In my last post, i mentioned something like this:

From today, i want to give some appreciation to my visitors and commentators by giving some kind of reward.

My 2008 intentions where to reply back with at least one new comment on my visitors blog, but sadly i failed that objective miserably. So i thought, what else can i do?

The answer was simple. I can reward my users through social networking.

So here is what i thought:

Every user that writes one comment here at BloggerVenue will receive at least 1 stumble at stumbleupon, and 1 submission to my new Social Bookmarking project from their latest post.

Off course, there are some rules.

I wont submit posts to Moocial that don’t fit in the Social Bookmarking standards, such as “Monday Link Love” type of posts, updates about the blog and other thin posts that don’t have some important information.

I won’t stumble and add articles of users that write comments like “Cool” or “Good post”.

Along this, i will try to keep up with my comments on other blogs, although that is a bit complicated at this phase of my life….

Everyone wins. You win because you will get tones of visitors from StumbleUpon. You win because you get a backlink from your comment on this blog and a backlink from my social bookmark site with no effort. I win, because i get comments here, i work on my new site and increase my stumble profile

I hope you all had a great Christmas and a outstanding Reveillon!

As we say in Portugal “New Year New Life”, so considering this i decided to give a new life to Bloggervenue.com. I wanted to do some changes for quite some time now, but only now i had the chance to do it.  The major change, is the most obvious one: The blog has a new theme installed.

I left the previous Options Theme, which i loved by the way, to this new theme. I felt the blog needed a new fresh look. So i found this theme and immediatly fell in love with it lol. Took me several hours to configure and edit the theme but i like the final result.

If you see something wrong here , please let me know

What do you think of the new bloggervenue face?

What have i been up to lately?

I have been busy this holiday season finishing my Investigation Essay about an Autistic Child in Regular School. The investigation took me half year to finish. Now the final step will be in about 3 weeks with the dissertation to a Jury.

Besides that. I have been working on some new projects, which i can only mention one. :p This new project is called Moocial and it is a social bookmarking site like sphinn (yes another site of this kind). I created this site simply for the pleasure of it. It is in beta so i kindly ask you to participate in this project by joining and submitting some stories.

More about this reward and other types of rewards will be discussed in a future post

Top Commentators of 2008

A change that i have made with the new blog theme concerns the Top Commentator List.

The Top Commentator list will remain secret to the general public until i release my monthly “Top Commentators of  the Month” post.

Perhaps some of you don’t agree with this, but is a way to prevent spammers (which is not the case). I prefer to keep things secret and “increase” commenting competition to earn the link juice for the top 5 commentators in the end of the month.  And in the other side, it is not having a link for 1 month in the sidebar that will give you the expected link juice. A permanent 1 post link is way more effective.

Now, my 2008 Top commentators:

1 - Agent 001 from GreatestReviews with 41 comments (sadly he is no longer an active blogger)

2 - Nelson from WebVicio with 40 comments

3 - Sire from LoadofBullshit with 26 comments

4 - Yan from Thoushallblog with 22 comments

5 - Jim from TheNetFool with 17 comments

To all who commented here my sincere “Thank You”.

I hope all your wishes come true next year, enter 2009 with the right foot. Have fun, party a lot with your friends and enjoy the company. IT is a new year, new resolutions, a new chance to start over for many of us…

Im sure 2009 will be a new phase for my life

Every month a new game launches, and with the proper marketing they achieve thousands of players in few days. So, there is a lot of money to make here.

I like to play these games, specially MMORTS games like tribalwars or thecolonies (a RTS space game with a small community) and i have been playing these type of games for about 6 years now. And along this time the desire to have my own game increased, and so, i did some research on some game scripts and i have to admit i have found several dozens (if not more) of open source browser games.

Along the years i have used some of them and managed to get some success, but the majority were private, only to play with friends.

Ok. Probably you are also interested in getting your own MMOG, but there are several factors to take into consideration.

1- Do i want to have a small membership base or will i want to have thousands of players?

IF you only want a few dozes to a couple of hundred members then your basic shared hosting will handle the load if your script is light on the server. If you are planning to get more than that, then you need to see if your server can handle the work load. IF not, be sure you have funds to support a private server because you won’t be making money from one day to another.

2 - Do i have time for such project?

Again, like the previous answer, you will have to think if you have a small membership number then you probably won’t need to work much. Just setup the script, edit the configurations to your desire, create a forum for your community and enjoy…. If you have a big membership base then prepare to work… Specially in support area.

Off course, a project like this will need you to test several scripts to see which one is the best in your opinion, and this can take time. Then you need to find if the script is in continuous development and if there is support, because you probably will need it.

How to make money from these games?

Most of you will try to monetise it with PPC ads obviously. Ads in these type of games can reach high CTR. I admit, when i am in one of these games i usually click around 2 times a week because i frequently find ads that interest me.

But one great way to monetise the games is through vip accounts. Look at tribalwars or travian. They use VIP accounts to make money, and they are a huge success. Why because it is easy to get one, besides the usual payment methods (paypal, credit card, moneybookers…), most professional games allow the player to pay with an SMS. Even 6 year old kids have cell phones nowadays so this is a gold mine. Unfortunately, free scripts with this possibility are rare and so far i have found only one.

Where can i get these games scripts?

Sourceforge is the number one site to find these script. A simple search will return you thousands of results. You can refine your search with “free broser based game”, “browser-based strategy game”, “browser-based RPG game”.

Free MMOG script

These are just a few, but i have tried them and ejoyed them. But in the end, it is up to you to find more and test them to see which one will fit your needs.

Games that i recommend:

Solar-Empires:  A multiplayer space game;

Medieval Battles: A free medieval fantasy game

Legend of the Green Dragon: An RPG game

Xnova (it is in spanish, but available in other languages) and Ugamella (i couldn’t find an official download): An ogame clone. A space strategy game.

World of Phaos: An rpg game.

And there are dozens more too choose

FInal Considerations

This can be a very fun thing to do, but it can also give too much work for your patience. If you are serious about this, then you need to do some research. Probably an ogame clone is a bit saturated in overal, but perhaps in your country there’s no competition for an ogame clone, so there is your chance to grab that opportunity. Just research your market and have fun

Well, i have selected 6 Premium and FREE wordpress magazine themes. Their quality is awesome, and will make you blog reach the next level. Im sure you will enjoy my selection:

1 - Gamezine: Ultimate Wordpress theme for Gamers

Demo | Download

2 - Daily Planet

Demo | Download

3 - ZinMag Futura

Demo | Download

4 - ZinMag Redux

Demo | Download

5 - Forex Press

Demo | Download

6 - ZinMag remedy

Demo | Download

As you can see these themes have great quality indeed. Because they are magazine style, it will require you to do some editing, but don’t worry, they all come with instructions that make the process easy.

There is one thing though, that i must say, these themes are free, but only because they are sponsored. There are a couple of sponsored links placed on the footer of each theme.

These wordpress magazine themes are serious candidates for my bans conversions. I must say that i have been trying to convert some of these themes in the past day with no success so far…

Many of you don’t give a damn about page rank but i learned to value my page rank 3 (at first) and the page rank 2 until recently.

I really don’t know why i lost my PR…. well, maybe i do know, but there is no way to prove what was the reason. Perhaps google bot detected link ads? i really don’t know.

Well, i lost the page rank, but i investigated a little more and saw that i lost almost half of my backlinks! Bloggervenue.com had almost 10,000 backlinks but now it is little more than 5,000 backlinks! This is a major difference!

This never happened to me so i am a bit lost. How can i loose almost 5000 backlinks so fast? Does any one have an explanation for this?

Have this happened to you before? How did you get through all of this?

The two months i have spent at the ER passed really fast, those were two hard months… really hard… I did mostly the afternoon shifts. There were advantages and disavantages…. One of the disavantages was the amount of people that go to the ER in the afternoon period. There were chaotic times, and the amount of work accumulates at a crazy speed. Specially when doctors decide to do their job and really work…. lol

But the advantages compensate… I can sleep until one o’clock in the afternoon and because there’s more to do,  i can learn more!

The demand level of my tutor nurse was high, the stress levels were high and to get things worse i was having some problems and my trust levels were low, which didn’t help me to work… But i survived, and in the end it was better than i expected. It was well worth the time, i learned a lot. i have grown professionally. We saved lifes, making our day worth it…. i saw people die… sometimes, it is hard to deal with the situation specially when family is near… I have grown as a professional but also has a person. I learned to value every minute of human life. Some times we don’t realize how fast a life can disappear…. in 1 sec you are fine, in the next you’re dead…

In the end, the ER could be a place where i would like to work in the future but only after i get more experience.

Plans for bloggervenue? Well, i hope to have spare time to write here, i have some plans, create a new website, release more wordpress-bans themes, release a couple of e-books and much more… All depends on the time i will have….

For now, i need to get back on reading blogs and bring the traffic i had 2 months ago and retake my top 100,000 alexa rank.

First I didn’t want to depend on others to get the themes i wanted to use on my wordpress/bans sites and secondly  there is an high demand for this type of integration and very few themes available.

So, after learning how to convert wordpress themes to be used on bans sites at mark’s blog, i decided to try for my self.  The process itself is somewhat simple, but i decided to go first with some simple themes and then head over to more complicated themes.  I have to confess that this process is a bit addicting, and im thinking that now that i have more spare time, i will be doing some serious conversions! lol.

There are some themes that i want to convert but i have stumbled with some issues that i need to correct and i haven’t discovered the solutions for them…. :\

I want to share with you some of the conversions i’ve made. The themes used are simple, nothing out of extraordinary, but i am sure they will fit the needs of some of you.

1- Peaceful Rush

Download Peaceful Rush

2- Pink Love

Download Pink Love

3- Preserver of Health

Download Preserver of Health

These themes are free to use. All zip’s come with a readme file with instructions on what you need to change to make the theme work correctly. If you have any doubt on how to install them feel free to ask for support here, and if you find any bug then please do tell me.

The themes are free, but i ask to please maintain the credits of the theme placed at the footer. Removing them goes against the TOS in which they have been released to the public.

I plan to continuously release more themes, some will be free, some will be available only to feed subscribers, others wil cost something. Let’s see how things go.

If you want a specific theme converted you can ask here, and i will put it on the queue.  If you don’t want to wait too much time then contact me so we can discuss the price of the conversion.

my internship at the ER is finishing. Im going to do the last shift this afternoon. So at 23h45 Greenwich time i will be offically free!!!! I will have about 6 days free to rest and dedicate myself to blogging and other stuff.Then i will initiate another internship doing community health for another 8 weeks. But i will have time to continue blogging regularly. So i hope…

So i expect to resume daily blogging the following days. :)  Expect a few surprises starting tomorrow.

Thank for your valuable comments and keep them coming

The top commentators of October are:

• Hendrik
• Simon from Otoo
• ZK@WebTrafficRO
• kouj
• Dennis Edell

Again thank you. Readers like you are what make blogging worth it

Sorry for the short post but im not in conditions to write something more elaborated…. I did the morning shift, but i haven’t slept very well last night, so right now im on zombie mode….

See ya soon