____________________________________________________________________________

This is yet another RSS icons set I made, to promote my PS Wish blog. I already made a bigger set of Feed Icons that came in 10 colours and shape of badges, but since the popularity of feed icons is unlikely to ever decrease, here is one more freebie for you. Please read the “read me” file before using, it’s very short!

Details + Download HERE

Other great RSS icon sets you might like…

____________________________________________________________________________

We all love TemplatesMonster’s design and always drool over their Wordpress themes and flash intros, right? Well, I have exclusive news for you and I could hardly wait for toptut.com to come back online to post about it: you have a chance to pick ANY of their site’s products absolutely free.

Where is the catch? No catch, serious.

TemplatesMonster.com is holding a lottery for 2 weeks only, from June 26th until July 9th. The lottery is extremely simple, just visit the lottery page and you will see 2 templates you can choose from, dedicated as you can guess, to the theme of elections. Fill in your email address, name, and place a vote. That’s it! No hidden fees or obligations, just vote for the design you like more and you will get awesome glossy Patriotic icons set FREE (everyone gets!) and a chance to win one of the special TemplateMonster prizes:

- 1 Gift Certificate giving the opportunity to
get any product from Template Monster database for free;
- two 80% discount coupons for purchasing any product from Template Monster
database;
- three 50% discount coupons for purchasing any product from
Template Monster database.

And still, this is not all. All the patriotic templates are sold with 20% discount, during the special lottery 2 weeks, and with each purchase of the “patriotic template” you get the icons set I mentioned earlier ($55 value!) free as well.

While everyone is busy with the election, this could be a fantastic opportunity to win a splendid design absolutely free and without any effort on your part. I think this is the biggest Give Away lottery TM held so far and it’s just mindless not to enter. Hurry, it’s been running for almost a day now but you still have 2 weeks to vote and tell your friends about it. I already entered and can’t wait for the results, in two weeks. The download link to the icons set was emailed to me instantly and I must say they look fantastic, psd format included and of course not watermarked if you started to suspect. Good luck to all!

Very elegant and melancholic theme with glossy  top navigation menu, rounded corners and big rss icon as well as special division for”about me” text and ad banners. Hope you like this theme!

Demo | Download

This is a very elegant yet neutral wordpress theme with vector flowers, pleasant dark colours scheme and special space for ads banners.  The theme has been tested on all the major browsers, including Firefox 3. Enjoy!

Live Demo | Free Download

Serious, this is really crossing all the borders.
First people downloaded my free themes, changed a few graphics and resold them as their own.. it was annoying but okay, be it! Then, a few smart guys figured a good way to get their SERPs and traffic boosted without spending a penny — just take all the best free themes for wordpress, not much, around 2000 is enough, sit and redo the footers, throw the designers and partners links away, they don’t deserve to be there, and place your own. That’s a great business, I am telling you!

While there is always a small percentage of cheeky users who decide to get rid of the footer credits on the FREE themes, today I got really shocked. While browsing the comments on this blog, I noticed the guy from myblogit . net complaining about “Arium” theme not working properly with widgets. I naively assumed he is using the theme and it doesn’t work for him, so I thought I will go visit his site and see what might be causing the problem… what do I see? Bloody hell, toptut.com’s custom theme. Status: ripped…

Similar or not, you decide, but in case it does look rather different to you, the colours probably resemble my other design much more — www.nowg.net and MY css, didn’t undergo through much changes from the one where David claims to be the author.

Now, how did this happen?

Toptut.com’s theme, just like nowg.net’s theme, were unique and designed by me (Lorelei Web Design) coded from my layered PSD, they never were and never will be free themes that users can download anywhere online. But that guy obviously uses my (Tom Sramek’s, to be exact) css, structure, idea, and even the graphics have the same names (why bother renaming?). Which leaves me with only one conclusion, he just ripped it directly from my server!!! Ain’t this bloody cute? Yes, I am angry. Not only they had no decency to ASK me if maybe I mind having my theme ripped, and not only they didn’t bother to at least say in their footer that this theme is based on the one they took from me while I was sleeping, but they also go further and credit themselves in the css! Marvolous.

I spend weeks combining the colours, deciding on the right structure, usability, then comes the hard coding part. This work eventually builds my reputation as a designer and if people see what I present as “Unique” on 10 other blogs, they will think I just make a “unique” theme and sell it over and over until I run out of clients. Right? That’s what I’d have thought, if I was a client.

Bottom line: if I spot anyone ripping one of the unique designs I made, OR, using / offering my free themes with removed credits, — email with complaint about copyright infringement will be sent directly to your host with demand to take the account down. I am really tired of the DAILY correspondence with those who rip and resell free themes on digital point forums, and those who “didn’t know replacing the designer link was not allowed”, and those who have ten thausand more excuses.

Today, one of my clients just reported blinger . org for offering my themes with ripped credits (they don’t offer only my themes), and I will do the same with everyone will rips my work from now on. No joke, there really have to be some limits!

UPDATE: It took a few emails, but me and David resolved the issue, looks like he got scammed and receieved my theme from someone else, but the guy who sold it probably dropped his free email account because any attempt to contact him failed and email bounced back, so guess it’s a dead end now and I will never nail the original theif. *sigh*.

Finally, after much gossip and talking around the Firefox 3 release, it’s been put online for a download! As you can guess, it’s not fully competible with all add-ons yet, but I believe it’s a matter of a few weeks.

From Mozilla’s official FAQ on Firefox 3:

Q: What’s new in Firefox 3?A: Firefox 3 is the fastest, leanest, most powerful browser Mozilla has ever released. With over 15,000 improvements, including the revolutionary smart location bar, malware protection, and extensive under the hood work, Firefox 3 delivers the Web without compromise.

It is promised to be the best, and break the world’s record for downloads count over the 24 hours, so we can only but wait and see how will it work. So far I don’t really like the new default skin and the drop down address bar with previously typed URL’s is rather alloying. But hey, it’s just me!

Okay, it took me practically half the morning, but eventually I did it! TopTut.com moved to Hostgator. This server is by far faster, allows us to see Awstats on the server and has better support.

Basically this was not a rushed decision, it’s been a while that I considered moving my most popular blog to a server with better uptime and speed, but yesterday the decision pretty much make itself. After 2 weeks of negotiations with the previous host, it has been decided to block Yahoo and Google bots from my blog, which resulted in no translation to 12 languages anymore, nor crawling of new content, ever.

It seems that mere 850+ visitors and 2000+ hits daily were too much for the shared host to handle, we consumed too much CPU and the only way to fix it was to block the search bots (or, upgrade to dedicated server, for only $395 a month..). Considering that 40% (!) of my traffic does come from Search Engines and $4750 a year for one hosting account was a too high price, we packed our belongings and moved with our nose raised high.

When you can read this post, means  we are already on Hostgator

BuySellAds.com has only been released a while ago and I already have something negative to say about them, sorry! From a buyer’s perspective I don’t see any disadvantages apart from inability to sort the marketplace inventory by price, hits or any other parameter. However, as a blogger or website owner who plans to sell banner ad slots with them, here are a few things that might stop you.

• 25% cut.
• Open listing on the marketplace.

While they do present their cut of “only” 25% as a big gesture compared to Text-Link-Ads.com, it’s still a lot. For example, if I want to sell a banner for $50 (and I do), i.e. either I will get $37 off this price, or need to charge the advertisers $63, to cover BuySellAds.com fees. Why would I want to do either of the above if I already have enough traffic to be able to “catch” an advertiser directly…?

But okay, everyone charges fees and you can’t expect the middle man to be left at loss. This brings us to another disadvantage you might want to consider, and this is the open appearance in their marketplace. While we all remember how Google rolled out penalties against all the websites listed on Text-Link-Ads.com and PayPerPost.com, and since that date you can’t view a direct url to the seller, BuySellAds.com come and repeat the same mistake, listing each site with it’s web address, which means, if Google will decide… Uhmm.. Ok, let’s not mention the devil! Even though it’s not “links”, you can still p*ss the big ‘G’ off.

Nevertheless, looks like despite being in beta mod yet, a lot of websites jumped on this opportunity, including some well known sites like welovewp.com, psdtuts.com, nettuts.com, and cssmania.com (I just learnt that CSSmania.com has almost the same Alexa rank as TupTut.com! Yay!)

I just registered myself to see how it works, looks like they do offer a few convenient options (payment by paypal 3 times a month or monthly issued check) and the registration approval was rather fast.

Advertisers can find quite a lot of websites to choose from, ranging from $1 to $1,500 per ad, and quite a lot of sites have their slots sold and sold out, so let’s see how it will start rolling!