I would like to present to you Design Crash Magazine.

So, what is Design Crash Magazine?

Design Crash Magazine is a blog formed by me and graphic designer Mitch Myers with the contribution of a group of talented professionals. Design Crash Magazine’s main objective is to bring to you as many resources as possible; resourcers such as feeds that will help the web designer, graphic designer and artist in general to get inspired with the  compilation of latest trends.

So, make sure to check out the blog and drop us a line anytime!

Y con ustedes Design Crash Magazine.

Qué es Design Crash Magazine?

Design Crash Magazine es un blog formado por mi en compañia del diseñador grafico Mitch Myers con la contribucion de un grupo de profesionales muy talentosos. La meta principal de Design Crash Magazine es traer a ustedes la mayor cantidad de recursos posibles; recursos que ayudaran a desarrolladores web, diseñadores gráficos y profesionales en general a inspirarse con la compulacion de las ultimas tendencias diseño.

Asi que sin mas preambulos, asegurense de dar un vistazo al blog y dejanos un comentario!

This is the second part of my previous post called How to Create, Develop and Maintain a Successful Online Identity.

Build and Maintain a Good Online Reputation

Regardless of what the purpose of your profile/website/ blog is, it’s important to keep a clean online reputation  – even if you are not planning on doing business online.

Have you tried “googling” yourself? Try it and see what comes up. What you will see is what’s your online identity today.

Brand Yourself with Gravatar

There are some really good tools you can use if you are trying to create a successful online identity. One of them is Gravatar.  To quote from the website “A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things…”

Benefits of using Gravatar

Avatars allow people to recognize you  easier whenever you comment or post something on websites, blogs and web forums.

How to Create an Avatar

All you need to do is just go to Gravatar and create an account. You can create different avatars for different email addresses, this can come in handy if you have different businesses and you decide to create different avatars according to the business you are promoting.

Use a Self Portrait

It’s recommendable to use a portrait of yourself in your blog, and as avatar.  A portrait of yourself will help people relate to you easier and feel more comfortable when reading/commenting – plus it will help increase your online identity and reputation.

…but above all, make sure you have fun meeting new friends!

I don’t know about you, but I’m really happy Spring is here.  I know we’ve had spring for about a month already, but it just didn’t feel like Spring to me until this past week. We’ve had a tough winter but it’s all gone – at least it seems.

So I figured, brand new Spring calls for a brand new design for the blog. This time I wanted to make something quite different from all the designs I’ve had in the past for this blog. I think you will notice that the main change was the background which is black when in the past I’ve tried to keep the background of a light color, preferably white.

Old Times ..Good Times

First, let’s reminisce a little in the various designs Karina Myers’ Blog has had. At the beginning, I decided to have a very playful approach using different colors and the result was…

I though it was cute and I like that I had my sponsors link in the top of the page. But, a designer’s mind never stops working so guess what…I came up with a second design.

For my second layout I wanted to include my twitter account, so I added a status post in the header which ended up looking like this:

I love swirly brushes, and I was pretty happy I was able to implement it in this design.

For the design that came after that I wanted to make a pretty innovative design with some fire or neon glow somewhere in it. Here is an image of what the header layout ended up being:

Red is one of my favorite colors and I still love that KM logo I made…good times!

The new and improved layout for Karina Myers’ Blog… that’s me

For this new design I decided to give it a rest to my digital web character. I hold the design very close to my heart and I’ll probably implement it in my future design… who knows? what do you think?

Let’s start with the logo. I must say, I’m really happy with the results. This new logo has a fresh look to it and I like that I was able to implement the various colors that I like in it without making it look bad, and guess what.. I’m using neon colors which look beautiful with the black background!

I’m also using different dark tones and thin light borders that you will probably need to take a close look to the design in order to notice it.

In the top right of the page you will also find a beautiful box that holds every link  you will need in order to connect with me online through any of the various social networking sites out there; links like my twitter profile, digg, technorati and of course links that will allow you to subscribe to receive the latest updates in my blog via RSS or via email updates, your choice. So in case you haven’t added me yet, make sure you do it soon.

A new addition to the blog are the networking tools that I have added for my beloved readers like yourself.

You can find this box in the sidebar located at the right side of the blog. TwitterRemote is a fun way to connect with your friends from Twitter and also get to know new people with similar interest as yours.

Another very new option added to the site is Google Friend Connect. This widget allows anyone to join the site with one click by using their existing Google, Yahoo and other accounts, that way you will be able to connect and network with your friends from this blog.

There are a couple things that I’m still keeping from the old design and that is the subscribe via email form:

And last but not least, the translate this page option for anyone who likes to have more options that just english.

I hope you enjoyed this short tour and find it entertaining. Is there any tool or widget that you would like me to add to the blog? Let me know your comments below.

Lately, I’ve been working in some small details in my blog – as some of you might have noticed.  This time, I just wanted to post a quick tutorial about how to customize your comments in your WordPress blog.

How to Change the Style of the Author’s Comment in WordPress

You probably have seen this before, whenever you are reading the comments of a post and you notice that the author’s comment is highlighted in a particular way, just so it’s different than the rest. Well, there are many ways to get this done.

An easy way to do it is by going to Appearances -> Edit -> style.css and add the following class:

.author_comment {
background-color: #F1C056 !important;
}

This simple class will just change the background of the author’s comment box. Here you can customize the style of your author’s box by changing the border color, etc.

Finally,  you need to make a small change in comments.php,  so go to Appearances  -> Edit -> comments.php. Once you are in the page, look up the line

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment...

Change it to this:

<li class="<?php
/* Only use the author_comment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = "author_comment";
echo $oddcomment;
?>" id="comment…

That’s all, if you followed this two simple steps correctly, your author’s box should be displaying with an improved and personalized style.

How to Change the Avatars Sizes in Comments

This is really easy, the kubrick wordpress template resizes the images to 32×32 by default. In order tyo change the sizes, go to Appearances  -> Edit -> comments.php and look up

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment,

You will find a line that looks like

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?>

In order to make the image bigger just try changin the number 32 to 50.  That’s all.

I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial.  Until next time!

Read More

Here’s is what you need to do in order to setup your Google Analytics Account:

1. Go to Google Analytics
2. If you already have a gmail account you can sign in, if not you will need to create one in order to start using Google Analytics.

And you’re all set to start tracking your website.
Hope this tutorial has been useful to you

Before we continue, you might be interested in reading a related post in my blog named Track Your WebSite Stats With Google Analytics. This is tutorial that shows you how to create an account in Google Analytics.

Okay, let’s begin!

STATS.

Google Analytics
Really good tool where you can keep track of your site stats.
You might want to check my previous post Track Your WebSite Stats With Google Analytics.

Clicky

ShinyStat

Alexa
See where your stats rank.

AWStats

Smart Tracking

StatCounter

BLOG STATS

FeedBurner
Stats on your feed, email subscriptions, social bookmarking tools, etc.

pMetrics

Technorati
See who’s linking to you.

PAGE ANALYSIS.

Trifecta Tool Set
A useful tool that measures the strength of pages, blogs and entire domains based on factors inherent to popularity, influence and ranking ability. See your impact and compare against others in your industry.

SEO Analyzer
free tool from Raven SEO Tools that can help you build better search engine optimized Web designs.

Meta Tag Analyzer

See how search engine robots analyze your or your competitors web site, receive tips on how to improve your Meta Tags, etc.

GoogleRankings
Check the ranking of your web page in Google™ A free search engine optimization tool.

Keyword Density Analysis
This service lets you see what key words and phrases are most often used on your pages.

Did I miss any? tell me what do you use to improve your website.

This article is to share with those who haven’t mastered in blogsome just yet and are trying to do some changes in their template. If you have any questions I might have the answer but I strongly recommend to ask the experts at Blogsome Forum if you have a question about your blogsome blog.

Here are some condensed info of the things that I’ve needed and learned to add to my blog.

1. Add “Read More…” at the end of my article:
   Do not mistake it with the option excerpt, I’ll be explaining this shortly. To do this teaser which refers to sentences or paragraphs of a post, you just need to insert the Quicktag after a few sentences to act as a cut off point.
   
   This way when the post is displayed, we’ll see the teaser, followed by a hyperlink (such as Read the rest of this entry…), are displayed. Your visitor can then click on that link to see the full version of your post.Blogsome by default shows “(more…)”. If you want to change that for “Read the rest of the story…” for instance, you will need to go into your Manage>Files>post.html and find {the_content} and change it for {the_content more_link_text="
Read the rest of the story..."}
2. Show # of post next to Categories
   To show how many post you have in each category and display next to it, you’ll need to go to Manage>Files>index.html and look for {list_cats optionall='0' all='All' sort_column='name'} and change it for {list_cats optional='1' all='All' optioncount='1' sort_column='name'} and you’re all set.
3. Show # of post next to Archives
   This one is pretty similar to the previous one. You’ll need to look for {get_archives type='monthly'} and change it for {get_archives type='monthly' show_post_count='1'}
4. Show more characters when showing “Most Recent Posts” or “Most Popular Posts”
   This one is pretty easy but I wanted to include it anyway, just in case. To do this you just need to go to Manage>Files>index.html and look for the Most Recent Post title. Once that you located the segment you want to modify, keep on reading a couple lines below and you’ll see a line that says {$title|truncate:20:"..."} that is the number you want to change, if you want to show more characters that 20 in a line you can do so, just by changing the number to 50, for instance.
5. So, what’s excerpt for?
   An excerpt is a condensed description of your blog post and refers to the summary entered in the Excerpt field of the Write Post SubPanel (see Advanced Editing). The excerpt is used to describe your post in RSS feeds and is typically used in displaying search results. The excerpt is sometimes used in displaying the Archives and Category views of your posts. The Template Tag the_excerpt() can be used to access the contents of this field.
   An excerpt should not be confused with the teaser which refers to the first few sentences or paragraphs of a post.

I think I pretty much covered the most important for now, hope you found this tips useful, let me know which one was your favorite!