Read the full post at BloggingTips – WordPress 2.8 Features

Club Membership

The site is primarily a themes club (in case you hadn't already guessed that!), selling 3, 6 and 12 month membership plans which will allow users to sign in, download and use any of our themes available, get updates of the themes as soon as they're available, get quality support via our private support forum and also via a support desk.

The membership prices are below however we've also reduced these until 1st August as we appreciate that starting with 4 themes isn't a large amount, however our prices are based more on support and continued upgrades:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29
• 6 months membership – $79 $49
• 12 months membership – $99 $69

Single Purchases

Going from experience I know a club membership isn't for everyone, and not everyone will need support or want more than one theme, so we've also got the option to purchase themes individually for a single use. This option doesn't come with any support, but the themes themselves go from $19 which we think is a fairly reasonable price.

Also until July 31st 2009 you can get 25% off the purchase of any Single Use purchase by entering the discount code LAUNCH25 during the checkout process.

Theme Designs

Of course we're aiming to cover all the subject areas that a design can be used for with WordPress including Blogging, CMS, Photoblogs, eCommerce and more. We've already got another theme almost ready to go plus a 6th is being planned ready for design soon. We're hoping to add at least one new theme per 2 months and of course keep our current ones up to date.

Win membership for a month!

To celebrate the launch of Blog Themes Club we are giving away 10 membership accounts for free to readers. These accounts are valid for one month. During that time you will be able to download all of our themes and get daily support.

To enter the competition all you have to do is help us spread the word of our site via Twitter. All you need to do is:

• Follow us on Twitter @BlogThemesClub
• Tweet or ReTweet the folling message via Twitter :
  

  @BlogThemesClub have just launched their new wordpress themes club http://tinyurl.com/n7rhnh – 10 memberships up for grabs in a competition

• Leave a comment linking to the status link of your tweet on our launch post

The deadline for this competition is Sunday 21st June 2009. Therefore, no tweets after midnight Eastern Time (New York Timezone) on Sunday (about 5am GMT) will be counted. We will select the winners randomly and do our best to announce the winners the following day.

» Read our launch post – Blog Themes Club Opens

First stop was the OS. I'm currently on Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.1 is out, however it doesn't look like there's any upgrade for my PDA (Dell Axim X51). Okay, that wasn't a major issue. I then looked at the next two important things, an RSS reader and a decent browser. I used to have an RSS reader on there but when I switched to Google Reader I just used that online, however now I have all of my feeds at Newsgator which allows you to read feeds online and offline and syncs the two (best of both worlds). In the last year I've been very lazy with feeds and not kept up to date with reading them, so I pruned my feeds in my account down to those I considered worthwhile of keeping and added a few new jQuery ones.

Newsgator comes with its own software for the PC, however after a quick look I found it also has software for the Windows Mobile OS. This is quite similar to their mobile online version however it does the synchronising which is great as it means I can download the feeds, sit on a train or take them away with me, read them and then just sync it when I can get online again and I don't see the same post twice.

Newsgator requires the .NET compact framework, so I had to download this from Microsoft.

Next job was a decent browser. The Internet Explorer on the PDA is a bit basic and I longed for tabbed browsing. Firefox used to have a mobile browser called Minimo, but this is no longer maintained, and instead have progressed to Fennec, but that's for Windows Mobile 6+, which is no good. Then Martin sent me a link on twitter for Opera Mobile. I have this on my mobile, however that doesn't have tabs, but it is quite nice so I figured it was worth a go. I used to have Opera installed however it was charged for back then so I removed it soon after, but now it's freely available which is handy. After a quick install I opened it up and discovered that it does have tabs and it's a really nice browser on the PDA too. It's got a nice screen and makes full use of the screen. My only gripe is that to scroll down you have to slide your stylus up the page (as if you're dragging the bottom of the screen up), as the scroll bars don't display. It's a bit confusing when you're used to sliding the scroll bar down!

Opera Mobile also comes with Opera Widgets, one of which is a Twitter app, although I'm not sure if it's as good as Dabr.

A couple of other pieces of software that I've tried out and recommend are SoftX FTP Client which is a simple but useful FTP client to access sites, and then a Pocket Text Editor to edit the files. Useful if you need to make a quick change or fix whilst away from the PC.

Now all I need to do is work out how I can make the PDA connect online via my mobile when I'm out and about!

Read the full post over at BloggingTips – Create your own WordPress Widget.

Read the full post over at BloggingTips – Revisiting WordPress Custom Fields.

Okay, so I appreciate that people looking for work will look through the local businesses and tout their work to them. If you're low on work you need to see what you can get. Luckily we've never been in that position, but I know if I was then I wouldn't approach it in the following manner.

First the developer visited the shop, asked if they needed a new developer and pointed out a few design/content issues that needed addressing (some of which are already being addressed anyway). My contact was away at the time but the owner was there and he entertained the guy a little. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do. The developer clearly took that as the green light and turned up again when my contact was there. She told him that they were not interested, they already had a development company on board and he wouldn't be hired. He didn't really take the hint however, then asking who did the site, who hosted it, what platform it was running on (it's not hard to find this information out but still…). She asked him politely to leave, eventually he did.

A week later he was back (persistant, or desperate, that's for sure!) and just sat down waiting for the owner who was in a meeting. My contact again told him to leave, in which he replied that as they didn't seem that bothered in his content points he'd gone and phoned the press office of their supplier, pointing out that the supplier's name wasn't mentioned on the front page of the site, and that the catalogue on the site was out of date (although that's the supplier's fault for not getting the current one sent out until last week!). Strangely enough, that didn't go down too well!

I can appreciate in these times that people are maybe low on work, but honestly, if you're going to try and get new clients, or steal clients from another developer, then do it a bit more ethically and don't treat your prospective new client badly or try to go above them! You really won't make any friends and potentially damage your own reputation.

On a lighter note, shortly after a regular customer of theirs asked for their site developer's details as they loved the site and really liked the functionality and design of it

Child themes allow you to inherit some or all of the files from a parent theme, and then you just override the styles and files you want, and leave the rest intact as normal. Much more efficient for upgrading.

Read the full post at BloggingTips.com – WordPress Theme Inheritance

PS. I promise I'll get back to blogging myself soon! Got so much to write I don't know where to start!!

Another nice point is the ability to run Windows and Linux scripts side by side, which is something I needed back in January for a site that needed Windows to auto update the database nightly into MSSQL (a supplied program from the database provider) but PHP to allow me to write the code, as I've long since forgotten ASP!

Finally, the additional bandwidth costs on this type of hosting are a lot less than standard hosting, around 50% of the cost. A friend who runs a popular entertainment site recently had a shock when a trailer they were hosting became a bit of an internet sensation sending visitor numbers soaring. The only problem is their 24 hours in the spotlight racked up bandwidth bills of almost £700 on their shared hosting account, and that bill was reduced by the hosting company in good faith. If they'd been on cloud hosting then that bill would have been around just half that.

As I mentioned Cloud Hosting is quite new to me, however a good friend of mine has started selling it through his hosting company who I recommend for all types of hosting. The packages are sold on a monthly contract and you get an inclusive bandwidth and space in that price, then any extra you need is charged for at the end of the month, a bit like our pay monthly mobile phone contracts.

So if you've got a site that can go up and down in bandwidth, or have large bandwidth bills, or you need to be able to run PHP and ASP together, then take a look at Cloud Hosting.

Read the full post at Widgetise your Theme.

Read the full post at Creating Theme Options.