recipes you would like to share, if you like. After all, you just have to add plugins.
4. Feeds page
   If you would like to have a mini-RSS and news aggregator on your blog, you could add a page which would do that. If you have some favorite blogs and you would like them to be easily accessible from your blog, you could set up the page with PHP-Exec and BDP RSS.

You could do a whole lot more with static pages! It is all up to you and your imagination. Whatever your needs are, there seems to be a whole lot of things you could do with WordPress.

[tags]wordpress,blogging,tools[/tags]

Content – What will you be yacking about? If your video blog will only be about your day with pretty much the same content as your personal blog then it might not be too good an idea because frankly it will just bore people to death and you’ll appear plain narcissistic. However, if you are Scarlett Johansson or someone equally hot or famous then by all means yack all you want and people will still come in droves. Seriously though, content that will do well when it comes to video blogs would be technical content (think tips) that will be hard to plod through if you read through it as one blog post. In this case it will still be a good idea to add a slideshow for the content or at least an outline so that people can take note of what they learn. Comedy acts and amateur music videos also do well. The point is to just make sure that the content will be made more interesting by using a video, instead of written, format.

Your look – Let’s face it, it would be better if you are presentable when you appear on screen. So make sure to appear your best (especially if the video blog relates to your work/business!). If you think that no amount of grooming will make you look good then get creative and use puppets or have someone do the talking/presentation for you. This way you can at least claim to now be an amateur director/producer.

Video cam – Make sure your video cam has a good resolution. You don’t have to use a professional camera but at least make sure that your video won’t appear grainy. At the same time don’t go for a ridiculous resolution because you have to think about file size and loading time.

Kindle Blogs are auto-delivered wirelessly to the Kindle and updated throughout the day. They are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so they can be read even when you’re not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle contain full text content and most images.

Bloggers who wish to publish their blogs on Kindle need to sign up for a Kindle Publishing account (this is different from the Amazon account). Signing up is free and bloggers get to have a percentage of the income Amazon will make from blog subscribers. It is still unclear just how much bloggers will be paid and how the commissions will be computed, but hey, at least there is a monetization aspect to publishing on Kindle.

Of course, Amazon expects to benefit from this arrangement much more than most bloggers will since they will not only have more content offering for Kindle users but they are apparently trying to reach out to a bigger market. Whatever Amazon will make, if you do have a blog, it is still a good idea, if only for the sake of added accessibility for your readers.

Resizing images is not a hard task, however, when resizing images simply recalculating the ratio may not be a good idea especially if the new image size is a lot larger than the original one. The reason for this is that the image gets pixelized and you end up with a grainy image that just isn’t nice to look at. If you want to resize images beyond changing the dimensions here are some apps you might want to use. All tried and tested and really easy to use.

You can also resize your images online at sites like Picnik. Picnik will resize your images for you free of charge WITHOUT even requiring you to sign up/register. It allows you upload photos from various social sites. If you want to have all the goodies though you’ll need to signup and of course pay. However, for blogging purposes I find their free version more than sufficient.

As for the SEO part make sure that when resizing images you also pay attention to aspect ratio. If you want your images to have a chance of appearing beside your link at Google’s SERPs make sure you use an image that has a common aspect ratio.

Wikipedia defines microblogging as “a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send BRIEF text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, digital audio or the web.” Being a subset of blogging the main difference is just the length of posts or messages.

Now, the question is that with microblogging being the “it” thing should we all just abandon our old blogs and shift to microblogging? The answer depends on your reason for blogging.

Personal bloggers – For those blogging to keep in touch with far away friends and relatives it is ok to completely shift to microblogging IF all your contacts also use the same microblogging platform. I personally find it better to stick to my own blog though because I like writing long updates complete with pictures of trips and my family. I use twitter as well but for a good story I need my good old blog.

Business blogs (meant for internet marketing) – SEO-wise it is not smart to abandon your old blogs especially if you already have a good rank and have developed a good number of readers. However, do look into micro-blogging to supplement your efforts.

Informative/Hobby blogs – Stick to your old blog because you will be more effective using the traditional blog format. Microblog for newsbits/announcements but not to convey the main content of your blog.

Dubbed as the “email as it would be had it been invented today instead of forty years ago”, Google Wave is out to revolutionize the way we communicate/collaborate online. A “wave” is both a conversation and a document in one. It’s your email, chat box, online document, developer API, and more all at the same time. Google Wave is so powerful that until it is out (right now it’s still in beta and is only accessible to developers) and we’ve tried it for ourselves it’s really hard to explain (and grasp) what it can do for us.

So now that I’ve raved about Google Wave let me explain what it has to do with blogging. Although it was a relatively minor part in the developer preview, one of the things that caught my attention was the integration of waves in Blogger. Due to the integration of Google Wave to Blogger, blogging will be easier in terms of accessibility both to bloggers and readers, especially those interested in keeping up with the comment section. Blog posts and comments will appear as waves in a person’s Wave account allowing a blogger to not only post entire blog posts (including pictures) via his/her Wave account but also to keep track of comments and reply via the same account. No need to login to Blogger to do this! The same goes for the readers/subscribers. They can see replies to their comments via their Wave account. Of course, all blog posts and comments can still be seen in the actual blog URL.

Details on how bloggers will be affected/benefited by Google Wave is still pretty sketchy but since, as mentioned earlier Google Wave is also an API then we can be sure that developers will soon be coming up with cool and useful stuff – both blog related and not.

Anyhow, if you are like me, there might be times when you get too engrossed reading blogs and before you know it, so much time has passed! If you are running on a pretty tight schedule for most of the time, this is not a good thing. What you should do is to carry out some practices that could help you maximize your blog reading time. How do you do this?

One, find a good blog reader. It is such a waste of time to visit tons of blogs every single day. You have to input the URL and then sometimes loading times present a problem. To get around this, use a reader instead. It will aggregate all the blogs you read and you can access all of them from one single platform. I personally use Google Reader but there are other platforms out there such as Bloglines, which is proving to be one of the most popular. Try out several if you are unsure and then make your decision.

(to be continued)

So how do you actually determine which blogs are the best blogs in a niche? Well, there are certain tools which you can use. These tools are already very popular and the chances are that you have heard of them. You just need to know the specific purpose that you want to use them for and you are good to go.

First there is Technorati. Most any blogger – niche blogger or otherwise – knows about Technorati. You probably already have an account with them. But did you know that you can download a file which contains information on the best 10 blogs in any category? This is basically what we are looking for – the top blogs in a niche. The good thing is that Technorati has a certain degree of authority and you can be sure that the information you are getting is accurate.

Del.icio.us is also another tool to find the best blogs in your niche. Again, you have probably been using Del.icio.us for quite some time now. Take a look again and look for the best blogs on a topic – http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

What you do with the information you get is up to you – use it to your benefit!

Anyway here’s how you can post date your entries on Blogger.

• Write the post the usual way
• Click the >Post Options toggle found at the bottom of the Compose box right on top of the Publish Post button
• Set the date and time you want the post to be published
• Click Publish Post

If you check your list of posts you’ll see that it will be labeled as scheduled and will reflect the date it should post. The entry wouldn’t appear until that date and time.

So why is this feature useful?

It’s very useful because you can ensure that you will still have posts going up on your blog even when you’re going on vacation. For themed blogs you can also write a bunch of posts in one sitting and simply post date the entries so you wouldn’t have to think about it again. It’s also handy for posting birthday/anniversary posts ahead of time especially if you’re the kind of person who keeps on forgetting important dates. For whatever reason, I’m pretty sure most people will appreciate having this new feature.