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One of the best ways to gauge the health of your blog readership is to check out how many comments you have for your posts. More comments mean that your readers are actively engaged in what you have to say. Such positive engagement between the readers and yourself creates a lively community that sustains readership and attracts more visitors to your blog.

Not getting the amount of comments that you would like to have? Don’t worry; it may not have anything to do with the content you’re providing. You may be providing quality content and information to readers, but not sufficiently stimulating them to provide inputs to your posts.

Here are a few ways to get your readers more involved before you scrutinize your content for any potential flaws. Full list after jump.

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• Marketing your blog
• How to run blogs that I.N.S.P.I.R.E
• Journalism for Blogging
• Improving blog traffics: 5 Must-Have Qualities

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This year, to celebrate the St Valentines Day, Hongkiat and Grafpedia are really proud to provide you this beautiful and lovely icons set. Roses, Love messages, hearts, chocolates, rings, gifts, candles everything to switch your website and commercial tools in the power of love.

Each icon is available in various sizes: 48×48, 72×72, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512. You can use them for personal and commercial use. Redistribution without permission is prohibited.

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Many of us are unable to survive without the internet because our modern society has grown to become so reliant on it. We go online everyday and has grown so accustomed to the net that we don’t actually realize the impact that the internet has on our lives. Needless to say, the internet has serves us well by allowing us to connect with the rest of the world ever-so-easily.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

Yet, this convenience comes with a price tag. We should take a moment and ask ourselves what are some of the things we may have sacrificed along the way. That way, we can gain a proper perspective and approach internet with some caution to ensure that we don’t lose more than what we gain.
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What the future might hold has long been a topic of speculation for artists and creative types. Trying to imagine what the world around us might look like in twenty, fifty, hundred years, or even end of the world can provide hours of entertainment. And it’s obvious that those artists and designers who take the time to create concepts of what they think the future might hold for us put a lot of time and consideration into their pieces.

Below are 100 fantastic artworks depicting what the future of the city might be. There’s a lot of diversity in the images, with everything from dark, almost apocalyptic, scenes to bright eco-utopias.

More:

• Epic Sci-Fi Artworks
• "End of The World" Inspired Artworks
• Futurism & New Age Digital Artworks
• Retro & Historic Artworks

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In our earlier jQuery Mobile tutorial I had introduced much of the underlying framework and how to go about setting up your first website. The JS library is both lightweight and easy to pickup in regards to learning difficulty. There is also generic a CSS stylesheet included with the files so you can further customize the elements in your layout.

For this second segment I’d like to spend a bit of time delving deeper into this idea of jQuery Mobile themes. The entire design industry has been revolutionized by jQM and the process of constructing a mobile template from scratch has been significantly improved. jQuery Mobile isn’t just a scripting library, but an entire ground framework to build upon and produce efficient mobile templates.

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In today’s blogosphere a lot of discussion is going on about various aspects of positioning and growing a blog. Even though the space gets more and more crowded every day, and the game is changing constantly, there are still some things everyone tells you to do – things considered as mandatory for any kind of success.

Among various aspects of promotion, advertising, search engine optimization, social media, and all kinds of other stuff lies the need of contacting other, fellow bloggers, and being in touch with people in general.

Quick note:
This post is the first and a part of a series titled – Networking Guide for Bloggers. Be sure to check back next week for more!

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Today we are going to do some photo manipulation with Photoshop. In the tutorial below, we are going to guide you through patching up spots in an old black & white photo and then colorizing it.

First we’ll run you through on removing white patches from photo and then we’ll proceed to coloring it. The steps are pretty standard. Load up your Photoshop, and off we go.

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In today’s tutorial we are going to learn how we can create a horizontal and vertical content accordion by just using CSS3. There are many jQuery plugins out that can do this job for you but what do you do if the visitor has Javascript turned off, then the accordion won’t work correctly. If your accordion is purely in CSS then it will work for all your visitors.

We are going to create a horizontal and vertical content accordion. On clicking the headline text the slide will open displaying the full content, and here’s a quick preview (screenshots) how they look like.

Like what you see? Let the coding begin!

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If 2012 is really the end of the world, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) could be the first sign. Though it is constructed in the way that it might protect the intellectual property from the possible copyright infringement, it is so powerful that the big industry players could even take down a website first without any investigation, and this is called Domain Name System Blocking. Basically it has no much difference from the censorship seen in certain countries.

(Image Source: sakimichan)

The great news is that the DNS blocking feature is finally intended to be discussed by the sponsor of the SOPA bill, which could mean the semi-victory of the Anti-SOPA people. Today, we’re still in the great war, that’s why we want to showcase to you a collection of precious anti-SOPA artworks from the brave people who fought for American’s freedom of speech.

While the war against the SOPA and PIPA hasn’t ended, we can understand more about the SOPA from these quality works, and even share them to the world to let every people stand up to fight for the American’s freedom of speech, and to protect user-centered sites like Google, YouTube or deviantArt from being taken down or censored! Full list of fearless artworks after jump!

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Ever really wonder what makes up an iPhone, Kindle Fire, Samsung Galaxy Tab or any other Apple, Microsoft or Sony gadget but can’t really wrap your head around the amount of destruction required to take these pricey tools apart? Then, you are going to love iFixit.

Channeling the inner naughtiness of geeky gadget lovers out there, these guys in iFixit crack open, rip apart, and "teardown" the archipelago that makes up the innards of any device they can get their hands on. Thanks to them, we are able to witness the inner beauty of our beloved gadgets without disassembling our own.

(Image Source: Rapid Repair)

Bear in mind that these are professionals who are turning these devices inside out, so believe me when I say that you should not this at home. Without further ado, feast your eyes on the following 30 infamous tech gadgets that range from smartphones, tablets, game consoles new and old and even the simply delicious iPad 2.

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Over the past 2-3 years we’ve seen a tremendous growth in browser and OS support for mobile websites. Most notably Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms come to mind. But others such as PalmOS and Blackberry are still in the mix. Up until recently it was very difficult to match a single mobile theme into all of these platforms.

JavaScript was a start, but there hasn’t been any truly unified library until now. jQuery Mobile takes all the best features of jQuery and ports them over to a mobile-based web source. The library is more like a framework which includes animations, transition effects, and automatic CSS styles for basic HTML elements. In this guide I hope to introduce the platform in a way that you can feel comfortable designing your own jQuery mobile apps.

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Here’s our first freebie of the year and we think it’s a great one. Folks at Artbees has created a set of high quality social network icons exclusively for Hongkiat’s readers. If you are looking for some icons to get your visitors more engaged, this is a post you should not miss.

So what are we looking at? We have a total of 27 social networks (Bebo, Badoo, Blogger, Delicious, Mylife Classmates, Digg, Netlog, MyOpera, Facebok, Ning, Orkit, Flixster, Zorpia, Youtube, Google+, Scribd, Technorati, Hi5, LastFM, Fotolog, Skype, Squidoo and Tagged) – each in 6 different sizes (24×24, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256), 3 mouseover states (link, hover and active) and 2 graphic formats (PNG and PSD).

Sounds cool? Jump right in to download.

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Since October 2011, the Internet all over the world is buzzing with the recent issue of Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill. Millions of Internet users and Internet entrepreneurs are protesting against the newly proposed law. On the other hand there is a strong opposition of politically influential people towards these protestors who favor this law by continuously highlighting its usefulness. The situation of the SOPA bill issue is getting closer to its destination with every passing second.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

However, for those valued readers who don’t know the story of SOPA, here is a piece of writing showing both sides of the coin so that you make a decision yourself that either SOPA is "securing" the Internet users or "scaring" them away…

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After more than 100 years development, Olympic has become a ceremony for the entire human being in the name of peace, friendship and joy, and Olympic logo is an indispensable part of this great event. Each Olympic logo is a work of art that demonstrates the best designing ideas and skills of the time. For logo designers, what can you learn from those excellent designing works?

Today, I list 6 Olympic logos from different analyzing perspectives which help us developing inspiration to our own work.

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