WordPress’s New Admin Theme
I recently updated to WordPress 2.5 on both of my blogs and although I love WordPress, I hate the new version 2.5 admin panel, not only does it seem extremely difficult to really get anything done, I have a hell of a time finding things that I’ve been using in WordPress for the past year.
This could just be me complaining for complaining sake but I hate the new “write new post” page. I really liked that all of the options for the post were along the right side of the page, but now there is about 1/4 of the page that is just white space and most of the options that used to be along the right side have moved below the text box, which might just be the worst place for them to be placed.
I hope the developers decide to get their act together and find somebody else to do the design of the admin panel because this just isn’t going to work.
Cutting Down On Your RSS Feeds
I know it has been nearly two months since the last time I posted and I’m not going to apologize for it, mostly because I have good reasons for not post (sick for nearly two weeks, traveling, terribly busy with other projects), but also because I think it is terribly cliche for bloggers to post once every few months and then spend the first few paragraphs talking about why they haven’t been posting… I’m only going to use the first paragraph.
So one of the major problems that I have run into when it comes to keeping up with the news is packing too many RSS feeds into your reader. I don’t have the hundreds of RSS feeds that I know some people do, I can’t, I have some sort of weird impulse forcing me to empty the new items out of my RSS reader everyday, that way I never get behind. That wouldn’t be so bad but for the past year and a half or so I’ve been collecting RSS feeds from all sorts of places, currently I only have 102 feeds but that translates to nearly 1,000 items a day that I have to look through.
What I needed to do was find out two things:
What RSS feeds haven’t been updated in a few months and don’t see any signs of updating in the near future?
and
What RSS feeds do I actually use?
I would like to get rid of all of the feeds that haven’t updated in a while and the ones that I don’t use. Now Google Reader (my RSS feed reader of choice) makes it pretty easy to find out what feeds haven’t been updated in a while.
From the picture above you can see that I only have one RSS feed that I’m willing to get rid of that hasn’t updated in the past few months, Cellularized.com can be removed from my reader.
Done.
The next batch of RSS feeds that I’d like to get rid of are the ones I don’t actually use. Since Google Readers trends doesn’t lend itself very nicely to my workflow (which is I use J and K to go through the feeds, hit S to star them, then when I’m done I go through the starred items, unstar them and bookmark them in my browser), I had to find another way of figuring out what feeds I use. What I decided to do was, every time I went into my starred items I listed all of those feeds in a spreadsheet. After about a week and a half I had 77 feeds listed in the spreadsheet.
I went through all of the feeds that I haven’t starred anything in and decided whether or not I wanted to keep them, I deleted the ones I didn’t want to keep and the rest stayed in.
I ended cutting about 20 or so RSS feeds off of my reading list, this has significantly lowered the amount of items I’ve had to read on a daily basis (many of the feeds I got rid of would post nearly 30 items a day), I’ve got the average items per day down to roughly 800, which doesn’t sound like it is much smaller than 1,000 but trust me, it is.
End.
Group Of Possible Next Themes
So I’ve been searching for months for the right theme for CyberSurge.org the last time I posted I wrote about WP Premium, which is a great theme but since then I’ve found a few that I also like.
The first one is the one I’ve really been looking at the most, Plane Jane. A very simple elegant two column theme that seems to be influenced by Daring Fireball (although I don’t know if that is true). The theme uses great fonts and the colors are great, I really like simple designs and this one is great.
The next one is called Elite, which is very similar to Plane Jane is that it’s best feature is its simplicity. The only problem with this theme is that I don’t really have much to say about it, it just doesn’t leave me with much of an impression, it’s great but I’m not really thrilled by it.
The last is GreenTech (Live Demo), I like this theme a lot but the problem is that it just seems too cartoony for me. I love the color but it is just too cartoony and I want my blog to go in a more professional direction and less in a shiny weblog direction.
Free WP Premium Theme
I have been searching for months to find the perfect theme for my other blog, CyberSurge.org. This search has up to this point been wildly unsuccessful, but I think I finally found what I’ve been looking for.
WP Premium is a free WordPress theme developed by R. Bhavesh. WP Premium is a “2/3 column, feature packed, widget ready theme that comes with three color-scheme options.”
The three colors that it comes with are, Brown, Black, and Red. For CyberSurge in particular I’m probably going to use Red or Black but until I download it and start playing around I can’t be too sure.
One of the cooler features that isn’t drastically obvious is that there are separate css files for the layout and the color, this way if you want to change the color of the theme you don’t have to make all the changes you have made to one color to another.
The theme comes with its own RSS e-mail subscription form.
There are 3 spots for 100×100 ads in the sidebar which makes monetizing the blog much easier.
I absolutely love this theme and I want to give a plug to Hack WordPress for this post ultimately pointing me towards this theme.
Weborithm’s First Exclusive Theme
I talk a lot about free WordPress themes but today I want to clue you into a great theme designed by the writer of a blog that I read every day.
Hyder who recently started a blog design company called Weborithm and the writer of the blog Everybody Go To.
A while back Hyder did a design for John Cow, but now you can purchase the theme via John Cow in three versions.
The theme is called Milk It. (Live Preview)
The basic version is priced at $39, the two links in the footer must stay
The premium version is priced at $59 and is for those who would like to remove the links from the footer and also gives you the choice of three different color schemes.
The personalized version costs $79 and gets you a customized header.
I’ve been reading Everybody Go To for a few months and love the blog. I just wanted to point all of you to this blog design because I think it is great. Wonderful layout, great colors, etc., etc., etc.