AdesBlog.com

Popular blogger Leo Babauta has gone Open Source, he says it’s okay to steal my content now. He is allowing people to use his blog’s content in any way people like. After this, I am sure his blog posts will be popping up in many blogs throughout the internet (especially when people are out of ideas and have nothing to post about).

His ebook Zen to Done is very popular too, selling over 1,000 copies within two weeks. It’s an ebook about productivity that is created out of his blog’s content. Currently selling at $9.50. If you do not want to go through his blog’s archive, you can buy this book.

In the same post, he argues that going open source won’t hurt his PageRank and his eBook sales. As you know Google sometimes punishes for duplicate content, when people start copying his content, his blog might get punished. He also talks about other interesting issues regarding copyright, check out his post.

In my opinion, he will do just fine, I think going open source will bring only good things for him. He will get free advertising and his readership will jump many many folds in the near future (currently he has more than 36,000 RSS readers).

What’s your opinion on Leo’s move? Do you think other bloggers should follow his suit?

Caroline Middlebrook has written an ebook on WordPress. The ebook is 41 pages long, it’s especially useful for the beginners who are migrating from blogspot to their own domain name.

These are the major sections of the ebook:

Chapter 1: Getting and Installing WordPress
Chapter 2: Basic WordPress Administration. 10
Chapter 3: Installing a New Theme. 13
Chapter 4: Setting up Adsense On Your Site. 16
Chapter 5: WordPress Plugins. 20
Chapter 6: Creating Your Site Content
Chapter 7: Final Thoughts
Appendix 1: Uploading Using FTP.. 33
Appendix 2: External Resources

You can download it here.

Advertising Blogger is a new project by Phil of www.contestblogger.com. Basically it’s a blog about potential advertising spaces on the blogosphere. In other words, Phil will be reviewing worthy blogs (that give the highest ROI - Return On Investment). You should consider these blogs when you want to advertise your blog in the blogosphere (i.e buy reviews, text links, banners etc).

It’s a new project, thus, so far I have seen only the familiar blogs. I hope Phil will venture into other blog categories other than “make money online” category and give us the gems of those categories. I am sure there are tons of great blogs in other categories that we all are overlooking. Now that Phil has taken that task, we can all relax and check his website for updates. If you know of any great blogs that you had a successful campaign, do let us know by commenting on this post.

I didn’t even know that he had reviewed my blog the first (wow), for that I would like to thank him!

If you have been gaining weight lately (i have), then you should read The Blogger Proof Workout, Vol. 1 that was written by Israel of FatManUnleashed.com. Israel had started his blog as the last attempt to loose weight. At the same time, he will be blogging about his progress.

It’s a seven page free ebook that has some innovative workouts that you can do right at your blogging space.

But some rules like “Received email: 5 pushups” wouldn’t work for me, because I get so much of email everyday, if I were to do 5 pushups for every email received, I would have to make mushups the rest of my life non-stop. But I guess the point is, to use your blogging environment to help you loose weight.

It’s an entertaining and funny ebook, look forward to the second volume.

When I used to work as a Web Designer before (2 years ago), I used to design quite a bit of projects in flash. And there was always one problem, finding suitable sounds for flash projects. Since the company didn’t provide with funds to buy CDs, you had to search for free resources (including sounds) on the net. They thought (the company) they could cut costs by using free stuff, but most of the time the quality of the free resources was not very good, and that directly affected the customer satisfaction. But for management, most of the time, it’s the cost that they are only concerned with.

Anyway, soundsnap.com is a website that offer professionally made sounds for free. You can download the sounds in MP3, WAV or AIFF formats. You can also share your own sounds if you have.

They plan to keep the website running free and make money from advertisements.

Is Soundsnap Free? Yes. We are planning to support our operation costs by advertising and we might offer premium services in the future. But all the services that you are currently using are and will always remain free. link

Currently I see that they are using only Google AdSense, I hope they can make enough money with AdSense to keep running the site for free.

soundsnap.com

There are many Open Source Projects on the net. There are blogging platforms, CMS portals, image galleries, shopping carts, discussion forum scripts… you name it. For any project in any category, there is a free script that you can use.

However, it can be mind boggling to choose a script that suits your needs, especially if you are not familiar with any of them. In order to really test each script, you will have to spend a lot of hours installing and debugging them. And that’s a big disadvantage.

Luckily there is a site that allows you to test-ride most of the popular open source scripts. You can test the front and back end of any of the listed scripts.

For example, if you haven’t upgraded your blog to the latest version of WorPress 2.3.2, you can test it here.

I frequently use this site to compare different scripts and their functionalities. I also noticed that I send many of my customers to this website to test out particular script (especially the back-end part) before they chose it to use it for their projects. I thought you would find it useful.