Adii: A Freelancer Designer and Strategist

Earlier this week I was contacted by Adriaan Pienaar (Adii) and asked if I would be willing to write a review of his blog and design services. This blog is still pretty new and it’s something I had yet to do here on Average Joe Blogger, so I was initially caught off guard. It’s not that I have any reservations about paid reviews, in fact I had planned on offering them at some point in the future. I just wasn’t expecting it to be now. Anyway, there’s no time like the present so let’s get on with the review, shall we?

Disclaimer: This is a paid review for Adriaan Pienaar. Adii is also a paid advertiser and you can see his banner ad to the right.

Who is Adii?

Adriaan Pienaar (a.k.a. Adii (pronounced “ay-dee”)) is a freelance WordPress designer and Web 2.0 strategist (an Adii Freelancer) who calls Cape Town, South Africa home. According to Adii’s about page he specializes in designing pretty websites with strategic aims and has been freelancing since February 2007 to help pay the bills. Here’s his words:

I’ve been freelancing, since February 2007 and it’s not because I have a phobia for commitment - it’s been a way of paying the bills. I’m available for freelance work most of the time, but I try not to take on too many projects at once…

I specialize in designing pretty websites, with strategic aims and I’m a whole lot more comfortable designing blogs. I use Wordpress for 90% of my personal and client projects, although I have recently ventured into doing just designing and CSS / XHTML work on request.

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Shutter Reloaded WordPress Plugin

If you post a lot of image sets on your blog, then it’s important to find and utilize a tool that will display them in an appealing and functional way. Shutter Reloaded is a WordPress plugin that I recently stumbled across and will be using here at Average Joe Blogger.

What is Shutter Reloaded

You may have never heard the term Lightbox but chances are you’ve at least seen it in action. It became hugely popular a year or so ago and prompted a number of spin off’s and revisions. If you’ve ever been on a site and when you clicked on an image it was displayed in the center of the screen over a semi-transparent black background, then you’ve seen and interacted with some variation of Lightbox.

The Shutter Reloaded plugin is an image viewer that works similar to the Lightbox script except it does not require an external JavaScript library. And unlike Lightbox and some of its spin offs, Shutter Reloaded weighs in at a very respectable 8KB. Which means it won’t add a lot of load time to your website.

Customization and Usage

Installation is very easy and similar to most other WordPress plugins. Just upload and activate.

The Shutter Release plugin comes with the following options to enable use on images as well as full customization of color and opacity settings for the background, color for the caption and the previous, next buttons and color for the “Loading” sign.

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Backup Your Blog Online with… BlogBackupOnline

If you are looking for a good solution for backing up your blog or even transferring the content of your blog from one platform to another, you may want to give BlogBackupOnline a try. As the name suggests, BlogBackupOnline is a service that allows you to backup your blog and save it online.

Blog backup services are nothing new, but what makes BlogBackupOnline really stand out is the number of blogging platforms it supports and how easy it is to use. BlogBackupOnline supports Blogger, WordPress, Friendster, LiveJournal, TypePad, Serendipity, Windows Live Spaces, Movable Type, Terapad, Vox and Multiply. You can even backup multiple blogs, from multiple platforms, all under the same account if you want.

BlogBackupOnline is still in beta and during that time they are giving each user 50MB of online storage absolutely free. 50MB might not sound like much, but unless you have like a 1000+ posts it should be more than enough space. For reference, at the time of this posting, Average Joe Blogger has 89 posts and 312 comments which uses all of 745.95 KB. At that rate, the free 50MB of space would last me a couple of years.

By far the coolest feature of BlogBackupOnline is the ability to transfer the backup of your blog from one platform to another, as long as it’s one of the afore mentioned platforms that are supported. An excellent tool for all of you who are looking for an easy way to move from Blogger to WordPress.

Screenshot Tour

After signing up for an account and registering your blog you are prompted to perform a full backup. The time it takes to perform the initial full backup of your blog will very depending upon how big your blog is, but should still be fairly quick. I think it took about two minutes or less to backup Average Joe Blogger.

From this point on, backups will be performed daily and can be configured from the backup screen.

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An Open Call for Guest Bloggers

Starting October 12th I will be heading out of town for a little over a week for some solid family vacation time. Rather than letting the blog slow down over that time, I thought I would open it up to a few guest bloggers.

If anyone is interested in guest posting on Average Joe Blogger please let me know and have articles submitted by October 11th. Obviously any articles submitted should fit into the overall topic of this blog, but besides that, pretty much anything goes. And of course, all guest posters will receive credit for the article along with a link back to their site. -Your gonna be famous!

Attract New Readers by Seeding Your Blog

As bloggers, we’re always looking for new readers. Finding people to share our ideas with and get feedback from, is what makes a blog a blog. After all, without readers a blog is just a journal and might as well be hand written or stored locally on our computers (Doogie Howser style).

So how do we find new readers? There are literally countless articles written about finding new readers, but the one I’m going to talk about now is how to attract new readers by expanding the topic, or increasing the focus of, your blog (just a little) and seeding these articles. Before I explain this idea further let me first tell you what I mean by seeding your blog.

What do I mean by “Seeding Your Blog?”

Seeding your blog is the act of pre-dating articles before you publish them. Similar to post-dating (adjusting the date so that your article will post in the future), you can adjust the publish date of your article to be some time in the past. By doing this you can seed your blog with articles like they have always been there.

How will this attract new readers?

Let me explain how the act of seeding your blog can attract new readers by giving an example. Let say the topic of your blog is widgets. More specifically blue widgets. You have gained a decent following and are considered an expert, and go to source, on the topic of blue widgets. However, the number of readers interested in the topic of blue widgets is limited and you want to expand your readership.

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