Blogging

10 Cool WordPress themes

WordPress

One of the many reasons why WordPress is such a super publishing platform are the many themes which are freely available to give your site a professional look and feel.

1. Envy – WPDesigner.com

Envy theme

Envy is a bold and bright theme with plenty of different elements to help you personalise it.

2. Insense – BloggingPro.com

Insense

Insense is a really classy, professional looking theme, which is just as useful for putting together a WP powered static site as it is a blog.

3. PhotoPress – Performancing

Photopress

Perfect for photo or video based blogs.

4. Elite – WPZone.net

Elite

Smart, darker theme. Sometimes themes with a black background can cause problems when inserting images – especially those with a transparent background. But Elite is still pretty smart looking.

5. Illacrimo – LifeSpy.com

Illacrimo

Again, very professional looking, and the one I’ve used a few times in the past.

6. Bluvision – lucianmarin.com

Bluvision

A bit like Envy, in that it has lots of space for you to personalise your site’s appearance.

7. Simpla – Ifelse.org

Simpla

Nice, clean look – perfect for a personal blog.

8. Glossyblue – NDesign Studio

Glossyblue-1-2-screen

Glossyblue is a theme I used to use on LGNewMedia. It’s really rather lovely. I notice Tim Davies uses it for his Drupal-based blog.

9. Gridlock – Hyalineskies.com

Gridlock

Gridlock is a perfect theme for non-blog WordPress sites.

10. MistyBlue – Romow

Mistyblue

The theme I used for FEconnect, and I stil have a soft spot for it 😉

A sense of place

The Birmingham Bloggers meet last night went well, with a good turnout and some exceptionally high-quality discussions on a variety of topics. I found myself burning up with jealously a couple of times as people talked about the exciting projects they were working on. Jon Bounds has a nice little write-up. Nick was an absolute gent as always. I met Stef for the first time, and was blown away by some of the stuff he is doing, mashing up social media services.

One thing that came up was that ‘Birmingham Bloggers’ is too narrow a title. Something based around the term ‘social media’ might be best – maybe a Social Media Club, like Lloyd runs in London?

Much of the discussion was around how bloggers can help improve the image and raise the profile of Birmingham, especially in the light of the second city’s total exclusion from this Guardian write up about city bloggers. A number of possible solutions were discussed, with the general feeling that a planet of Birmingham based bloggers would be a good idea. I’m going to have a look at putting this together.

On the way home I thought a Birmingham based customised search engine might help. brumsearch was born this afternoon 😉 I like building things and being (hopefully) helpful.

But this focus on the geographical element of the meeting – discussions around promoting Birmingham through social media – left me feeling pretty isolated. I live in Kettering, an hour’s drive away, but work in Coventry, just down the road. This meeting is the nearest thing I can get to as a group of people who dig new media.

Charlotte, who also attended, wrote along similar lines:

The thing about a meeting like this is that it is hard to figure out why we’re getting together. I guess to meet and share with a bunch of folks with a similar pursuit…

I came away feeling pretty down about the whole thing. These guys were so enthused about where they live and what they can do to improve things… But I don’t have that sense of place, not about Birmingham (obviously) nor indeed anywhere else.

Open source is best

Simon Dickson muses on the advantages of using open source platforms, as opposed to proprietary ones, in the light of the Interesource debacle.

It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.

True. As Simon points out, one of the Interesource developers has mentioned the fact that none of their clients had escrow agreements in place to mitigate against this sort of risk. But when you are providing a service like a community based web platform, which people are wanting to access 24/7 escrows don’t supply the solution in an adequate time-frame, in my view. They may make managers feel happier, but don’t really give you the protection you need.

With open source, there’s bound to be someone in the office who knows about the innards of your system. Failing that, there are experts a-plenty out there on the web, easily accessible through blogs, forums and mailing lists. WordPress, the favourite of both Simon and myself, is a great example of the wonderful support communities that exist for open source systems.

So here’s a challenge: why not use open source? Well, recently Telligent – a company providing a great (if proprietary, and (worse) .NET based) community portal system called Community Server – released some information about a blogging/lightweight CMS platform they are developing. WordPress is the clear competition, which they make clear on their landing page:

Finally, a WordPress Alternative

Install and setup is easier…You don’t need to know PHP…Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform…

Hmmm. I, for one, am not convinced!

The ‘Lazysphere’?

Steve Rubel has posted about "The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging".

Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted – at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It’s almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.

So is this true? Is there really less value in the blogging that’s going on right now? I’m not so sure.

One issue is that the level of noise has increased – there are more bloggers. Therefore, there are more rubbish bloggers, and more crappy blogs. After all, 98% of everything is pretty crud. So that’s a factor. Attention loggers like TechMeme are bound to display large numbers of bloggers regurgitating news, because that is what a lot of bloggers do. That doesn’t mean to say, though, that the quality bloggers aren’t out there, nor that they are in decreasing numbers in real terms.

The other is that many of the best bloggers like to be on the bleeding edge – they like to be early adopters, especially those who blog about tech and web innovation. Quite rightly so: if they weren’t engaging in new technology, we’d be questioning why we bother reading them. Now, one of the trends of recent developments is that stuff is getting smaller, shorter. Twitter is blogging, reduced. Seesmic is YouTube, reduced. If people are playing with these toys, then their output is bound to be reduced. That’s not being lazy, it’s just taking part.

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