I think I just got over the writers block last week and I think I have some 10 posts in future timestamp for this month already. I have not been posting regularly since the start of last month. But all that is set to change this month. I am planning on some really solid posts and some of them are already in schedule.

Yea, I want to give you a chance to redesign that blog of yours with a spanking new design and give a breath of fresh air to your blog. The design will be as per your tastes and inputs. For a example of the wordpress magic I can do, check up the design of this blog, my homepage and my free themes section.

Why do you need a professional design?

How could you even ask that question! No one wants to be one of the millions, everyone wants to be the one in millions out there. I have redesigned my blog three times now after using the popular misty look theme.

The contest finally came to an end last week and I am putting up the winners and their winnings here. If you have been selected as one, get in touch at Yahoo! or Gtalk IM or use the contact form to claim the same. First, here are the participants.

• John
• Shypy
• Aravind
• Sreehari
• Tito
• Haroon
• Meldweny
• Bob
• Shareng

I had assigned each of you a number and used  the randomizer and (drumroll please)…the winners are:

Shypy - Gets the first domain Entersurf.info

Haroon Hameed - Gets the Freedombabe.info

Today I am in a mood of giving something back to the community. Today, I am celebrating the birthday of someone special with you my readers! For all you out there this is a small contest where you can win a few stuff and wish Happy Birthday to someone very special.

What is on the winnings table?

1. 2 Free domains - EnterSurf.info and Freedombabe.info
2. SEO consultation for your site - 2 hours.
3. 2 months of free link on my blogroll.

What are the advertising offers?

• 15% off on any advertising on my site. Check the advertising page for more information

The blog is finally up and running. I was having a hectic time tweaking the plugins and design to get that perfect look that I missed the posting for a few days. Presenting, TheAnand 2008!

Also, I will be putting up my old theme for public download soon since some people seemed to like it better. And wordpress themes have my fancy that I will be putting up a few of my themes for download asap.

As TheAnand.com matures with time, I think its time for a redesign again. Initially this blog used a free theme, then I got around making 2 custom themes myself and now I am in the process of getting a professional theme done.

As per the team behind the redesign, it should be up in another 3 days or so.. The main ideas behind the new design are better readability and professional looks and more nifty features. I designed the theme myself and it is being coded by pros now.

StumbleCult the upcoming stumble helper for webmasters is now going strong and registrations are coming by the day. To celebrate the popularity, we are now giving away free credits to everyone, this excludes the free 10 credits you already get when you signup! The only requirement in order to win the credits is to blog about the cult and send in a email to them. This as they say in the blog is a win-win situation for both the cult and its members since more active the cult becomes, more traffic we get to your sites.

StumbleUpon, every blogger loves this one! Its a great source of traffic for every blogger, big and small. The best part of StumbleUpon is that it gives you free traffic and is not really into the crowd mentality like Digg or the other media sites. Though hard to monetize, it builds a brand by putting it in front of a million people. Thats very important if you are looking forward to become a problogger or a popular one. Here is a screenshot of my traffic:

This time, they came out with a Rs. 750/- broadband unlimited(256kbps) with 50 local call pulses! I was using the unlimited 64kbps plan with about Rs. 399 month and changed it to the new plan. I did search unsuccessfully if anyone else has a comparable offer to this. Yay Airtel!

I always wanted to move out of Wordpress content related sites to something more fun and interesting to work on. RADIOez is the site that started off as a personal venture on my localhost containing all the stations I listen to on the internet. Then the idea bulb struck and I finally got the site completely up and running in the past week. RADIOez is my latest adventure into the world of online music stations. Its a aggregations of the various music stations on the Internet with stations arranged according to genres.

King Nomar, my good Internet friend and my first Internet money making friend went low profile after he sold his blog. I am sure he must have got some nice change since it was bought by iEntry. The very same iEntry who bought CashQuests for $15,000 (I think) recently and are in the perfect process of killing it. They have not even approved my comments on that blog yet. I sometimes feel sorry for these blogs which are rarely updated by the new owners and end up in a slow death.

What if I told you that I can tell you a trick that will help you own unlimited .edu blog for free? What if I told you that .edu backlinks are most sought after links by most link builders and SEO Gurus everywhere? Guess you already knew that.

Today I, The Anand turned twenty after, well 20 years of my birth I usually don’t really celebrate my birthdays cuz its been that way for as long as I can remember. So no birthday cake cutting pictures or party pictures today.

I was also happy to discover that I share my birthday with Micheal Kwan, the freelance writer who is rumored to be JohnChows’ accomplice in the laters panda slaying ventures. Happy Birthday Kwan!

Recently I noticed that Court was doing a bit of SEO for wordpress themes by checking their code and tweaking it to get the most out of them. I must say that I am pretty much satisfied using the themes he had optimized for SEO, since my minisite ranks pretty google for its terms.

So I asked him if he could look at my first wordpress theme - Arabian Sea and optimize a bit here and tweak a ‘lil there. And he did and now you can get my theme all SEO’d for free! He has made some minor tweaks to some of the files to give your content more attention and to prevent other page elements to steal focus of the search spiders. Read about the changes he made and to download the optimized theme.

Do you think you totally lack creativity? I, for one is a person who totally lacks creativity when I am in front of Photoshop or Flash. Its because of both that I was never a good artist or know how to create what. But I am totally interested in creating stuff with it and spend hours to get that perfect look. But at times I feel I lack creativity to do anything useful. Why? Is creativity a trait of a select few? Can everyone unleash their creativity in a steady flow?

Here are a few tips I usually do to rediscover my creative juices.

I was experimenting with wordpress themes for testing them for providing a viable backlink source for my site. I recently uploaded my theme to wordpress and received more then 100 downloads in the first two or three days. This was simply excellent considering that it was my first theme and possibly my last one too!

My technorati authority jumped about 60 points and the rankings by about 40k upwards. But about the quality of links, I am not very happy since most of these blogs were brand new and some were even in foreign languages! I did see a PR3 and a few links of that levels coming in.

Recently this tagging game has been doing the rounds. I was tagged by Venu. So here are some random stuff from TheAnand!

1. I am a Internet addict. I am usually online for more than 12 hrs a day. Usually surfing around, reading and learing stuff.
2. I was never interested in studying at school. But when I passed out from School, I was the School Topper in Computer Science. While in Math I scraped through, Computers comes naturally for me
3. I used to have suicidal tendencies, pre high school.

I think the best way to learn PHP, or any other programming language for that matter, is through practical application of the language. I was looking around for a way to learn PHP easily and having fun on the way when I was thinking of designing a new theme for wordpress blogs. This is definitely a good way to learn some PHP, loads of CSS and get a basic foundation on how these work together and stuff.

Recently I won a contest from a fellow blogger Andreas Bard in a contest hosted by him. I promised to give away the prize money to another blogger in a contest. I won $30 cash from him, but due to credit card payment, paypal took a commision off it. So I am giving away 27.93, what I got from Andreas.

The rules are simple since the prize is not something to write home about. To enter the contest make a post about this blog linking to a inner post tell everyone about the contest and where the money came from. Here is a sample.

This a pretty interesting thing I came across all the normal blogs, which claim to make you money online is not making a great deal of money online. Only the big ones like John Chow and others of the kind are actually making big bucks enough to quit a day job. Also the content for making money blogs attract people who already know about advertisements and adsense and others, so it will not make much in terms of PPC revenue either. I had these thoughts running through my mind when I saw this at Courtney Tuttle:

MsDanielle, Can I have the Zune? Please..

I have been planning this post for some time now, but since I did not want to rush the post since I really want to win that Zune. So, Whats this whole Zune thingy? Read on.

Once upon a time….na, sounds boring I have no idea how many times I have been pressing the backspace to write this review of Ms. Danielle’s Blog, which is now officially 3 months old. The pink blog site has had some terrific graphs of improvement in terms of ranking. Its in no other way but up! I don’t remember from where I got to her blog, but after digging through the blog for a while, it got into my picky RSS reader.

The John Chow pen arrived 2 days back and I am sorry for the delay in posting this, just like the Agloco is not able to talk with the ad servers, my camera was not able to talk to my PC

Now that it can talk, so I took a few shots for this post! For those who don’t know about this game, here is a small introduction. Matt recently won a pen in a JohnChow contest, he decided to let the lucky pen go sightseeing around the world! So he started a fun game to pass the pen all over the world. Here is how the game is played:

I am enjoying blogging so much that at times I forget that my aim is to make money online! But I find blogging to be a very fun thing to do and a nice way to socialize with the world. Here is my current update on my money making missions.

1. Content Writing: This is by far the most profitable for this blog. I write a few articles for some clients who do not wish to be named. The usual payment ranges anything between $2.00 per 100 words to $8 for 300 words. I do plan to continue this mode of earning for some time to come. The opportunities come from a wide range of sites, like the DigitalPoint forums, freelance writing sites and a few personal friends online. Now you know where I make money writing!

This is one those posts where one gets a chance to laugh at the fate of a country called India where the country advances to higher and better standards in spite of the those in power. . .

Haven’t you heard? India is bringing equality to the common man. Now anybody can become “The President”. Read on to know how to apply for the post

1. The Application Form

The application form above has been issued by the Samajwadi Party for them to evaluate the candidate whom they would be backing. Take a print out of the form, fill it up and send it to them at i-be-the-one@samajwadi.com

Hey people…..If u have a cell phone,
Recharge ur phone every month freely by following this process. Please follow the instruction & you can recharge your SIM card absolutely free.
Yes it is possible, see how technology can be used to make anyone a fool!

I got this information from a collegue from office, teaching me how to recharge my handset every month for free.

We have launched our 2mbps plans like BSNL, or better.

There are some powerpoint presentations circling the net right now. But the question almost everywhere is why doesn’t Airtel promote them? Print them, and market them? Is the plans not good enough to compete in the market? Is the promised speeds not delivered? These are some of the questions I will try to cover through this post.

What are the current 2 Mbps plans?

Here are the plans in short:

I had written earlier that I was going to quit my day job at Airtel in Cochin and start concentrating on my studies and my online activities. But due to some reason or the other, for the better or the worse I am still with Airtel Broadband and Telephone Services.

I work in the retention team here in Cochin. My job? Bring back customers who are leaving us. That’s my job profile in one line. Customer retention is a major concern for every telecom operator all over the global village. Recently Economic Times published statistics that says that 1/4th of the customer base moves between the operators in a year! Most companies have realised or are in the process of realising that a customer retained is better than two customers acquired.

A little hack found on the forums on about how to access the net from a pc using a mobile with Airtel prepaid card. Enjoy!
Raw Materials: PC/Laptop and necessary connectivity tools ,ie.,
Serial/USB cable OR Infrared Device OR Bluetooth dongle to connect the mobile to the computer.

1) Activate Airtel Live! ( It’s FREE so no probs)

2)Create TWO Airtel GPRS data accounts (yep TWO) and select the
FIRST as the active profile.

3) Connect your mobile to the PC (or Laptop) and install the driver for
your mobile’s modem.