Even if you do not intend to blog, WordPress can be used as a very easy way to build a website without any coding knowledge.  With a little bit of learning you can easily change the colors to suit yourself and  create something unique so that your photos or artwork stand out.

Boldy

Theme Site Demo Download Documentation

• Nivo Slider
• WordPress 3.0 Menu Management Support
• Easy to set up – Theme Options Page
• Latest Tweets Built-in Widget
• Built-in Pagination
• JQuery PrettyPhoto Lightbox
• Ajax based contact form
• Dropdown Menu

Journal Crunch

Theme Site Live Preview Download Documentation

• WordPress 3.0 Menu Management Support
• Easy to set up – Theme Options Page
• 9 Shortcodes
• Built-in Latest Tweets Widget
• Built-in Pagination
• JQuery PrettyPhoto Lightbox
• Ajax based contact form
• Dropdown Menu

Minimatica

Theme Site & Download Demo

• Clever image gallery slider supporting default photo sizes.
• Gallery & Blog View
• Post Thumbnails
• Post Formats
• Audio & Video playback
• Clean, organized & documented code
• Child themes can be easily built upon it
• Support via Forum

My Corporation

Theme Site & Download Demo

• Minimalistic business and/or portfolio website
• Custom post types and admin options for complete control over the homepage layout

Photoria

Theme Site & Download Demo

• SEO Options
• Localization ready
• jQuery Slider
• Custom Widgets
• WPZOOM Theme Options Panel
• Custom Templates

Quik Gallery

Theme Site & Download Demo

• Gallery style homepage/category/search page layout using featured images
• Built-in NivoSlider
• Blue, green, pink or red color options.
• Header ad spot
• Slimmed down CSS
• Optional Widgetized footer
• Custom logo option

Rocket Wood

Theme Site & Download Demo

• Flickr and Fancybox Integrated
• 30+ Shortcodes
• 14 Page Templates
• 9 Custom Widgets
• Custom Logo and Favicon
• Upload a Custom Favicon
• jQuery Drop-Down Menu
• Working Contact Form
• Twitter Integration

Shaken Grid (Free)

Theme Site & Download Demo

Elements are arranged vertically then horizontally according to a grid resulting in a gap-less layout even with posts of varying heights.

• Two Color Schemes – light and dark.
• Theme Options panel to change the color scheme, your favicon and add a stat
• Uses CSS3 (font-face, transitions, drop shadows, rounded corners) and jQuery but displays fine in older web browsers and Internet Explorer 7+
• Widgetized Sidebar

Simply Delicious

Theme Site & Download Demo

• Free blogging theme based on mmminimal.
• Minimalistic theme features big images, clean styles and easy browsing
• This theme heavily relies on big 640px wide images.

Tech9

Theme Site & Download Demo

• Options panel
• Custom cufon fonts
• Sliders
• White/green color scheme.
• 2column fixed layout

WP Folio

Theme Site Download

• designed by artists to meet artists needs
• minimal design that emphasizes your images (at 900px wide!)
• Features separate design for your portfolio and a news/blog section
• widget-ready sidebar
• automatic rss feeds so users can subscribe to updates to your site
• Theme Options for cusom colors and fonts
• uses the latest web standards
• Allows you to choose thumbnails to represent your project
• Sample Child Theme included to keep your tweaks independent of the parent WPFolio theme.

Top 10 Free WordPress 3+ Photo Themes | Blogging Sueblimely

Although you may not have the same needs as this organization you may consider using WordPress MU if you want to develop more than one blog.

I had originally created the coastwatch site using the Joomla CMS system but, as the interface was complicated for them, WordPress was my obvious choice. After working with WordPress on various sites for a year or so, I know how flexible it can be. I was pleased to see that immediately after the new site was up and running Keef, who will be a co-author, had written a post and just needed me to tell him to hit the media button to add images. So much simpler.

As NCI East Coast now comprises of two coastwatch stations, managed by two separate committes, each needed their own unique identity, I decided on using WordPress MU to make administration simpler. Both stations now have their own unique pages and blogs on their own virtual subdomains.

The blog and some pages on the main East Coast site are being used as a private member only area for both of the coastwatch volunteer teams. Plugins turn this section into a true community site.

The other East Coast pages are public and contain information common to both stations. By using WordPress MU, the three blogs and three sets of static pages (NCI Eastcoast, NCI Skegness and NCI Mablethorpe) can all be managed from one admin dashboard.

I am hoping to see lots of posts written on the site to gain it speedy search engine page ranking and to raise awareness, more volunteer watchers and, hopefully more funds, for this worthy charity organization. Their volunteers man the coastwatch stations daily, making sure beach and sea goers are safe.

You may like to go along and leave a comment, joining me in congratulating them on their hard work and efforts in getting their second station up and running.

I will expand upon the advantages of and uses for MU in an upcoming post. For those of you interested in setting up an MU site I will also be talking of how to I set the East Coast site up, the plugins I used and where to find futher information.

I will also be discussing how you can use WordPress, including an existing installation, or WordPress MU to create a community site. As with the NCI Eastcoast example, you do not have to run your whole site as a community site – you can just have it as an add-on to a normal WP site.

WordPress Multi User | Blogging Sueblimely

Here are a selection of such free WP themes. They vary in the amount of customization available; all are widget ready. Another advantage of all of these themes is that there is more help available. The theme designers have gone the extra mile to provide you with with help pages, forums, tutorials or wikis.

Dkret2

- An adaptable theme with its own options in the admin/presentation area for choosing which stylesheet to use – either one of the included styles (or if you are feeling adventurous one you have created or modified yourself.

• A dashboard theme page for making adjustments
• Up to five Sidebars including 3 “footer” sidebars.
• Choose from one of the supplied style schemes or add your own without the need for editing the base them files.
• Includes Guestbook Events and Todo templates. and the ability to have no Sidebar,
• Uses AJAX for comments and has a built in AJAX comment preview

Download from WordPress.org
Documentation
Forum
Making Schemes Video

Mandigo

A customizable theme from onehertz which among other features allows you to choose from 7 color schemes and determine the placement of sidebars.

• Dashboard Themes Option page for easy customization
• 38 languages .
• Two widths 800×600 screen resolution or 1024 pixels.
• One or two columns, right or left side selected selected from the Theme Options page
• Per page or random header images
• 7 Color Schemes – blue, red, green, pink, purple, orange & teal.
• Schemes can be selected from the Theme Options page, or switched randomly by enabling the random scheme feature

Download from WordPress.org
Wiki

Royale

Another customizable theme from onehertz with layout and color options and an unusual feature of changing link colors.

• A fluid-width layout
• Two or three-column
• 3 column layout – side by side or right/left sidebars
• Choose the accents (link) color from a 360-color palette or make colors cycle automatically, which means that the color of links will change smoothly as your visitors read your blog.
• Translated into thirty-eight languages.

If you do not like the black background color this is reasonably easy to change.

Download – WordPress.org
Theme Homepage

onehertz also has a customizable theme based on Nintendo’s Mario Bros although you could change the background image to your liking – smw theme

Starscape

This theme has a large range of customization options and the creator MillaN has added more and more features over time. StarscapeII in the pipeline.

• Theme Control Panel
• Inbuilt ready to use themes of different colors.
• Customize header logo and background
• Control the rendering of menus and sidebars,
• Sidebar customization – left and right or just one -
• Sidebar width options
• A footer ’sidebar’ for 3, 4 or 5 widgets.
• Icon customization
• Date Button for Posts and Pages
• plus even more features

Theme Control Panel

A selection of the built in styles

Download - WordPress.org
Theme Homepage
Tutorials

Tarski

by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson.

This theme comes with different styles and layouts and a choice of stock header images.

• Tarski comes with a choice of several stock header images but you may prefer to add your own.
• You can choose from with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly or add your own custom style.
• There are a number of different sidebar options

Theme Homepage
Download – WordPress.org
Documentation and Help
Forum

Ikarus

Finally one with over 2,000 options configurable from your admin dashboard area. Here is but one example of the layout and colors available.

• Theme options page and help page in admin
• Live theme preview in admin area
• 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
• Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
• Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
• Many sidebar features built in without the need for additional plugins – popular content rating, recent posts, comments and feedback, tagcloud, Social bookmark tools
• 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
• 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
• 3 Columns, Widgets 2 columns
• CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
• MooTabs slider box
• Featured YouTube Video post
• Custom typography styles
• and more …,..

Download - WordPress.org
Homepage and Demo

I have created a list on diigo for this type of theme and will add to the list and this post as I find more of interest. I will be continuing with this series of posts to bring you details of unusual themes, niche themes; free and premium.

Please let me know if you use any of these themes or know of more themes that allow for easy customization.

Flexible Customizable WordPress Themes | Blogging Sueblimely

Theme Directory

For personal bloggers the cost of buying themes tends to outweigh their advantages. For those who are making money or promoting a business with their blog the price is less of a factor. The good news for those who do not want to spend money on themes is that the new WordPress theme directory not only has a huge repository of themes but, to be eligible for inclusion, themes have to meet certain standards. This means that anything downloaded from the directory will work, without any coding glitches. That is the theory; although I would have thought that there are bound to be the odd few that fall through the net. Despite this we can feel much more confident downloading themes from the WP theme directory than from sites we don’t know and trust.

If you do want a magazine style layout you may still have to consider paying for a premium theme. The WP Themes Directory only has two tagged as “magazine”. There is however more good news, hence the title of this post. The site that brought us the premium Revolution Theme is going open source (under a GPL licence) as from 1st November. The themes will all be new (as it is not fair to offer the Revolution Theme itself after many have already paid for it). There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things (not yet specified) but the themes themselves will be free. More details can be found on the site of Revolution’s creator Brian Gardner – Revolution Going Open Source.

WP Limits is following the lead with some soon to be released free themes, including a “never before created knowledgebase theme”.

I have spent some time researching magazine style themes, free and premium, and have a post in the pipeline showing you my findings.

For Blogger users, there is a list of blogspot template sites on my Blogger blog.

Revolution in WP Themes | Blogging Sueblimely

• Your turn – if you have written or have read something that may interest readers here or come across a new site worth a look at let me know; by leaving a comment here or via my contact page. (The latter may be best if it is your own post so that others do not perceive it as being spammy) I will only publish comments that include links if the links are relevant and useful. (covering myself here in case I get spam!).

  If you are a regular reader you will know I try to feature posts from some of the lesser known blogging blogs and those who write excellent posts about blogging but do not have that as their main topic.

  You likely check out the more popular blogging blogs yourself but I do also include links to these if the content is of particular significance.

News

• I know a lot of my readers are mums so Moms Group Manual may be of interest. – this blog is a "Mom’s Guide to Connecting with Other Moms" both online and in person.
• Google is partnering with newspaper publishers to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online. Millions of pages of news articles will be digitized. These will be searchable by using Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. This may come in very handy for research purposes for some bloggers. Read more on the Official Google Blog.
• Come On In The Web Is Fine has started a campaign to encourage sites not to play music on loading. I was recently asked by a client to add Christmas music to their site this year and I had to politely say "no way", that is not a good idea. I feel a post coming on about this topic so will say no more for now.

Blogging Tools

• 8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3

Cyclo.psis a stock photo site search engine that "brings the results of the most popular stock sites to one location". Search once. See it all – no binocular vision on this site folks Joking, I think the name clever.

Social Networking

• Sweetcron- I am looking forward to get onboard with Sweetcron, a new lifestreaming application. Similar to Friendfeed in that it collects together your activities on sites such as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg. The difference is that you install and run Sweetcron from your own server and in a graphical format. A good example can be found on YongFong’s Sweecron site – not surprising as he is the application’s creator. Cha Cha France gives more details at Sweetcron | The Best Automated Lifestreaming & Blogging Software
• CMS Wire discusses whether Jaiku, which now allows its members unlimited invites, has missed the boat in Microblogging with Jaiku: Too Late to the Party? I must check Jaiku out again. If anyone wants an invite let me know, seems I can now invite anyone I like.
• Dwigger – threaded conversations and voting for Twitter. The idea sounds promising although the content does not show this as yet – No breaking news here. Top voted tweets today being largely about Talk Like a Pirate Day e.g." talk like a pirate day? shit, i forgot."

Blogger

• Antonio Lupetti from Woork has published some excellent tips for tweaking a blogspot template in 7 Tips to design professional blog layout using Blogger.

WordPress

• So you want to create WordPress themes huh? 16 beginner tutorials from wpdesigner – more advanced lessons to come.
• 68 Unique WordPress Themes from CSS Leak
• wordpress plugin : my profiles download page
• Smashing Magazine have written a great post for those interesting in doing some WordPress tweaking and coding, with links to articles and tutorials. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox I wish I had thought of that post!!
• Web Tools Collection takes a First Look At WordPress 2.7
• 2.7 brings the option of adding SSL security to protect your blog from hackers. To activate go to Edit Profile in the My Account menu of your dashboard and then to "Browser Connection". Choose “Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages.”

Blogosphere News Sept 27th | Blogging Sueblimely

From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it – despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.

As well as standard WordPress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.

More technical aspects:

I chose WordPress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and WordPress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.

I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the WordPress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.

My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.

A request

Please visit the site and have a bit of a read – your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item – it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask – or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.

Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.

The WordPress CMS Site is Launched | Blogging Sueblimely

• JimmyR.com – a mashup that puts all the best rated sites of today on one page. Includes BBC Today in History, del.icious, Digg, Fark, Google MP3 Search, Google News, Lifehacker, Reddit, Stumbleupon, YouTube, WikiHow. An archive page links to previous days listings all the way back to the beginning of 2007. I discovered it because my Best Stock Image Sites post appeared on the site – Yeah. Similar sites – POPURLS and THEWEBLIST
• NxE’s Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers
• Firefox Privacy Protection
• Jason Calacanis Retires From Blogging, Listen Up Bloggers – This Means Something I did not put this in news as for me this post relates more to the author’s impressions of how blogging has changed. There is a lot to be said for the pre stumble, digg, fav, friend me, add me days.
• Will blogging have an impact on our children? Some food for thought here. Will our words come back to bite us? Could mommy bloggers cause their children embarassment or is this a just recompense for the challenges they cause us
• 5 Security Tips to Protect WordPress Blog
• If you have ever considered applying for a job as a blog writer have a look at the extensive list of skills that may be expected of you! Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?
• Blog Bloke has had an unusual problem with Feedburner pinging his WordPress blog so much it caused his host to take his site down until the problem is fixed. He can be found using his old blogger blog for now. I am interested in reading what caused the problem.

News

• Features Planned for WordPress 2.7 2.7 looks promising with inbuilt functionality to replace some plugins and more.
• Delicious has finally been redesigned and some new features added. Now that I have moved over to diigo with its even more advanced features, including automatic posting to Delicious, the new features aren not enough to compel me to move back again.
• Opera – Pownce and Digg have been added to the Services available to the People Sidebar. Even if you do not want to use Opera as your main browser it is worth using it as a way of monitoring/ interacting with your social networks, feeds, chat programs and email and for uploading images and videos to online services.
• Gmail to No Longer Auto Add Contactsinstead adding addresses to a suggested list for you to choose whether to add them to your contacts. I did not realize I had so many gmail ‘contacts’ until recently when my list was somehow compromised and spam email was sent out to the whole lot of them. Apologies to those who received this and did not get an apology email. I think more of the apologies were rejected than the spam email itself – maybe because it was the second email in as many days ‘I’ had sent out to a big list?
• BNet Australia reports on the draft rules for blogs compiled by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission: New Rules for Blogs . Unfortunately, with the increasing number of bloggers being sued, Associated Press trying to stop bloggers quoting from their articles and bloggers not being given attribution by the main stream media, maybe this is inevitable and necessary. More information on the DBKP blog: MSM Stealing Blog Content: Times Online Joining Growing MSM Trend?

Blogging Tools

• Tools to help you mark up your posts semantically to be read by the few but increasing search engines that cater for semantic markup.
  These are produced by Clearforest
  who have recently been acquired by Reuters.
  • Calais Marmoset – enables your site to automatically provide microformat metadata to Yahoo and other automated metadata crawlers.
  • Tagaroo WordPress plugin – Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about.
  • Power Blogging Tips: Comment on Blogs From Within Google Feed Reader – Lorelle tells us about a Greasemonkey script that enables commenting via Google Feed Reader and another that adds feed icons to a page identifying and allowing you to subscribe to the choice of feeds available.

Blogger

• There are good Blogger templates to be found on Blogger Tricks. Thanks to snos of Life in the Country for letting us know about these via the Aussie Bloggers Forums

Blogosphere News 1st August | Blogging Sueblimely

In the 10 years I’ve been online, I’ve used a lot of software, some of it good, some not so good. Every now and again I come across a system that seems to be offering something totally different from its original focus – and I ask, “it used to do this, didn’t it?” Straying from your original focus is a dangerous thing to do – you lose touch with the people who were interested in you in the first place.

All systems have their benefits and drawbacks, along with their conventions and quirks. Some of these systems are extremely complex, but they do pretty much everything you could ever want. From being in the business for so long, the providers of these products know their stuff, right?

But then there are people who start asking for more and more from a system, and the software vendor gets worried. If they don’t give the customers what they want, will they move to another system? So they add more and more features, not daring to say “no” if something doesn’t fit with the product.

The product slowly becomes more and more bloated, it might be more prone to issues, and the vendor starts to lose sight of who they are focusing on. Who is their target audience? For instance, if you want a decent message board, are you really going to start with a blogging system? Maybe it’s good for existing users of that system, but one system can’t do everything. That’s why other systems exist!

Would you blog about every topic under the sun?

Think about how you run your blog. If you’re an authority in your niche, chances are you’ve established yourself as a writer of a particular type of content. It’s hard enough to get your blog noticed without trying to write about anything and everything, right?

So when a system comes along that has a clear focus right from the start and doesn’t plan to make a sudden shift away from that focus, is it fair to say that system has a good chance of delivering something really special?

Bend it, break it

WordPress is a very popular choice for blogging, and I don’t doubt it’s a great blogging platform. The problems occur when you try to bend it to do what it wasn’t originally intended for. Sites with a complex hierarchy of content, a photo gallery or a forum can all be created with WordPress, but how easy is it to do?

Technically speaking, WordPress is a content management system, but it was created with the blogger in mind. That’s OK. Simple blogs are not going to run into major difficulties here. If you want a more complex site, that’s when I believe there’s a case for Injader - an open source content management system that I’ve been working on for three years.

Less of the jargon

I maintain a “blogging tips” blog but instead of littering my posts with endless jargon, I take a moment to explain what all the jargon means. Actually, I try to do the same in Injader – it’s the system from the technical guy who tries to write without a lot of jargon. Bit of a mouthful, but it’s quite a unique selling point.

My website also contains my music, my photos, along with some tutorials and a carefully organised Blogging Guide to help beginners get started in the blogging world. Trying to shoehorn those into WordPress is probably doable, but I’m not convinced the solution would be particularly elegant. With Injader, I can do all of this with ease.

Sure, some WordPress plugins are great, but the other day my wife installed a plugin for someone just to change the “reply address” on the contact form. That’s ridiculous. One plugin for that? No offence to the plugin author, at least people have the option to do this now, but this is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be a plugin at all.

Who is Injader aimed at?

Anyone who wants to do more with their blog but doesn’t want to install loads of plugins for basic functionality. Anyone who’s sick of having problems with their themes when they upgrade. Anyone who wants to upgrade their site with ease. You may still have to upload files via FTP, but it’s faster and easier to upgrade Injader than it is to upgrade WordPress.

One thing to remember

No system is perfect. If there’s something you don’t like about Injader, or there’s something it doesn’t do yet, please take a moment to let me know. There’s a contact form at Injader.com where you can send your feedback. I do listen to all feedback, and the vast majority of upcoming changes are based on comments from existing users, rather than my own personal wants and needs.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see some more people trying out Injader!

Footnote by Sueblimely – Thanks for agreeing to this guest post Ben. I wish now I had used Injader instead of constantly breaking WordPress in my attempts to use it as a more advanced CMS system than my almost non-existent PHP coding skills allow for.

Injader – A focused project | Blogging Sueblimely

Social Networking

• FriendFeed -
  • New Feature – Rooms
  • Share web pages on your FriendFeed using the Share on Friendfeed Toolbar Button

• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter- some good tips here on making the most of Twitter and using it efficiently. I am adding this link to my Twitter Beginners post
• The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics- a guest post by AJ Vaynerchuk on BloggingBits.
• 50 Top Niche Social Media Sites and Their Power Accounts- I should imagine this may have changed some since it was written in December. Does anyone know of other more recent posts on the topic?
• Profilactic social media aggregator – you can now post content to 14 services from within Profilactic – currently supported are: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga.
• Flickr integration with Facebook – share your own Flickr photos and browse those of your Facebook Friends.
• If you work from home you may be interested in the WhyDoWork network. A new feature that has been introduced by the site is the ability to add links to your blog, website or affiiate activities to their directory. Reviewing other member’s sites is a factor in determining how high your own links are in the directory.The more reviews, the higher you get. WhyDoWork includes forums, an add friends feature, your own blog page and a work at home job search engine. I have joined up but have not signed up for the blog review feature as yet. I want to check out the others who were doing reviews before I decide on whether it is a suitable feature for this blog.

Blogger

• Blogger in Draft has introduced new features including the long awaited comments embedded in post pages rather than those annoying popusp.
• I am using my blogspot blog to answer the specific questions relating to Blogger so if you have a problem or wish to learn something please drop me a line via comments or my contact form at Sueblimely Blogspot I also keep its blogroll up to date with any good blogger template sites or blogger help sites I come across.

WordPress

• How to Format Images for Feed Readers A simple solution to ensure your images and text are well laid out in feed readers.
• WordPress.com enables the use of Google Gears, a powerful browser add in to speed up access times when your PC is communicating with your Wordpres dashboard. If you do not already have Gears installed and enabled on your PC click on the “Turbo” link at the top right of your dashboard . This will take you to the Gears download site. After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This is not so useful if you use more than one PC or use a public computer while blogging. More info:
  • Browsers supported by Gears
  • Gears Help Center
• WordPress 6 is around the corner, hot on the heels of the much maligned version 5. Technosailer gives us a sneek preview of 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 which includes Google Gears and what looks like a nifty post/snip from any website directly to your blog feature.

Search Engine News

• 4050 Search Engines – Phil Bradley maintains a list of Country Based Search Engines – 4000 to date. Don’t panic at the amount, they are categorized by country . If you are interested in more specific topics then Laura Milligan at College@Home provides 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of As I tend to concentrate on blogging and general search myself I had not heard of many of them, but bloggers on other topics may find this list very useful.

I am setting myself a target of one news post per week, otherwise I will no longer be able to call it news!

Blogosphere News 2 | Blogging Sueblimely

I have restarted posting to a blog I began a couple of years ago, now called Sueblimely Blogspot. I began the blog when the “new” templating system came in, then called ‘Blogger Beta’, to explain its new features and how to use it. As other blogs started covering this in depth I decided to leave it to them and concentrate on this blog.

My daughter has just started a blogspot blog so I am now aiming my own blogspot blog at beginner users. If you are a newcomer to blogspot and blogging. or know of someone who is I welcome your questions over there.

If any of my regular readers wish to do a guest post on that blog aimed at beginning blogspot users or have written tutorials that I could link to please contact me.

Blogspot Blogger Beginners | Blogging Sueblimely