Promote your brand with Firefox 3.6 Personas

I bet you all downloaded Firefox 3.6.

One of the new features is Personas, which allows you to instantly change the look of your Firefox with thousands of easy-to-install themes.

There are thousands of Personas to choose from, with more added every day, because users can upload their own, in a growing library with more 35,000 submissions.

Personas work with any type of computer that has Firefox installed. This includes Mac, Linux and Windows platforms.

This means if you design a popular theme, thousands (if not millions) of Firefox users will have your Persona theme installed. Creating a Personas theme can be a fun way to promote your brand. It’s easy, free and won’t take you more than a couple of minutes.

Probably you won’t become famous with your Personas theme, but it’s something you should create, especially if you are a graphic artist. Creating various personas with your artwork can attract visitors to you site. Basically the process would be something like this:

People browse Personas to custom their Firefox, they see you awesome skins and become fan of yours.

Let’s create a custom Firefox Persona!

To create your Firefox Persona you will need:

* Firefox 3.6
* The Persona Plus plugin
* An header image, 3000×200 pixels, jpg or png and lighter than 300k
* A footer image, 3000×100 pixels, jpg or png and lighter than 300k (only the size changes) Read more

Moved on a new server

I am happy to annouce the blog has moved on a new server.

My old server, aruba.it, simply had too much problems to host a blog with high traffic, and as you probably experienced during the last days, the blog was hacked too much times.

The funny thing is every time I reported the problem to the customer care, they replied (normally after 24 hours, from monday to friday) it was my fault.

If I have a fault, is waiting that long before migrating (but I prefer to say “running away”)

Now I am hosted on HostGator and finally I am back to life!!!

Since moving more than 6,000 files and about 25,000 queries can lead to some errors, I would like you to report any missing file or strange behavior to info[at]emanueleferonato.com

Alexa rank under 30K!!!

Another important milestone… the blog is climbing Alexa’s ranking ladder… some months ago it was one of the 40,000 most visited sites in the world, now it’s time to celebrate my ranking under 30K!!!

That’s a really important achievement for such a niche blog.

Thank you!!

Alexa rank under 40K!!!

About a year after being one of the top 50,000 sites in the world, the blog now is one of the 40,000 most visited sites in the web.

That’s an awesome result for a niche blog like this one, and obviously this motivates me to continue posting more and more stuff.

3 years of blogging

Ladies, gentlemen and geeks, today the blog is three years old!!!!!

The blog had 77 posts in the first year, 187 in the second one and 237 this year for a total of 501 posts (and none of them is off-topic… no “got a new sofa” post in this blog).

More than 2,000,000 people visited the blog during the last year.

Now, let’s jump into the 4th year… I am open to any kind of suggestion.

And, last but not least…

THANK YOU

Facepalm – when having a backup is not enough

If you are a regular reader, probably you noticed during the last days I went from about 5 posts per week to 3 posts/week.

I didn’t plan to give up blogging, and I didn’t run out of inspiration… I have a lots of things to write, but lately I find the blog to be too slow, so I thought it would be due to a server upgrade and waited a couple of days.

Yesterday I was writing an interesting article about a new project I started with an important partner (you will find it tomorrow) when I got the 500 internal server error.

Never mind, let me close the page and open it again. 500 again.

Ok, so I deleted the entire site and uploaded the backup.

500…

Ok, maybe something happened to the database, let me check it and back it up.

I wasn’t able to back up the database… I was only able to perform select queries… update, delete, insert and other writing queries gave me errors… and still, of course…

500…

At that time, having a backup was not enough. What’s the point in having a backup if you can’t back it up?

While I was thinking, and the site was softly displaying

500…

Never mind, I was lucky enough to have another database on the same server, so I switched the databases and the site was up and running again.

But the administration panel was still in 500 error. Probably the same issue that screwed the database caused problem to the disk.

I had to delete all files once again and upload them, and finally the site is running.

But I am a quite afraid at the moment, so I am writing this post using the notepad

Obviously I opened a ticket to the customer care, and they answered this way (translated from italian)

we found your DB (dbname) having a table (tablename) with some spam records [so what?]. This causes problems when making queries on such tables [really?].
So we renamed (tablename) to (new tablename)… you are invited to clean the DB blah blah blah

So, forget what probloggers say. Having a backup is not enough.

During your life as a blogger, you will have to face weird errors and stange support teams.

Did it happened to you once or twice?

Now I pasted the post in WP dashboard… 3… 2… 1… Publish (pray)

New blog header: how did I make it

During the weekend I played with the blog header.

In my opinion bloggers understimate the power of a rich header, and in most cases you will see only the blog title and description.

I am going to show you what I did on my header, why I did it and how can you do it on your own.

Pages first

The first thing included in the header is the navbar with blog pages. Having the pages in the very top of your blog will give it a more “corporate” look.

To list your pages, use wp_list_pages WP function.

You can find a brief explaination about it in Customizing WordPress header or in the official docs.

Logo

Now that I have a logo, it’s time to use it…

Categories

Then I wanted to display categories in the header, and I used Multi Column Category List Plugin for WordPress to split them into three columns.

I also modified a bit the plugin to show how many posts have been written for each category.

Gallery

The last thing I added was a slideshow showing my latest projects. I used SlideShowPro that isn’t free but has a lot of features and is made with Flash, that means no frameworks/complex javascripts required.

It’s also fully XML driven, that means it’s easy to configure.

If you are looking for a good free alternative, check JonDesign’s SmoothGallery, that uses MooTools.

And this is the result…

… an header that’s not the “image-title-description” you are used to see in WP themes.

During the next days I will redesign the rest of the blog, to make its contents as much accessible as I can.

One of the top 50,000 sites in the world

Well, everybody knows it’s not right, but sounds fine.

As I said in the post New look for www.emanueleferonato.com, I am on top 50,000 sites according to Alexa.

It’s not so bad for a niche blog, so let’s go to the pub and have a drink, tell the bartender I will go there and pay tomorrow.

New look for www.emanueleferonato.com

The blog is approaching Alexa’s top 50,000 (and I like to think it’s one of the most 50,000 visited sites in the world) so I spent the weekend to redesign it.

After browsing a thousand of templates, both free and not free, I decided to download Silhouette WordPress Theme and take a look at Macalicious and changing a lot of things and this is the result.

It’s far from being finished but I wanted a feedback from users.

With the new look I want to focus the blog on contents. I removed Adsense injections because I want posts to be ads free for a better reading.

I also have some other stuff to add on the blog but after two days of hacking, coding, deleting, installing again, hacking, coding and so on I am really tired :) Read more

Looking for your experience for a case history

I need some of your experiences in order to build a case history section in this blog and for an article do be published on a paper magazine… and maybe for something else.

If you think this blog changed your way of developing and monetizing Flash games, or just made you love Flash game developing, then please leave a comment with your first name, the first letter of your last name and the Country you are from (example: Emanuele F. – Italy)

And, of course, your experience.

Thank you very much.

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