Davinian

Tumbled - A Wordpress Theme

Tumbled, a Wordpress theme.
click to enlarge

This is my first Wordpress theme I have made publicly available, and it’s not something I have had sitting around for ages either - I started it yesterday afternoon with the soul intention of making it purely for public release.

So here goes, I would like to introduce you to Tumbled, a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr.

Yep, that’s right, you can now have that Tumblr look on your Wordpress blog.

I must warn that Tumbled is still a Beta, but rest assured I have tested it in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and Internet Explore 6 and 7 plus Firefox on the PC. Everything seems to work fine, although there is a slight discrepancy with the navigation in IE 6 - there always something wrong in IE 6 though isn’t there!

NOTE: A problem was found where Smiley Faces inherited the default image styling! It is recommended that everybody downloads the latest version to avoid the visual unpleasantness - sorry about that!

Read More …

My Top 5 Website Building Tools

Designing and editing websites and blogs can be much easier with the right tools. Here is a list of my top 5 website building tools:

Smultron: A free text editor for the Mac which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced user. I have been using Smultron for well over a year, and it has become my default text editor of choice for .txt, .html to .php

Website: Smultron by Peter Borg. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 Tiger or later. Price: Free!

CSSEdit: This little application is quick, clean and offers superb CSS styling of absolutely any web page. It is the fastest, easiest CSS editing application I have used, and find using anything else a real pain in the …

Website: MacRabbit. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. Price: $29.95.

Adobe Photoshop: Possible slightly over the top, in price terms, for most web-designers, and can be a bit daunting to use for the first time. But I’ve been using Photoshop for fifteen years now and know it like the back of my hand - so I never start a new design project or website without mocking it up in Photoshop first. It is always running on my Mac and allows me to edit any image instantly.

Website: Adobe. Requirements: PS CS3 Mac OS X v.10.4.8 or higher. Price: from $649.

Transmit 3: If you design your site locally like I do, then you need a way to get it from your desktop to your server! For pure simplicity I have used Transmit for years now, as it does just that. It is the FTP app of choice for a lot of Mac user, allowing perfect Synchronisation between Your Stuff and Theirs (local and server).

Website: Panic. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher. Price: $29.95.

Parallels: If you build it you really (really) should make sure it works in every browser! I must confess I am slightly cynical on the whole browser testing thing because I use Safari for most of my browsing these days, and generally it seems to work with 99.9% of every website I visit. Firefox does come a close second, and I do use it for writing and editing posts on my Wordpress sites as this is one thing that Safari doesn’t like (sigh!).

Read More …

Tweaking a few things

After yesterdays stats overdose, I’m back on track - well I’m only checking stats every two hours and feel I can get myself back to only checking them twice a day again by the end of the week… I hope!

Anyway, just tweaked a few things here on Davinian:

1. Removed the over-sized RSS logo from the top of the sidebar - I have no idea why I made it so big, but it was taking up too much room - so its gone and in its place I’ve added the Feedburner feed stats.
2. After playing around with an additional ad on single posts, I’ve decided to move them from the top-right to the bottom of the post just above the comments area. I’ll continue to monitor its performance and see if it is really worth having a 3rd ad box at all.
3. You may have noticed that there is now Related Posts at the bottom of ever post. I meant to implement this from the start, but completely forgot to add in he necessary code when I re-designed everything on the 14th August (I’m wondering what else I forgot?).

OK, not a bad few hours this morning - especially as I’m a little hung-over!

Obsessively checking Stats

I seem to be obsessively checking my website stats all the time at the moment!

I normally check them first thing in the morning as part of my, what has happened while I’ve been sleeping routine (more on my daily routine soon), and then I usually check them again before I go to bed. This way I can get a good feel of the effects I am having on new and returning traffic to my sites form using different types of advert campaign’s and social networking tools/websites (i.e Bla.st, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc.,)

Time is Money?

But as the volume of new (unique) visitors goes up, which is great, I have been finding I spend more and more of my time analysing my stats than writing new content, which is not so great - detrimental to the cause in fact!

I guess a way around this is to try and find the information I want in a more efficient way. Currently I tend to find my built in hosted AwStats cross referenced with Googles Analytics gives me the most accurate figures, but this can be time consuming. So I’m wondering if there is a better way or an additional traffic monitoring service that is quicker and more accurate? Thus saving me time!

So, does anybody have any suggestions? What do yo use for site traffic monitoring? And how many hours a day do you spend checking your stats?

Challenged Challenges

The resent Tumbr problems with the Thirty Day Challenge (see We have been Tumbld…) has caused a lot of people to have a re-think on what is really being taught in the challenge — is it genuine or a bit of a get rich quick thingy?

I’ve managed to escape having my account suspended on Tumbr, but that’s probably because I haven’t been using it for an TDC activities, in fact I’ve hardly use it at all…

So it it time for a switcheroo? No not at all — I’m still following and ultimately still taking part in the Thirty Day Challenge, as I have learnt some interesting tips, tricks and techniques — but I think it is good to keep your options open — especially when it come to trying to make money online.

That is why I am going to play catch up on the 31 Days to Building a better blog. When I say catch up what I really mean is I’m going to read everything as it has technically ended. If you not sure who Darren Rowser is, then head over to ProBlogger and check out the mountain of valuable information on making money from your blog — you should have already be reading it if you want to make money online anyway!

And if you are questioning the TDC, my advise is to stick with it as you will probable learn something out of it in the long run.

Hacking Wordpress themes is better than fishing?

There is nothing I enjoy more than getting my hands dirty with a little bit of custom Wordpress code. I’ve just finished sorting out this blog and have decided to dive right in again and redesign the theme for one of my other blogs Cryptoworld.

Sucker for punishment? Why yes — but heck it is better than fishing?

The Power of Colour

It’s amazing how a simple change in colour makes your site look so different.

Not sure if you have visited before, but I had a rather depressing grey gradation for a background. After a little bit of research in colour psychology, I discovered that green is one of the most pleasing colours on the eye and can even improve vision.

It’s also a calming and refreshing colour, one reason why you feel so good when outside. Dark green (note the background) is considered masculine, conservative, and implies wealth!

There are plenty of websites on Colour Psychology, a few I’ve looked at are: infoplease colo(u)r, designcrux Colo(u)r Psychology and Colour Affects.

A question for readers - what colour if any do you most like and do you think it is important from a design and ultimately a sale point of view to take colour into consideration when designing the look of your product?

NOTE: You may have noticed that the background colour is no-longer green! this is because I changed the theme (again) on the 14th August 2007 — Orange is the new black you know!

Will I make $10 in 30 days?

I was going to say that I didn’t know how I got myself involved with this, but then I remembered I read about it over on Yaro Starak’s site (Internet Business Blog) [link to post].

The thing is though, I’m not really sure what the hell I am supposed to be doing! Yeah ok, I have to try and make $10 in thirty days (August to be exact), but within what rules? as it’s not yet clear.

I guess all should be revelled on the 1st of August, well I hope it will…

If you want to have a go, or see what all the fuss is about, head over to thirtydaychallenge.com and sign up - it’s free… oh, and if you can’t find the link to the thirty day challege blog - it’s here [link].