Hola Balkhis Users,

I am thinking that I want to thank all of my readers who read this blog and give me feedback. I want to get to know my readers very closely. Therefore I am starting this thread so we can all be friends.

The purpose of this thread is to get you to list your social media profiles here as well as the link to your main site. I will go forward in the list and add all of you.

Blogosphere is more like a family. We should all help each other out and stay updated.

If you want more friends, and more visits to your site. Simply put a list of your social media network profiles in the post below along with your major site link. I will try to add all of you guys.

I will start with my profiles:

Plurk – I am here the most if you are not then Join Now

Twitter

Digg

Youtube

Revver

Technorati

Will be looking forward to see how many of you are actually looking for more friends.

Last year, Wordpress decided to close off their Theme Directory. Which made it difficult for alot of designers like myself to promote our themes. Many people went their own ways listing their themes on their own sites but there wasn’t that one collection.

As Wordpress updates, it was getting harder and harder to find themes that worked well with newer features. Well Thanks to God that Wordpress has opened up the Themes Directory Again.

All of these themes will be human reviewed before being published to ensure the quality. So make sure you submit only the top notch theme. Also make sure you start submiting your themes quick before the que gets too big.

Another thing to take in account is do not put more then one link in the footer if you want to have a chance getting in the list. If you have more then one designer link, then more likely then not you won’t make it in.

But all to all the good news is that the Theme Directory is back up.

By the way if you guys haven’t noticed I have released my e-book that teaches you how to make a magazine style theme, so take a look.

Wordpress has announced the release of another stable version (Wordpress 2.6 Tyner). It is named after a Jazz Pianist McCoy Tyner. This new update comes with some great features that I believe definately makes wordpress a much more stronger CMS system.

Important features that Wordpress 2.6 consist is:

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.

Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.

Bulk management of plugins.

A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.

Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.

Plugin update notification bubble.

Customizable default avatars.

You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.

Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.

Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.

You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.

Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.

Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”

You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.

A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.

Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Wordpress has prepared a short video that gives an overview of this new release

Download Wordpress 2.6 (Tyner) NOW

Hey Balkhis Users, I don’t do this very often, but this time the EEEnkay Blog’s Market Leverage Contest is being held at Enkay Blog who has become a very close friend of mine after he joined my blog and that was at the time of Balkhis ML Contest.

Well he have some unique prizes up on the roll one of them being the Asus EEE Laptop hence why the contest is called EEEnkay Blog’s Market Leverage Contest. Ofcourse it is sponsored by Market Leverage.

He is also giving out a $50 ML Gift card and 3 2GB USB Drive.

I am not a big fan of random contests, but Enkay gives me alot of backlinks from his posts also so this is the way I show him my gratitude.

Visit EEEnkay Blog’s Market Leverage Contest and Join if you like.

Top Affiliate Challenge is still going. All competitors are working hard (atleast I hope) and alot of them are not happy with this contest as well. So many things went wrong in this event. But I am not going to talk about those.

I would rather talk about a strategy being used by John Chow of giving away $25 VISA Cards to 20 readers who fullfill the offer.

Reader will spend $14.94 doing the offers and will get $25 back so they are in profit. But only the first 20 will get it. Now you don’t know which number you are technically, so there can be hundred people submitting at once and your turn can be lost.

No Catch in this technique as claimed by John, but the technique itself is tricky because you can potentially be losing money as well. Now I want to know how well does this work?

Do you consider it a spammy technique because alot of other sites use this technique on a much larger scale.