Thesis Wordpress Design Tips

iPhone 5 Rumor Summary

admin — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:25:21 +0000

This is a great info-graphic on the odds of what new features may be in the new Apple iPhone 5

Free $10 iTunes Gift Card w/ iDrive for Smartphones

admin — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:50:58 +0000

For iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android smartphone users, get a free $10 iTunes Gift Card (official promo link) when you sign up for and use IDrive. The free IDrive Lite account is limited to 5GB of storage. To get this deal:

Download IDrive Lite to your smartphone
download IDrive for Windows
backup at least 1GB of data
you’ll receive confirmation of the free iTunes gift card within 72 hours

Top 10 things we learned about SEO in 2010

admin — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:21:39 +0000

Great video on the latest search engine optimization insights for 2010

SEOmoz – SEO Software

WordPress 3.0 Officially Released!

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:43:34 +0000

We’re currently running the latest release of WordPress 3.0 on this site along with Thesis Framework version 1.7

Everything seems to be working fine, though I’m told that the new custom post types aren’t fully functioning.

Upgrade today!

Thesis for WordPress just got hotter!

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:32:42 +0000

These are the latest details on the latest thesis 1.7 release straight from pearsonified

Hooo boy! Thesis 1.7 is coming soon, and I’ve gotta say—this is the most excited I’ve ever been for a Thesis release. On the technical side of things, I rewrote a significant portion of the software to add functionality and increase efficiency at every turn. From a practical standpoint, Thesis 1.7 is noticeably faster, far more comprehensive, and way more detailed than previous versions. In other words, it’s pretty doggone slick

But the best thing about Thesis 1.7? That honor may go to the new Options Manager, which not only allows you to backup your Thesis settings, but also gives you the ability to share settings with friends! Skin developers will be especially keen on this new functionality, as it will allow them to distribute recommended design options without having to create long-winded and highly technical installation tutorials.

At any rate, the list of changes in Thesis 1.7 is long (but awesome), so if you’re ready to get started, dive right in!

Insane new SEO controls and detail: Thesis has always been optimized and ready to perform in the search engines, but there were still some areas where exacting, precise controls were lacking. Not anymore. Version 1.7 contains a totally redesigned document that allows for SEO customization at a level that no one has ever seen before. With 1.7, you’ll be able to control the robots tags (noindex, nofollow,noarchive) on every post and page of your site, and better still, the new Page Options will give you total control over all these details and more on your Category and Tag archive pages! Optimize everything, because that’s how you win on the Web, and that’s what Thesis is all about.
Options Manager: If you’ve ever delivered a Thesis site to a client, then you know what a pain in the butt it can be to go into a new site and set every single option by hand. With Thesis 1.7, you’ll be able to save and restore the Thesis Options without having to be woefully inefficent. Oh, and skin developers? You’ll be able to use this new functionality to share font and design settings, and this will make it easier to help people set up your awesome skins on their sites!
Completely reorganized options pages: The more I organize the underlying code, the more I’m able to organize the controls you use to unleash Thesis’ potential. In version 1.7, you’ll find five main pages under the Thesis Options: Site Options, Design Options, Page Options, Custom File Editor, and Options Manager. These pages are all leaner, faster, and more sensibly-arranged in 1.7; simply put, my efforts here are designed to make it easier for users to do more with Thesis.
Increased efficiency from every angle: Quite literally, every single page load is faster with Thesis 1.7. Whether you’re browsing your site or navigating the reorganized Thesis Options, you’ll notice snappier interface behavior that can be attributed to two main things. First, I improved the way each page is generated by implementing smarter, more efficient PHP object modeling. Second, I changed the way options are delivered throughout the theme, thereby reducing the overall page load thanks to fewer function calls. These improvements also allowed me to eliminate the antiquated header.php and footer.php files, and now Thesis can deliver your site’s pages faster than ever before.
Include a slew of JavaScript libraries!: Pretty much everyone can benefit from having Javascript libraries at their disposal, and with Thesis 1.7, you’re just a click away from the most popular ones. Add jQuery, jQuery UI, Prototype, MooTools, and others with a single click, and kiss those old JS library folders goodbye!
New home page controls: In the new Page Options, you’ll find a section dedicated to your home page. In previous versions, Thesis offered some home page controls, but the SEOoptions were somewhat insufficient. Now, you’ll not only have complete SEOcontrol on your home page, but you’ll also have granular control over JavaScript libraries and post display (with more to come here in future releases).
Flexible new comment system: In previous versions, Thesis didn’t give you a choice here, and everybody’s comment areas were rendered in the same order: trackbacks, comments, and then a comment form. In 1.7, you’ll not only be able to drag and drop the display order, but you’ll also have a few more fine-tuning display options that are sure to please. Look for these new controls in your Design Options.
New hooks: The .post_box now contains hooks inside its opening and closing
tags—thesis_hook_post_box_top and thesis_hook_post_box_bottom. I also added similar hooks to the #content_box—thesis_hook_content_box_top andthesis_hook_content_box_bottom.
New headline filter: This one’s a bit technical, but I’m using (and loving) it on my newly-relaunched version of Pearsonified, which is running on a pre-release version of Thesis 1.7. Basically, this simple filter will allow developers to show/hide headlines, and you’ll be able to use this to create more diverse post styles on your site. I’ve used it to create “asides,” which are a little less formal than my normal posts—here’s an example (note the absence of a headline and byline). It’s just a little thing, but oftentimes, things like this bring the most joy to people who like to customize their sites!
Beefed-up internationalization: Thanks to the help of our fans in other countries, I’ve been able to identify certain parts of the code that were not so translation-friendly. To fix this, I’ve gone through every single string in Thesis and made sure that everything is up to spec for internationalization. Now, it will be easier than ever to use handy translation software to translate Thesis into different languages!
Improved core element defaults: This one is best explained by way of example. Take, for instance, the comment links that appear after each post on your home page—you know, the ones enclosed in the curly braces like this: { 0 comments }. Those curly braces are nothing more than typographic embellishments that are native to the default Thesis skin, but in the past, I had mistakenly included these braces in the core code for this element. In version 1.7, I removed the braces from the default code, and I used filters to add those braces to the default Thesis skin instead. Ultimately, moves like this will give skin developers more flexibility and allow them to modify Thesis’ look and behavior with less resistance.
Dramatically improved code quality: I’ve touched on the subject in earlier points, but seriously—Thesis 1.7 is head and shoulders above previous versions in terms of the quality and efficiency of the core code. Ultimately, this results in a better Thesis experience no matter how you interact with the software, and in my book, that’s a huge win!

Get extra free dropbox space

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:34:22 +0000

Dropbox is an awesome service that allows you to synchronize your files across your mac, pc, phone, etc. They offer 2GB of free space which should be enough for most users (ie. if you’re syncing your most important documents as opposed to your entire music library which isn’t as important).

However if you’re looking to eek out a bit more space, here’s a few quick tips.

1. If you haven’t signed up for the service yet, don’t. Or if you have and are willing to get a use a new ID, you can get an extra 250MB of free space through using a referral link when you sign up. Don’t sign up straight from the dropbox.com site or you’ll miss out on this free referral space.

2. Sometime’s people miss this one when they first start out. I had registered for dropbox a year ago and didn’t see an obvious link back to this, but if you go through a few of the starting out tour tips you can earn an extra 250 MB of free space as well. Go to http://dropbox.com/gs

3. Finally, invite/refer your friends. This will earn you an extra 250 Megabytes of space up, capping at 3 GB for your free account. They need to both register and install dropbox for both of you to qualify for the free space credit.

Hope this helps!

And the best time of the day to blog and tweet is…

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:07:33 +0000

Best tweeting time is 4:01 pm – some interesting stats from malcom coles :

Half of people read every tweet.
But 20% read only the last 20 tweets or less when they check Twitter.
At 11am-12pm, 51% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 31% are sending them – a margin of 20%.
At 4pm-5pm, 56% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 39% are sending them – a margin of 17%.
At 7-8pm, the margin is just 2% – people are more interested in tweeting than reading.
Weekend Twitter users are much more likely to be tweeting than weekday Twitter users who often just browse tweets.
As a proportion of all tweets, use of the term RT (for retweet) is highest at 4pm

Blog posts seem to depend more on your readers, content type (if it’s breaking), and consistency. Lorelle has a solid post on it, but it generally seems to be during the 9-5 working day. Being in Eastern Standard Time, I generally prefer around the 11-12pm hot zone, while being able to catch the morning readers on the west coast.

Another tip if you’re auto-tweeting or have feedburner subscribers is to set it at a time a few minutes off of the hour when other larger services are bulk mailing. ie. 11:55am.

Quick Social media solutions for your organization

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:32:19 +0000

Credit:Elliance

This is not Thesis

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:44:27 +0000

This is StandardTheme. We still love Thesis here, but we thought we’d give human3rror‘s new standard theme a whirl.

Currently most of my images are a bit oversized for the page frame, but there’s definitely a number of sexy features. More complete review to come shortly.

The State of the Internet

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:00:28 +0000

Some intriguing data by Focus that may make you want to tweak your web strategy.