Please remember that you can only change the WordPress logo from your login page only if:

1. Your blog is hosted on a self-hosted server. For example, you cannot get rid of WordPress.com logo if your blog is hosted on WordPress.com free server.
2. You have access to the FTP server of your blog.

Step by Step Tutorial

Step 1: First, Prepare your desired logo you want to see in your login page. It is recommended that you use a logo similar to your blog’s banner. But make sure the file’s width and height is not more than 310pixels and 70pixels respectively. Also your logo should be in *.gif format. PNG and JPG may also work, but in that case you will have to edit a few codes which is not recommended for newbies.

Step 2: Rename your new logo as “logo-login.gif”. Please note that once you save your logo as *.gif format, you don’t have to write that .gif part in the file name. Just write logo-login and that will do

Step 3: Now, you need to log in to your FTP server using an FTP client. If you don’t have any FTP client installed on your desktop, you might want to use web-based FTP client, Net2FTP.

Step 4: After you log in to your FTP server,  go to your WordPress directory. You’ll see a couple of sub-directories named as “wp-admin”, “wp-content” etc. Go to the sub-directory “wp-admin” and then enter the sub-directory “images”.

Now, a list of images will be shown up in the screen.

Step 5: At this point, you will need to back up the logo you see while logging in to your dashboard. Find out the file named “logo-login.gif”. Click on it and it will be downloaded to your computer. Save it in any folder you like. And then delete this from the server.

To delete, simply check the “logo-login.gif” file and click “delete” from the upper right corner of the page.

Step 6: Now upload your new logo using the upload button at the upper left corner of the page.

Once upload is completed, the system may take a few minutes to change the logo. Refresh your login page a few times and you’ll see the default WordPress logo is gone replacing your new one.

See an example below:

My banner at the login page.

Restore

In case you see that you don’t like your new logo, just remove it from the server and upload the old “logo-login.gif” from your computer. Please note that your logo will be gone each time you upgrade your wordpress to a new version. But don’t worry; the process is just as simple as deleting and uploading a file.

Advanced

Performing the task following the steps above will replace the default wordpress logo with your own one. However, the title “Powered by WordPress” and a link to wordpress.org will still remain there. It’s not that difficult to change those links and allow JPG or PNG format files as your logo. You will need to edit an important file of your wordpress, which is risky unless you’re familiar with PHP.

However, a tutorial describing the process making it easier to get them done will be published anytime soon on this blog. You can say that a sequel to this post will be published soon. Make sure you don’t miss that tutorial. It’s strongly recommended that you Subscribe to RSS feed to stay updated with the latest posts. You can also subscribe to receive all new posts right on your inbox, just enter your email address (no spam, guaranteed!) into the sidebar’s “Subscribe the way you like” box.

Share Your Thoughts

Share what you think about this. Are you happy with your wordpress default logo on your login page or you really want to change it to make your login page look more personal? Do you think it is necessary to change the logo you see while logging in? I think it is a must if you have multiple authors on your blog. I don’t have multiple authors here, still I would like to see my login page more personalized and that’s why I did this.

Don’t hesitate to tell me if you face any difficulties while performing the tasks above.

More on this topic:

• How to Add Google Buzz This Button to WordPress Posts
• How to Match Your Adsense Unit Color with your Theme by ColorZilla
• How to Manually Insert AdSense ads Inside WordPress Posts?
• How do I offer/subscribe to category-wise RSS feed?
• WordPress 2.8.2 is out: Upgrade now
• How to install & activate WordPress plug-ins

Google Wave sounded much, but I think, it’s a little flop.

On the other hand, there was almost no sound about Google’s latest social media tool called “Buzz” before it was released. The day before Buzz came out, we had reports that Google was going to put itself into direct competition with Facebook and twitter (and friendfeed, also) soon with something brand new and innovative. We didn’t get much time to wait before Buzz was released. Luckily, we didn’t need anyone’s ‘mercy’ to use Google Buzz. We just had to wait a little bit until it was rolled out to Gmail.

Since the first day, literally, I fell in love with Buzz although you will not find me pretty regular there. It’s a lot more user-friendly than Wave. It’s fast, it’s amazing. And it was built under the hood of Gmail so we don’t have to go to another location to use the service. That’s another reason why I loved this buzz from Google.

Today, just after curiosity started pushing me, I paid a visit to Google Wave and noticed that there were some messages from my friends and contact list. I replied all of them stating that I like Buzz more than Wave, so I won’t log on to Google Wave regularly.

Power of inviting!

While exploring other unread Waves at my Google Wave account, I suddenly noticed that there was a new wave sent by the Google Wave. I opened it and saw that I was given the power of inviting new users to try out Google Wave. “It’s been late”, I thought to myself, “because people are likely to spend much time on Buzz.”

The question is, am I right?

I think there might be people out there who are still interested in trying out Google Wave. Maybe even some people have fallen into love with Google Wave. For those who are still interested in trying out Google Buzz, I have good news. I’m giving away Google Wave invitations in public. All you need to do is just drop me a message in this post as a comment and I will send you an invitation.

Please make sure that you mention in your comment that you need a Wave invitation and use your Gmail address while filling up the Email field of the comment section. I will send you the invitation to that Email address without any further contact with you. Also, please don’t ask for a Wave invitation if you have already got one and have been using Google Wave. Let new users try out Google Wave.

Let Your Friends Enjoy

In case you already have a Google Wave account and don’t need a new one, you might like to share this post on social networks so that people from your contact/friend list can drop by this post and request an invitation. Use the share buttons or retweet/Buzz This button to share this post offering Google Wave invitations to others.

More on this topic:

• How to Add Google Buzz This Button to WordPress Posts
• Google Tells You What it Knows About You
• Introducing the Google Chrome Operating System!
• Google has updated PageRank :: Mine is 2 now!
• Search terms – let’s learn how to ask google

Google Buzz also comes with Google’s RSS reading service, Google Reader. Here you won’t see anything called Buzz, but you will be following those Google Reader users who you follow on Buzz. It’s like sharing a link to a post or an article with all to your followers. Not to mention you can make updates private, too.

As Google Buzz is another growing social media tool, developers have created plugins to let wordpress bloggers put a ‘buzz this’ button after all wordpress posts so that readers can share the content they like with their buzz followers.

I think I don’t need to say that I’ve recently integrated “Buzz This” button to all of my posts on this blog. You must have been seeing the button live now.

Adding Buzz This button to your wordpress blog is as simple as installing and activating a plugin. There are a few plugins out there but there’s only one that I found user-friendliest and easiest to use. Here’s my recommendation:

WordPress G_Buzz_Button

Download WordPress G_Buzz_Button from the wordpress plugin directory or install it directly to your wordpress via built-in plugin installer. Use the search term “G_Buzz_Button” and you will be able to install and activate it immediately.

After you activate, there will be an option named Google Buzz visible under your settings menu. Clicking that will lead you to the plugin settings page, which looks like the following.

From the settings page, you can turn buzz counter on or off, set the alignment of the button, and edit Custom CSS for both the style of the button and the text. I’ve come through many other plugins that adds buzz this button but none of them looked offering all of these facilities. That’s why I choose this plugin as the best for placing buzz this button anywhere on your wordpress posts.

Share your view with us about Google Buzz. Do you think sharing your post to Google Buzz is worth it?

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• Easiest Solution on How to Change WordPress Login Logo
• How to Match Your Adsense Unit Color with your Theme by ColorZilla
• How to Manually Insert AdSense ads Inside WordPress Posts?
• How do I offer/subscribe to category-wise RSS feed?
• WordPress 2.8.2 is out: Upgrade now
• Recommended WordPress Plugins of all time

Most of newbie bloggers do a common mistake after getting an opportunity to write a paid post on their blogs. We just forget what our niche is. To those bloggers, I have a simple message: Please don’t forget that your audience is of greater value than money. Audience helps you make money. Money doesn’t make you gain audience. Of course, in some case, money is necessary to reach wider level of audience; but that’s not all.

Today I’m going to explain you the fact showing an example of what I did last night.

From a third party website where I signed up for receiving paid review on blog proposals, I received an email which offered me to review a website for $10. I was asked to check out the website and take necessary actions. Obviously the actions were either Accept or Deny the opportunity. Any blogger would be happy to get such a proposal in the inbox just like I was. But hey, that’s not all. You have to consider if you should accept the offer.

Proposal that came to my inbox.

The first thing I did after reading the email was checking the customer’s website out. I checked out the site thoroughly and finally figured out that the website was a car-selling website. That means, the niche of that site was Automobiles, and the site was selling autos to consumers.

Now, I ask you, what do you think? Ring any bell on your mind? Should I accept the opportunity?

Well, honestly, there is no difficulty to write a review for that website about automobiles. BUT, my blog has a specific niche and I don’t want to hurt it. If I would write a review of that site, I would have been paid $10. Understandably, the amount is pretty much good for us in Bangladesh. I guess most of Bangladeshis would accept the offer, write a review, and then wait for the money.

No awards for guesses that the blogger would get paid shortly. In fact, some companies pay bloggers in advance.

But, I didn’t do that mistake. I thought just a little moment and clicked the “REJECT” link. Do you know why? Let’s see what I wrote as the reason for rejecting the opportunity.

Reason for declining.

As you can read my message from the picture above, the reason for declining the opportunity was it didn’t match my blog’s niche or subject or central topic. So, I didn’t think thrice (I did twice, though ) before declining the proposal.

And that’s my today’s lesson to all my readers. We should always remember that we have some readers and they come here for their OWN INTEREST. They would not be happy to see an irrelevant post on my blog. They would come to check out if there’s any new post on my blog; not to mention the post would be about technology. If they find that the post is all about a website selling automobiles, they would be either confused or disturbed to see ‘mixed content’.

Considering my readership, I just threw $10 away. And I’m not sad at all. There is nothing to be sad since I did that just to respect my readers’ valuable time that they come here and spend reading my stuffs. I can’t be bothering to them. I have some responsibilities to provide them the best and the most relevant content to my blog’s topic.

And that’s what you too should think before you accept a sponsored post.

Important: Please note that if you don’t want to write a review proposed directly by the advertiser or via third party clients, you should decline or reject the opportunity instead of making no reply. If you don’t reply, they will consider you as disrespectful or something alike that may cause you receive no more proposals in future.

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• 5 Easiest Ways to Keep Your Blog Up
• Happy New Year 2010! The New Year Plans
• A Cock-and-Bull Story Can Drive Traffic to Your Blog
• Beware of Mortal and Immortal Contents
• Learn to Love Criticism
• Why You Must Use MS Word if You’re A Blogger

Happy Valentine’s Day, all my dear readers!

I hope all of you had a great day while I was expressing my happiness after I received the gifts from someone on this very special occasion. (Check out the link for details) Now, it’s time to reward my reader.

In case you forgot, I launched a contest back in early January titled as “Top Commentators’ Contest“. The rules were as simple as leaving a valuable comment that counts and be the top within this valentine’s day. And now, I’ve got the winner.

I don’t have any tendency to extend my post’s length by writing unusual stuffs, so I’m just about to end up this post and bring down the curtain of the contest by announcing the winner…

M. R. Sohel of electronicworkshop.net from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Congratulations M. R. Sohel and thank you very much for participating in the contest by leaving valuable comments on my blog posts. You will soon be contacted and a 125×125 pixels sidebar banner will be placed at the sidebar of this blog for two continual months.

I also express my heartiest thanks to everyone who commented on this blog during the contest. But hold on, don’t just jump off the blog. I still encourage you to post your valuable thoughts in a form of comments. You will now have the instant rewards for being an active commentator once you have decent amount of comments on my blog prior to place yourself at the top 8 commentators so that your name linked to your website can be shown from the sidebar.

Yes, that’s the top commentator’s widget that I’ve had enabled on the launch of the contest and now NOT closing down.

Thanks, again, everyone. Hope you have a nice day.

More on this topic:

• CONTEST: Valentine’s Day Top Commentator Contest
• Blog Notice: Some Random Statistics, a Poll, and Launch of a Contest

Sometimes your favorite social tool twitter just gets too much heavy with so many followers. You too become seriously busy when you’ve got a lot of people to followers. Sadly, most of the time you don’t find any interesting tweet to read and reply to. Ever wondered why? This is just because most of your followers are probably not human being. Those characters not more than 140 letters were actually written by an automatic bot. You aren’t a bot, so you will not find any interest on it.

You maybe are thinking how you are following bots. Any of the following may have caused you following a lot of bots:

• Auto-Follow: Your profile, by a third-party tool, is set to automatically follow those who follow you. Bots find out your profile address or twitter username crawling through blogs and websites. Once they find it, they readily start following you causing you follow them back, because the developers know that most people use auto-follow tool these days. From my experience, it is not recommended.
• Mass Follow: Maybe you manually follow all of those who follow you. This isn’t recommended as well. Before you start following someone, you should go check out their earlier tweets to draw an image of the nature of that tweeter. By then, you will figure out if it’s a bot or not.

It’s very natural that you will lose your interest on twitter after you come to know that the majority of who you follow are not human beings. But there’s a tool to help you in that moment. The tool comes to help you start over. Because sometimes you just need to start over.

Unfollow All is a free tool that will take its time to unfollow everyone you follow. All you need to do is to head over to UnfollowAll.com, think again about your decision, provide your username and password of twitter, and click the unfollow all button.

The tool will then start unfollowing everyone you follow. It may take a little bit long to affect the unfollow process in your timeline. Please be patient.

Before you do so, please make sure to be informed that the action can’t be undone and it will unfollow all, not only bots.

You, My Friends, What’s up on Mind?

Do you think you’re one of those who are constantly listening to bots? If yes, have you decided to unfollow everyone that you follow? Share with me and other readers on this blog.

More on this topic:

• Twitter Tool: Who Was My First Follower?
• TwitPay – An instant way to Pay via twitter
• How do I Check the Real Link of a Shortened URL?
• Use bit.ly URL Shortener’s Firefox Plugin to shorten and preview links
• How to get more [valuable] Followers on twitter
• Submit your blog or website into Web Directories to gain extra traffic

One thing I find interesting is AJAX. Ajax makes everything faster, simpler, and undoubtedly gorgeous. However, it has some disadvantages too. Some people use Ajax comment submission (or whatever it is called) in their comment system. This means when a commentator presses the “Submit Comment” button, the comment will be posted without reloading the whole page. This obviously makes your readers feel a little more comfortable. But how much it is worth?

A reader posts a comment when he thinks that he has something to say. And when his cursor approaches to the Submit button, he isn’t afraid of the reloading of the whole page. So, it is not a mandatory option that your blog should have. From that I can imagine that you add that option as an additional feature for your blog.

But have you ever guessed that this is reducing your total pageview? If you have adsense or other cost-per-impression based advertisements enabled, you are losing revenue just because of thoughtless implementation of ajax comment submission system.

Let’s draw the disadvantages of ajax comment posting/submission system I’ve found so far.

• As Ajax disables reloading the entire page after a comment is posted, you are losing 1 page view each time a comment is posted.
• Sometimes comments are not published as readers leave or close the page thinking that the comment has been submitted. I experienced this several times. Sometimes internet connection makes trouble. At that time, when I clicked the submit button on an ajax enabled blog, it showed me that the comment was being posted. It usually takes a few seconds to be posted. So, after a few seconds, I closed the tab containing that page as I thought the comment was posted. By that time, I didn’t know that my connection is experiencing troubles.

I have tried to put up the main things of my post. If you’re still unsure, I advice, read the above bullet points three more time. Put much attention onto the first one — loss of pageviews. You will surely realize why I say that ajax commenting system has disadvantages.

Note: One thing may come up to your mind that my blog has an AJAX-enabled comment system. In fact, I can’t do anything about it as long as I’m using third-party comment system. Some people use extra plugin just to make their comment ajax-enabled. I was talking about them. It’s not worth adding a plugin for ajax as it reduces the pageview of your blog. However, if you’re using IntenseDebate, Disqus or any other third-party comment system, then your case is different.

What’s your point?

Now, share with us if you have any experience with AJAX comment posting system on your or others’ blog. Do you agree that it reduces your pageview so you should avoid using it?

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• How to Match Your Adsense Unit Color with your Theme by ColorZilla
• How to Manually Insert AdSense ads Inside WordPress Posts?
• What is Permalink and How Should be Your Permalink Structure?
• Why a ReTweet Button is a Must Even if You Have a Share-This Option
• Modernize your Comment section with IntenseDebate
• How do I submit my new blog’s address to Search Engines?

I’ve decided to start a series post where I will write reviews on various twitter tools from outside the twitter that helps you do more with twitter and that is entertaining, important, and often just fun.

So, my first post of the series reviewing twitter tools is about FirstFollower.

First Follower

How many followers do you have? A hundred? A thousand? A couple of thousands? If the number of how many followers you have is pleasing, you might someday wonder who the first to follow you was. There is a traditional way for checking that. You can go to your inbox and find out the first Email notification you received from twitter when someone had begun following you.

But for most people, you won’t find it. Because either we disable email notification, or delete notifications after they are received. I go with the second way. My gmail has got several labels, one of which is for twitter notifications. As soon as I receive a notification, I read that and push it to archive. After a certain period of time, I go delete all of those notification messages from my inbox. And I think this is what most people do.

If you are among those ‘most people’, this way won’t help you find out your first follower. That’s when you need something to help you find out your first follower, maybe a tool.

FirstFollower

Head to FirstFollower and enter your twitter username. You will immediately find out who was the first to add you to his/her streamline. I don’t think this tool has some other uses. But if you’re too curious to know about it, you would like to have a look at this twitter tool built on a freshly different concept.

Share Your Thoughts

While I don’t have any idea if this tool can help you in any other way, I’m keen to know if something has come up to your mind about it. What’s your thought? Help us read that by showing off your mind in the comment area below.

More on this topic:

• Twitter Tool: How to Unfollow All
• TwitPay – An instant way to Pay via twitter
• How do I Check the Real Link of a Shortened URL?
• Use bit.ly URL Shortener’s Firefox Plugin to shorten and preview links
• How to get more [valuable] Followers on twitter
• Submit your blog or website into Web Directories to gain extra traffic

WordPress.com is the best free blogging platform the earth has ever seen. Anyone wanting to blog can start blogging in less than a minute. It takes hassles off, makes blogging faster, easier, and unworried. Yes, you don’t have to worry about the data of your blog. WordPress.com has a strong backup of your data in more than one datacenter making sure that if one falls into the sea, others remain stable.

You are allowed to buy a few upgrades, but you aren’t allowed to run your own ads on the WordPress.com network. If you’re willing to pay a high amount, then you can. But for personal bloggers, no one will buy WordPress.com hosting. Self-hosted takes less money.

For years, wordpress.com authority has been saying that it is thinking about enabling end-bloggers to put their adsense ads so that they can earn a few money from their blogs. At last, wordpress.com has come up with a beta testing feature that calls ‘certain bloggers’ to put up their adsense ads.

The feature has been named “Ad Control”, under which a blog having over 50,000 pageviews per month can put their adsense unit under the condition of sharing the revenue with wordpress.com. To put simply, the total amount of revenue will split 50/50, which means half goes to the blogger and other half to wordpress.com.

The conditions are simple,

1. Your blog has to get over 50 thousands pageviews per month. It will make you eligible to apply.
3. If your application is accepted, you will serve adsense ads to your wordpress.com blog. Half of the total amount you earn from that wordpress.com blog will go to wordpress.com and the other half will remain at your account.

If you meet those conditions, you can apply for Ad Control feature on your blog. Simply email to ad-control@wordpress.com.

I suppose that many bloggers don’t have a wordpress.com account which receives 50k pageviews per month. This is because premium bloggers don’t start at wordpress.com. But those bloggers who already have this amount of page impressions per month did not start blogging with a view of making money online. But today, wordpress.com gives them a chance.

What about you, reader? Do you own such a busy blog in wordpress.com? Or you are going to create one right now with a target of getting over 50 thousands pageviews each day?

More on this topic:

• How to Match Your Adsense Unit Color with your Theme by ColorZilla
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The default screen capturing takes the screenshot only, you need to open photoshop or MS paint to paste it, crop it, and then save it.

To make it easier, there are plenty of tools available out there. Today, I will tell you about an awesome tool that I use these days and wonder why I hadn’t begun using it earlier. And the name of the tool is PrtScr, no different than that you see in your keyboard.

Tool Details

PrtScr is a freeware that you can use on your windows computer. You can use it to capture any part of your screen and readily save them anywhere you want. You can launch it using hotkeys like the default PrtScr key, or Ctrl + PrtScr key or any key you choose. Settings available when you capture a screen or right click on the PrtScr icon at your systray.

Once activated for a shot, your screen will be light blue and you will see your cursor still right where it was when you pressed the hotkey to capture the screen. Now, you can crop any part of your screen.

To crop at a random size, simply use your mouse’s left button. Or to highlight anything with a bold red line, use the right one.

On the other hand, if you need to take a rectangular sized screenshot, press and hold the control key and use your left button to crop screen or right button to highlight.

Once the shot is taken, the preview of the screenshot will be floating at the upper right of the screen until you save it somewhere.

Saving a screenshot of desktop. It is my desktop!

To save it on Desktop, simply click “To Desktop” button from the option menu or drag the preview to desktop. Also, when a screenshot is taken, the picture (not the file) is immediately copied to your clipboard so that you can paste it anywhere you need.

I recommend you using this great little tool to make screen capturing easier and simpler. To download this on your computer, please follow this link.

Have Your Say

I know that there are other tools for professionals to take screenshots but I find this one useful for most users around. Download it and use it by yourself. Once you’ve used it, please share what you think about it. Do you think that this tool is good enough for everyone? Or you have any other recommendation for us?

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• Easiest Solution on How to Change WordPress Login Logo
• How do I Check the Real Link of a Shortened URL?
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