So how do you avoid that kind of inconsistency? The answer may be found outside your notebook computer.

It has been found that moods can affect work and an improvement in a person’s mood results in a positive outcome at work very often.  There have been studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business that strongly suggests that mood you bring to work sets the tone for the rest of day and affects productivity.

Mood improvement differs for person to person, but here are a few tips that may help bloggers:

• Blog in a comfortable place – Blogging on the go can be exciting but really stressful. In order to come up with a quality post, try to find a place where you can site comfortably and has good lighting.
• Take a little break – So you’re a blogging junkie, but that doesn’t mean you should be in front of your computer 24/7. Little breaks can be a breath of fresh air, literally and figuratively.
• Work in your own machine – Have you tried blogging in someone else’s notebook? It feels like you’re visiting a foreign country if you ask me. Try as much as possible to bring your own machine if you’re blogging actively and on the go.
• Avoid blogging right off the bat – Athletes always warms up before competition and there’s wisdom in that. Some bloggers may find it refreshing to watchthat funny viral YouTube video before opening WordPress or Blogger.

Like I’ve said, ways of improving one’s mood vary. But one thing is clear: a better mood will result in better, more enjoyable blogging.

Performancing Hive is a dedicated forum specially built for professional bloggers. Their membership usually costs $10 a month but right now they’re giving it away for free to anyone who is interested to join. Yes, you’ve read it right, free!

All you need to do is to sign up by filling in the form found here using the code 093588648A.

This promo is valid only until the 11th of December so you may want to sign as soon as possible!

For questions or comments regarding Performancing Hive you could leave them on the post found here.

]]> http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2009/11/12/be-a-member-of-performancing-hive-for-free/feed/ 2 http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2009/11/06/wpworldmap-net-mapping-out-wordpress-users-from-all-over-the-globe/ http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2009/11/06/wpworldmap-net-mapping-out-wordpress-users-from-all-over-the-globe/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:27:32 +0000 Karlo Licudine http://www.bloggingpro.com/?p=3380 We all know that there are millions of Wordpress users all over the globe. Wouldn’t it be nice to see where they are located? With WPWorldMap.net, now you can!

WPWorldMap.net is a new website created by Oliver Schloebe of WPSeek.com that lets Wordpress users mark their location onto a map for others to see. Each marked location reveals user profiles complete with personal information, a link to their blogs, and also their Twitter accounts.

Powered by Google Maps, the site is relatively easy to use. To map yourself all you need to do is to place a pin marker on your location and then signing up by filling in the required fields on the site’s registration form. It’s so easy that it only takes a few minutes.

Surveying the world map, on the other hand, is as easy as clicking and dragging. You can zoom in and out and even display the world in terrain, map, or satellite form. There’s also a search functionality that let’s you search according to users. You can even add a filter if you just want to display Wordpress users, developers, core developers, Wordpress related companies, or even fans.

The great thing about this new site is that it gives us a good picture of how many Wordpress users there are, not just in the whole world, but also in a particular country or area. This is great tool if you want to find out if there are any Wordpress users near your location which is ideal for making new friends and for blog networking!

But of course, the site needs the cooperation of the community as it cannot populate itself. So if you don’t mind revealing your location to others, why not sign up and map yourself now. Oh, and don’t forget to share it to your friends!

Go Wordpress Warriors!

From the Blog Post:

So effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

While I am not sure what this means for the long term use of the code as they are going to give away the final release to whomever wants it via GitHub. It is always interesting to me to see big projects loose steam, despite the sadness that surrounds the demise of an otherwise great project and product.

The question now is: who will continue on helping people parse RSS feeds in the future? WordPress 2.9 was set to use SimplePie version 1.3. What will they use for WordPress 3.0? Only time will tell.

During the study, they “observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.”

The results are pretty interesting, and a bit surprising in a few places. They talk about the effects of homepage layout on how people read the content of the page, the best placement for images, using font size to increase reader focus and avoid having them quickly scan through text rather than reading it all, and even the effects to paragraph length on how/where people’s eyes drift around the page. It’s all pretty damn cool.

Especially important might be the results of what happens when people get to a break in the text (say, from an ad), that could cause some people to rethink the layout of their ads, and site in general. They actually go into pretty good detail about advertising. The study is worth checking out for that section alone if you run ads on your site.

There is also a bit about navigation placement that could help some sites struggling to get people to drill down into their site past the initial entry page.

All in all, if you want to learn a TON about how people are likely to be reading your blog, and get a lot of tips about how to control the flow of their attention, I’d highly suggest reading through the Eyetrack III study. It’s a bit lengthy, but it’s so packed with useful info that it’s well worth it.

It is always interesting to me to see how people brand themselves, and I think a logo can say a great deal about a brand, and its goals. That being said, I also wonder if with a big site like LogoPond, if you couldn’t find at least three or four logos in the last few months under almost any “trend”.

I enjoyed the selections though, and would love to hear about any of you using the trends listed on that post.

The first was my own attempt at writing a free college software guide on College Crunch which then was noticed by Online College which built upon the list, adding more things that students (but really anyone) could and should use.

Then, I found another great post, on noupe, one of the blogs I frequent, relating to Mac Applications for Web Designers, and so the question then is, what do you all use as a blogger? I don’t just mean blogging software, but Twitter applications, day to day software. What is installed on your computer that you rarely go a day without launching? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to mention which operating system you use, and please no OS snobs.

Here are some of the enhancements that Otto covers:
▪ Creating a 2.7 compatible comments.php file
▪ Password protection check
▪ The comments loop
▪ The power of Ajax
▪ Styling

We all know that commenting is one of the great features that WordPress is known for. Apparently the development team is taking this feature a step further by offering important feature upgrades like threading, paging and javascript enhancements.

I bet ‘ya this will result in better blogs as people can now interact intuitively from one comment to another.

Show your love for good ‘ol WP!

I’ve seen several creative WordPress fan art lately, which brought  me to think if there are any official or unofficial collection of all WordPress logos on the net.  If you’ve got any WordPress fan art yourself, you may want to consider writing the WordPress team to submit it for all the world to see, or use, or whatever… maybe to just brighten up their day. :)

The WordPress fan art above was from WordCamp Philippines.  Matt was quoted to “really like this art work”, though I’m sure he favors every fan art made for his WordPress work.  We’ve seen this fan art on t-shirts and bags… they really rock!

What makes me wonder though is “can people copy these logos on shirts”, some of them really are cool and would be great to wear a few myself.  Is there a way to ask permission to use them?  hmmm…  of if you would like to make fan art, would that require a permission from WordPress? double hmmmm…  wonder how that works? anyone?

Set your browsers and travel to this fan art page … and this one too.

What does placing “ninth in the highest internet users in the world “mean?  It means an undisclosed amount by Google purchasing Korean blogging company Tatter, that’s what it means.  Google is setting it’s eyes on Yahoo dominated Korea with this move to “Google-ize” the country’s popular blogging software “TextCube” by Tatter.  TextCube has been compared to Blogger.com rival WordPress.

“We are excited to welcome Tatter and Company’s engineering team to Google Korea”, announced a Google spokesperson in an e-mailed statement. “Acquiring Tatter and Company will allow us to enhance our online publishing tools in Korea, benefiting a large number of users who already depend on and enjoy Google and Tatter and Company’s products”.

An excited Tatter co-chief executive Chang-Won Kim confirmed the deal on his personal blog, noting that Tatter had been “Googled”.

In a country where it’s all high-speed internet access (mostly), it is no wonder that with this move by Google, all other big names in the “cloud” and the computer industry in general will take a definitive move towards connecting with the Korean market.