Well as you know that I follow all of my reader’s blog. Mike Huang at Bloggin-ads is having a Mac Air and $1000 giveaway. If you don’t know he does blog reviews free reviews for blogs that he find interesting. Not sure if he does paid reviews.

Well the contest is very simple, he collected bunch of sponsors and decided to give away 2 Macbook Air, and 100$ to 10 different people which means his subscribers.

There are bunch of entry methods,

Subscribe to his blog Via Email (1 point)
Participate in forums (1-10 tickets per day)
Participate on the blog (1 ticket per comment / 5 comments a day)
Write about it (10 tickets)
Stumble and Digg it (3 tickets)

Since he admires John Chow alot he is getting evil also by making the contest end on Friday the 13th. Yup it is June 13th 2008.

I normally don’t enter contest, but I’ll enter Mike’s contest as he is a Balkhis user.

As you know that I announced the winner for April 2008 Pimp My Blog Show winner on this post, and it was one of a regular user and email subscriber of Balkhis, Puneet. He decided to get his Vol Cars Blog to get a new pimped version of the design by me.

I am happy to see the excitement this show brings on in my users because when I first emailed Puneet and told him that he won, I got a reply in the email

WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Yippieeeeeee…..

Thats a gr8 news Syed … Thanx a lot frddddd….

One of the thing Puneet asked for is a custom header and simplicity in the rest of the design. Also ensure that he have tons of ad space, so I said ok. I showed him the design, he liked it, and I went ahead with the coding of it.

I don’t want to do any more talking because the Video explains it all.

Well Puneet was the winner of this month, you can be a winner of the May contest. Remember this is a never lasting contest, so there will be a winner once every month. Now who doesn’t want a custom wordpress design by me All you have to do is subscribe to this blog via email. Yes it is FREE, so subscribe, and you will enter a chance to win.

For your convenience I am including the box below

Will upgrade you guys closer to next month’s drawing. Subscribe and begin commenting, as the more comments you do the more chances you will have because top commentators get more entries if they are my email subscribers. Also, if you write about this contest and send trackback to one of the posts in pimp my blog category, you will also get extra entries. Don’t wait and enter.

Two Days ago I wrote a post about How to display recent posts in your wordpress sidebar and gave reasons on why one should include that. A few of the users brought up the point that displaying Popular Post is equally if not more in the benefit of the user. It is very debatable because in some cases recent post works better whereas in some cases popular post would work better. Therefore, I have decided that I will show my users to install the popular post in their wordpress as well. (Also this was requested by Bruce of Authority Directory)

Popular Post Plugin

This plugin will display popular post in your sidebars, or anywhere where you want to put this plugin. The popular post will be determined by pageviews.

This plugin would work easier for those who will use it dynamically with the widget in the admin panel. If you want to include this somewhere else other than the sidebar of the template, you can still do it. I have added a very useful article to Balkhis which shows How to add Dynamic Sidebar in wordpress. Basically follow that tutorial, if you want to display it in some other place than your sidebar, but want to use the widget area in the admin panel. All what you would have to do is paste the last code discussed in that tutorial anywhere on the template for instance footer or whatnot.

Once you have done that, [Read the rest in the full post]

Today was a crazy day. After taking care of bunch of issues, I decided to go to SHOPPING and buy bunch of sports gear. This morning I didn’t really had anything to post about, so I let the important recent post display post up. Now I left the house around 8:30 a.m, and I am getting back in at 8:51 p.m EST. Checking the mail, and I found my adtech pass. For those of you who forgot, I am attending Adtech in Miami….. You can Register here also.

I am only going to the exhibit, and what I like about this is that exhibit is free if you register early. That means till June 2nd. So if you live in the Florida area, this will be a good opportunity to meet some companies and get to know them. Let me know if any of you guys are going, so I’ll keep my eyes open for you, and if anyone of you see me feel free to bump into me.

Did you know aside from having your users view the top 5 posts on the first page, you can also show as many recent posts you want on your homepage. Well in this post I will talk about how you can display recent posts in your wordpress and why should you do it.

Recent Posts

Basically what this will do is display a list of recent posts in your blog. You can insert this anywhere on the template, but most people do it on the sidebar. You do not need a widget or plugin to do this. All you need is the code below.

<?php get_archives(‘postbypost’, ’40′, ‘custom’, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’); ?>

As you see the number 40 means it will show 40 recent posts on the main page. This is what is currently being displayed on Balkhis. (I know it is alot, but it will change with the new template.. Inside Leak)

Anyways as you can see all the above function can do is display the link to recent posts, and many people have modified codes in different ways to help themselves.

For those who like everything to be done via admin panel, I looked in the plugin directory of wordpress to find this one. This plugin will let you display excerpt and bunch of other features. Everything done via admin panel. Download this plugin.

Now that you know how to display recent posts in wordpress, I will tell you why you should display it.

Main advantage of displaying Recent posts in your Wordpress is SEO. Yes, in my opinion that it helps a site in indexing and in ranking when you display a link to recent posts on wordpress. Some sites does not get indexed quickly, and if pages are indexed, they are often ignored due to lack of importance. What do I mean by lack or importance? I am displaying 5 posts on one page, and if I post 2 – 3 posts a day within 2 days that one post will be on the second page. To show a search engine bot that this page is important index it and rank it, you need to put the links on homepage. Now I am not saying display all 40, you can display 10, 15 or so. Now let me explain to you why I think this way. Aside from your homepage, what else gets high PR, or get mentioned when given sitelinks in google. The About page, Contact page, and some other pages that are linked through the homepage. I figure if one put about 10 – 15 recent post links on the homepage, search engine will visit them daily for a certain period of time which ensure that those posts get indexed and ranked.

The next advantage is, it helps users like me. While search is a good option, I usually look at the recent posts to keep track of the blogs that I read. Whether I have read that post or not, so it is just another cool thing to add on your blog for your users.

Do you have recent posts on your blog?