About a month ago, I posted my intention to try and improve my Alexa rank. What did I do to improve it? Almost nothing really. I installed the Firefox plugin, SearchStatus, and added the Alexa widget to my sidebar. I also released my Bluebird theme this month, which was good for traffic. It jumped 35% in just a month! Here are the details:

Monday 6/4 – 125,976
Friday 6/8 – 120,543
Monday 6/11 – 114,712
Thursday 6/14 – 108,680
Monday 6/18 – 100,856
Thusday 6/21 – 93,440
Monday 6/25 – 86,863
Wednesday 6/27 – 81,800

Now the question is… will the increased rank mean that I can sell text link ads in my sidebar for more per month? I’m thinking of offering a few for sale on the Digital Point forum. Anyone have success with that in the past, or have some helpful hints about the process of selling links (beyond joining Text Link Ads, which I’m considering)?

Speaking of Bluebird, I mentioned when I released it that I hoped I could get at least 500 downloads, and that goal was surpassed in the first several days! As of today, over 1,100 people have downloaded it, and I am, of course, very happy with the results. Thanks to everyone who is using the theme!

On to the speedlinking:

Have you seen PopURLs? The site brings together the top items from Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube, and many other news and social sites, as well as some of the most popular blogs out there. This site is going at the top of my bookmarks.

I’m really interested in photography in general and particularly in photographs of people. I ran across this amazing collection yesterday: The Face of an Age

19 Blog Designs that are a sight for sore eyes – and check out the rest of the site as there are lots of good articles.

Need some logo design inspiration? Mis i Pile does great work.