For centuries designers have searched for a solution to create anti-aliased rounded corners with CSS. Before it was only possible with an image editting software like Adobe Photoshop, but this recent breakthrough changed the old-style way of making rounded corners. Spiffy Corners is a CSS tool created by Greg Johnson. It helps you create rounded corners with your own colors (for whatever reason you have for it) and generates the CSS for you to copy-and-paste to your design.

Via Ades Blog.

This might come early but I’m on GMT+8 here so Happy New Year everyone!!

I hope this is the beginning of an exciting year for all of us.

Starting a new blog is never easy, especially if you don’t see the big picture and you’re stuck inside your little box. This happens to the best of us. We for example often slack in content simply because we feel like no one’s reading. We often feel as if our efforts are improperly disposed of and that we’re wasting our time. But the key to a successful blog is to keep going even when the going gets tough. Stick with your original passion and make sure you find a way to relive it everyday of the week. Sometimes we have to blog not to please the crowd, but simply to please oneself. If we blog out of passion, because we love the subject or the niche, then eventually traffic will pickup on its own and we’ll slowly build a readership. It sounds very simple yet people get caught up everyday. We’re guilty as charged and we know it, that’s why we write this article as a reminder for ourselves and for you bloggers out there. Stick with your work and blog with passion. Persistence pays.

We’re sorry for the lack of updates within the past week or two. I have just moved to KL and Lee now has a dayjob. We will reorganize our schedule ASAP to pick up on things around here. Until then should you need any help with your website or anything please feel free to contact us.

Here’s a quick tip if you want to boost your traffic overnight (or over a short period of time). Write something controversial. Sure people will love you and hate you. But most of these people would link you anyway to make their point, or to flame you. Google doesn’t care if a link is meant to harm you or praise you, it only counts it as another link to your blog or article, hence boosting your PR. If you keep doing this for a while you’ll get tons of incoming links, bringing tons of traffic. I’d be careful though, you wouldn’t want to lose credibility or anything, so play it safe.

If you look around here you’ll notice we don’t get too much feedback in our comments. You might experience the same lack of discussion on your blog too, but don’t let that little fact worry you just yet.

There are six major types of readers out there:

1. Passer-Byers - most of these people hit your blog from search engines. They come like a storm (sans the effects) and they’re gone before you know it. The only reason that would keep them around is if they find something interesting on your blog, then they might come back another day. These are also called speed-clickers.
2. Lurkers - these are probably the most loyal of readers any blogger can have. Lurkers would come to your blog like their lives depended on it, but they always keep below the radars. Lurkers don’t post, they just like to read you and watch you from a distance.
3. Commenters and Critiques - this is a mixed group. Some may come from search engines or other links and they would say something because they feel the need to. Some commenters and critiques are loyal readers and they would say something from time to time. They keep you in check. They’re very honest and sincere about what they say most of the time. They’ll praise you when you do an excellent job and they’ll shove it right in your face when you suck. Commenters and critiques are a valuable asset as they can help you shape the direction of your blog.
4. Flamers - unlike commenters and critiques, flamers on the other hand are quite the opposite. They would post flammatory comments because they want to be cool like you but they can’t. These are envious people.
5. Friends - just like lurkers these are the most loyal of readers, but they would share their thoughts with you from time to time. They read you not because of what you write but they read you because of who you are. It’s always nice to have friends around.
6. Robots - some are nice (like Googlebots) and some are evil (spambots). They come and they leave like a thief in the night. Good bots index your content to help boost your search engine positioning, evil bots leave nasty links and spam your comments box.

There’s probably more types of visitors out there, but those are the six major groups that come to our blogs.

So if you notice that your blog isn’t receiving much feedback, don’t worry. You might have a bunch of passer-byers, lurkers and friends, which is good enough for me any day of the week. Look at some of the gods of blogs out there, like Gizmodo, they don’t get too much comments either. So cheer up and remember, content is king!

I was chatting with a friend on MSN last night and we had the kicks showing each other our past websites. I gotta tell you some of my best works are burried in my archives, forever hidden to the outside world. Sometimes we work too hard to make things better only to derail ourselves from our original purpose. Sometimes we begin to lose our touch and trying too hard isn’t exactly the best we could do. We need to sit back from time to time and let things shape on its own. Looking back I see my work like audio spikes. There were times I was damn good and there were times I sucked.

This is for those of you web designers and developers out there who have been making websites since the dawn of time. I would like to encourage you to take a quick trip to the past. Put your past in a kaleidoscope and look through the tube. You might surprise yourself and you might learn something from your past to help improve your current and/or future work.

If you’re one of those people who trash everything after you’re done with something, you can use the Wayback Machine to retrieve some of your old sites.

But we live in a modern world, who cares about the past? Well history repeats itself baby!! So unless you make peace with your past you will eventually repeat your old mistakes again.

Learn from your past. Recycle your brilliant ideas and don’t repeat the same mistakes. And always remember to have fun!

Do you watch you blog stats? Do you know how long your visitors stay on your pages? For most of us, it’s not a pretty picture. Most visitors come and go before the page even finishes loading. This happens the most when the majority of your traffic comes from search engines.

One thing I would suggest is to watch your exit pages. Check if you have too many link outs. You want to make your visitors feel welcomed and you want to get them comfortable surfing through your pages. You don’t want to show them out if you can help it. Here’s a few things you can do:

1. Keep your blogroll only on your main page
   You do want to exchange links with other people to give yourself some connectivity and exposure, but you don’t have to link them from all your pages.
2. Link to local entries/posts
   When you write about something and you need to refer to another thing, search your archives first. If you have supporting articles in your own domain why link out?
3. Keep your sidebar clean
   Clean up your clutter. Yes some of those blog directory buttons are useless unless they drive you some sort of traffic in the first place. The idea is to keep your doors closed until your visitors are ready to go, then they can show themselves out.

Ok that wasn’t rocket science, but you want to work on visitor relationship. The more they read you the more they will get somewhat attached to your writing or content and that could bring them back another day.

What do you do when you build a niche blog and it just so happens that your niche isn’t so exclusive, like a thousand other blogs talk about it already? One, you can choose another niche with less competition. Two, you can give up. Three, you can keep going and find different marketing plan.

If you choose #3, consider word of mouth. This works best if you have a large network of friends and acquaintances. You can tell EVERYONE about your blog, and ask them to tell their friends, etc. However this won’t usually work UNLESS your niche is a popular niche, drawing a lot of interest from just about any individual out there. If you have a tech blog and you try to spread the word offline, good luck and have fun looking at people’s confused face, rejection, etc. But let’s say you have a fashion blog, and you’re a girl with lots of girlfriends who like shopping, you can tell all your girlfriends about your blog, and you can connect with local stores to offer discounts on your blog, etc. Word of mouth can and will work in this case.

One of the blogs in our network is urbanskaters.co.uk and this is a very good example where word of mouth can actually work in favor of online advertising. Our Chief Editor Lee talks about it all the time when he skates the streets of London and traffic is really picking up fast on that domain. We even got our first client lead through that blog.

So, what is your blog niche? If it’s popular to the offline world, try word of mouth, you’ll be surprised.

Firstly we’d like to personally apologize for that last article we posted. If you didn’t get a chance to read it before we removed it, that’s even better. We made a terrible mistake and someone reminded us the harsh way. We’re just glad that we got a chance to nip this at the bud before it caused anymore damage.

Now, the cause of the problem was our lack of time to manage things this week. We have been so overwhelmed with ongoing projects that we didn’t get a chance to write up quality articles for the blog as planned. So we resorted to posting a free article from articlecity.com. What we didn’t realize in our hurry is that the article wasn’t valid, and that it was outdated and even proven wrong. We risked having our readers following what the article suggests therefore misleading them (you). For this we sincerely apologize if you’re one of the few who read the article.

The biggest damage to us came from Nick from performancer.com when he publicized our mistake to the readers of his blog. This made us look very poor and unprofessional. We sincerely appreciated what Nick was trying to do, but we wish he could’ve done it in a more subtle way as not to hurt us.

On another note, Google hates duplicate content, and when you use free articles on your blog you’re doing exactly that. When Google indexes your blog it can mistake you as a splog.

The moral of this is, DO NOT USE FREE ARTICLES WHATSOEVER. If you like an article you read online, cross check its truth, and rewrite it in your own words. Do not fall into the mistake we just did. It can and it will damage you and your reputation. Stay away from free article repositories and stay away from duplicate content.