February 5, 2012

Problogger Book Review

I purchased Darren Rowse’s Problogger book a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to write  a review on the book. Its a fairly quick read and has some fairly decent tips for blogging if you are starting out with a blog and even for people who have been blogging for a while.

The book  follows a lot of the same context as you find on Problogger in terms of style and context. Of course you should probably expect this as Darren wrote a lot of the book. Overall I would say the book is a good read and has some really useful information. Its mostly theory and advice on things you should be doing when you build a blog. I would have liked it better if there where more explicit examples on some of the items the book covers mainly on stuff like revenue generation and private ad sales.

It would have been hard for them to give specific examples on a platform as the book’s focus was designed to reach a wide array of bloggers and not spend verbiage on any one specific platform. if you are serious about building your blog up, then I would say the book is worth the few dollars it costs and could probably help a lot of people learn to be better bloggers. I don’t really want to spoil any of Darren’s thunder so I won’t tell the specific tactics that are in the book, but I did pick up a couple of items that should help me a lot.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
by Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett

Read more about this book…

 

Revolution Themes Review

I installed Brian Gardner’s City Revolution Theme on another of my sites today and it came out really well. I bought the developer set of these themes a while back but never installed one. I had started work on putting the Magazine theme on that same site I installed the city theme on this morning, but at the time I did it there were only a couple of post on that blog and it made configuration of the theme difficult. As a result I went with a free theme on the site and just let the Revolution Themes gather digital dust.

Initially the themes can look a little over whelming, but if you dive right into them, then its not that difficult at all. For the majority of the themes you will need at least 4 categories on your blog and 5 is better as you will need a Featured category for most of the themes. Its then a matter of figuring out what the category ID is of the category you wish to feature and then edit the templates to handle it. Editing the templates is a little tedious, but not hard once you figure out where everything is located. The only way this could be better if Brian had written a plugin to allow you to set the categories and text of the featured sections from within the admin panel which would make it easier for users without comfort with modifying wordpress themes.

The themes are starting to have options which can be set in the admin panel, so this may be something that is on Brian’s list for a future release. Overall I like the way the theme’s look and its quite possible you will see one of the versions on this blog very soon. I need to create some images prior to installing it here to obtain the look I desire, but after going through the city theme this morning I’ve got some ideas how I can make one or a combination of a couple of the themes work out well for this blog.

Brian has a free version of the themes which you can download to try them out on your blog before you purchase, but the free version does not have near the customization features as you get with the professional pack. If you want a professional looking theme at a decent price then you may want to check these out and see what they can do for your blog.