LATEST STORIES

Bitly has a New Realtime Search Engine For You!

bit.ly new search engine!
As many of you might already know, Bitly is the largest Link Shortening service. In fact, it is the one responsible for ushering the world into the concept of short links four years ago. Since then, it has been extensively been used to replace long URLs into a collection of just a few characters, which can be easily shared on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. It came is handy especially for twitter, where there is a character limit on tweets. Well now, after almost four years, Bitly has finally collected enough data to create a whole new search engine of its own! Bitly calls it "Real-time", and describes it as an "Attention Ranking" Search Engine. Although still in its beta phase, it has been rolled out to the public. It can be accessed at http://rt.ly.
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Google PageRank Update August 2012

pagerank update 2012Well there comes just a new update on Google's Page popularity algo on 2nd August 2012. The PageRank toolbar has started showing new ranks for all websites worldwide. The update this time seems a major one and there could be no further expectation of any new changes within the next 24 hours. The last update was on May 3rd and third last was on February 6th. The duration gap has now become constant. Google rolls out these updates quarterly, after every three months. The next update and last update of this year is expected anytime between  November 1-10 2012. PageRank as you all know is a numerical weighting scale between 0-10. Websites that are recommended by related niches via backlinks rank higher on PR scale and get the benefit of faster crawl and index rate.  Blogs with higher PR are crawled faster compared to those with lower PageRank. For example a PR 7 webpage is crawled several times per minute compared to a PR 5 page that is crawled once every minute. The faster the robot crawls your pages the greater the chances for you to drive organic traffic from Google and build readership.
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How Can Weak Eyesight Destroy Your Blogging Career?

How Can Weak Eyesight Destroy Your Blogging CareerBeing Neutral in everything you do is the primary rule to lead a happy, peaceful and contented life. However, when it comes to making money, there are hardly any rules to be followed to ensure a healthy routine. If you are a blogger or a freelancer, or an entrepreneur, making money online, then one thing you have common with all others in your niche, is your eye exposure to the Screen of your Machine. Although the idea of earning from your living room is always an appealing one, but what you really risk is your eye! It is no wonder that the online money making business causing vision weaknesses and in return, weak eyesight can affect your productivity, further bringing a downfall in your career.
If You Work for a really long duration on your machines daily, then you need to have a keen look on the unfolding aspects, that we will share in this post.
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Customize Labels Cloud in Blogger

Back in the year 2008 when Blogger.com was moving through several update phases, third party developers would often take the golden opportunity of creating widgets for BlogSpot blogs but as soon as Google rolled out massive changes to their online services, several official widgets popped out which load fast and perform well because the scripts are served by Blogger servers. Page List and label cloud/list enabled designers to create dynamic menus. Since the stylesheet was made accessible. therefore we all got a chance to play with these widgets and transform them completely in look and appearance. We shared tutorials first time on how to create dynamic menus with page list and an automatic menu with label list and today we would share a simple stylesheet that will transform the labels cloud into organized small blocks that rotate on mouse over. I must ensure you that the styles are perfectly compatible in all major browsers including IE8+.
DEMO: Look at the label cloud on the sidebar of this blog

This is how labels look in cloud display:

labels widget blogger

This is how it will look after you apply the new style.

label cloud widget

How it works?

Each label link is nested inside a span tag followed by a class named label-size. If the font-size is not specified the widget changes font-size of each label according to its post-count. Therefore showing big and small clouds. Introducing custom styles would over-ride the exiting styles thus changing the entire look. 

Turn Random Cloud display into Blocks

The code below can be customized in several ways to create exciting label designs. You can also add background images to them.
Follow these easy steps:
  1. Go to Blogger > Settings> Layouts
  2. Click add a gadget and choose Labels                     
  3. Inside the settings make sure to choose the cloud display. You may set other options as per your requirement. See the screenshot below as example 
labels settings

Please choose to display at most 25 labels. Too much labels on homepage look awkward. Showcase your best categories only.
       4.    Now save the widget and go to settings > Template
       5.     Backup your template
       6.     Click Edit html > Proceed  and search for this
]]></b:skin>
        7.   Just above it paste the following CSS code:
/*-----Custom Labels Cloud widget by www.MyBloggerTricks.com----*/
.label-size{
margin:0 2px 6px 0;
padding: 3px;
text-transform: uppercase;
border: solid 1px #C6C6C6;
border-radius: 3px;
float:left;
text-decoration:none;
font-size:10px;
color:#666;
}

.label-size:hover {
border:1px solid #6BB5FF;
text-decoration: none;
-moz-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
-o-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
-webkit-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
-ms-transition: all 0.5s ease-out; 
transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
-moz-transform: rotate(7deg); 
-o-transform: rotate(7deg); 
-webkit-transform: rotate(7deg); 
-ms-transform: rotate(7deg); 
transform: rotate(7deg); 
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(
                    M11=0.9961946980917455, M12=-0.08715574274765817, M21=0.08715574274765817, M22=0.9961946980917455, sizingMethod='auto expand');
zoom: 1; 
}

.label-size a  {
text-transform: uppercase;
float:left;
text-decoration: none;
}
.label-size a:hover  {
text-decoration: none;
}
          8.  Save your template
         9.    All done!
Visit your blogs and see the labels completely transformed to small neatly crafted rectangular boxes. If in case you want the label boxes to be of random sizes depending on the post-count then simply delete font-size:10px; from the above code.

Need help?

I am sure the installation of this tweak wont trouble you a lot, if in case you needed help in changing the font colors on active, hover and visited modes then let me know. By default the visited link will turn black, unlinked and would also not rotate. Click any of your label links and see that page to check this effect.
I will be posting normal tutorials on plugins and widgets and I have got some new SEO tweaks for blogger blogs that would further improve your SERP ranking. I am sure you would love to try them out. Peace and blessings pals :)
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