Below I have provided the first Thursday Links post of the new year. I hope that all or some of these may feed your blogging soul:
The Art of One Butt Cheek Blogging
Chinese Bloggers Reach 50 Million
What are Your Blogging Pet Peeves?
How Much of Yourself Do You Reveal When Blogging?
Happy blogging everyone! 
Popularity: 10% [?]
With so many new blogs popping up every day, it’s critical that you’re able to make your blog stand out from the crowd somehow. One method for standing out is to feature a unique and creative design that gives your blog a distinct appearance. Here is a look at 20 blog designs that do just that.
For more on the topic of creative blogging see:
Popularity: 42% [?]
Most bloggers like to change their blog theme from time-to-time to maintain a fresh look for visitors. Ideally, you’ll probably want to make major changes to your theme every 1 or 2 years and not constantly, but that is a topic for another discussion.
If you use the most popular blogging platform, WordPress, you have basically 4 options from which to choose. Each of the 4 offers its own unique pros and cons, and hopefully one of the options will be a good fit for you and your situation.
Free Themes
One of the reasons so many bloggers use, and love, WordPress is because there are literally thousands of quality themes available for free, and more are being released every day. There is a great variety of free themes, and you can find one for just about anything you can imagine. However, the downside of using a free theme is that it will not be exclusive to your blog and it may not give your blog the optimal look and functionality. The most popular free themes are easily recognizable because they are used by so many blogs. What this means to you is that you will have a bit of a harder time standing out from the crowd with a free theme.
Who Should Use a Free Theme?
Free themes are ideal for personal blogs that are intended to be a hobby rather than a business. In this case, you’re not attempting to make money with a blog or to brand a business, so a theme that is used by other bloggers is almost a non-issue. Also, new bloggers who are just getting started or “testing the waters” may want to use a free theme temporarily until they know for sure what direction they want to go with their blog.
Premium Themes
In the last year or two there has been a huge growth in the number of premium themes that are available. A premium theme is sold be a designer/developer for a set price. For example, you may pay $100 to buy the rights to use a premium theme. Other bloggers will also be paying to use the same theme, so it will not be exclusive to your blog, but it will also not be as common as many free themes.
Who Should Use a Premium Theme?
Premium themes typically feature a very high quality design for an affordable price. They’re the middle ground between free themes and a custom design, and so they’re a great fit for anyone who is serious about their blog but unable or unwilling to pay for a custom design. Additionally, most premium themes will come with some type of support or assistance from the developer.
A Customization of an Existing Theme
Both free themes and premium themes can be customized by anyone to create a more unique look for a blog. If you have a little bit of experience and knowledge of WordPress and CSS, making some customizations to a theme is not that difficult. For example, changing color schemes will only involve making some simple changes to the stylesheet. Adding a custom logo or header image can be done by making some changes to the header.php file.
Who Should Use a Customized Theme?
Anyone that isn’t afraid to do some experimentation with their theme can benefit from added customization (of course you’ll want to save a backup of the existing theme in case you make any changes that you want to undo). A basic free theme can quickly turn into a much more effective theme with a few customizations.
Custom/Professional Designs
Rather than making some changes to an existing theme, you have the option to hire a designer to create a completely unique theme for your blog. This is of course the most expensive option, but if it’s done well it will also have the best results for your blog. There are plenty of designers out there who are willing to do the work, and there is a pretty big variety in terms of price and quality.
Who Should Use a Custom/Professional Design?
Any individual who is making a good income with their blog should consider having a professional design. In many cases it will be money well spent. Most of the top blogs have unique themes, and poor quality design could keep you from reaching your blog’s potential. Additionally, business that have blogs should also consider professional designs, as the theme will be a reflection on the business.
What type of theme do you use?
Popularity: 15% [?]
I mentioned last week that I’m a fan (and a user) of MetaFilter, the community website. MetaFilter predates the entire concept of “Web 2.0,” but manages to maintain all the things we like best about large communities on the web, while avoiding the possibility of a bunch of crappy Ron Paul posts or questionably relevant links to stories about how some programmer is really upset about… well, whatever it is programmers get upset about.
We can all learn a lot from looking at the things MeFi does right:
A Negligible Membership Fee. MetaFilter charges a one-time, five-dollar fee to join.  The fee was implemented in 2004 as a result of overwhelming membership requests. It’s a brilliant idea; Five bucks isn’t much, but it is enough to ward off trolls, and to encourage people to join only if they really want to. The hassle of dealing with PayPal is by itself enough to keep out the riff-raff.
Compartmentalization. One of the big no-nos on MetaFilter is self-linking; the strict policy against it can get you banned if you try. But founder Matt Haughey appreciated his users’ need for a forum for their own projects, so he created MetaFilter Projects, where self-linking is not just encouraged, but pretty much necessary. It’s yet another in a list of sub-pages designed to relieve the front page of non-essential posts and too-specific minutae, along with Ask MetaFilter (sort of a community advice column) and MetaTalk (for discussion of MeFi itself… a sort of MetaFilter Meta).
Design. MeFi’s design is so distinctive that its members often only refer to it as “The Blue.” (They also call AskMeFi “The Green” and, occasionally, MetaTalk “The Grey.”) There’s nothing striking about MetaFilter’s design, but with its cool blue concept and serifless font, it’s definitely memorable.
Self-Policing. Because the blog is subtitled “The Best of the Web,” and early users fostered a community based on quality, courtesy and a strong adherence to that subtitle, MetaFilter has a powerful reputation for self-policing. A system of tagging and “favoriting” posts allows users to both alert mods to bad posts and reward good ones.
Quality Posts. All of the above factors result in a series of immersive, readable posts every day. It’s not like Reddit or Mixx or Digg or Stumbleupon; at MetaFilter, the users strive to contextualize their posts, often providing multiple links to related material, so that each post is like a reading list on some specific topic. And even when the posts are just single links to things like YouTube videos (ahem), they’re still pretty good.
Popularity: 18% [?]
I love WordPress, not least because it’s so easy to customize. For the design challenged among us, you can download one of thousands of free themes and change the look of your blog with the click of a button. I’ve been running WP sites for about three years (I have three of my own) and over the years, I’ve found myself going back to a few designers from time to time. Here’s a guide to some of my favorite WordPress theme designers and my favourite free themes.
Brian Gardner
Brian Gardner is currently best known for his series of Revolution themes. These are premium magazine style themes (which means you have to pay) and they look fantastic. However, for those of us on a budget Brian also has several free themes, many of which he is just about to update. Brian’s themes use clean code (so everyone says, and I’ll take their word for it), are easy to customise and are SEO friendly. My favourite free theme of his is Silhouette, but I have also used Modern Paper, which Brian designed for Performancing. There are several other great themes available on Brian’s site.
Justin Tadlock
Justin Tadlock is my current favourite. He designs magazine style themes which are infinitely customizable. The first one was Visionary, which I was all set to use when Structure came out. I like structure because I have the choice of a magazine or traditional blog look, and I can highlight quite a lot of my previous content in a tabbed area on the front page. I also like the tabbed interface in the sidebar for looking at popular posts, categories, archives and more. Justin has recently released an even better theme, Options, which I plan to use on one of my sites as soon as my host upgrades my WP installation.
Chris Pearson
I know I’m not alone in liking the themes designed by Chris Pearson. His Copyblogger theme is tremendously popular, and I’m considering that for a new site I’m developing. However, I used his popular Cutline theme for several months. This is a great theme for showcasing large header images and it is SEO friendly with a built in sitemap if you want it. The latest version of the theme has support for WP 2.3 tags as well as a few new plugins.
Nathan Rice
I’ve only used one of Nathan Rice’s themes, Deep Blue, a release for DailyBlogTips. I liked this theme because it was easy for me to put my Adsense code in, to include my Feedburner feed and to put plenty of 125×125 ads in the sidebar. As the blog author, my comments were highlighted by default. In the end, the blue, orange and green proved too much for my eyes and I started looking around for alternatives. One of the themes I considered was ElegantBlue, which has a more muted color scheme and many of the same features.
Bonus: Courtney Tuttle
Courtney Tuttle is an internet marketing genius, most recently known for being the co-founder of BloggingZoom. However, Court also goes around finding great themes and optimizing them, so his site is a good place to look if you want a theme that will tick all the boxes for Google. His SEO WordPress themes page is easy to navigate and there are dozens of themes there.
So, those are my favorites. Who are yours?
Popularity: 28% [?]
Many Blogspot users haven’t moved from Blogspot to WordPress because they’re afraid they’ll lose some of their loyal readers, but each time some of them hear about a new WordPress feature or visit other blogs created with WordPress, they sigh with envy. As a Blogspot user myself, I can honestly say I wished I had known about WordPress when I created my Life of a Writer blog, but it wasn’t as popular then as it is today. And like many others, I haven’t moved my blog to WordPress because I don’t want to risk losing my loyal readers readers either. However, as I was blog hopping last night, I discovered a great post on Download Squad that would allow me to improve my Blogspot blog by giving it a more professional look. Would you like to give your Blogspot blog a professional makeover as well? Then keep reading as I reveal the information I discovered on Download Squad last night.
One of the things I like about WordPress is their selection of free templates. I like the fact that they offer three column templates, which is something Blogspot does not offer, nor does Blogspot have a large selection of templates to choose from. With that said, the post I discovered on Download Squad, “8 Steps to a More Professional Blogspot Blog,” includes links to six third party websites with several Blogspot templates to choose from. In fact, all of those websites, except for one, has some three column templates that I plan to check out further.
In addition to third party websites with great Blogspot templates to choose from, Download Squad also tells Blogspot users how to eliminate the ugly navigational toolbar at the top of their blog, how to change the label list to a tag cloud, how to add an About Me page and more. Then at the end of their “8 Steps to a More Professional Blogspot Blog” post, they provide links to some other posts they’ve written about Blogspot, and one of those links will take you to a post that discusses adding recent comments to your Blogspot blog.
If you’re looking to give your Blogspot blog a more professional look, I urge you to head to Download Squad and read “8 Steps to a More Professional Blogspot Blog.” It’s most definitely a must read for any Blogspot user!
Do you have any tips on improving a Blogspot blog that you’d like to share with us? If so, please share your tips with us in the comments section. After all, Blogspot users really could use the information to help make their blogs more appealing.
Popularity: 15% [?]
