Awesome Free Wordpress “Coming Soon” Themes

Posted on March 16, 2010 by George Pearce

Coming soon themes are a great way of gaining a following while you work on your website – especially if you know how to market. I’ve put together a collection of some of my favourite free “coming soon” themes for Wordpress.

UnderCon

UnderCon is one of the best free coming soon themes I have seen – it’s very simple, clean, and I just really like the design (it’s that cow, I swear). You can find out more or view the live demo.

WP Blueprint

WP Blueprint is also a very nice coming soon theme, complete with a countdown until the site is due to go live. You can see more info or download.

Ready2Launch

Ready2Launch is another theme with a built in AJAX countdown timer. It’s very clean, and very simple – something which I like. You can see more info, a live demo, or cut to the chase and download.

IceBreaker

Icebreaker is a very nice, clean theme, keeps it simple, which I’m a fan of. You can find out more, or download.

Do you know a “coming soon” Wordpress theme that should be added to this collection? Leave a comment with a link and we’ll add it in.

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Brighten Up Your Posts With Pictures

Posted on March 13, 2010 by George Pearce

You know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The single easiest way to increase uptake of your content, in terms of visitors who actually read and take an interest, is to use pictures in your posts, even if they are only loosely related, they have a definite positive effect on the interest of readers.

Every single high traffic blog uses pictures of some form in *almost* all of their posts, especially news related – and yet, of all the blogs I visit, maybe one, two of the twenty I read regularly use images? I prefer them when I read posts, it.. breaks up the content, keeps it from being too wordy – and their also very, very good for getting your point across.

So there’s the tip for today – use pictures! (even though this post has none :P )

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Wordpress Admin Menu Bookmarklet

Posted on March 2, 2010 by George Pearce

I found a really nifty little bookmarklet today, which allows complete access to your Wordpress admin panel menu with a single click:

Apart from a tiny caveat, which is that it only works if you’re *on* the blog you want to administer (IE, browsing), it’s an amazing little implementation.

Doesn’t actually add any functionality but it’s very pretty, and I think if you could set the Wordpress blog that it’s tied to, it’d be even better.

You can find out more over here – at the very least, it’s a very nice implementation of JavaScript.

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Menu Manager in Wordpress 3.0

Posted on February 28, 2010 by George Pearce

The new menu manager set to launch in Wordpress 3.0 is really shaping up, I think it’s going to be an amazing addition to the core code.

The Wordpress Menu Manager is based on the WooMenu plugin (?) by WooThemes, who donated the code (I think) to the core. Since then it’s changed from how it was in the WooThemes implementation but I have the most recent version from the nightlies and it’s very, very nice (pictures below).

The whole interface is a simple case of drag and drop, and it works perfectly – I used it on the menu of my own blog, shown left. I like that there are more options now than just listing the pages a blog has – I always found that very restrictive in themes and near always removed it. :P

I’m looking forward to seeing more themes support the manager (Right now I think you only have to add one line of code, but it’ll be interesting to see how many do). I wonder if a plugin could be made to add the support to themes that *could* support it..

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Piwik – Free OpenSource Website Analytics

Posted on February 23, 2010 by George Pearce

Piwik is an awesome little open-source project I stumbled upon today, entirely by accident. It’s aim is to provide Google Analytics-like features, in an open-source, self hosted package.

I installed it on my own blog earlier; and gave it a try – and I must say that it’s impressive. I had it up and running in a few minutes, and it’s giving me some pretty cool stats about my visitors.

I’m very much a fan of self-hosted apps, I don’t so much like using hosted ones, so Piwik was a brilliant find for me. It’s very fast, and the layout of the control panel is simplistic, but in a right balance – I like it.

Piwik also supports multiple websites, which means I can set it up to track BP and all my other little sites, and I’ll be comparing it’s stats to Analytics over the next few days, I’ll be curious to see the differences in reporting.

For those with their own self-hosted blogs who maybe don’t like Analytics so much, Piwik is a *brilliant* project.

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Wordpress Network

Posted on February 21, 2010 by George Pearce

Today, I installed the newest alpha version of Wordpress (3.0) on my own blog, and activated the network function. I’m going to use it to keep all the little blogs I have lying around together in one place – it seems simpler. After some definite teething problems, it’s now up and working and serving one of the blogs that used to be a seperate installation from within the main one – that means less to backup and if all goes horribly wrong, less to recover.

I have a couple more to move in, but so far I’m very pleased with how it’s all worked – there seems to be far more in the way of things you can change than I remember when I last used Wordpress MU (although, that was a year or so ago).

The only thing I actually had to change on my blog was that I lost the www. , which doesn’t bother me hugely – I had to do a htaccess hack to get the www. urls to redirect okay though, I’m not sure if this is a mess-up in my installation or whether it’s a bug in alpha software – either way, I reported it, and am talking to one of the developers.

I love the idea of managing all my blogs from one central control panel, one installation to upgrade and maintain and such – it’s brilliant. I’m not yet sure about the security implications but I backup daily and with one central installation I’m very likely to notice any attacks, so I guess in that way it is a plus.

I’m going to look into how possible it is to run multiple top level domain blogs from a single installation, too – that could make a good guide. Stay tuned.

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Wordpress: Using Feedburner To Tweet When You Post

Posted on February 19, 2010 by George Pearce

One of the great features of Feedburner (now Google have taken over) is that you can use it to post to Twitter, whenever you make a post on your blog. This works with any blogging software that supports RSS feeds. The benefits are that you can expose your Twitter followers to your blog posts, and thus increase your traffic.

Step 1

Well first off you need to setup Feedburner for your feed. If you’ve already done this, skip to step 3.

Okay, navigate to http://feedburner.google.com (or click the link), and sign up / sign in (having a Google account at this point is really handy, it allows you to use Analytics and Webmaster tools).

Step 2

Okay, next you need to setup a feed. When you create your account, you should be presented with a box to put your feed URL in. Input the URL of your blog, and Google should magically find your RSS feed. Click continue, and you’ll be presented with this.

Although yours will probably already be filled in, here you can choose the title for your feed and the URL that it can be accessed at. If you have people subscribe to this feed (or setup email subscriptions) then you can track them, and collect lots of yummy statistics.

Once you have selected your feed details, you can click activate and follow through all the introductory steps that Feedburner provides – it has many more uses than just a Twitter poster, and it is advisable to have a look at the others, because they can bring you some serious traffic (or revenue).

Step 3

Alright, now we have your feed setup, and you’re at the control panel for that feed. Select “Publicize” from the menu bar at the top, and then from the options on the left, “Socialize”. You’ll be presented with the screen below (click to enlarge).

In the picture my own Twitter account is already configured, but you can add yours, and the configure all the settings so Google handles it for you.

That really is it – Google will now post to your Twitter followers every time you make a post on your weblog, and you can set it up for as many blogs on the same Twitter account as you like (although only one twitter account per feed).

This can also be done using the popular website Twitterfeed, but I reccommend using Feedburner because of all the stats you can access.

Could we improve this tutorial? Leave a comment and let us know if you feel anything is wrong – we want to make the resources as strong as possible for you.

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Wordpress: Setting up Permalinks

Posted on February 19, 2010 by George Pearce

Permalinks are the fancy name for pretty links on a Wordpress installation; for instance having a blog post at /2010/wordpress-setting-up-permalinks rather than /?p=3. To function they use mod_rewrite, a module built into the popular webserver Apache (and Apache2). There are other ways of setting up pretty permalinks but this is the default one in Wordpress.

After logging into your Wordpress admin panel, look to the bottom left of the page, for the settings main menu. If you expand this, you will find the “Permalinks” option.

Click this and it will take you to the page which controlls all aspects of permalinks, which looks like the picture on the right (click to enlarge). From here you can select the kind of permalinks you would like – the suggested ones are thought to be the best in terms of usability and search engine optimization, and for my own blog I use the “Month and name” option.

There are also a number of custom tags allowing you to make up your own permalink structure, for instance /%postname%/ can be placed in the box and your structure will show only the post name.

The options below about category and tag bases allow you to change how categories and tags display (by default, categories will be /category/categoryname and tags /tag/tagnanme) – you can change this if you like but for most it’s okay to just leave it.

Once you’re done, just click save – for most now Wordpress will do it’s magic and that’s all you need. However; if it brings something up about setting your mod_rewrite in .htaccess, then follow these steps:

1- Copy the text in the provided box at the top of the screen.
2- Open up notepad and paste the text.
3- Save the file as “.htaccess” (no quotes)
4- Upload to the same directory as index.php from Wordpress, via FTP (or ask your hosting support)
5- Done.

Any feedback? Was this tutorial easy to follow? Should it have been written differently? We’d love to hear from you – leave a comment!

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Wordpress.com Goes Down, World Ends

Posted on February 18, 2010 by George Pearce

Today, Wordpress.com in all it’s glory went down, for the best part of two hours. Taking with it, 9.2 million blogs. Essentially, a quarter of the known blogosphere just vanished.

And there were a *huge* number of people on Twitter talking about it – it was huge. Matt Mullenweg posted (linked above) saying it was a router problem that messed their failsafes over; and they predicted the loss of 5.5 million page views. For 110 minutes.

I’m wondering what the fallout will be in terms of a) lost visitors who will never return and b) any of their VIP customers who decide to move to their own hosting as a result of this. Although; it’s the biggest downtime in 4 years so it’s not like WP.com make a habit of it :P

It’ll be interesting to see any announcements in the next few days in terms of consequences of this downtime.

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Google CSE

Posted on February 15, 2010 by George Pearce

I have been looking into the merits of using Google’s CSE (link) as a search engine for Wordpress (and any other blogging software); over the search automatically built in.

I’ve always liked Google’s search, and used it over any other search engine for as long as I can remember. I tried out CSE on my own blog a few days ago because I have multiple Wordpress installations for various other topics – physics and bits. It was simple to setup and as you might notice, it’s integrated quite nicely into the design of my website, which I think is a huge plus. The results are great because unlike Wordpress, their relevancy based; not date – from experience with larger blogs than my own, external searches help me find what I’m looking for *far* faster.

I’ve hooked my own up to Adsense (of course), which means I can also get ad-clicks (from ads that would be there anyway) from my search, as I don’t use ads on the rest of my site as of yet, this could be a small income stream.

Another reason the CSE is great is because it allows the cross-referencing of multiple sites, for instance on my personal site search I can include this site (as I write about similar stuff here) and the other blogs I run / contribute too, which could create a little sort of network-search – very useful for multiple blogs.

Google CSE can be found over here, and is available inside adsense.

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