Blogging Sueblimely

Blogging Benefits - Diversifying

November 15, 2008;

Welcome and a Happy New Year. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

My lack of regular posting recently has not been due to any lack of motivation or ideas, rather a lack of time. Part of the reason for this is a consequence of blogging itself which has led on to other activities. Even the social networking aspects have had to take a back seat lately. I concentrate on Stumbleupon as a voting site, diigo for my bookmarking and belong to a few active Ning groups and forums. Digg has taken the back seat. I never really did enjoy using it so never put in the time necessary to make it work for me. One aspect I have regretted having to neglect is visiting and commenting on blogs I enjoy.

This blog has become my base in the online world, a world that has expanded greatly in the time it has been running. Membership of social networking sites aside, running and moderating forums, developing and customizing Wordpress themes, starting up and running blogs for business and non profit sites and an increase in my website building jobs have been the main consequences of being a relatively long term blogger.

I look forward to expanding my involvement even further; making money from blogging itself is on my agenda too although this has been in the ideas and planning stage for quite a while now and I have yet to take more than a few tentative steps towards this. I resigned from my last remaining accounts job recently, a remnant of a former life, which means I must rely on income from web design and blogging. Wish me luck

Please let us know if your blogging activities have led to extra activities too, on or offline.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Category Community Building

Tags Forums, Themes, web-design |

Flexible Customizable Wordpress Themes

October 25, 2008;

If you are not confident adapting Wordpress themes but cannot quite find one that is ideal, you may like to consider using a a free flexible and customizable theme; where changes are made via an admin dashboard theme interface. There is no need for you to touch the code at all, with theme options built into the admin area. Some of these type of themes are also ideal if you want to easily take advantage of the capabilities of Wordpress to create something a little different, do not want to go all the way with a magazine type theme, or want to use your site for more than just a blog.

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.

Dkret2 adaptable wordpress theme

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.

Wordpress theme Mandigo

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.

Wordpress Theme Royale

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.

Wordpress Themee Starscape

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

WP theme Starscape Options
Theme Control Panel

WP theme Starscape colors
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.

Wordpress theme Tarski

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.

Wordpress theme Ikarus

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.

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Category Themes, Wordpress

Tags wordpress themes custom flexible |

Revolution in WP Themes

October 18, 2008;

Premium Wordpress themes and theme sites have been springing up over the last couple of years, often catering for the increasing popularity of magazine style themes. Free themes have not always measured up to premium themes in design complexity and, at times, in their coding accuracy. The additional support offered with premium themes is also a draw card.

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”.