When Facebook threatened with a possible update to its ToS they also possibly killed the power of Facebook Pages for bloggers.

If in recent months I started a Facebook page for almost everything, often with great success for small blogs, they very often have proved most useful to market and promote local businesses. Not every time have they reached the same success as traffic referrer than (automated) Twitter accounts, but I have seen many ‘Likes’ and comments on updates, even on ‘New chocolate cake just arrived‘ updates for a local coffee shop. I never put a real emphasis on comments on my blogs as long as the traffic came in or the marketing machine seemed to work and my Facebook pages drove business.

Things are bound to change with the update the update to Facebook’s policies:

When you publish content or information to your Page we have no obligation to distribute your content or information to users.

If Facebook applies this update after the community has had the occasion to leave feedback on the proposed changes until 18th August 10.00PDT, Facebook Pages will lose every interest in my strategies and I will quickly forget about updating my pages. Probably I will even delete every fan block from my own sites.

What will you do? Will you still consider Facebook a valuable platform to promote your sites or will you revert to promote your sites on your own Facebook profile?

Jonathan will weekly answer a question from one of our readers and help you with his advice based on many years of experience. Every Wednesday we will announce next week’s episode and open the question round. Jonathan will answer one question every following Tuesday.

About Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey writes at Plagiarism Today, a site about plagiarism, content theft and copyright issues on the Web. He is also the manager of CopyByte.com, a copyright protection service.
Jonathan also writes for Blog Herald and was recently on PerfCast with Jeff Chandler.

Jonathan is not a lawyer and none of the information he provides should be taken as
legal advice.

Post your questions in the comments and look forward to Jonathan’s answer on Tuesday 18 August 2009.

Photo credit: Jonathan Bailey.

Performancing has released 20 different themes, designed by some of the best WordPress themers known, in little more than 2 years. Today we can proudly announce you that all our free themes have been released under the GPL License.

After we have integrated all the Performancing themes on the Performancing page it now has become easier to look at the different themes Performancing has released in the past. Soon a new theme will be released and added to the list.

But what if you can keep your blog posts in “treasure chests” of their own? This is what Performancing’s Treasure Theme for WordPress is all about. Each blog post is kept enclosed in its own box–or what you can call its treasure box. This is very appropriate for bloggers who want to consider each and every published post as precious ad gold and gems.

Another classic from Performancing Themes for WordPress, the Treasure Theme is a collaboration with designer Randa Clay, who has done various other Splashpress Media designs.

Treasure Theme is optimized for use with WordPress 2.7 and above. It supports threaded comments, post classes, image captions and gallery classes introduced in this version of WordPress.

Download the Treasure Theme for WordPress here.
See a live preview here.

The theme features widget-ready sidebars, which can accommodate several different image dimensions (suitable for button and banner ads). The theme is the first Performancing Theme to support new WordPress 2.7 features out of the box:

• Threaded and paginated comments
• Post classes
• Image captions and gallery classes

Another highlight of Too Newsy is the use of the sidebar for snippets of the latest posts in a pre-defined category (which is by default the “features” category). This can be useful for bloggers who wish to highlight certain posts, such that they are not pushed down too soon by newer ones. The theme also supports gravatars out of the box.

Too Newsy is another collaboration with Splashpress Media designer Sophia Lucero, who previosuly brought us the Rubidious Theme, and various other Splashpress Media blog designs.

Usage Notes

You would need to make some sidebar edits, either through widgets or on the sidebar.php file itslf. This is particularly for the features column, where you can define a category that will have a few posts as “sticky” on the sidebar.

Also, you would need to edit the menu.php file once the theme is installed, so you can define the header and footer links. This menu is actually an unordered list (UL) and you can add or remove items as needed, and as long as the navigation bar does not get too crowded.

Update

We’ve received some complaints about the widget-capability of the theme, and apparently there was a small bug in sidebar.php that prevented widgets from properly appearing in sidebar 2. The download files have been updated (below) to fix that. If you’ve already installed Too Newsy, then you can simply replace style.css and sidebar.php.

Do note that the widgetized areas appear right below the blurb (for sidebar 1) and right after blogroll (for sidebar 2).

Download Too Newsy Theme

Too Newsy for WordPress download

See a live theme preview here.

A free, public release version of design guru Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Swedish-language blog, TDAge is a light-blue themed design with big, bold feed and “about” images, and large-font headers. TDAge also has easy access links to a blog’s pages and categories from the headers, and has a clean-cut pre-defined template for use as an archive summary page.

TDAge is a pun for TDH, which stands for–you guessed it!–Thord Daniel Hedengren, who has developed various designs for Splashpress Media, including the Blog Herald, Jack of All Blogs, Blog Network Watch, Blogger Jobs, Bloggy Award, Audival, Wisdump, Devlounge, and many more. Thord has also collaborated with us on other Performancing WordPress Theme releases: One in a Million and Estranged.

Usage notes

Image alignment. You can align images by using the following:

• Left: class="alignleft"
• Right: class="alignright"
• Center: class="aligncenter"

Or if you’re using the WordPress editor’s media manager, the “left” and “right” classes will automatically be inherited by the image.

Category headers. The theme will automatically display parent categories in the header. Thus, the default design is meant for blogs with just a few categories. Otherwise, this line tends to be very long. Users can take out the Topic line, though.

Archives Page. The TDAge theme has a built-in template page for the archives (a sample here). This can be activated by creating a page using archives as its slug, and by selecting the “The Archives” template.

Update

Additional usage note: TDAge was originally intended for use with a single-post homepage, thus the long list of posts under the “More from the Archives” box, and also the fact that the sidebar is bare, save for the RSS button and a short welcome note. But of course, you are free to display as many posts as you want, and also to add items to the sidebar.

If you wish to add items to the sidebar, these can be enclosed with the following to create the blue boxes:

<ul id="menu">
<h3>Heading goes here</h3>
Your text goes here.
</ul>


Also, we’ve updated the theme download to include the blogroll out of the box.

Support and Download

Official support for the theme can be found at the Performancing Community Forums.

See a live preview of TDAge here.

Update: TDAge has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.

Download TDAge Theme for WordPress.

One interesting feature of Nitrous is that nested pages are automatically added to the top navigation bar as nested dropdown menus. This way you have easy access to your static pages–including the nested ones or the “subpages”–without cluttering up the navigation area with text.

Nitrous is yet another collaboration between Performancing and Brian Gardner, released as a free monthly theme by Performancing Themes.

Update: Nitrous has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.

Click here to preview the theme.
Click here to download the theme.

#1 principle: Choose a site where your target audience is hanging out.

Don’t choose a site just because other bloggers are talking about it. Digg and Twitter are popular social media sites. However, you may not want to participate on Digg if you have a wedding blog or Twitter if you have a dog blog.

How can you tell if your target audience is hanging out at a certain social media site?

1) Use the search box
2) Check popular blogs
3) Monitor front page
4) Ask bloggers

Here are some under the radar social media sites to consider.

• YouTube
• MySpace
• Facebook
• forums
• niche social media sites (Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites from TropicalSEO.com)

Try a testing and experimenting period of a week to a month.

• Does the site drive traffic?
• Do you like the people there?

Focus on one site at a time.

• There’s a learning curve to know and understand a community.
• It takes time to build a reputation.

Please leave feedback. Which social media site has worked for you? What niche are you in?

[podcast]http://performancing.com/podcasts/perfcast-dee-how-to-choose-a-social-media-site-that-fits-your-blog.mp3[/podcast]

Download link

Two light-on-dark sidebars sit on opposite sides of the main content. The left sidebar is called “menu” in the Widgets configuration page (WordPress 2.5), and is ideally made for navigational elements like links various subpages. The theme supports WordPress 2.5’s avatar features, though it should work with WordPress 2.3 just fine.

Update: Rubidious has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.

Click here to preview the theme.
Click here to download the theme.

It’s a three column design with the content on the far left, followed by two sidebars. The color scheme uses a subtle mix of tans, oranges and browns to provide great texture and depth for your blog.

Rounded corners and a unique left margin give the impression that you have just turned the page in a compelling story.

Whether you are writing your blog to tell a story, or engage readers with a product, the Story Theme just may be the perfect choice.

You can preview the theme here.
You can download the Story Theme here.