To celebrate the new year Performancing has released a new WordPress theme. Named as the College Theme, this 2-column theme is available for free download. It has a left sidebar with rounded corners. College Theme also has a dynamic footer with footer columns that can accommodate lists. A customizable link header is also there, to help readers navigate through the blog.

College Theme features soft shades and hues of blue. The rounded corners add to the visual appeal–each box on the sidebar, footer and main content have rounded corners for a softer feel. The sidebar boxes come in three gradients: dark, medium and light, to help differentiate the list content.

I think that College theme is a perfect WordPress theme for a clutter free blogging experience! You can see the live preview of this theme here. And the download link is here. Get it today for your blog!

What happens when some database errors occurs in your WordPress blog? Your blog shows the ‘cannot connect to database’ page to your visitors. This default error page may show a little bit of info about your file structures. So, WordPress 2.3.2, the latest version of the popular blogging platform allows you to define a custom database error page. It is a small but important feature in WordPress. It will also help you to give a personal touch to your database error page!

Well, that’s sounds good, but how to add this custom error page to my existing blog? It is very simple. Just follow the following steps and within a few minutes your custom database error page is ready!

• Create a simple page with your custom database error message. You may write something like “Oops! we have encountered a database error. Please check back later. Thanks”. You can use any HTML editor or a simple text editor to create this page.

• Save the file as ‘db-error.php’. It is important. If you are using a text editor like notepad, then also save the file with .php extension.

• Upload the ‘db-error.php’ file to the wp-content/db-error.php location of your blog.

That’s it! From now on this error file will be displayed whenever your WordPress blog has encountered some trouble connecting to the database server.

Moving your blog from Blogger to WordPress? What about the fear of loosing some traffic in this process? Don’t worry a new WordPress plugin will help you in retaining your old traffic. The plugin is called “Blogger To WordPress 1-2-1 Redirection Plugin“, that allows you to redirect individual blogger posts to their respective posts in WordPress.

Wait, what is new about this plugin when I could easily redirect visitors from my old blogspot blog to the new WordPress blog? Yes, you can simply place a redirect link. But, what about the search engine visitors, that comes to read your old blog posts? The redirection through “Blogger To WordPress 1-2-1 Redirection Plugin” will help you send search engine visitors to the right post on your new WordPress blog.

Installation of the Plugin:

• Download Blogger To WordPress 1-2-1 Redirection Plugin here.
• Unzip the file and you will see a file named “rbBloggerToWordPress.php“. Open it with notepad or any text editor.
• Find rb286.blogspot.com in the file and replace it with your blogspot address. Save the file
• Upload rbBloggerToWordPress.php into your ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder.
• Go to plugins option under WordPress Admin panel. Activate the plugin.
• The plugin will now map your old blogspot post to new WordPress posts on 1-to-1 basis.

Another free WordPress theme! First take a look at the screenshot below. This is a 4-column, widget ready theme with three sidebars. It is named as Techicon and Blog Oh! Blog released this theme for free download. Techicon theme looks simple but has enough space for lots of content. It shows five recent posts, recent comments and popular posts in three different sections, right below the header. That’s why, I am sure that most bloggers will like it.

What are the features of Techicon WordPress Theme:

• 4-column WordPress theme.
• Widget ready sidebar.
• Three sidebars.
• Fully validated design.
• Three different sections to show recent posts, recent comments and popular posts.

If interested, you can test drive Techicon here. And if you like it, you can download the theme here.

Google has introduced a new demographic bidding feature in AdWords. This new feature will help you to display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network. According to the Official AdWords Blog, it is still in beta and they hopes to start the testing stage within a few weeks. Interested AdWords advertisers from the US and UK can take part in the testing.

How this demographic bidding feature will work? According to Google AdWords:

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network. Here’s how it works: Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups.

Demographic bidding means you get more control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with certain demographic groups. There are two ways you can use demographic bidding. First, you can modify your bids for a particular audience segment, such as increasing your bid for 25-34 year-old males by 230%. Second, you can ask that your ads not be shown to certain demographic groups if they aren’t meeting your ROI goals.

If you’re not sure which demographic converts best for you, you can run Demographic Reports to guide your bids for certain groups. These reports can show you campaign performance metrics by the gender and age range of users who saw your ad. You can increase your bids for well converting demographic groups, increasing the frequency your ad will be shown to this audience. You can also choose to have your ad hidden from certain groups that don’t respond well to your campaign.

Good news for the WordPress.com bloggers. The free upload space for every account has been increased to 3GB. Yes, three Gigabytes. Mind it, earlier it was just 50mb. We think that, this 60 times increase in free space will encourage bloggers to use rich media in their WordPress.com blogs. Also, 3GB is more than enough space for many blogs.

The Official WordPress blog says:

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

But for some bloggers, 3GB is nothing! So, WordPress.com has also increased the limits of the paid upgrades. Extra 5GB will be given for every 1GB paid upgrade. In WordPress, paid upgrade is required to use certain file types, like movies.

The Blogger platform is now available in three more languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. It is a great news for many bloggers. To support these languages, Blogger has also added right-to-left templates and new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor. It was important, because all these three languages are written from right to left.

If you want to write your blog in any of these three languages, you need to change your language preferences and settings. You can select your preferred language from the drop-down menu on your Dashboard. You can also choose your language on Blogger’s homepage and via the “Language” link in the footer of most pages.

To change the language of an existing blog, just go to Settings > Formatting section and select a new language there. Your blog language affects date formatting, other blog text, and your blog’s comments form.

For Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew blogs, the blog template has been rearranged. It will have right-to-left templates to help in reading from right to left. To help you in writing bidirectional posts, Blogger have added right-to-left and left-to-right buttons to Blogger’s post editor. They’ll appear if your Dashboard language or your blog’s language setting is for a right-to-left language.

With the addition of these three languages, we can now expect to see a rise in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian language bloggging communities. Don’t wait, write some good blogs in these languages!