More changes in Google PageRank

Today many people are reporting changes in their PageRank and backlinks from Google. Some are increasing, while others seem to have dropped to a (temporary?) zero.

On some data centers, Blogger Buster has dropped to a zero, while on others the site remains at PR4. I'm not too worried about this, and imagine that the update is still in progress.

Have you noticed any changes in your PageRank in the past couple of days?

I will update this post as soon as I have any more information for you all. In the meantime, you can check out this PageRank tool which checks your blog URL across multiple datacenters to get an idea of these changes are affecting you too.

Your domain:   (eg. iwebtool.com)

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Poll: Which default Blogger template have you used the most?

If you have a moment to spare, please take part in the poll which appears in my sidebar.

Even if you don't currently use a default template, you can still vote to tell me which of these default templates you prefer, or which have used in the past.

The results of this poll will be very useful for the ongoing Blogger Template Design series, and will help me get a better understanding of which customizations are most important to you.

This poll will only run until Monday, so be sure to get your votes in soon!

Thank you to everyone who takes part!

A cheats' guide to customising Blogger templates

I'll be honest with you: designing a complete blog template is not an easy task. It certainly isn't a quick one!

Throughout the whole Blogger Template Design series, I will take you step by step through the entire process I use when designing a Blogger template, from the initial plans and considerations right through to the final tweaks which will make the template your own.

Altogether, I imagine this series will become quite long, so as a taster of what is to come, I'm offering you A Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger templates: a few quick tips which can help you transform your blog from this:

to this...

in as little as an hour!

For this example, I'm going to use the default Minima template provided by Blogger. However, the examples used here could easily apply to any blog template.

In total, we are going to make three major changes to the overall appearance of the blog:

1. A new header image
2. A new background pattern
3. A plain colored background to the main content of the blog

I'm sure you'll agree from comparing the before and after screenshots that these changes make the template seem vastly different to the default one!

None of these changes are particularly technical (I'll cover such aspects in later installments of this series). Instead these techniques will be easy to learn and use, even for absolute beginners!

Before you begin!

Be sure to make a complete backup of your existing blog template, just in case you make a mistake or would prefer to revert back to this at a later time.

To do this, go to Template>Edit HTML and click on the "Download Full Template" link near the top of the page. Save the XML file to your computer, and ensure you are able to access this later.

Making a new header for your blog

In my opinion, one of the simplest and best customizations you could make for your blog is to customize your header. In this part, I will offer you a quick and easy way to make your own clickable header image.

Finding the width of the header

Before creating a header image, we need to know the width of the header section in the existing Blogger template. This prevents the header image from being clipped or malformed when it appears in the completed design.

To find the width the header image should be, go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, and look for the following line:

#header-wrapper {

Just below this line, you should see the CSS statement for the overall width of the header. In the default Minima template, this appears as follows:

#header-wrapper {
width:660px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
border:1px solid $bordercolor;
}

From this information, I know I need to make my header image 660 pixels wide. This may differ for your own template, so be sure to check the width of the header wrapper in your template code to be sure you have the correct width.

The height of your completed header image does not matter. You can make this as tall or as short as you like, though I would advise that header images taller than 300px prevent any blog content being seen beneath it in some internet browsers.

Making your header image

Those of you who are experienced with image creation and editing may now be racing off to create their very own unique header image using their header dimensions. For those of you who are not so familiar with CorelDraw or Photoshop, an alternative would be to use a free header banner and adapt this to your needs.

In the example above, I downloaded a free vector header from BitBox and resized this to 660px wide using GiMP (a free image program sililar to Photoshop, but without the price tag!). Here is the resulting image (click on the image for a full sized view).

For this "cheats' guide", I would advise you to add your blog's title or logo into your header image. This is because there may be problems when using your image as a background behind the title and description (I will explain this fully in a later post).

Again using GiMP, I added some test to my header image, and here is the finished result, saved in GIF format:

Adding your header image to your blog

This quick method of creating a blog header is the simplest one of all. Just go to Template>Page Elements in your Blogger dashboard, and click on the Header widget near the top of the page:

On the popup screen, you will see options for using your own header image. Select the radio button to upload an image from your computer and locate this using the "browse" button. Then check the radio selection which says "Use instead of title and description. Finally save your settings.

Using this method, your image will be hosted by Blogger, and will appear instead of your regular title and description, like this:

Note: in the Minima Template there is a glitch in the CSS which can make the header appear slightly misaligned. This is easily solved by changing the margin of the #header statement from this:

#header {
margin: 5px;
border: 1px solid $bordercolor;
text-align: center;
color:$pagetitlecolor;
}

To this

#header {
margin: 0;
border: 1px solid $bordercolor;
text-align: center;
color:$pagetitlecolor;
}

By now, you should have your brand new header image in place of your default textual header. This was probably the trickiest part of "The Cheats' Guide", so now we'll get on with something a little easier to achieve.

Using a background image

For my demonstration template, I decided to use a tiled floral background image which blends well with the colors in the header. There is a wonderful selection of free tileable background images available for download at SquidFingers (in fact, this selection is among the best I've ever seen!), though a Google search for tileable background images will bring you some alternative downloads to try.

Choose your background image

The first step to using a background image for your blog is to find one which you like. I chose this pattern from Squidfingers, though you could choose any image you prefer. You will need to save the background image to your computer as we will be using this very soon.

Upload your image to the web

In order to use a background image for your blog, you will need to upload this somewhere online. One method is to upload this to Photobucket, or a similar free image hosting service. But here is a trick to help you host your images with Blogger for free!

Simply create a new post and upload your image as normal. But don't publish the post, just save this as a draft which you can delete later.

Now preview your draft post. You should see your image displayed in the preview page. Right click this image and view the properties. From here, you should be able to extract the URL of where this image is hosted. Copy this URL to your clipboard or Notepad so you can use this to reference your background image in the template's HTML code.

Now you can safely delete this draft. Choose NOT to delete the image when prompted, otherwise you will be unable to use this URL for referencing your background image.

Alternatively if you choose to upload your background image to Photobucket (or similar hosting service), ensure you have copied the URL of your image.

Adding the background to your template code

We will now need to edit a small part of your template's HTML code to add this image to the background. So go to Template>Edit HTML in your blogger dashboard, and look for the following lines:

body {
background:$bgcolor;

We need to add the URL of your background image to the "background" statement using the following format:

url(the_url_of_your_image)

In my demonstration template, the additional code appears like this:

body { background:$bgcolor url(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCCLWH1Z7bb4ji8jhz-dkq4mekwEXmg-7VpkP9chOrKjJBppC9_VI8rgPJ0EyY37ASPRlx1peksfREPTo7XkIWL2ELQ5LTzyMupgzWRepHpMvTj-eDx8cOf8GVGiTNfnoZKj6M3BJGM70/s1600-h/pattern_140.gif);

Of course your own URL will be different. Just be sure to follow the same format, and ensure that the semi-colon (;) appears at the end of the statement.

Now preview your blog to see the changes. It may look something like this:

If you are happy with the background, you can then save your template for us to go on to the next step. However, if you prefer not to use this, you can simply click the "clear edits" button and start over again.

Now in my demonstration template, you will notice that the text is barely visible against the patterned background. This leads me to the final customization of this tutorial: changing the background color of the main blog content.

Adding a background color to the main section of the blog

One of the best ways to draw attention to the content of your blog is to place this against a flat, contrasting color. This draws the eyes to the 'meat and potatoes of your blog': your blog posts. So in addition to the background image, we need to place the main content of the blog against a complementary color which will make it easier to read.

We don't need to use any images at all for this, and compared to the previous two customizations this is a minor tweak.

To add this colored backdrop for your blog content, simply locate this line in your template's HTML code:

#outer-wrapper {

In some templates, this may be "#outer-wrap" instead. Directly below this line, add the following line of code:

background: #ffffff;

This line adds a white background to the main content of your blog (both the blog posts and the sidebar). You can easily use a different color if you prefer by changing the hex value for white (#ffffff) to a different hex value instead. An easy way to find the correct hex value for your chosen color is to use the web color calculator in the Tools section of this site.

In my demonstration template, I opted to use a light blue background (#E3F2FB) to complement the background image. Here is how the whole section of code appears in my template code:

#outer-wrapper {
background: #E3F2FB;
width: 660px;
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
text-align:$startSide;
font: $bodyfont;
}

To make the foreground stand out even more from the background image, I also added a border to the left and right hand sides of the outer wrapper, which can be achieved by adding the line in red to the outer-wrapper style statement:

#outer-wrapper {
background: #E3F2FB;
border-left: 2px solid #cccccc;
border-right: 2px solid #cccccc;
width: 660px;
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
text-align:$startSide;
font: $bodyfont;
}

And here is the finished result:

Final adjustments...

Once these main customizations are complete, you may wish to change some of your fonts and colors to better match your new design. I changed the post title colors, the link colors and the fonts to end up with my final design:

These simple customizations can easily make a default template into something unique to you!

These three customizations are the most noticeable and easily achieved customizations you can make.

You may also be interested to read some of my earlier tutorials which can help you add to these basic customizations and begin to edit your template even more:

• Add three columns to your footer section
• Create navigation buttons
• More ways to customize your header
• More ways to use background images

Coming soon...

In the forthcoming posts in the Blogger Template Design series, I will expand on these basic customizations and guide you through the more advanced techniques of template design. Each post will fully explain one particular technique, building up to a complete step-by-step guide.

The next post of this series will explain the preparations and tools required for creating your own complete and unique Blogger template.

To ensure you are updated about the new posts in this series (plus other Blogger news), be sure to subscribe to the blog feed.

As always, I appreciate your comments and opinions about my posts. And if you have used this Cheats' Guide to create a more personal template of your own, please do leave a link to your blog so we can take a look at the final results!

A great big AdSense slap for foreign webmasters

I've just read about a huge change in AdSense terms and conditions which is going to greatly affect the earnings of many AdSense publishers. These changes affect everyone who publishes referral ads for Google's AdSense program, and promises to be an even bigger slap in the face for those of us who live outside North America, Latin America and Japan.

There are two main changes to the AdSense program for ad publishers:

Changes to payments through the referral system

About a year ago, experimental changes were introcuded to allow AdSense referrers to earn good money through recommending Google's advertisement service:

• If you referred someone to AdSense who made $5 within 180 days you would get a payment of $5.
• If you referred someone who made $100 within 180 days you would get $250
• If you referred 25 people who made $100 within a 180 day period you would get a bonus payment of $2000

But this is about to change back to the way things were before. SO from now on, if you refer someone who makes $100, you will only receive $100. This will make little incentive for publishers to refer small websites to the program.

But the changes get worse for publishers outside North America, Latin America and Japan...

AdSense referrals are retired for publishers outside North America, Latin America and Japan

WHAT IS THIS GOOGLE!

When I first read about this on ProBlogger, I could barely believe it was true, and had to see with my own eyes. Here is what the AdSense blog has to say about the changes:

- If you're outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired.

For publishers not located in any of the three regions detailed above, we'll soon be retiring referrals promoting AdSense. We've found that this referral product has not performed as well as we had hoped in these regions. (Read the full entry)

I'm truly shocked.

No doubt, AdSense will lose a great deal of its own income from restricting its referrals to these three areas. I myself will be greatly affected by this loss since I live in the UK, as I'm sure many more of you will be too.

Lately Google seem to be upsetting a lot of people with their restrictions on content. Now that their popular advertising program is being affected too, many more of us are losing all faith in Google.

I wonder what the next big Google slap will be?

Please do leave your comments and opinions below. If I hear any more about the changes to the AdSense program, I will be sure to post it here to advise you of the situation.

Template changes

I've just made some slight adjustments to the template, most notably the presentation of the title, labels, comment link and calendar widget. Hopefully these edits have not caused any other problems with the template, but if you do notice anything amiss, please do let me know.

Also, I welcome your opinions on these new changes, so please let me know if you prefer the posts presented this way.

I will be explaining the method I used for these changes during the Blogger Template Design series, so if you're interested to know how this was achieved, be sure to keep updated on future posts!

Weekly Review #1

This "Weekly Review" is one of the new features I decided to introduce for Blogger Buster in 2008. From now on, each Sunday you can expect a review of news, interesting articles and resources I've discovered through my blogging week.

I hope you'll find this a useful addition to the regular content posted here, and welcome your feedback on this, including any recommendations of sites which you have found useful too!

So far, it has been an interesting start to 2008 and I have quite a collection of links to offer for this week's feature, both from my feed reader and through sites which readers have recommended.

News on the Blogger Buster front

New features added

To get the New Year off to a great start, I've introduced three new features to the site: the Blogger Template Design series began on Friday and will continue over the next few weeks with a step-by-step guide to creating your own unique Blogger template for your blog. Today, you are reading the "Weekly Review" where I will be posting blogging highlights from the past week, and on Tuesday, I will post the first of the "Reader's Questions" series, where I will answer questions from my inbox about Blogger and blogging in general.

Blogger Buster enters the Technorati Top 5000

I was thrilled to discover that Blogger Buster is now in the Top 5000 blogs in Technorati's ranking. At the time of writing, this blog ranked at 4286, so we're gradually creeping up in the ranks. Thanks to everyone who linked back to Blogger Buster, and also to those who have made this site a favorite in their Technorati profile. I hope that this time next year, we may even be creeping up towards the top 1000...

Guest posting for Blog Bloke

On Wednesday, I made my first guest posting over at BlogBloke.com: Become a more productive blogger with a ten minute workout. This post seems to have attracted much interest over on Blog Bloke's site, so check it out if you haven't already done so and let me know what you think. I hope to make guest posting a regular feature over at BlogBloke.com, so it's likely you'll see more of this in forthcoming weeks.

And finally...

I released my new blog, Techiboo.com on New Year's Day, which features more general articles about blogging, social media, web design and internet lifestyle. Please do check it out if you haven't already, and let me know what you think to my new site.

Blogging News

"Weblogs" are ten years old!

I was perhaps a little late in realizing that weblogs celebrated their tenth birthday late last year. The term "weblogs" was apparently coined on Decenber 23rd, 1997 when Robert Wisdom decided to start his own web page, logging the best links and sites he found on the internet on a daily basis. And so the blog was born!

You can read more about the tenth anniversary of blogs over at The Guardian, which lists some of the highlights in the past decade of blogs.

Technorati Top 100 suffers link spam

We all know and hate link spam, usually suffered through comments pointing to undesirable sites. Unfortunately, the Technorati Top 100 blogs became victims of this unwanted attention over the weekend, when spammers decided to overrun the Top 100 bloggers by favoriting them, including links back to their own unwanted blogs. More details over at MixedMarketArts.com who discussed this trend in detail. I do hope Technorati can put a stop to this spam soon, or we will all end up with spammers promoting their unwanted services through our blog profiles!

The Bloggies are open for votes!

The annual Bloggies are back for the 2008 showcase of the best blogs as voted by the public. You can vote your favorite blogs for a variety of awards, including Best Entertainment Weblog, Best Blog about Politics and Best New Weblog. Voting is open until Friday, and unlike other blogging awards, you don't need to register to make your votes. Be sure to get your nominations in while there is still time!

This Week's Links

Here are links to some of the best sites and posts I've come across this week in the field of blogging:

• BlogBloke.com: Previously hosted at Instabloke.com, Blog Blokes popular blog has moved over to a new domain. Be sure to update your feeds and bookmarks for Blog Bloke, and check out the new look for this site.
• The best of Skelliwag in 2007: Skelliwag.com is a veritable treasure trove of articles and resources for bloggers, especially in regard to blog promotion and blogging habits. This post highlights the best of Skellie's posts over the past few months the blog has been online, which I would really recommend as an introduction to this highly interesting blog.
• Captions for images in blog posts: Peter discusses methods of adding captions to your images in Blogger posts, a highly useful feature to assist your readers in the understanding of your blog content.
• Disqus.com (for Inline Comment Forms): Angel tipped me off about Disqus.com which offers a commenting service you could use to add inline comments to your Blogger posts. In action, these comments look much neater than the version I blogged about previously. As yet, I haven't extensively tested this service myself, though I will be sure to post about this when I do.
• EarthFrisk.org: This is a new and rather wonderful search engine, which collects the search results from over a dozen different search engines and filters the results to find the best matches to your queries. So far, I've been really impressed by this service, which soon hopes to become a rival for Google searches (though of course we have yet to see how popular EarthFrisk becomes).
  
  A novel feature is that you can add your own profile for anyone searching for your specific name, including links to your sites and a profile image. Furthermore, you can choose to search social media sites like Technorati and Flickr in order to find the best results for your queries.
• Free Business cards for your Blog (from OoPrint): OoPrint are offering a selection of free business cards specifically tailored to bloggers. You will only need to pay for postage costs for these free cards, and unlike those offered by Vistaprint, you can expect to receive your cards in a matter of days (not weeks). There are 32 designs to choose from, many of which are graphically tailored to bloggers, and all of which seem to be of good quality. These would certainly be a useful tool for promoting your blog offline!

I hope you have enjoyed this first Weekly Review. For next week's feature, I would welcome any of your own suggestions, so do send me an email if you find any interesting sites or articles you would like featured in the next review.

Why your blog design needs to be unique! (Blogger Template Series)

As many of you will know, I've decided to post a complete series about Blogger Template Design, taking you through the process step by step in order to create a reference for the creation of your own Blogger templates. To kick start this series, I wanted to discuss some of the reasons why you may want to create your own blog design, in essence to make it unique.

Blogger's Generic Templates

Currently Blogger offers it's users 16 generic templates, many of which have different color schemes or options. These default templates do have their advantages:

• They are very easy to use. When choosing a new template, you simply check the radio button below your chosen design and click "Save Template". No need to upload a new template, or copy and paste the code!
• Your widgets will all be saved if you decide to change templates. One of the disadvantages of using customized templates, such as those I offer in the Templates section is that non-standard templates cannot be configured to host existing widgets unless the respective code is already present in the new template (though there are ways of getting around this problem).
• All images contained in Blogger's generic templates are hosted for you, so you don;t have to worry about hosting them yourself.

Unfortunately, these default templates have one big disadvantage: there are thousands of bloggers using exactly the same templates all over the world.

Default templates are not really unique.

For example, a blogger in Utah may write about her experiences as a dental nurse while using the default Snapshot template; a gentleman in Baghdad may write his memoirs, again using Snapshot for a base; an up and coming finance company in Berlin may be blogging company news for potential customers and shareholders... But if, on first impressions, their templates are the same, what is there to easily distinguish between them?

Of course, their sidebar widgets, blog title and post content would be vastly different, but from experience I understand that web-surfers are impatient. First impressions really do count, and if a visitor has seem dozens of other blogs with the same design, they are unlikely to take much notice of yet another of the same theme, regardless of the value of its content.

First impressions count!

It's an old saying, but this is very true of blogs and web content in general. As I mentioned earlier, visitors can be very impatient, and the first few seconds they experience when landing on your page are crucial in determining whether or not they will stay to read it.

For many blogs, new visitors will find you through a search engine. In such an environment, there are many other links they could choose from, and perhaps they have already visited many other sites while searching for the piece of information they need. Your blog needs to stand out from the rest if you want this visitor to stay and read what you have to offer. Even if your page doesn't contain the information they are looking for, a unique and interesting design provides just as good an invitation to stay!

Brand your blog!

Don't be fooled into thinking only products and companies have a brand to offer the world! Just as you are an individual, so is your blog. The clothes you wear are those you have chosen, and probably make a statement about the kind of person you are. The same principal can also apply to your blog.

To illustrate this, I want to offer you two examples of Blogger blogs. One of these uses no branding at all, while the other provides an excellent example:

Let's look at the first example. Without knowing anything in advance about this blog (which I understand many of you already will), would you have much of an impression of what this blog talks about? Can you tell at first glance that this is one of the most popular Blogger powered blogs in history, that it spawned a series of popular books and even inspired a TV series here in the UK?

While Belle De Jour does serve as an example of how popular a blog can become, it doesn't so much in terms of branding to offer the casual onlooker a taste of what it has to offer. In fact, when I first visited this blog, I thought I had got the wring URL!

Now let's take a look at our second example: Flair in the City. You would be forgiven for believing this is not a Blogger powered blog at all. By providing a striking header related to the theme of fashion and shopping, Flair instantly tells us what her blog is all about. The consistent color scheme and style of logos throughout the blog reinforce Flair's "brand": a playful and feminine theme used both to reflect her personality and attract her target audience. Flair in the City is not a commercial blog, though the effort put into the theme would certainly convince us of it's authority in its niche!

Taking both of these examples into consideration, which method do you think better serves the purpose of ensuring readers want to read your blog, subscribe to your feed and return regularly to see what new posts you have to offer? To brand your blog effectively, you wouldn't need to customize to the same extent as Flair's complete design, but you can take some inspiration from it.

Customize your template because you want to!

The most important reason you should make your template unique is because you want to! It may surprise you to know that for a few years, I blogged using generic templates which I barely customized at all. When I finally began to look into the possibilities of template design, it was because I wanted to learn more about it, not because of any criticism of my original blog design.

Most of what I know about blog and web design was learned through my experiments with blog templates. For me, this has been a great learning process, and I would certainly recommend this route for anyone who wants to learn the basics of web design. One of the most rewarding things you could do with your blog is to learn how to customize your design.

In the next installment...

Creating a completely customized Blogger template is no mean feat. In fact, it took several weeks of hard work and experimentation to create the design you see in place on Blogger Buster today!

So rather than throw you all in at the deep end, the next installment in this series will be A Cheats' Guide to Blogger Template Design. In this post, I will tell you offer you some quick tips and tricks to make your existing template more unique in less than an hour of your time.

Once you've seen what can be achieved with a few quick tweaks, I'm sure you'll feel more confident in creating a whole new template for your blog! In the meantime, why not take a look at some of my earlier posts about template design as I will be drawing on many of these in the forthcoming step-by-step guide.

Be sure to subscribe to the feed to keep up to date with the latest posts in this series. And as always, I love to read your thoughts and opinions, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Welcome to 2008! (The year ahead, announcements and thanks!)

Wishing a Happy New Year to all Blogger Buster readers!

I'm really looking forward to a new year of blogging and have many new projects which I embrace with great enthusiasm. So in my first post of 2008, I'm going to make a few announcements regarding my future blogging exploits, and offer my thanks to those who have assisted in the development of this blog.

Blogger Buster in 2008

Over the past week or so I've been analyzing statistics, re-reading your comments and generally trying to figure out where I plan to take this blog in 2008. My most popular posts are those long tutorials and articles, so this is what I will focus on in the year ahead, with a splattering of Blogger news and ready made templates for good measure! I'm also going to introduce two new regular features which you can read about below.

Blogger Template Design Series

One of my first projects here at Blogger Buster will be a series of articles focusing on Blogger template design. Beginning with some general articles about Blogger templates, you can expect to read a full-blown account of how I design Blogger themes which you can follow step-by-step to create the perfect Blogger template for you!

Readers' Questions (New feature #1)

Since starting Blogger Buster, I've received loads of emails and comments from readers who have questions about the Blogger platform. Many a time, I've thought just how good it would be for other readers to read my answers, either as a case study for a particular problem, or to help deal with Blogger problems they may be facing themselves.

What better way to accomplish this than by posting a new weekly feature: Reader's Questions. This feature will be an invitation for you to send me your questions about the Blogger platform (or blogging in general), and each week I will take answer one question in detail so the community as a whole can benefit from this advice.

In the next few days, I'll make a full explanatory post about this new feature, so be sure to check back soon if you'd like to be involved.

Weekly Review (New Feature #2)

Another feature I've been considering for a long time is a Weekly Review, where I'll highlight any Blogger news, interesting features and great posts by other Bloggers which I've found over the course of the week.

I think this would be a great way for us all to keep up to date of the latest developments in the Blogger community as a whole, rather than simply focusing on the events happening on this site.

Announcements

Now for the New Year announcements...

Techiboo.com - my new site!

As I live a good part of my days online, I learn lots of interesting and useful things which aren't strictly related to blogging. Rather than keep all this useful stuff to myself, I decided to pour this into a new venture; essentially a sister blog to Blogger Buster.

Enter Techiboo.com: a blog about the more general aspects of blogging, social media, web design and internet lifestyle. Featuring a brand new theme and a growing collection of resources, this site is dedicated to those who spend time and effort on their internet presence.

While not strictly related to Blogger, many of the posts at Techiboo will be useful to the expansion and popularization of your blogs. Today is the official launch day for Techiboo so please do drop by and let me know what you think of my new site. As always, your comments and opinions are appreciated as I develop this new venture!

Guest posting at BlogBloke.com!

Today Blog Bloke launched his brand new blog design and domain over at BlogBloke.com, and as part of this great development, he invited me to be a guest writer on his popular blogging resource!

I think my first guest post will appear in the next couple of days, and hope to become a regular contributer of the Blokester team.

If you're a regular visitor to Blog Bloke's blog, be sure to update your bookmarks and feeds to the new domain as Instabloke.com is now redundant. And if you haven't yet discovered all that this prolific blogger has to offer, be sure to head on over there soon and discover a new flavor of blogging about blogging!

Thanks where thanks is due...

As a closing note to 2007, I want to thank some of the people who have helped me develop this site in various ways:

Flair for the advice about template style, and for helping me develop my ideas for the new Blogger Buster design.

Peter, for the blogging advice, sharing ideas and promoting my content.

Blog Bloke, for the invitation to guest post, and bouncing ideas about the design of our new sites.

My Family, for all their encouragement.

And most importantly:

Thanks to all my readers, for sticking with me, for all your comments and emails, and for encouraging me to keep on blogging. Without you, this site would not exist!

And finally...

I hope you have all enjoyed the past few months of Blogger Buster. I look forward to reading your comments on my plans for the future of this site, and hope that I continue to provide you with enjoyable tutorials and useful information about the Blogger platform through the new year ahead.