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!

Yes, we decided to go greedy and sell even the least we can offer you — 16*16 pixels icons spot, which you see now below the bigger banners. For more information about how endlessly popular we are, please see this post.

Price: ONLY $8 / month. Payment via PayPal. Contact me at lorelei [at] loreleiweb [dot] com This sale is only for 30 days, then we might higher the prices.

EDIT: As of June 20th, all the ad slots are sold out, please email me if you want to book in advance. Thank you!

Okay, we decided to sell two (updated 16/06) one banner spots on toptut.com, additionally to what we have on right now.

We are currently nr. 57 of all the blogs on Technorati with over 10,000 reactions from other blogs.

Alexa rank: 83,800

Feed Burner Readers: approx. 400

PageRank: 3 (although we don’t sell based on PR, of course )

Visitors: Uhm, I didn’t promote this blog for ages for the stats are not particularly impressive: ~ 18,500+ uniques a month and 47,100 page impressions the past 30days, according to Google analytics.. Primarily USA traffic.

So based on the above, we are going to offer 125 * 125 banner spots on the right column, below the 2 you see now, for only $50 / month. Payment via paypal.

Interested? Please contact me: lorelei [at] loreleiweb [dot] com with the details of your request. We will not accept casino / gambling / illegal links of any kind. Thank you!

This is a very cute and timeless theme. The elegant vintage drawing of orchids, the pleasant beige colours and the Victorian header background make the layout pleasant for the eyes and easy for reading. I hope you will enjoy this neat design!

Live Demo | Free Download

This is definitely one of my most clean and successful themes. The header has a spacial place for tags cloud, if you don’t use tags, replace it with a standard banner or text in the aboutme.php file.  Don’t forget also to replace the email (envelop icon) with your own. This is an ultra web 2.0 layout you will definitely enjoy!

Demo | Download

Glamorous is a very stylish web 2.0 theme, try the live demo, to see the background texture and beautiful composition of the colours and layout.

Demo | Download