A few days ago I was introduced to yet another publishers network that popped out on my horizon — The Clickbooth Publisher Network. I just signed up today so I can’t really tell or judge how profitable is it. Basically this is a Cost-Per-Action middle man that helps site owners to find affiliate advertisers and get paid for sales. The main advantages over other companies is that publishers can request banners of any size they wish. While we are all used to some standard billboard slots on our sites, it should be a good idea to place a non-traditional advert size, which will blend it more naturally in site’s design. Moreover, they offer Custom Rotators which gives publishers full access to custom built rotators and increase conversions.

Unlike some other similar companies that set the minimum monthly payment to $100, Clickbooth’s threshold for the month is only $50. You can also make money by referring other publishers to Clickbooth and get $10 off each new referral. While they guarantee the highest payout to publishers, I guess you cannot really know it unless you give them a try and sign up, run their ads on your website and see how much does it pay you.

You will have the option of email marketing, search engine marketing and of course on-site publishing. Sign up is absolutely free and you lose nothing by trying.

Here is a new wordpress theme from my collection, starring a nice and shiny Porsche car. This theme has plenty of web 2.0 elements and will fit perfect with any automotive or personal and business  blog. Enjoy!

Live Demo | Free Download (178 kb)

I am proud to present my new wordpress theme - Mørk Horisont (Dark Horizon, in Norwegian).

This is a professionally designed wordpress theme with beautiful combination of web 2.0 colours, dark horizon image and rounded corners. For a limited time we will be offering this theme for a download for only $8, instead of $10. Thats, uhhmm, 20% save, my friend! You can preview the live demo if the theme HERE.

What’s included?

• Fully coded wordpress theme.
• PSD file of the logo.

What’s the difference between this theme and the free themes I offer?

Basically, many bloggers want unique, or at least remotely unique design, but due to the high prices for custom designs, most bloggers today cannot afford it. Using a free wp theme means your blog will look like 1000 others on the net, if not more. Here, for a pretty symbolic fee of $10 $8, you get a professionally looking design with juicy colours, professional structure, fast loading, optimized for various plug ins and XHTML valid (please see Copyright credits for coding below).

*** Please note that all payments are non refundable. You will be asked to confirm the payment while going through the check out form via PayPal (secure payment), and once the payment is made, you will be automatically redirected to the download page. If you have any difficulties downloading, please email me to lorelei [at] loreleiweb [dot] com with your transaction ID.

Copyright notice:
This theme is a modified version of WPdesigner.com’s Music theme which is available for Club members only. As a member of the club, I am free to make commercial and non commercial use of this template on unlimited amount of domains. Please see their TOS for more details. When you download please read the readme.txt file for more details.

Thanks WPNorge.org for the correction!

Looks like not only we got featured on CSS Container yesterday, but we were also chosen to be the site of the week! Pretty of the guys behind CSS container, thanks!

By the way, just 10 more incoming links and we will make it to the  top 100 most linked-to blogs on Technorai. Doing well so far. Have a great weekend peeps!

This theme was released as a promotion for WP Site - WordPress Gallery themes new website. Ultra Web 2.0 is a very sleek and professionally looking wordpress theme with 2 columns, a lot of web 2.0 elements and rounded corners. Enjoy!

Live Demo | Download

I often get emails asking what web hosts am I using for hosting all my sites and the answer is — I use many. I try to host each few sites on a separate IP, first of all, if the host goes down only a few websites will suffer from downtime, and secondly — link building within my own network brings more benefits. All this pays out spending a few dollars a month extra on each host.

Recently I got my hosting account at Lunar Pages. This host is often compared to Dream Host by means of offering too much bandwidth for too little price… You can also avail of our special deal, and get $50 OFF if you input the coupon code LORELEI. (That turns out to be less than $4 a month + free domain.. not a bad deal?)

The difference between these 2 hosts, Lunar Pages seem to have a much more powerful servers and obviously better uptime. I also signed up with their referral program that pays out much better than Dreamhost. Both DreamHost and LunarPages give you a FREE domain upon sign up, which you can keep for life as long as you host with them.

However, both hosts still do not perform as good as HostGator, on which I host my forum. Even though they offer less disk space and bandwidth for a higher price, you get a better quality server, faster, always online and Awstats installed.

Another host we would recommend is SurfTown. For $7.95 a month you get more space than you can ever use and a FREE domain. You can host only 1 domain on the basic plan, but then again, if you have a quality site with plenty of visitors this is a great solution.

For more info, we always use websites that compare many web hosts and their features, this is always a very useful tool to help you make up your mind and decide which host you want to go with.

Okay, I am pretty sure that an average blogger who posts often is NOT going to like wordpress 2.5.

Everything seems to be in the wrong position, you can’t find anything and the “simplified” in-theory menu, is in practice seems to be rather complicated. For example, instead of just using the upload window below the post, now you need to click on the small image near “add media”, and wait until the window is loaded (about 5-10 seconds), and choose to upload from your computer, which is additional load time. Then, when you finally uploaded your poor photo (alleluia to that!), you need to choose parameters and alignment of the picture. Sounds simple? Well, it will take time to get used to it…

For choosing, in which category you want to file your post, you need to scroll down, because in the place where categories were normally located you see a menu of “related functions”… Hmm, if I am already making a post, why to put links with “manage tags” and “manage categories” under my nose, while it would be far more useful to display related posts close by, so that I, if needed, could link to them..? Oh and, when you work in Visual Editor and choose to insert hyperlink, in previous versions, the “http://” part would be selected by default and disappear if you click or paste URL, while in the new version it stays unselected, so if you just follow the habit and paste URL without removing the “http://”, you will have it twice and.. yeah, url won’t work.

Is there anything good though?

You can run spell check in 12 languages, and… and manage your plug ins, settings and users, if you put your glasses on and look good enough in every corner.

Bottom line… While everything is so web 2.0 and so rounded that it hurts the eyes, why oh why no one in this whole wordpress department could crop the bottom WP logo better..? Okay, once I will locate the “publish” button — this post goes online.

Most you probably already heard of CrownPeak CMS. CrownPeak Technology is the first company to provide world-class content management as a service, This is a secure, feature-rich, enterprise level technology can be made available economically. Please note that this service is provided within USA only, so if you want to sign up you need to be from the States.

Advantages?

Get complete control over your Web site. CrownPeak CMS features an award-winning interface, powerful workflow, content publishing and integrated web analytics, CRM and campaign management powered by industry leaders such as WebTrends, ExactTarget and Salesforce.com

An Instant And Permanent Member Of Your Team.
Every customer receives a dedicated Account Manager, who’s only job is to make sure your web site is successful. All included - as part of the ongoing service.

And don’t worry, the sign up form does not require you to provide any ultra personal details (like address, for example), so looks like you can’t lose anything by trying.