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It is getting harder to show you professional and good looking wordpress magazine themes. The Majority is widely advertised by bloggers. A brief google search for “Free wordpress magazine themes” will show you the usual suspects. Pages that you are tired of visiting and showing the same old magazine themes.

Fortunately from time to time there is a new free wordpress magazine theme release that is worth mentioning. Today i have only 3 but i assure they are top quality.

The first two are from one of my favourity designers (Web2feel.com). They present us with regular wordpress magazine themes. The themes “skeleton” is basically the same, but they make alterations that make them impressive.

1- Milano

A free magazine that suites all niches. It is designed to help you make money through ads.

Nice olive color scheme. Definitely a theme to take into consideration for your next project.

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

2 - Zherald

Another excellent realease by web2feel. Theis free wordpress magazine theme uses a white color scheme with some grey and olive. It has the usual image slider, featured post and video and optimized for ads like google adsense. Worth taking a look.

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

3 - Premium Entertainment theme

This theme is obviously not for all kind of blogs. If you plan or have a blog about celebrities/gossip/fashion/entertainment then this may be the right choice.

This is a premium free magazine style theme for wordpress. Comes with a variety of plugins all included in the pack, and it is adsense ready.

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

These are the one i think they deserved to be posted. There are a lot more magazine themes to show, but like i said, they are widely advertised by bloggers and i want to bring you original and fresh content

I have been using this week, a software called Comment Sniper. It is one of the best software that i have downloaded lately.

What is Comment Sniper?

Comment Sniper is a free software that allows it’s user to keep track of new posts of your favourite blogs. You just add the desired blogs to the tracking list (i have around 10 so far), choose the scanning interval (i use 5 minutes), and the software will alert you with a small popup on your lower right screen corner, every time it detects a new post on any of the blogs you added to the list.

With the scan interval i choose, i will be able to read the post and comment few minutes later after the post publication, increasing my chances to be the first to comment.

How can this help me?

Well, being the first to comment will help increase your blog visitors. Usually, visitors read the post and the first comments, and sometimes (if not often) the reader will click your link to check your blog. This way, you can bring quality visitors to your blog. Off course, your comments need to be relevant to the post and with some quality, “nice post” kind of comments won’t help you bring visitors.

(just a quick note: while i was writing this post, a new comment sniper alert popped up, and again im the first guy to have a comment on a new post )

But being the first to comment and increase site visitors is not the only advantage of this software. With time and continuous posting, it will help you increase your search rankings.

I totally recommend this tool, and if you want to try just download it, and don’t worry, i know you love this blog, so the software comes with this blog already subscribed for new post alerts by default :p

Download Comment Sniper

P.S: My offer one 1:1 rss subscription is still available, read more about it here.

Some of us like to know our neighbourhood, create relations with them and create a steady group, others can’t do this because they live in a big city where it is hard to accomplish this, but even so, sometimes they say something is not right….

Curiosity is a natural thing, and if it is natural to want to know whats going on our neighbourhood, and since 90% of us has a shared hosting account, why not get curious on whom are we sharing the server with?

That is possible with a reverse ip tool such as myIPneighbors. There are several other sites that offer the same service, but this is the one i use.

This tool grabs results from search engines to get sites with the same IP. Off course the results shown may not be the total number of hosted sites at the server, but it is close to that.

For example, i did a check on my domain name and got a total of 156 sites. First impression is that this server is not overcrowded ( i have found server with more than 900 different sites), but i have found some neighbours that run adult sites. SInce im no puritan and none of them seem to break any law im ok with them, as long they don’t lag the server.

SEO issues:

Since getting links to a website is very easy, you just need to create hundreds of sites linking to yours. But these links usually come from the same IP, so Search engines tend to value more inbound links that come from a different ip address than our own.

One thing is clear. Having several sites on one ip is nothing to worry.

Website Filtering:

Some countries like China block ip’s, some libraries or public services or even filtering services to protect children to access unwanted sites may block a site due to law infringement, not suitable for kids or contains viruses, adware or spyware. The bad news may be if the banned site gets also the ip banned, and you by misfortune get also blocked because you share the same ip.

But this is very rare to happen, at least i don’t know anyone affected by this, so i wouldn’t worry about website filtering.

Justin Tadlock has become one of my favourite wordpress templates designer. He produces a style of templates that im very fond of: magazine style templates.

Recently, he created what he calls, a super theme. It is called Options theme, and it is a wordpress magazine style template. It is not only a magazine, it is a versatile theme that will fit every blogger need. As Justin says, the options theme is like Structure (the theme im currently using) on steroids!

The name says it all. This theme is packed with a load of options for you to choose. It will take some time for you to get comfortable with the options this great theme has to give

This theme is still in Beta version, but Justin plans to release this week the “final” version. He already made some changes for the current beta version.

But enough of this talk and lets head for what the options theme has to give.

Right now, the package comes with 3 CSS layouts. The original release came with a Dark css template and a light css template. This week, “new groove” style was added. You can choose which CSS style to use within the administration panel. If you know a bit of CSS coding, you can easily create a CSS layout to implement on options theme, if not, than you just need to wait for more releases from Justin or the growing community around this theme.

The homepage layout can be changed in multiple ways. There are five blocks, and in each block you can choose 14 different options.

The sidebar is totally widget compatible, and the theme comes with several widgets to help you customize the blog, from several ad widgets to flickr or a video widget.

One of the things a like most on this theme, besides the CSS customisation, is the Features Gallery option. This option uses Smooth Gallery. This allows you to cycle featured posts with a nice transition effect between posts.

If you want to see how the theme looks, and the transition effect I’ve just mentioned then visit the demo.

As you can see, the demo is using the Dark version. The light version in my honest opinion it’s nothing special. There is now the new CSS style, new groove:

image from justintadlock.com

Pros:

- Great looking theme!

- Easy CSS customisation;

- Options for every kind of blogger;

- Widget Ready theme;

- Great support from the author and form the community

Cons:

- You will need to try, try, try all the options to see what fits best for you. (is this really a negative aspect? lol)

- Hum, can’t really think of more negative aspects…. lol

To download or gather more info about this theme just visit Justintadlock.com

So, in conclusion. this is one of the best (if not the best) theme around. Im tempted to change my current theme (Structure theme) to this one. What do you thing? Should i change? Im really tempted, but i will wait a couple more days for the new release.

Last week, during my scarce free time i decided to search for a wordpress plugin that could manage my ad sales on this blog in an almost automated way. I found a couple of them but none gave me exactly what i wanted.

So, i decided to invest some money to buy a tool for the first time to use on this blog. I decided to buy OIOpublisher. I knew this wordpress plugin for some time now and read good reviews about it. So it seemed the right choice for me.

The plugin is somewhat cheap, it costs only a one time fee of $37 dollars, and you can use it on an unlimited number of blogs, the buying process is extremely fast. But to talk you into buying this wordpress plugin i need you to show you exactly what oiopublisher is.

Oiopublisher lets you cut the middleman in your ad sales. The plugin is a direct ad sale platform that can manage a the majority of advertising deals you want to use.

WIth OIOpublisher you can sell in a easy way:

- Banner ads (Like the 125×125 button im using on the right side);

- Text Links (home page, site wide, single post links);

- Inline ads (video, image);

- Reviews (written by you or by the buyer);

- or you can customise your ad deal;

The plugin even comes with a referral system that allows you to reward your members that refer advertisers to your blog! pretty cool huh?

As you can see, by managing ads itself, oiopublisher will take down the headache of managing who bought ads from you, or if they have paid you or not. For the days i have used this script, i could see that was a good investment, it is a time saver. But it is not only that. You can now have more advertising options, that before you wouldn’t have the patience or the right script to do them.

The plugin installation couldn’t be easier. Just download (after you paid the $37 fee), unzip and upload to your wordpress plugin directory and activate it at the plugin panel in your administration area. Then you just need to go to the business tab and configure your ad spots. After that, go to your widget configuration and choose where the ads are displayed.

It is as simple as 1-2-3. If you buy this script you won’t regret. This is by far one of the best plugins i have found for wordpress. It is cheap, and you even get 50% for every new costumer you sent to oiopublisher.