In doing my daily write-ups for WLTC, I’ve become even more aware of just how many WordPress themes out there contain sponsored links – and believe me, there are a lot of them. I can also understand folks wanting to make a little money of their work. Theme design does take a lot of time and effort, which is why I haven’t done more than the one WordPress theme and the one bbPress theme of my own – I simply haven’t had the time. And it’s always cool to get paid for doing something you love.
But I myself will probably never use a sponsored theme. I shy away from them for the same reason why I have decided against using any form of adsense modules on my site. I think advertising of any form embedded on a site I’m reading is annoying and distracting, and I think that most people feel much the same way. The last thing I want my site to turn into is an advertisement for someone else. Granted, I’ve tossed banner ads up once or twice for something I truly believed was worthwhile, but always those ads came down within several days or a couple of weeks once the promotion period itself was passed. And I likely will never put up ads again – I just don’t like the added clutter. Sponsored links, while they usually take up hardly any space at all and since as simple text links in the footer, are still advertising that clutter things up too much.
The thing of it is, WordPress is free software and what’s more, it’s open source. It’s a community project of sorts, one that a lot of people contribute their work toward improving with themes, plugins, bug fixes, and much more. And a lot of this work is excellent, top-notch stuff. I’ve stumbled across a lot of sharp-looking themes and plenty of plugins that make life so much easier and better. So I guess I feel a little bit insulted when someone else comes along with a theme or plugin, one that has probably already been seen in some form somewhere else (for free), and wants the rest of us to billboards their ads and sponsored links on our sites. Aside from the objections I’ve already raised, the thing I object to is that by allowing such things on my site, I’m implying my support for whatever businesses lie on the other end of those links, most of which I know nothing about and cannot, therefore, provide any sort of endorsement for.
With so many free, unsponsored themes out there, plus the ability to make my own, there’s no reason for me to ever use a sponsored theme. Besides, with the WordPress Theme Generator and Canvas, I don’t know why even the least HTML-savvy individual can’t create their own theme to their preferred specifications.
Tags: Rants, themes, WordPress
You may have noticed that periodically my site goes down due to a CPU Exceeded error from my server. It’s been a constant annoyance the last two or three weeks, and research into the problem has not revealed the specific cause. It may well be that I’m simply running too many sites from my server.
In an effort to rectify the problem, however, I’ve just installed and activated WP-Cache to see if I can take some of the load off my server. I don’t know if it will work or not, but I’m certainly going to give it a go. If it appears to be working, then I’ll probably load it up onto most of the other WP modules I have running and see if that prevents that CPU server error from appearing again.
If something looks like it’s ‘off’ or not functioning properly, do please let me know.
Tags: plugins, software, WordPress, wp-cache
Innovation is, I believe, born of three things: necessity and imagination. By and large, it is the need to be able to do something that you cannot currently do that breeds an innovative idea, a way to accomplish something new or to do something else in a completely different way. It is that rare visionary, however, that has the ability to see far ahead and say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” – and then to reach out and make a way.
This is no less true in the world of web design. A few days ago, someone left a comment on one of my daily summaries at Weblog Tools Collection expressing his frustration with a perceived lack of creativity in most of the WordPress themes that have been released by various designers. Indeed, his comment expressed his opinion that the quality of most themes of late has dropped and that few have anything worthwhile to offer.
While I was somewhat put off by the way he expressed his opinion, I could relate to his frustration. I myself have looked long and hard for new and interesting WordPress themes that do more than your standard, run-of-the-mill template. The fact of the matter is, however, that most of your WordPress theme designers are amateurs. Very few of us do this sort of thing for a living, and so many find themselves locked in either by a lack of know-how to innovate or a lack of experience and imagination to create something truly unique. Of course, the best way to solve this particular ‘problem’ is through experience. The more you code, the better you get at it and the more ideas you come up with doing things differently.
Personally, I’ve latched onto the idea of minimalism in my web design. Partly, I find that for the serious blogger, a minimal theme serves to direct the reader to the actual content you want to communicate better than a busy theme with lots of gadgets does. From a technical aspect, the simpler your design, the more efficient the execution of the script and the better your server runs to provide your readers with the information they’ve come to get from you.
As a result, I’ve kept my eyes peeled for good single-column themes to use on my site. The best I’ve found so far is my current theme, Daydream, but even so, it’s not quite what I want. I’ve been frustrated, as well, by designers who share their WordPress themes around and tout them as single-column, only to find when you look at them that they’re actually 2-column (or sometimes even 3-column) themes. As valuable as the sidebar can be, it’s my opinion that it can be far too distracting from the main content. A single column containing just the WordPress loop, with the sidebar at the bottom of the page or, even better, on a completely different page would do a much better and more efficient job at keeping your readers’ eyes right where you want them – on the content, rather than the peripherals.
I’m actually in the process of trying to design a new single-column theme that will, ironically, have a couple a pseudo-sidebars. The main content will, of course, contain all the regular content you’d expect in a blog – and even that may end up with some heavy redesign and re-arrangement. I think I’ve decided that the traditional sidebar content – categories, archives, links, etc. – will end up on some sort of ‘Sitemap’ page. I’ve seen one other theme that does it this way, and I really liked the effect and the organization method.
So, what will my sidebars contain, then? Well, for starters, I think I’m going to end up calling the theme “Jack of All Trades.” I have a variety of interests, and I actually want my blog to serve as my portal to those interests. It will take a bit of playing around, I’m sure, but I’d ideally like to incorporated some aspects of my other interests there – gaming, writing, reading, coding, etc. Again, I’m not entirely decided on the final layout and design yet, but I’d like to drop my Xbox Live gamercard in, my Xbox 360 Voice feed, and the feed from the TTL Gunslingers clansite. But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of minimalism, you say? Well, yeah, probably. But I’m hoping to compensate for that some by making the ‘sidebar’ content opaque, fade it out a bit so that it’s there, you can see and read it, but it doesn’t stand out the way your traditional sidebar content does. I’d like to fade it into the background as much as I can without making it completely transparent. I’m nowhere near that stage in the design process, though, and in the end I may decide it’s still far too distracting and remove it completely.
I’m also still trying to decide on a photo gallery. Up until today, I haven’t found a decent photo gallery that incorporates into WordPress the way I’d like it to – and the one that I found today doesn’t allow comments. Of course, I’m less and less sure that I like the ability to comment on individual pictures. For one thing, most people don’t seem to bother commenting on images and for another, the comment metadata blocks simply add additional clutter to the gallery and, hence, to the blog site, taking away even further from a minimalistic execution. This, then, is the problem with being a jack-of-all-trades – it’s very, very difficult to incorporate all of one’s interests into one site and still keep it minimalistic. I’m going to try, though, to build something lightweight and fun while still allowing it service my broad range of needs and interests.
And if I can come up with something truly innovative in the process, so much the better.
Tags: Design, themes, WordPress
I’ve just picked up my first paid writing gig – Mark over at Weblog Tools Collection posted a brief note a couple of days ago indicating he was looking for someone to take over the daily theme and plugin release entries. Well, I’ve relied on those for a long time as my best source for new utilities for WordPress, and I’ve been disappointed recently that they’ve been inconsistent, and I’ve always wanted to start making a little money doing something I love – so I jumped on that and contacted Mark to express my interest. Today, my first entries have appeared, which I’m very, very excited about. I’m not certain about the exact readership statistics at this point, but I know that the feed shows over 5500 subscribers, which is the largest readership I’ve ever written for. It’s a bit intimidating, really, but I think it’s also going to be a lot of fun. It’s just nice to finally be putting my writing skills to good use. Granted, right now it’s simply making lists, but hey, a guy’s gotta start somewhere, right?
Tags: weblog-tools-collection, WordPress, Writing
I am a WordPress god! Ok, not really, but I am enjoying the fact that I can now manipulate a WP theme pretty easily. It’s true – the more you use CSS, the more you play around with web design, the better you get at it.
I host a number of different websites for myself and for friends on my shared account, and I’ve been helping a guy who maintains one of those sites tweak a WP theme to force it to behave. He’s done most of the actual template work, taking an existing one and hacking it pretty heavily to change it to a very different look and feel. I spent a couple of hours IMing with him last night adding additional tweaks to the theme – like adding a navbar at the top of the header, dropping the sidebar completely from the theme (since it’s going to be essentially a static CMS once everything’s in place), and changing a number of other small elements. It was fun to realize once all that was done that it was a lot easier now than it had been the first time I tried to change and manipulate a WP theme back a year or so ago. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable both with how individual WordPress elements function as well as with CSS itself in being able to position and affect various things on the page.
From the first time I started teaching myself HMTL about 10 years ago until now, I’ve always enjoyed playing around with web page design. I’m pretty much self-taught, which is also why I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like to. I’m pretty well-versed in HTML and CSS now, and I know enough about PHP to be able to hack the code, though I don’t know enough PHP to write pages from scratch, much to my chagrin. But sometimes I don’t wonder if I shouldn’t go into the information technology business. I love playing with server-side utilities, I love hosting websites, and I love just building things out of code. It’s a hobby that I’m pretty passionate about. I’m just afraid that if I ever turned such into a business, I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
I don’t know if I’ll ever actually step into the IT business – it would probably require me to find both the time and the money to pick up formal training to finish filling in the gaps of my coding knowledge, and that’s not something I’m sure I’ll ever be able to do. But the prospect of being able to go freelance sure is appealing to me. I’ve always wanted to be self-employed. There’s plenty of time, though, so it’s an option that I’ve not completely ruled out yet.
I’m starting to think, though, that it might be time for me to create another WordPress theme. Anyone have any suggestions for layout and features?
Tags: Coding, css, geek, html, php, software, WordPress
06 Jun 07 PWP
Planet WordPress has been unusually quiet the last few days. I admit to missing frequent news updates from that feed.
Tags: planet-wordpress, WordPress
Just updated with the latest version of WordPress again (2.2). Painless as always and I like the new features. I played with the RC1 version last week and enjoyed having widget support built in and automatic disabling of plugins that’ll generate fatal errors. It’s also a bit faster, but that’s something you might not notice. If you haven’t already upgraded, go do it. You won’t be sorry.
Tags: geek, software, WordPress
I ran WordPress 2.2 RC1 through a quick test-drive this morning. Most of the changes in this version are all but invisible – or for the most aggressive WordPress users. The biggest thing that users will likely notice and care about is the widgets.php now being included in the core. Also, folks coming over from the New Blogger can now import their stuff. Apparently, comment editing is improved, but I’m not really sure what’s so improved about it. I also like that WP has now switched to a lighter, faster JS library. That should make things really slick in the long-run and provide less wear-and-tear on server usage. The important thing, though, is that nothing broke, so it should be a simple matter to upgrade all my blogs once the final release is issued.
Tags: software, WordPress
Excuse me for a moment while I toss out a little mini-rant…
I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for a nice single-column theme to use on my blog. I’ve got Daydream, which I’m using now and that I like quite a lot, but I’m always interested in finding some new ones, as well. Here’s the problem I keep running into, though:
I wonder if WordPress theme designers actually know what a “one-column” theme actually is. You see, I’ve found two themes in the last week that were described as being single-column themes, yet when you navigate to the download page and look at the theme’s screenshot, there it is! Two columns! There’s a main column for the content and a second column for the sidebar. It’s also fruitless to search the official WordPress themes directory for exactly the same reason – half the themes listed in the one-column area are actually multiple columns. For once, I wish WordPress theme designers would learn their numbers.
And I still wish there were more crisp, clean one-column themes out there.
Tags: Rants, themes, WordPress
Tags are coming to WordPress soon as part of the core. This, to me, is both a good thing and a potential complication. It’s good because suddenly WP users won’t have to rely on plugins to tag their entries. The potential complication that could make things a bit more… sticky is whether or not the native WP tagging system will accommodate an import of tags from other plugins. For instance, I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my entries and make a pseudo-site index from the resultant tag cloud. I spent a number of hours cataloguing my entire blog with UTW and the last thing I want to do is have to repeat the process with the native tag system in WP. And believe me, I’ll likely prefer the WP tag system exactly because it’s native. My philosophy has always been that the more you can do natively, the better, easier, and more efficient things will be because there will be less likelihood of coding conflicts to break functionality. I’m really, truly hoping that WP will allow for some sort of tagging import for the most popular tag plugins because otherwise things are likely to become a bit of a headache again for a while as I transfer things over and manually go through and tag every single entry again. We’ll just have to wait and see how the WP developers handle this new feature. I’m always excited by new toys being added to the core WP files, but there’s always a bit of trepidation to go along with it, since there’s always the risk that many of my favorite plugins will break. I’ve already lost one with the upgrade to 2.1.3; I hate to lose too many more.
Tags: plugins, software, tags, ultimate-tag-warrior, WordPress
