I decided to make a theme that does not fit with my regular themes’ scheme and you can see from the design what is it all about. Very strong colors and pretty cool design for 2 coloumns blog. Enjoy!

Demo | Download

This is a spectaculary beautiful, fresh web 2.0 theme with vector of lemons and oranges.  Very neat theme with rounded cornes, big rss icon and competible with all major browsers.

Demo | Download

If you write a personal or love blog, perhaps this theme is exactly for you, however, I think it may as well suit any blog, thanks to the neutral blue colours scheme.  Enjoy!

Demo | Download

This theme may look simple at first, but you are going to love the rollover tabbed menu, the widgets wrapped in rounded corners, the rss seal badge and the high resolution shot of the grass.

Demo | Download

This is a very neat web 2.0 theme with fractal art made especially for this theme. Very clean and easy for the eyes design. Widgets ready and competible with all major browsers.

Demo | Download

After the success of Modern Magic wordpress theme that not only became my most downloaded theme but also won the first price in LP’s awards, here comes a “sister” theme - “Modern Poison”. Dark, clean, web 2.0 and very juicy!

Demo | Download

After trying REALLY a lot of hosts from free  to paid, from shared to dedicated, I thought I will post some of my reviews of the webhosting services, so you’d know what more or less you are getting. I will only highlight the CHEAP hosts (under 10$ a month) bearing in mind we all want to get a good and affordable deal.

My # 1 host - Hostgator

This is the server that currently hosts toptut.com, and my other main business sites - Lorelei Web Design and Lorelei Web Forum. It’s has better uptime than the rest, professional support and, unlike other cheap hosts, inbuilt Awstats even if you pay 7$ for your account. The shared plan gives you the best value, just check their website for more details, but believe me this is the best deal you can get for as little as a few dollars a month. Full cPanel and loads of nice features come in the pack.

My # 2 host - Lunar Pages

Even though I won my hosting in a contest and don’t pay for it, I’d still say that if I was to pay, it would be one of the better hosting deals out there, and no wonder Lunar Pages are so popular. I host pswish.com and wpsite.net there, and despite all the CPU loads on the server (traffic, SE hits) I never had any problems, the support is excellent, friendly and professional, and they even have cPanel with Fantastico (no awstats).

My #3 Host - Dreamhost

Don’t let the big Bandwidth and Diskspace fool you. I currently host a about a dozen of sites there (including digitalfreephoto.com, nowg.net and more), use hardly 3% of my allowed diskspace and 1% of my bandwidth, yet I can’t use ftp anymore because I hit the files limit (can only have 200,000 on the server and I have 750,000+. When every single image and page and favicon counts in, it’s very easy to reach this limit. You will find quite a few limitations BUT if you use the coupon code LORELEI - you will get 50$ off, i.e. for $69,40 you get your annual hosting and for this price you can’t really go wrong.

My #4 Host - WebHosting Pad

This host is run by my partners, who I know and fully reply to. They give perhaps the cheapest deals, just click here to check more details: $4.95/mo.
And basically for this price you also can’t go wrong since this has been a stable and reliable hosting service ages ages now.

My #5 Host - BlueHost

This is a famous hosting company, and by all means should not be the last one my list, the only reason why it dropped so low was because they are a few dollars more expensive than the rest, however, just like 4 above mentioned programs this is one of the biggest and most well known hosting companies. The deal is: $6.95/mo — which is VERY affordable, considering you land on such a respectable host. Check them out for more info on disk space and bandwidth they offer.

All these were hosting companies I used and can recommend from personal experience. Moreover, they all have affiliate programs that pay out quite well, so you can start making money that will cover your hosting fees, just like I do

Like many bloggers who wish to generate as many as possible links in Google, a few months ago I discovered the “Global Translation” plug in. This was perhaps the best plug in I ever came across, especially the recent version, which could translate the entire blog to 13 languages instantly, all these pages were getting cached by Google and it could practically double the traffic, especially when we talk about blogs with a lot of content. Various terms in different languages, that ranked high IN SERP’s allowed a fresh tide of readers to come in. In the beginning, it was truly awesome!

The downside came when Google and Yahoo started to hit the server too often, because apart from the few queries from users every few seconds, we also had dozens of hits from the spiders each second. As a result, you know, this brought the previous server down and we had to leave because they blocked Google from crawling toptut.com.  The blog with enabled translation only held a few days on the new server (hosted on Hostgator) because again, no shared host can hold such a CPU pressure. So, we had to upgrade to dedicated server, just to keep it all online. But that didn’t solve the problem. The translator was still hitting the server way too much (even with database cache plug in activated and setting the cache refresh to 10 hours did not help!) and while we couldn’t get suspended or be put offline anymore by the host, it actually got worse because I ended up overheating my own server and my other sites hosted on Hostgator were crawling unbearable slow or just showed connection time out.

In my attempts to find a solution, I read many blog posts about how to fix the translator and get rid of the 403 server error, looked for alternatives, but eventually I figured that the only wise decision would probably be to get rid of the global translator itself, before even SE will ban me. Now that the translator is gone, my server is so calm and quite..

Bottom line is, having your blog translated to 13 languages is a fantastic SEO strategy, an amazing traffic booster, awesome tool to gather readers worldwide, but also a great server killer. If anyone knows of a proven way to use the Google Translatrion via Global Translator without knocking down everything around, please let me know, I really miss this plug in..