No more drop shadows, reflections, or shiny buttons. Destroyed, messy buttons for the masses.

Download includes PSD, JPEG, and PNG formats.

Download

Thanks to Bittbox for some of the textures and brushes.

This post is an update to a previous post about Outbrain’s recommendation system.

Previously, I had come to the conclusion that Outbrain had been (unknowingly) selling links in their recommendation widget. After talking to the Outbrain guys, this is (fortunately) false. The Outbrain widget is the first recommendation widget of it’s kind and goes against most web 2.0 practices. The recommendations widget finds the best posts on the entire Internet and puts them on your site. With alternative recommendation engines you would only have recommended posts from users using the same service, which may lower the quality of recommendations on your site.

Outbrain is the first web company that isn’t greedy with their service. They don’t have any advertising in their widget, anyone can use the service, and recommendations come from everywhere, not just from bloggers using the widget.

After this experience I wanted to publicly apologize for my outburst towards Outbrain. I should have contacted them before posting anything on the Internet. Outbrain is different and every blogger should give their service a try.

Vist Outbrain

Picture by Macwagen

Outbrain, an embeddable rating and “recommendation” widget for your blog or website has found a place at the end of each of my posts. The guys behind Outbrain have been great; allowing me to try out new features and even helping me with formatting issues. I have been extremely happy with Outbrain and what they are offering until I noticed that the “recommendations” portion of the widget is not what it seems.

Before something drastically changed at Outbrain, the recommendations widget would show similar blogs at the end of your blog post. In exchange for putting the recommendations on your blog, you would expect to have your blog show up on other Outbrain users. This in theory would give you a little more traffic, but it’s not true anymore. The Outbrain recommendations now include more popular blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, but neither Engadget or Gizmodo have the recommendations widget on there site. (Where’s my part of the deal?)

So I am involuntarily putting free advertising on my blog without ANY chance of getting ANYTHING beneficial in return? Yep. Outbrain has either made an error (I hope) or worse they’ve been selling recommendations links. If they’ve done the latter, expect my use of the widget to cease. It’s too bad to see something like this happen and I’m hoping it’s a mistake.

I have currently turned off the recommendations portion of the widget until this conflict is cleared up.

Readers, what do you think about Outbrain’s new recommendation/advertising widget?

Update: An explanation post.

Blogs are a dime dollar a dozen now and when I see a promising blog introduce itself to the internet only to lie deserted until the hosting plan isn’t renewed, I get irritated. I’m not going to name names, but I have concocted a (YES or NO) test for maybe bloggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being an avid blog reader I started noticing “free link exchanges” on some of my favorite blogs. Free link exchanges have become more popular because it promotes your site for free. I decided to try out the SPOTTT link exchange service and I was pretty happy with it, at first.

I was getting a few links back to my site, but it wasn’t anyone that was going to come back again. One of my goals this year was to generate some readers and the link exchange isn’t going to do that. Having the link exchange on my site wasn’t that big of a deal until I started seeing what links where showing up on my site.

Refreshing my site about a dozen times I had four links that were questionable. The SPOTTT terms of service says no “adult” links, but these ones are sure adult-ish.

I don’t think having these links show up on my site it alright. It makes my blog look trashy and that’s no good for bringing in new readers. I want the readers to way in so I have set up a poll. What do you think?

I started a little (daily) picture blog about a week ago and I’ve finally built up a good number of posts. Doosh’d is a little more edgy than r3fresh, but I’m hoping for a broader audience. Also, I just added the ability to submit your own “Doosh.”

Visit DOOSH’D

If you have any ideas for either site, feel free to email us. mail[at]r3fresh.com

I just wanted to congratulate the guys at Outbrain, the makers of the fine rating widget on this site and many more, for there recent funding. Good luck and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

A popular portion of r3fresh.com are the videos, but the videos don’t mix with the other content throughout the site. To fix this I’ve created ’s1deblog’ a sideblog for media that doesn’t quite fit into the main blog. Instead of having video’s (and whatever else) fill up the r3fresh blog, s1deblog will have it’s own feed. s1deblog is still being tweaked, but it already has posts.

s1deblog is located to the right of the posts and below the big orange subscribe button.