WordPress.com 30 Credits Giveaway

UPDATE: No one entered, so no free credits to giveaway. Comments closed.

There is ‘new’ old news about WordPress.com displaying ads on users’ blogs. Some people knew about this and others didn’t. The reason some didn’t know about this is because when you are logged in or are a regular reader, you won’t even see the ads. I have yet to see the ads when I tried looking for them. I couldn’t find one.

A lot of people don’t mind, but there are some of you who do mind. I hope you realize that WordPress.com offers you a free service with the option of adding upgrades that is cheaper than if you pay for hosting. Most free services place advertisements to help keep the service free. But most of them are intrusive. The ones on WordPress.com blogs don’t seem to be.

Taken from the WordPress.com blog:

We seemed to have lucked in to a good balance with this approach, and don’t plan to change anything there. (Most of your readers will never see an ad.) As an added bonus the light advertising has allowed us to focus on free features for you guys rather than paid upgrades, and enabled us to invest in infrastructure so your blog is always fast and reliable and never shows a fail whale.

That sounds like a good deal to me! But I do understand if you are completely against ads on your blog.

So, I thought I would help out one lucky person. I’m going to give away 30 credits to one blogger. This will end on October 11, 2008 (in 3 weeks). Please share with anyone who might want a free year of no ads, it could earn you 15 credits.

Follow the instructions below to enter in the giveaway.

1. Subscribe to the feed. (If you are already subscribed, then you should find the 3 sets of numbers on a new post in the feed.)
2. Contact me via the contact form with 3 sets of numbers found in the feed and your WordPress.com username.
3. Leave a comment saying you’ve subscribed and contacted me. (This lets me know that I should have received an e-mail so it doesn’t get lost someplace.)
4. (Optional) Share this giveaway with a friend and if your friend wins, you will receive 15 credits. Your friend must provide your WordPress.com username in order for you to receive the 15 credits. So be sure to tell your friend to include your username on the contact form.

WordPress Self Destruction

I may be the last one on Earth to find this, but I thought I would share it for those of you who also don’t know about this hidden feature.

With the newer revisions feature in WordPress, there are two radio buttons next to each revision to allow you to compare. I thought I would compare a revision with itself. Not sure why, I just wanted to. Watch the following video to see the self destruction of WordPress.

I apologize for the looping of the video.

Tip: Fix Gmail IMAP Inbox

For the past couple weeks, I have had an error appear anytime I go to the inbox. It would just prevent me from downloading any new e-mails in the inbox. I didn’t know why it was happening, just figured Gmail was having some problems. After I heard from people that Gmail was working fine for them, I thought it was probably my profile in Thunderbird.

I didn’t get around to cleaning up my profile and just today thought I would look at my Inbox properties. In the General Information tab, there is a button that says Rebuild Index. I’ve never known what this button does, but thought I would just click on it and see what happens.

Do you know what happened? All of my e-mails in my inbox were downloaded from Gmail!

So, if you ever have problems with your inbox (or other folders), try rebuilding the index to repair whatever is broken.

Good Deals at Super Warehouse

I had purchased a new laptop just recently. I had to do a lot of research and looking around to find that perfect laptop for a good price. It’s great that the costs of laptops are going down, but it seems like you spend less for the cheaper quality ones.

My only regret is that I didn’t find Super Warehouse sooner. It was so hard finding a laptop that could handle the work I do on my desktop at a cheap price (in case my desktop was to ever fail). I pretty much had to search for laptops that were on sale, but there weren’t many that I liked.

If I could afford Apple laptops, I would have actually considered purchasing one. But, for a lot less, I can get something faster and with a larger screen.

Super Warehouse has a very large selection of laptops. I was surprised to see some Sony VAIOs available for cheaper prices than I have seen at other online stores. See for yourself – take a look at the Sony laptop page. There is even one Sony laptop that I had looked at that has a battery life of up to 5 hours! That’s quite a long time.

Even though I was unable to use Super Warehouse to purchase a laptop, I still have a chance to take a look at their digital cameras! I like my digital camera, but it’s very old now. It’s a Canon PowerShot A20, which only features 2.1 mega pixels. The pictures don’t seem to come out as well as they did in the beginning, of course I may just be so used to seeing higher quality ones that the ones I take on my camera look horrible. I wouldn’t mind having a Nikon Coolpix.

I like that Super Warehouse provides a lot of accessories for the products they sell. I hate buying something at a store and then finding out they don’t even sell accessories for it and I have to spend time looking elsewhere.

They sell so many different products, including photo printers, Lexmark printers, printer toner, scanners and PDAs.

Besides some of the affordable prices, they also offer free shipping on many of the products. Check out some of their deals.

Tumblr and Themes

After having seen the Notepad Chaos WordPress theme by Evan Eckard on Smashing Magazine, I wished I had a blog to use it on. Then I realized I had a Tumblr blog that I was using a plain looking Tumblr theme on and have been wanting to make it look better.

I had never touched the code in Tumblr themes, so I didn’t know if I could port a theme over to Tumblr. Fortunately, it was very easy because the theme author had created a single file that had all of the theme code in it, minus the CSS of course.

The Tumblr code is pretty easy to understand and they provide a useful help page that explains each variable and even includes some page examples.

I did eventually learn that I couldn’t upload images on Tumblr, so I had to upload the images elsewhere and point them to the right location in the code.

Once the theme was ready on Tumblr, others started noticing it. In less than 24 hours, my blog was on the Sweet Themes Tumblr page.

So, if you are tired of the Tumblr themes provided, seek out a theme that wasn’t made for Tumblr and customize it for Tumblr! I’m glad mine doesn’t look like everyone else’s (except for the WordPress blogs using the theme). Here are a few sites that offer Tumblr themes:

• Tumblr Themes
• Free Tumblr Themes
• Custom Tumblr Themes

Interested in a custom Tumblr theme? Check out tumblize.