Zirpy

Who says Yahoo is going bankrupt? In fact, it now has a new feature on its popular free web-based email service. This is quite an exciting new feature.

You now can have @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com email addresses! And you’ll be using Yahoo’s award winning email service, the same as the usual Yahoo Mail. This service is still new, so you may want to grab your email address using your name before someone else does

I’ve been using the old theme on this blog for more than a year. One year and a month, to be exact. The old theme was the popular TypoXP 2. I’ve been looking at the old theme for more than a year! Now it’s time to move on, as I want to be more serious with this blog, I need to refresh myself, including this blog’s theme. This is the screenshot of what this blog looks like before:

I must admit that I wasn’t really serious with this blog at first. I was just trying new things, and blogging was a new thing for me then. I wrote about those programs about making money on the internet, but just reviews of those programs. I myselft even made a little money from them.

As time goes by, I know more about blogging, and I find it really interesting, especially when my other blog in my native language has made me new friends and knowledge. I want to do the same with this blog.

If you ever notice, using my old theme, I set the title of this blog to Anything Anyone Should Know, while I didn’t give much to my readers and the tagline was Online money, jokes, cool stuff, movies, games, just anything!. None of them anymore, this time I set the title to Zirpy (just the same as its domain name), and my tagline is Just Me Blogging. Yes, this is just me blogging right now

I don’t know if this change will change this blog’s position on search engines. But I don’t care, because it didn’t have a really good position on search engines anyway. This is just like me building this blog from scratch again.

Ah, one more thing. This new theme I’m using is Damai. I hope you’ll like it.

After waited for 2 months, The ProBlogger book has arrived, at last I just got it yesterday, and very excited to read it. I bought it from Amazon on April, it was not released yet, and now it’s in my hands!

The ProBlogger book has 220 pages. I haven’t finished reading it (hey, I just got it yesterday, remember?), but I have read its introduction, which tells its readers about how Darren Rowse and Chris Garret got into full time bloggers and make money from blogging. Darren’s story is quite long, it takes 7 pages, while Chris’ story is short, only 1.5 pages.

In the introduction, Darren tells us that what he has right now, he didn’t get it instantly. It took him a lot of time and efforts to get to what he is now. He had 3 jobs when he started blogging. And after he made a lot of money from blogging, in December 2005, Google made his blog dissapeared from search results, making him take a job again.

From the book’s back cover, it promises that you can learn to choose subject matter that works for you, handle technical issues, examine different ways your blog can earn income, evaluate your blog’s success, keep content fresh and interesting, and use your blog to generate income indirectly. This is very exciting!

I want to start the rest of the book right away, but I need to get some sleep first

See the image above, but don’t click it Well, you can’t click it anyway because it’s just an image. Ok, you see something different with the adsense above, right? It’s using a background. Actually there are so many variations of backgrounds for adsense, such as the adsense inside a paperclip image etc.

The use of these backgrounds make your ads look more attractive, and may can increase your click through rate.

The question is, is it legal to use those backgrounds for adsense? I’ve never asked Google about it, but I found these two websites that claims they’ve contacted Google and Google replied them saying it’s all right to use those backgrounds, as long as they meet this criteria: “Background images are fine so long as the ads are clearly portrayed as ads, and clearly distinguished from the content.”

You can check out the websites here and here. The first website is selling those backgrounds, so I prefer to believe that it’s ok to use those backgrounds.

What do you think?