This is just a bit of fun - a theme based, roughly, on the Commodore 64 monitor display, with some javascript to type out the blog title - it’s a retro symphony in garish blue.
It’s a fixed-width, 2 column with right sidebar theme, enabled for widgets and compatible with WP 2 upwards. The theme has been tested on Firefox 1.5, 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 9.
Download: Com64 WordPress Theme - zip - tar
Release Notes:
The javascript is easy enough to switch off…
This theme is not sponsored.
Released under terms of GPL v2
We live in frightening times. The average blog gets 80-90% of its organic search traffic from Google - and there are enough horror stories about being suddenly dropped from the results, to be left hanging and hoping…
So why not boost your traffic by paying attention to other search engines and their results?
There’s actually not much point. Basically, what works for Google will work fine for Yahoo and MSN, and the time and effort could probably be spent more profitably on other things.
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You want to put an advert (or anything else) after some posts on the front page, but not others.
There are some fancy programming ways of doing this involving template tags, but this way will do just fine and couldn’t be simpler.
First, find the Loop in your index.php
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
… the post …
<?php endwhile; ?>
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There are good reasons to use Feedburner - and, depending on your circumstances, sometimes reasons not.
Feedburner republishes (burns, as they have it) a RSS feed in more powerful and useful form - it’s the same basic content, with added extras.
Reasons For
Statistics/Metrics
It’s the quickest way to find out how many subscriptions a given RSS feed has. Note that this isn’t the same as unique users. WordPress plugins do exist for this purpose, and if that’s all you want, then no reason not to use them.
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Still not sure I understand the allure of “ideas not quite formed enough to be part of a blog” - but then I’m not sure I understand Twitter, end of story.
It seems total narcissism to expect anyone to spend the time reading a random jotting that required 8 seconds to impart to the world.
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This story still with a strong question mark to it - but it makes sense that Google should be thinking towards it, all part of the plan to get a near monopoly on text links (if not all ads) on the web.
Feed readers often don’t support the graphical ads which a lot of advertizers prefer - but text ads in RSS, feedvertizing, whatever you want to call it just hasn’t taken off.
Text ads in feeds receive so little attention from readers that Google, which pursued its own trial, abandoned the experiment.
In three years time you’ll have the choice - send your visitor stats to either Google or Microsoft-Yahoo, or both.
The “voted on by users so it must be good” idea is due to be tested to destruction.
Not only the semi-publicized plan of Wales/Wikipedia to produce a community-fuelled search engine, hinted at here and here - but also with SquidOffers:-
The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.
Leaving aside the semantics of ad vs. offer - and with the usual caveat of unless I’m missing something - the question remains: why would people vote to receive more ads?
Folksonomies are born, not built by artifice - I don’t know whether that’s a law or not…
What’s a Squeeze Page?
Very simple - sign up as a subscriber or leave.
In the context of a blog, it might be subscription to a mailing list, or more often than not, nowadays, an RSS feed.
A squeeze page is probably of less value than it used to be - users are wary about giving up an email address, even a disposable one… But, depending on the sector your blog is operating in, it might pay a dividend…
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Devlounge.net is midway through a comphrensive guide, how to write a WordPress plugin. It’s simple and sensible.I’m sure it will be mentioned there in some form or other, but what got me started and probably the best overall advice on the subject is:- download a plugin and dissect the code - oh - and if it’s not too obvious- pick something simple first…
You want to list your pages as fixed links, for example in the header of the theme, rather than simply use the sidebar lists, with widgets or otherwise. In WordPress, this is handled by the wp_list_pages() function.
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programming, themes, wordpress | Lewis, 25 May, 2007 | 
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