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Finally, i got around to designing and coding a decent template for serverdome, as the last two designs were actually very, very bad looking. (I had several people commenting on the “mustard colored” blog). The template is far from over, as the plan is to release it as a free wordpress theme when i am done polishing and customizing it for public consumption. This version has some glaring oversights, (and probably some problems i haven’t noticed yet) like the lack of a functional footer and support for some plugins.

The curved corners are done through the use of the wonderful Nifty Corners Cube that you can use to get rounded corners on any html element using just javascript.

A big improvement over the last design is the customized look of the MyBlogLog widget. I always hated the default look of the widget and wanted to customize it but couldn’t bring myself to go through the mess that is the MBL code. This article on styling the MyBlogLog widget was a huge help in figuring out where every little piece of css goes.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with the look and feel of the new template compared to the old designs. I was considering using a free template and not have to worry about designing and coding a template from scratch but i prefer to do things by myself and knew i wouldn’t be happy until i had my own custom design.

Want to know when the downloadable version of the template will be available? Why not subscribe to the fabulous RSS feed ?

In case you haven’t been checking my site’s source regularly (who doesn’t really), i removed the NoFollow tag from all comment and trackback links on this blog during the weekend, and went through about 100 comments checking each link for validity. Even with my awesome moderating skills i still uncovered a bunch of trackbacks from article scrapers to remove.

I was hoping to use a plugin that would remove NoFollow on a case by case basis after i moderate each comment but the closest i could find was Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin that will only remove NoFollow from regular commentator links. Since i wanted to reward all commenters (and encourage more people to say their mind), i just removed NoFollow completely from both comments and trackbacks.

List of blogs that remove the NoFollow tag from links.

Why remove NoFollow?

There are many reasons to remove NoFollow from your blog. You might want to encourage commenting, or reward people that actually comment. I’ve even noticed some people removing NoFollow for a while just to get on the DoFollow lists and get a PR boost, then take it off (sneaky yes?). In my experience, removing NoFolow will not hurt your PR as long as you always check comments for links that point to bad neighborhoods, which you should be doing anyway. Google PR for internal and external links is a different thing, you won’t lose any PR juice on your pages if you link to other sites.

Update
Riceblogger has a nifty list of blogs that removed the nofollow tag sorted by PageRank, from PR2 up to PR7.

Do you blog from work? Do you also blog from home, a net cafe and a friend’s house? Well, i do. On Friday afternoon i needed some files on a future article and i realized i had everything on my work pc, i wouldn’t be able to get to these files before Monday. This happens far too often and it’s become a permanent setback to always having to carry around a flash card or a cd. Not to mention i keep forgetting that damn things everywhere.

A man with a plan

During the next weeks i will be moving the bulk of my blogging and general office-type activities online. Productivity web apps are a dime a dozen these days, even Google is getting into the game with Google Docs. My first attempt to move my work online will be eyeOS, an open source web desktop solution.

My needs from an online desktop
There are two ways to move from the real desktop to an online one, either find a solution that handles all desktop applications under one roof, or combine different tools and services. Using a different tools is a more flexible solution, but managing an ever growing list on logins and passwords is not my idea of ‘web productivity’.

Consistency between applications is also important. Office apps must save documents that are compatible with everything (including ms office), image editors should save jpg, gif and png files with some sort of ’save for web’ function.

No fees

Everyone wants something for nothing. I’d be willing to pay for a web office solution some time in the future, but not now, and not before it’s become indispensable for my blogging.

Decent looking

Thats the designer in me speaking, but if i’m using something daily, i want it to look great.

What i plan to replace with web based software:
Basic image editing with Photoshop

You can’t beat photoshop for design work, but i want the ability to do some basic editing, adding text to an image and saving it for web use without it. I’ve used some of them in the past and found them as an ok tool for non designers, now i’ll have to find one for everyday use.

Text editing

I keep most of my blog writing on the wordpress dashboard, which i find lacking to say the least.

File storage

I need access to files from everywhere, with a decent file upload and download limit. For this, i could live with just having a simple ftp account on serverdome to upload and download files from.

RSS feeds

I use feedreader right now, which, while excellent software only runs on windows machines.

This post was written using the text editor of the eyeOS web desktop and the images edited and saved with with Pixenate.

Serverdome.org entries for this week:

4 must have free SEO tools for bloggers
Four essential tools to get you started on improving the SEO of your blog.

How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers
If you’re going to read something on this blog, start with this. My pride and joy post about how the top bloggers allocate ad space on their blogs.

7 most annoying things bloggers have on their sites
Seven things i see on blogs that make me want to run far, far away. Surprisingly, only two are ad related.

Why i ditched Blogrush over MyBlogLog
Self explanatory title, really.

Promote your new blog with Social Bookmarking - Digg.com
How to start promoting your blog with Digg.com, along with some basic traffic percentages and concepts.

A month of better blogging

Links i enjoyed elsewhere

Case Study: Mystery blog - part 1 at www.patbdoyle.com
Interesting post about the process of monetizing an abandoned blog.

The Morning After Wordpress theme at themasterplan.in
Expertly made free Wordpress theme. I love this.

Mybloglog traffic at andybeard.eu
Mybloglog traffic stats over other similar blog widgets.

Blogrush is a traffic generation widget that is getting publicity on blogs right now. After you install the widget on your blog, the blogrush service tracks your posts and displays them on blogs that also have the widget installed, while posts from relevant blogs appear on your site. The widget displays post titles with a larger font than the site name, if you’re expecting to drive traffic with this tool it’s even more important to optimize your titles for this. Right now, one of the links on it is “Fast updates #02″, which tells me nothing about the actual post.

Getting the widget to run was easy enough, after i signed up i got a piece of javascript code that i pasted on my wordpress template, and the blogrush service handles displaying the widget.

Blogrush will display a link to a post on your blog every time your own site displays the widget, so the more traffic you have the more use you’ll be getting from it. I hope they change the widget to something more adword-like soon, the design is bound to clash with many blog color schemes.