To guest post here at BloggingPro you will have to be a member of My Blog Guest and our own Andrew G. Rosen will deal with the submissions and schedule accepted posts.

What is My Blog Guest?

MyBlogGuest has been started by Ann Smarty, a fairly well-known weblogger and social media user. She’s been guest blogging and building relationships in the blogosphere long enough to understand the power of a guest post – and that’s what she wants to share via her little cozy web community.

My Blog Guest is a unique community that is based on one simple principle: if you provide quality, you don’t need to pay to be heard. It unites bloggers who are interested in connecting to other bloggers, journalists and other content creators in any niche and publish their high-quality articles on their blogs.

What is a guest post?

A guest post is a piece of content the author and the blogger arrange to publish on the blogger’s site for free. The guest post belongs to the author and is attributed to him. It is up to the author which sites to link to within the post and it is up to the blog owner to accept/reject the contribution.

You can also submit your guest posts via our Guest posting on BloggingPro page but remember to become an active member at MBG as we will verify your credentials.

And for those wondering, yes that’s a Gravity Forms submission form.

For more information about our job board and how to be featured, read our job board introduction post. For only $25 your job will be listed as featured for 30 days, additionally your listing will be mentioned in a weekly review post here on BloggingPro and on our sister site BloggerJobs.

IndyPosted

IndyPosted an up and coming News website is seeking News Bloggers. The site features a variety of categories (Sports, Tech, Politics, Business, Lifestyle, Celebrity, ETC.) and writers can choose to write in as many areas as they feel comfortable. Bloggers receive 50% revenue share and are guaranteed $2 CPM, with revenue share averages between $3 and $5 CPM. View the job listing here.

Demand Studios

Demand Studios is looking for talented, experienced bloggers. Writers will receive weekly assignments and can make between $15 and $30+ per hour. View the job listing here.

There are several more jobs in our job board, check it out if you’re looking for a blogging gig or need a blogger.

The BloggingPro team is proud to announce the first BloggingPro End of Year Giveaway.

Next week, from Monday 28th December 2009 to Thursday 31st December, every day we are giving away different prizes. A big thank you to all our sponsors who have made this giveaway possible.

Follow BloggingPro on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss the competitions next week!

I can’t believe that Akismet has protected this blog from over a million spam. Started in October 2005, Akismet has been bundled with WordPress almost since its inception.

Without Akismet, and most other anti-spam tools, estimating a minute for every thirty spam comments, it would have taken me almost twelve full days of time to manage myself, or a few hours each and every month.

It is both sad that we have this problem that needs to be taken care of, and exciting that we have solutions to make our lives easier. Where do you sit with your Akismet spam protection?

I have been having some issues with the new theme that I am working on fixing, but they seem to be ingrained into WordPress, and so might take me a little while to rectify.

Other than one or two small issues, I am very impressed with both the design and implementation of this WordPress theme. Designed by James McDonald, the same person that did my site Branding David, James has done an amazing job with the revamp of Blogging Pro.

I am excited to hear what you think of this new design, and going forward, I hope you enjoy the refresh as well. I will talk about the coding process in an upcoming post.

Sidenote/Update: A huge thanks to Sivel in the WordPress IRC chat for helping me through a strange problem I was having.

I was trying to think about the pro’s and con’s of redesigning this blog, and stumbled upon a great article relating to blog redesigns on Blog Design Blog from October, 2008, entitled, The Secret to a Great Blog Redesign.

Making visual changes just for the sake of change itself will result in a prettier blog, but that does not necessarily mean a better blog. You can actually make it worst if your redesign is not built with your goals in mind. You can’t hit a target you cannot see.

Just like social media and SEO, your blog design is a tool, a means to an end and not the end in itself. Reassess your goals and allow them to guide your decisions when redesigning your blog.

I definitely think that Blogging Pro needs a redesign for both making functionality and form better. Either way, the future of this blog requires at least a strong refinement in goals and direction. In fact, as we go forward, we have a fork in the road to figure out with the site: do we focus purely on WordPress or try to bring real diversity in regards to platforms at Blogging Pro?

The audience here is very WordPress-centric, and this has made exploring outside subjects, frustrating at best. When you have a captive audience, you’d rather not frustrate them for fear of loosing it, but this site isn’t WordPress Pro, it is Blogging Pro. Of course I don’t see myself taking on the role of telling you how to format your words, gain links, and whatnot, but instead, I enjoy pointing out tips, tricks, and giving the occasional advice on blogging from the more technical side. I love talking about the themes, plugins, and growth of an industry surrounding bloggers and catering to their needs.

Anyways, with all of that being said I’d love to know if you think Blogging Pro needs a redesign, and if so, should it focus more around delivering great WordPress content, or would you like to see it talk about many platforms? Your comments will help decide the fate of this site, and I don’t take the time and energy you spend letting me know your thoughts lightly.

I hope you’ll all join me in thanking Splashpress Media for having me come back on here and take another stab at fulfilling your WordPress cravings. I also hope you’ll provide me with constant feedback, so I can be sure to satisfy your expectations on this site.

If I have missed something, you want to see more coverage of another thing, then please just let me know, and I will do my best. I love talking about blogging, WordPress, and the business of online publishing, and I hope that you’ll all be able to pick up on my passion and join me in being excited.

Fast forward to a few months after, Blogging Pro is sitting proudly as one of the more high profile blogs in the network. Sadly, David has had to leave the network to pursue other endeavors (a startup, I hear?). So he is passing along the reins to me.

With me to help spice up things would be Andrew G. Rosen of Jobacle fame. Drew is a mainstay at the Blog Herald and other technology-related Splashpress sites, as well as the snarky (and smart) Jack of All Blogs.

Moving along, when I started contributing here at Blogging Pro, the topic was wide and varied. We usually discussed blogging news, and various tech-related matters like blogging apps and software, plugins, and themes. We weren’t very much platform-specific, but for some reason we tended to lean toward the platform we used on the blog itself, which was WordPress.

Thing is, with Splashpress Media running a handful of blogs about blogging and new media in our network, it gets difficult to determine which gets posted where. Sometimes lines are crossed and toes are stepped on. In short, there tends to be an overlap of the topics that each blog handles.

And Blogging Pro sits smack in the middle of this issue!

So I ask you dear readers, what do you think is best for us to talk about here on Blogging Pro, given that we have other sites to talk about blogging, such as:

• The Blog Herald for blogging news and commentary
• 901am for new media news and commentary
• Performancing for problogging
• Wisdump and Devlounge for design
• Blog Network Watch and Blogger Jobs for blog-network related news
• Blog Tutorials for, well, blog tutorials

And the list goes on.

So how about we focus on what we’re best at: the technical side of things. Whether it’s WordPress, blogger, or other blogging software, we will focus on plugins, installing, tweaking, upgrading, and the like. We might still have some overlap with the other blogs, but we can get more in-depth here.

Any other bright ideas?

The point is that they have created a video I have seen all over the web, and while it is an advertisement for Dell, it is also a funny and interesting video that people want to show their friends.

I have seen many videos go viral over the last few years, and interestingly enough, a fair number of them are promotional for one corporation or another, even if you didn’t realize it.

Check out the vide at the bottom of the sidebar, and let me know what you think. Also, if you have any other professional level viral videos, I would love to see them. I would say bloggers should harness the viral video fever that the world seems to have, but I know many of you already do.

For the rest of you, why haven’t you recorded video?

I am planning on using Ustream.tv tomorrow for a live video questions and answers section. I am hoping to talk about WordPress, my blogging career, advertising, marketing and all of those fun things. If you have some questions you would love answered, and I might know the correct response, check out my Ustream channel at 8pm EST Saturday, March 8th.

I have previously mentioned this on the Blog Herald as part of my questions about advertising post.

I hope to do more of these if the need is there, so let me know if you plan on stopping by, or if other days and times would work better for you.

Update: Didn’t work out as Ustream wouldn’t transmit audio from either of my computers. More on that soon.

I want to apologize to everyone. It seems the new server we are on isn’t working out for us. Hopefully, we will have all of these issues resolved soon, and I am very sorry for any inconvenience or nuisance this has caused.

If I could stop these issues before they happen, I would. My server administrator assures me that he is working on it.

Here are some details about the network from the Bloggy Network blog:

As such, Bloggy Network is very proud to launch a new mini-network centered around local cities called ‘is My Home‘. We have started out in nine cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, and Philadelphia.

Each is My Home blog is tailored to your city – this ain’t no cookie-cutter content. Our bloggers will be poring over their cities, making sure you know what is going on. If you are looking for a great wealth of local information, and haven’t found what you are looking for, our blogs are a great place to start.

It is just the start of a much larger network and project, and we hope you’ll all check it out, and let us know what you think.

Also we are looking for more bloggers to talk about their city (US only at this time). Feel free to contact me at local@bloggynetwork.com.

I am so sorry, and I hope all those that have attempted to contact me without response will now understand why it seems like I have been ignoring you all.

This problem has been fixed, and I look forward to your comments.

Again, we are looking for local bloggers from major US cities, so if you want to blog about the city you live in, and get paid for it, please drop us a line.

So far he has written three posts, which cover the creation of the network, a major component of the network, Blog Flux, and some details on our server infrastructure.

Ahmed is a very savvy business person, and I am honored to be working with him, and I am really enjoying his series on the network.

Some rounded edges, some subtle lines, InSense is a very nice looking theme, that would be even easier that our previous theme to modify.

Having such themes created though takes time and money, and so we have gone ahead and added a sponsor to the theme. We want to be up front about this and mention it, as it is not something we feel should be hidden. This sponsorship has allowed us to produce this theme, and will allow us to continue to produce themes for the WordPress community. We hope that you will keep this link intact, but it is not required as part of our Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

InSense is Widget ready though the search box is not moveable, and when using widgets, the different areas will not use the nicer icon graphics that we have set up. It is a bit of a trade-off, but we are limited in what we can make the WordPress Widgets code do.

InSense requires no plugins to run and function.

Check out the Demo.

Download InSense

Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Adding in their own header graphic as well as changing the colors around is Caracasapie.

Another shift in colors and header area is CwickCrown. I love the gray shift.

The most popular shift seems to be towards green, and I have three examples of that. The first example is from ToddNation.com.

The second is from TalkNewMedia.

Both use very different greens, but both look absolutely great, but the third example is something completely different, and at first I didn’t even recognize it as using the Blogging Pro theme and that would be the Expression blog.

Last but not least is my favorite shift in colors for the Blogging Pro theme. It basically flips our colors around in a one-eighty, and you come up with the blog for The Situation.

I am looking forward to seeing more modifications to the Blogging Pro theme, and if you have created a major color or design shift using the Blogging Pro theme as a basis, please let us know.

Also, if you liked the Blogging Pro theme, you are going to love what we have for you coming out tomorrow.

We have made it so both sidebars, and the footer area are enabled so that you can add widgets all over the place.

We have already had more than 1500 downloads of the Blogging Pro theme from the great readers and supporters of Blogging Pro and it has been less than 48 hours since it was released.

The addition of Widgets was also in hopes to appease the WordPress.com administrators, as we are hoping to see our theme added to their ranks, but it will take WordPress.com users requesting this theme for it to be added.

Reading up on how to get a theme added to WordPress.com, I found out that you have to ask for it in their Ideas forum, and so we have created a thread there in hopes that you’ll leave a comment showing your support for the addition of this theme to WordPress.com.

Download Blogging Pro Theme Widget Ready Version

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Second Update: We have added a Widget Ready version and we are looking for support from WordPress.com users in getting it added to the service.

Updated: We have implemented some fixes in our theme, and so if you have already downloaded the theme, we ask that you at least download a new header.php (zip/phps) file.

The below zip files have also been fixed.

We have been getting some compliments on our design here at Blogging Pro, and a few e-mails asking where they can get our theme. I have been wanting us to release a WordPress theme for a while now, and so I present to you this design, Blogging Pro’s Theme as a free to download theme.

This theme was created by Design Disease for Blogging Pro, we have made a few changes for public release though, including:

• making the site information text, rather than an image
• making the navigation text rather than images
• removing one of the Adsense spots we have on our site
• making sure the third column can be used for more than just advertising

We ask only that you keep the attribution links in the footer, and link to this post, rather than directly to the zip files, when spreading the word about this and other themes we will be providing on Blogging Pro.

The Details
This three column theme is WordPress 2.1 ready and should work just fine in WordPress 2.0.x. It has been tested on a variety of browsers, but we can’t promise that there will be no problems.

It comes in two versions, one with the big footer like Blogging Pro, that gives information on recent posts, recent comments and most commented stories, and one without the big footer, and thus no need for any plugins at all.

For the plugin required version, we have included a separate zip file that contains the three plugins needed. All three are from the talented Nick Momrik of MtDewVirus and we always recommend you get the latest version from the plugin author.

Note: If you already have Nick’s Most Commented, Recent Comments and Recent Posts plugins, you will most likely not need the plugins.zip file.

The Downloads
Blogging Pro Theme
Required Plugins
Blogging Pro Theme (no plugins needed)

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I don’t know about all of you, but I love the new comments button.

The blog has Akismet on it, but that doesn’t deal with the past, unless there is a setting I am missing, and thus will look fairly silly. So let me know what plugins I can use to filter past comment spam.

The big topic of interest was Yahoo! Pipes, a new service from Yahoo! that allows you to manage RSS feeds and do some interesting things.

You can clone pipes and modify them, and you can merge feeds together and filter them based on content.

While it was an interesting session one of the most important things is that if you depend on a hosted service, you might have outages and that is exactly what we got to see mid-way through the Pipes demo.

In the first session they also make mention of the fact that you have to remember that not all RSS feeds are created equal and so content filtering via Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t always work.

Identity and Security

We currently have too many identities online, and that was the main point of the Identity and Security session. They talked about the number of online identities that people hold, and a quick poll showed that around fifty percent of session attendants had around 100 accounts, profiles and identities online through various services and sites. And everyone agreed that we are tired of entering the same information over and over on each and every site.

There is a growing trend though towards a single sign on service. An identity provider that has some form of relationship with other sites to process your logins easily. You can log in once, and be signed onto and accepted to many sites.

It seems like a great idea, but if it is controlled by any single corporation, it can take away control from the citizens it is supposed to provide a service for.

If Microsoft made a deal with Nike and Microsoft had colour preferences and whatnot they could give that info to Nike who could then be able to market you better. But if you didn’t want to give that information to Nike it is too late as you don’t have control over that information anymore.

The most interesting technologies to come out include OpenID and Microsoft CardSpace. The good thing is that CardSpace is going to work with OpenID. I will be interested to see how that all pans out, but with sites like Magnolia and soon Digg supporting OpenID logins, I think I’d place my support in that camp.

Getting Your Podcast Levels Right

Bruce Sharpe, co-author of The Levelator, a piece of easy to use Windows, Mac, and Linux software that magically levels out audio levels held a session to talk about podcasting and how you can easily improve how your podcast sounds.

He gives some quick tips that podcasters should follow including using a bandpass filter at 80-10kHz, removing snap, crackles and pops, a little tweaking of the EQ if needed, and some gentle noise reduction, as more is not better.

Another great tip that came out of the session is making sure you have a decent sound card because the included notebook soundcard in certain lower end machines will make even the best microphones record horrible audio.

The piece of free software mentioned most during the session was Audacity, so that seems like a must have for podcasting.

If you are interested in the project, please leave a comment here with the e-mail address you can be contacted at. We know there is a guru out there with the skills we need. Go WordPress Plugin Power!

I will be dealing with the spam the best I can, and I hope you can all understand how hard it is to keep a blog spam free.

Thank you for your patience.

This post, as much as any other tone it has, should serve as a warning. Just because you are the Internet and are blogging, does not mean you can forget about the “real world” issues that come with making money or building a company like accounting, legalities and whatnot.

This blog, Blogging Pro, has been around for some time, and in July of 2005, Jacob Gower puchased it and formed Bloggy Network LLC, a blog network company.

The reason I mention this is because there has been some problems that the company now needs to deal with as the new owners of the Blog Herald are also named Bloggy Network.

In its word from the previously anonymous owners, a few readers raised the issue as to why the new owners had a name very similar to ours and really, we’d like to know as well.

The whole issue stinks of an attempt at getting some publicity.

BloggyNetwork.com was registered on July 20th, 2005 while Bloggy-Network.com (the other guys), was registered April 18th, 2006. With the non-hyphenated version taken, you’d think that would be enough to dissuade anyone from building a company, but alas almost a year later, they decided to proceed anyways.

Even other well known bloggers like Darren Rowse have chimed in about the rather odd name.

Of course, this isn’t a one shot deal. As exhibit B we have: Pingoat, the popular pinging service, and Bloggy Ping, a “copyright 2006″ service of Bloggy-Network.com. This blatant rip was confirmed by Kailash, the original creator of Pingoat.

While we understand that there are many companies and technologies based upon the works of others, especially online in the forms of mashups and whatnot, I think that ripping off names, ideas and efforts of others is still frowned upon.

I guess all us here at the non-hyphenated Bloggy Network should be proud. After all, imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery.