Crenk Showcased In Top Wordpress Galleries
In the last couple of days Crenk has been fortunate enough to have been profiled on some of the top Wordpress galleries.
WeLoveWp – Crenk page
CSSbased – Crenk page
Archive for: wordpress
Comfy News Theme: Free Magazine Style Wordpress Theme
Comfy news theme is a free news / magazine style theme for WordPress. It looks really clean, stunning and professional. Comfy comes with many features, some of them are basic magazine features such as dropdown navigation, feedburner subscription, advertisement spots, featured entries, ajax tabs, widget-ready, gravatars built-in, and more.
Techcrunch Changes Its Theme Again!! Oh Come On
Techcrunch has changed their theme yet again. A few months ago the theme was changed for the 3rd time in a year and I thought it was really moving in the right direction. The navigation was clean, there were a lot more options to find the articles you are looking for, and the theme had some colour and character.
Techcrunch today have launched a new theme which keeps the same navigation principles but totally gets rid of all the character and colour on the page.
Let me know what you think!
Before:
After:
Freemium Wordpress Theme
Freemium Theme is a free premium theme for wordpress, it was designed by Paul Kadysz and developed by Dariusz Siedlecki and made free by freebiesdock.com.
You can see the demo here.
Some of the features of freemium theme are:
- XHTML compliant
- flickr RSS support
- jQuery menu
- 2 widget ready sidebars
- completely free
Download: freebiesdock.com/freemium-wordpress-theme/
Top 10 Adsense Optimized Wordpress Themes
There are so many publishers out there that are just learning what Wordpress is and how they can actually make money from blogging. The easiest advertising network to join is Adsense from Google. Adsense provides users the ability to earn money every time one of their readers clicks on an ad. Recently I was looking through free Wordpress themes in search of the most basic template I could find which have adsense blocks as standard and in which optimise those positions to bring in the most revenues for the blogger. After all my searching I thought I might even compile a list of ten themes that I think everyone should use when they are first starting to blog on Wordpress.
1. ProSense | Download Prosense | ProSense Gray | ProSense Blue
2. AdSense Theme | Download
3. Problogger Clean | Download
4. SEO Blix with AdSense | Download
5. Ads Minded | Download
6. Connections with Adsense | Download
8. Adsense Ready | Download
9. Boqpod Adsense | Download
10. Tigopedia 1.0 | Download
Wordpress.TV: Your Video Resource Directory For Everything Wordpress
WordPress.tv is your visual resource for all things WordPress. To make it easy for you to find up-to-date, WordPress-themed video content within a couple of clicks. Without having to wade through spammy promotional videos, out-of-date content, and missing chunks of presentations. WordPress.tv is there waiting for you, you can learn anything related to WordPress by watching the videos there.
Additional to basic Wordpress tutorials they have a section specifically for WordCamp videos in which is Wordpress related sessions in which professions talk about Wordpress and how to use it affectively and efficiently.
Techcrunch Theme Changed Again, This Time It Is Actually User Friendly
I have also noticed today that Techcrunch has changed their theme again. It hasn’t really been too long since they last changed their theme, probably about a quarter off the top of my head. Last time the Techcrunch theme was changed they seems to have nothing in their sidebar except advertising (i know Crenk also has a little bit of advertising), however that being said this new theme really addresses the key issues of the older theme.
The site itself is a lot more compact in the header and key change is that the 728×90 advertisement is no longer above the site, but fitting in with the header itself. The key green is not really as predominant, but it makes it easy to distinguish between Techcrunch and the other network sites. In the old theme they just had excepts on the home page, but now they have an additional three slots in which they can feature certain articles. Navigation has really improved within this new theme and now it is a lot easier to find new content. As well as feature articles in the header on the home page they have also added eleven featured articles in the sidebar sitewide. If I didnt have an RSS reader or use it everyday, with the previous theme it would have been impossible to keep up with the new content, however with this new theme it provides me with a better idea on what is happening in the tech space.
This new theme is far from perfect but it is a huge improvement from all the previous themes they had on the site. I would really still like to see a lot more integration between the Techcrunch home page and the other network sites, but im sure that will come within the year.
Brian Gardner’s Revolutiontwo.com is Down and No Longer Free
I was on Brian Gardner’s new project RevolutionTwo.com and previous there has been a lot of talk about this project, because he was offering free downloads but with paid support. This afternoon I went onto his new site and noticed that you can no longer download the themes for free and that they are now all paid themes. I find this a bit of a weird mood by Brian, is this because he was simply just not making any money from paid support?
I went back onto the site a couple of minutes ago and noticed that the site is now down due to a database error. Is this because it has been hacked or it Brian updating something? Anyone have any tips?
Does Branding Play a Part In a Site The Size of Crenk?
There hasn’t been a post on here for a few days so I thought I would just have a bit of a rant. Here at Crenk the theme of the site has changed several times in the last year. Currently for the last few weeks I have been thinking about re-branding the site and actually changing the theme again. This time I have thought against changing the site. My basic thought process was that a site like Crenk needs to improve to a certain level and then branding has more of an affect, but at the present size it is really more about content and basic usability of the site. I was wondering if this was the thought process of most blog owners or am I in the minority?
You Can Now Update to Wordpress 2.7 Just Like Crenk
Here at Crenk we have updated our site to the new Wordpress 2.7 and it is better than ever.
It only took about five minutes to upload via FTP and it is so much better than the previous 2.6 version.
The interface is a lot easier to look at and the dashboard has so many features to use. Additionally, one of the best features has to be editing and commenting right within the admin dashboard. Brilliant.
If you haven’t already head over to Wordpress.org and download Wordpress 2.7 now.
EmbedIt WordPress Plugin Review
I adore WordPress, so much so that I use it to design websites that don’t even require a blog, just solely based on the CMS, ease of installation and abundant supply of options and plugins available for it. With all that being said, now and again I run into an issue with some stupid coding somewhere along the lines that won’t let me do exactly what I want. Today I ran into a problem implementing a plugin that would allow me to place a Google Maps map onto a client’s website. Google is nice enough to give the code out to hard code their maps into any site, but it requires the iframe tag which does not play nicely in WordPress.
After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag. This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin. According to their site, EmbedIt is a,
simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.
- embed Youtube videos into wordpress
- embed ustream into wordpress
- embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
- embed whatever html code into wordpress
- embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article
The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme. EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.
My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on. I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it. I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.
MySpace Crossposter plugin review for WordPress
Yesterday friend and fellow blogger Daniel Scocco posted the 16th part in a series about generating website traffic, Promoting your content on social networking sites. Outside of Twitter, Daniel admits he doesn’t do much in the form of utilizing social networking or media sites to drive traffic to his site, but I have. Leaving a comment in the article about my experience with MySpace specifically spawned a conversation of sorts in the comments of the article.
There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens. The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins. Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.
A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress. It is almost totally what I was looking for. As described on their site,
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.
Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.
Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.
Perfect! The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file. Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server. Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it. I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are. Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress. The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.
Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password. Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog. Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.
Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content. I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.
The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site. While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source. For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.
Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information. The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.
Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing. This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.
