An online notebook
Thanks to Simon Dickson, the Welsh Wales Office website has had a real facelift. It looks really good, nice and clean layout and a smart news layout. Simon covers it all in more detail on his blog.
And the best bit? It’s running on WordPress. Great work, Simon!
(And if any other government departments would like a WordPress site of their own, you know where I am 😉 )
Matt Mullenweg has announced over on the WordPress.com blog that Automattic, the company behind WP.com, Akismet and the driving force behind WordPress development, have created a new theme for WordPress. Whoopie-do, you might be thinking. But this theme is more than just a look and feel for your WordPress blog. This theme clones Twitter. To quote the post:
Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.
Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.
How incredibly excellent. I’ve been after a clone of Twitter for a while, and to be able to combine it with my beloved WordPress is just awesome. I’m already putting something together to make use of this!
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.
Envy is a bold and bright theme with plenty of different elements to help you personalise it.
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.
Perfect for photo or video based blogs.
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.
Again, very professional looking, and the one I’ve used a few times in the past.
6. Bluvision – lucianmarin.com
A bit like Envy, in that it has lots of space for you to personalise your site’s appearance.
Nice, clean look – perfect for a personal blog.
8. Glossyblue – NDesign Studio
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 is a perfect theme for non-blog WordPress sites.
The theme I used for FEconnect, and I stil have a soft spot for it 😉
Neville Hobson reports on the new site for BA’s new airline. And guess what? It’s running on WordPress.
More and more, public bodies and corporations are moving towards WordPress as a lightweight, flexible and powerful way of establishing a social web presence. Let’s have a look at the evidence:
Anyone got any more? I will update the post if you leave URLs in the comments.
WordPress never fails to astound me with its brilliance.
I still haven’t finished putting this blog together properly yet, but today thought I ought to at least cobble together a mini blogroll of some of my favourite fellow bloggers. I’d already got a blogroll at my old blog, and the thought of copying and pasting them across was not, to be honest, a pleasing one.
A quick Google later though, and I had been alerted to the page residing on every WP blog, at http://yourblog.com/wp-links-opml.php. All you have to do is chuck this into the "import" option on your control panel, and you’re away.
OK, this could be made easier by allowing you to download the OPML file straight from your originating control panel, but I expect it’s not there to avoid cluttering things up with rarely used functions. But it is at least still there, and pretty easy to use.