Davinian

Tumbled reaches 200 downloads

Tumbled, a Wordpress theme.
click to enlarge

Today I’m celebrating as my first free Wordpress theme - Tumbled, has reached 200 downloads.

Now 200 is not a massive amount, but it still amazes me when I see it being used. It was my first attempt at designing a public theme and seems to have worked surprisingly well.

I have been meaning to update it since late last year, but never seemed to find the time. Now it has reached the 200 mark makes me want to do it as soon as possible, so stay tuned for an update soon.

Tumbled is a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr, and can be found/downloaded here Tumbled - A Wordpress Theme.

125Cards.com has landed

125Cards.com is about design, style and how we can improve those lovely little 125 x 125 Adverts and Cards that we so love to place (drop) on other peoples websites.

They are meant to advertise what we are selling, be it a product, service or even just ourselves. Yet, they really don’t do us justice, they are difficult to read, look gimmicky and hardy every relate to what we are trying to sell.

Remember, they should be driving traffic to your site - so come on, get serious… visit 12Cards.com, grab a free template and start designing a better Advert.

Ugly Squeeze Pages and Design

The Landing Page or Squeeze Page as it is more commonly know, is seen by some as the most important part of any opt-in email or affiliate driven website.

Are Squeeze Pages ugly?

A typically Squeeze Page tries to entice its “target” audience with marketing and copywriting techniques such as headlines, bullet points, teaser copy, deadlines and testimonials. All of which are generally so well researched that they can take the author days and several attempts to perfect.

But something that I just can’t fathom out, is why such a well written bit of marketing tends to have to look so aesthetically unpleasing to the eye. I have found myself on several occasion just giving up trying to read such a page as the design is so appalling.

The classic example generally has a blue or grey background with either a white of light yellow text area. The text for some god-awful reason seem to usually be Courier - can anybody tell me Why? And with alleged meaningful words and phrases picked out in a collection of insipid Red, Yellow or Blue bold text makes the whole thing unbearable.

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Dealing with Numpty Hot-Linkers

Man, what is it with silly pictures of monkeys and numpties who like to hot-link images?

Funny monkey portraits. Scarily human don’t you think? click to enlarge

I have just spent the last 2 hours sorting through my inbound links to this site trying to cross-reference genuine incoming inks against stupid hot-links.

Bizarrely, the image that every numskull seems to want to hot-link to is this - a montage of some funny monkey portraits (link to my original post).

Good old .htaccess to the rescue is all I can say. Basically I have used RewriteEngine/RewriteCond as describe here: How do I stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft? Which seems to work perfectly.

If you think you are being hot-linked, check your top inbound links first and check for your images on the site linking to you. If the site is a blog or forum, you may need to check previous pages/posts. If you suspect somebody is using your images on their site, then customising your .htaccess is probably the best solution for blocking them.

Note: I don’t use an alternative image, but the temptation to redirect to a rude alternative is very tempting at times - but that would then lower me to the thieving hot-linkers standards, and to be honest, I am above all that!

A Something and Nothing Day!

It has been one of those days for me today, I tried to write this morning, but kept finding myself being distracted by other things. When it happens it is damn hard to break out of it. If I catch myself free-falling early enough I can usually do something about it, but today wasn’t one of those times, so I decided to take a break and headed out of the house for the day.

On reflection it was probably the best thing I could have done, as I got thinking about Tumbled (my free Wordpress theme), and I think I should try and make it more Tumbleblog-like with separate styling for each category - links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video being the obvious ones - what do you think? Should I make it more, dare I say it… Web 2.0 ish?

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!

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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!).

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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!

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?

I’m never happy with the way my blogs look

I think it is fair to say that I am constantly trying to find a better look and feel for my website - this must be the 100th + such theme change for Davinian, and I suspect it wont be the last!