Customizing This Wordpress Blog

As this blog is new, I spent almost the whole day looking for modifications I can apply to make it appealing to my soon-to-be readers.

Picking A Cool Template
One of my priority in looking for a wordpress template is the ability to display ads in the sidebar, specially 125×125 ads so upon querying google, I came to the rebel wordpress theme by a fellow filipino, Chiq Montes. It really fits my taste, magazine type and dark themed. At first I thought it was a paid one as it ranks along the line of other premium themes but was amazed knowing that it’s given away for free. Nice one kabayan.

Additional Plugins
Aside from Akismet and Hello Dolly, I installed the following plugins which I think will give more added features to this blog:

• All in One SEO Pack - to make this blog more seo friendly
• All in One Adsense and YPN - for the monetization part though its only adsense that I can use, YPN isn’t available here yet
• Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button - to let readers easily bookmark any of my posts
• Blogroll Links - to place my long blogroll in a single page
• FormBuilder - so I can easily create and add forms to my posts/pages
• NextGEN Gallery - this is a very cool photo gallery that I have been using in my other blogs
• Please Link 2 Me - this will let readers to easily create link backs to my articles via their own blogs/websites
• Wordpress Download Monitor - I am thinking of releasing some freebies in the future like templates, scripts, etc. and this will be useful for sure
• WordPress Related Posts - this will let readers find some other interesting articles published by me which is related to the one they are currently reading
• Wordpress Thread Comment - to make the discussion healthier

At the moment, I am still looking for things to add here or to change, will post next time if I make any.