The folks behind TIME magazine at TIME Inc. have just launched their new technology website dubbed Techland. The new website has many old faces from TIME on its masthead including their Tech editor Lev Grossman who’ll be a regular contributor.
They’ll cover the more ‘user orientated’ area of the market with much of their categories revolving around products and less about news. These categories include Gadgets, Gaming, Culture and Videos.
Overall, it looks like a good website from a reliable bunch however the design is a little sloppy and I’d imagine they’ll be tidying things up a bit as the site grows. The ties with TIME are still evident with many of their information pages such as ‘Contact Us’ leading directly to TIME’s customer services page.
Don’t like having the same theme as everyone else on your Wordpress blog and can’t find one just right for you? Well then just create your own – no coding necessary. WPTheme Creator is an online web app that allows you to generate your own custom Wordpress theme by simple entering in things like how many columns you want and what colours you would like certain aspects to be.
As you can see in the screenshot, the options are fairly basic but they return good results when you really put some thought and effort into creating your new Wordpress theme.
The generated themes will run on Worpress programs up to the most recent one – 2.8 right the way from the fairly ancient 2.1 Wordpress release. One you have finished creating your theme you simply click ‘Save’ and then download it as you would any other theme. Then, go to ‘the Appearance tab in the wp-admin screen of your Wordpress blog and upload the theme, then click Activate once it has finished installing. Your new generated theme will be active on your blog.
I though I’d share with you guys an RSS reader that I started using recently called Feedly. Basically it’s and add-on for most browsers including Chrome and Firefox which combines all your RSS feeds into one incredible place that by far surpasses generic readers such as Google.
Here is a screenshot:
What I like most about is that it also combines other services such as GMail and Twitter into the same package so you’re getting all of your information in the one place instead of having several tabs open.
It’s free and its easy to set up once you have installed it as an add-on. Click here to download Feedly.
Twitter’s Trending Topics is a great way to see what’s buzzing, what’s going one and what’s happening in the world. Often, big stoies are made publicaly aware on Twitter trends before they hit mainstream news. Several times I’ve watched BBC World News when the presenter used Twitter trends as a source.
Now Digg are launching a new trends experiment which will follow in the footsteps of Twitter. However it’s not just a carbon copy.
The trends feature will display stories that people are digging fast but only recently. The idea is to catch big stories in their initial phases before they hit mainstream media.
Here is what the official Digg blog reads about the new experiment:
Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.
How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:
The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible.
“Come on now Dean. Ryan was nice enough to share it with you. The least you can do is share it with the loyal Crenk readers!” – said the little angel on my shoulder.
“Feck ‘em! Sure can’t they find it themselves, boy? Arrr ark ark ark” said the little devil on my opposing shoulder. (For some reason he’s an Irish pirate). I flicked him away… I hate pirates.
Okay, so I’m going to share with you guys the great WP theme that a colleague of mine directed me to for my new blog. This theme incorporates the minimalistic feel while still having all the functionality of a highly strung WP theme packed with plug ins.
Her name is Arthemia.
As you can see from the screenshot below she’s a beaut. Great menu bar across the top, followed by a headline section with a scrolling ‘Featured’ slot to the right. Below this there is a categories bar with cool animation when you hover your cursor over a category.
Then, below all of this magic we have the posting area with a sidebar to the right. Amidst all of this there are two premium ad placements; one square in the sidebar and another to the right of the title.
It’s available for free (although there is a slightly pimped out premium version available) right here. Seriously, for any WP user who has been finding it difficult to locate the right theme for their blog that says “I don’t take myself too seriously, but my blog? That I do.” – it has to be Arthemia.
Let us know your thoughts and opinions about the theme in the comments!
W3 Total Cache is a new wordpress plugin that improves the user experience on your blog by improving your server performance. W3 caches every aspect of your site and helps your server to reduce download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
W3 Total Cache plugin remedies numerous performance reducing aspects of any web site going far beyond merely reducing CPU usage (load) and bandwidth consumption for HTML pages alone. Equally important, the plugin requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to reap the benefits. Setup is easy.
HackADay.com is a cool blog that I found featuring cool things that will keep you busy all day long. Unlike other hack blogs such as LifeHacker, Hack a Day focus more on the kinds of things you can build in your garage and use every day – well, sort of. I mean you’re not going to use a homemade spot welder every day but you might use a homemade iPhone keyboard everyday.
The main section of their blogs covers their antics and those of their readers. It’s mainly features stories of some of the cool electronic gadgets that they built on a rainy afternoon. This section is updated daily so they must have their fair share of free time!
Probably my favourite section is the ‘How-To’ section. This is the section with step-by-step guides that demonstrate how to build cool toys, gadgets and as I mentioned above – highly experimental homemade spot welders. This is updated weekly (although there hasn’t been much activity over the past month or so)
Today I came across a great new theme directory which really tries to help users and not just show the basic themes. The directory is called ThemeGrade and instead of just showcasing the themes it also rates them in terms of general quality and seo.
Features include:
User-friendly Theme Search
The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page!
Theme General Test
Each and every one of the Wordpress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme.
Theme SEO Test
The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass, the score will be added to the SEO test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the SEO test score of the theme.After you get the general and the SEO test score, the total score of a theme can be calculated. To do that, first, take the general test score and multiply by 0.6 and the SEO test score multiply by 0.4. Sum up the two number and you’ll get the total score of a theme.
Different Ranking Status for Themes
What makes ThemeGrade so special is the ranking system. Quality themes will be awarded either a Gold, Silver or Bronze status. The themes with the highest standard are those which score more than 90% and are awarded with the GOLD status! Ever since I outlined the details of each test, I have found out a few things that I could improve for my themes especially the SEO part.
Two New Themes will be reviewed Daily
Selecting good quality themes and reviewing them in such details take a lot of time.
Being a man is tough; all that shaving, working, grunting, analysing football results, drinking competitions, acting like a gentle man and being the strong silent type. Like I said; tough work.
One of my all time favourite blogs is the Art of Manliness. Basically, it’s a blog/online guide to being all the man you can be. When I visited there most recently thy had article on shaving with a straight razor, the 15 best buddy films and physical benchmarks every man should reach in order to save his own life.
It’s satirical at points but entertaining always. They use plenty of retro images and articles to get their point across; often drawing on the 20th century stereotype of a man being hard working, rarely smiling whose best friends is a horse who will.
Basically, if you’re in the mood for a bit of man time without all this crap about being modern, rich and having more girls than fingers you should check out the Art of Manliness – a truly fantastic blog.
Icons automatically appears at the sidebar, after assigning them to the pages or categories at icons admin menu. You do not need to insert some special code for inserting icons. Icons automatic inserting also during using these functions: wp_list_pages, wp_list_categories.
Divine is a clever little tool that allows you to make Wordpress pages using your pre-made Photoshop works, allowing you unlimited customization right down to the smallest details. All this can be done with minimal knowledge of site creation assuming you know how to use Photoshop but that’s a separate issue.
Yes, you are only as good as your Photoshop template. You see, the idea behind this is to design the perfect visual template within Photoshop then to upload it to Divine, adding all the interchangeable information within Divine. It works surprisingly well and at the moment it is absolutely free however because of this they have limited the number of functions.
It’s clear that a lot of effort has been put into the project and the example that have been put up look great. Ease of use is the key term here, the website not only offers a simple tutorial to Divines use but it has a guide to installing wordpress.
I’m impressed, with features including Built-in FTP-client, Supports for all Photoshop filters and Encoding support the internet could be well on its way to being neater and more stylish, well in terms of Wordpress websites anyway and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.
The Internet moves at a staggering pace. In a single day it gains more news, blogs and twitters than you could read in a lifetime. Fads come and go over night and it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep track of what is relevant. This is where Twittorati comes in.
From the guys who brought us Technorati, one of the top blog search engines on the net, Twittorati aims to sift the gibberish from junk, tracking tweets from the highest authority bloggers and posting them in a way that’s meaningful and easy to follow.
It’s all about ‘authority’ and what determines a blogs authority is the number of unique blogs that link to that blog. The technology for this is the same as Technorati. In fact Twittorati incorporates blogs from the Technorati Top 100 and promises to include “many more of the web’s most influential voices.”
It’s certainly a good idea but after a brief look on the website I couldn’t actually find I was genuinely interested. Sure it’s all convenient, at any time at anytime I”m only a few clicks away from the highest authority blogs and tweets on the net but therein lies the problem.
There are no rare gems, no cult hits and no must know info-bites. Having a high authority does not mean it’s a good blog. Take a quick look at the front page, how much of that do you actually care about? Very little I bet. Well it’s not all bad and it really depends on how much you care about tweets in general.
