Also a new writer will be joining MyBlogIt, her name is Kellie Reynolds. She will be doing most of the post from this point forward. She will be adding some really good content.

We will also be extending our content topics to include blogging tips, blogging technologies, writing, SEO and many other topics.

I do  plan to make a few post every now and again, but not very often.

Related posts:

1. Who should I write for?
2. Consistent Blogging
3. MyBlogit Updates

Winners of the Revolution Two Pro memberships

cherrie
katrinaelizabeth9

Winner of the SparkplugU Workshop:

Introduction to Starting a Blog Network with Wendy Piersall & Easton Ellsworth

wpthemedesigner

Winner of the SparkplugU Workshop:

Diversify Your Income Workshop with Wendy Piersall & Marla Tabaka

melwinnie

Runner ups

Zambo – 13,000 Entracard Credits from MyBlogIt
aztekh – 2000 Entracard Credits from RandomDetox.com
burnhamhotel – 1000 Credits from TechByPC
claregatenby – 1000 Credits from Singaporean in London
hbk_halaby -500 Credits from Multiply Themes
mr.foolish – 500 Credits from Journal of Journey
tettro – 500 Credits from Cheapest Airfare
wce_amruta – 125×125 ad banner for two weeks from 24patrol
zentron – 1 Free Banner design from Reviewe

Please contact me at: mr.blogit@myblogit.net to redem your prize.

Congrats to the winners! We will do this again very soon.

Related posts:

1. ReLuanch Contest
2. Contest Winner for Jan 18th
3. Advertising options and contest news

It has long been understood by WordPress theme designers that the WordPress leadership has some control issues. These issues come down to their desire to restrain competition from all but a chosen few.

So what brought this up?

Today @andrea_r posted a tweet about 200+ themes that had been removed from the theme viewer. She posted the source of : WordPress.org Pull 200 GPL Themes You should make a point to read Dave’s post.

Why is this so important?

The WordPress blogging platform and it’s success was not just built by the few folks that control it. It has become so popular by the work and equity of those building themes and plugins. Could you just imagine what WordPress would look like without all these great addons?

It would not be nearly successful as is it is today, not by a long shot!

Just a hobby?

Most people that have put their time and energies into developing themes and plugins started as just a way to give back to the software they love and it’s community. But it’s very natural to desire an income from what you enjoy doing.

And why shouldn’t they? Developing themes and plugins while continually working on making changes every few months to insure compatibility with new versions is a lot of work.

So the rules…?

The only way you can a profit from WordPress is by doing custom design work…. Right? Will that change in the near future too?

At some point will WordPress refuse installation on domains of users that use WordPress to blog for profit? You may think this is a rather extreme thought, but then again if those  developers that help make WordPress what it is today are not allowed to make their hobby into a business, is it really that far fetched?

Now I know that WordPress is not stopping them from making their hobby into a business but they are certainly not helping them.

By excluding them from the communities such as the WordPress Theme Library WordPress in my opinion is spitting in the face of the best WordPress contributors.

One last point

Have you noticed that every premium theme on the market has a link proudly proclaiming “Powered By WordPress”.

Maybe we should remove those links? and of course the links in the default blogroll…

Why is this all so important? (part II)

Because when an open source project losses the support of it’s contributors it ether dies or goes commercial.

Related posts:

1. Warning Check your themes
2. WordPress Theme Viewer
3. All You Need to Know About WordPress Themes

Related posts:

1. Mail working with XAMPP
2. The easiest way to upgrade your WordPress blog
3. Your WordPress RSS Feeds

Related posts:

1. The easiest way to upgrade your WordPress blog
2. How fast can you build a WordPress theme
3. Next version of WordPress

How to upgrade WordPress

First download the new files from WordPress.org, unzip the files to your desktop.

Next backup your database.

Next log into your FTP to your WordPress root directory, create 2 new directory called ‘upgrade’ and ‘backup’

Next upload all the new files into the upgrade directory. leave out the wp-content directory.

Now drag all your files in your main directory to your backup directory. but be sure not to move these files: wp-content, .htaccess, and any other files not related to WordPress

Next go back to your upgrade directory and drag all the files to your main WordPress directory.

When that is all done log into your Dashboard and WordPress will walk you through any database updates you might need to do.

We’re almost done, the next step it to upgrade your plug-ins, WordPress can do this for you. just go to the Plug-ins page in your dashboard and do the upgrades one at a time.

You might want to note the name of the plug-ins before you upgrade them just in case they fail.

Last step; go to your blog’s front page and make sure everything is working. Check your archives, categories and single post. Also make sure your Next and Previous links work and that your comments are showing up.

After you have done this a few times it will become very easy and you be able to do it in just a few moments.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Plugin tutorial part 2 The Header
2. Installing or upgrading a WordPress Theme
3. Next version of WordPress

So if you need help or just don’t care to learn all the pesky info needed to do it yourself take a look at the services I’m offering. WordPress install, upgrade and fixing WordPress issues.

If you have questions or comments feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. MyBlogIt has a new look
2. The easiest way to upgrade your WordPress blog
3. MyBlogit Updates

The prizes:

Workshop
SparkplugU Workshop: Diversify Your Income Workshop with Wendy Piersall & Marla Tabaka ($49 value)
SparkplugU Workshop: Introduction to Starting a Blog Network with Wendy Piersall & Easton Ellsworth ($35 value)

WordPress Themes
2 Revolution Two Pro memberships

Entrecard Credits
13,000 Credits from MyBlogit.net
2000 Credits from RandomDetox.com
1000 Credits from TechByPC
1000 Credits from Singaporean in London
500 Credits from Multiply Themes
500 Credits from Journal of Journey
500 Credits from Cheapest Airfare

Ad Space
125×125 ad banner for two weeks from 24patrol

Banner Design
1 Free Banner design from Reviewe

How To Enter

You must be an email subscribe to MyBlogit.net RSS.

You can earn extra points by doing the following:
Tweet & or Plurk the contest once per day (4 points)
Follow Me on Twitter (5 points)
Blog about the contest (75 points + 10 per contest sponsor links)
Social Bookmark the contest (10 points)

Your Name will go in the drawing for each point you earn. Please let me know what you have done to earn points with this contact form

The winners will be selected via a randomizing program on Dec 21, and will be listed as a post on MyBlogIt.net

Sponsors

I will continue to add sponsor throughout the contest. If you would like to be add to the list of sponsors please drop me a line via the contact form.

GOOD LUCK!

Related posts:

1. Contest winners
2. Advertising options and contest news
3. Contest Winner for Jan 18th

Check your theme for the not so nice

After downloading your newly found WordPress theme unzip the files look for a file called functions.php with a text editor. Look for anything that looks like this:

What we have here is a cheap and easy encryption method. The bad news is we don’t know what the heck is in there. It could be anything from simple link back code to a algorithm allowing backend access to your WordPress dashboard.

If you find code even remotely like this don’t use the theme. Maybe another day I’ll show how to decode this.

Next look in the image directory; There should not be any text or php files in this directory. If you find one take a look for the same type code as above.

When I tear into a theme I open every file looking for any encription. I have seen themes with link backs in the 404 files too.

Title and Keywords

Many theme designers are very lazy when it comes to the title and keywords.  Most will use a very simple title such as this:

<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>

So lets get started, open the header.php file.
I would suggest changing it to something like this:

<title>
<?php
if (is_home()) {
echo bloginfo(‘name’); echo “: “; echo bloginfo(‘description’);
} elseif (is_404()) {
echo ’404 Not Found’;
} elseif (is_category()) {
echo ‘Topics:’; wp_title(”);
} elseif (is_search()) {
echo ‘Search Results’;
} elseif (is_day() || is_month() || is_year() ) {
echo ‘Archives:’; wp_title(”);
} else {
echo wp_title(”);
$subtitle = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Subtitle’, $single = true);
if($subtitle !== ”) { echo ‘: ‘ . $subtitle; }
} ?>
</title>

Keywords

Most theme designers will not offer any keywords or will often use their own in the keywords meta tags.

so find this:

and change theme to your keywords.

WordPress Version

This is meta tag that is really not needed. You really don’t want hackers to know what version of WordPress your using. So just remove this entire meta tag.

Footer

Now open the footer.php file and look for the that encrypted code as we talked about before. Most themers who make themes for sponsors will add encryption so that you don’t remove the sponsor’s link.

But then again, there could be more in the code than just some simple link code.

Tracking code

Now don’t forget to add your tracking code for google analytic, mybloglog….

Did I miss anything?

Related posts:

1. WordPress Theme Tags: ‘bloginfo’
2. Adding A Guest Blogger Intro Block
3. Installing or upgrading a WordPress Theme

Could you tell us a little about yourself
Thanks for asking. I am Sunny Nathan, a 32 year old husband, professional engineer and a part time web developer. I started learning HTML and CSS out of a desperate need to create database driven sites for a not for profit foundation I co-found with a school mate from Canada.

Where do you find your creative inspiration?
I am perpetually on the learning curve, since this is not my primary occupation I have not had an opportunity to obtain any formal academic training. With that said, I draw inspiration from many sources, magazines, television, the Internet, pretty much anything I encounter. I have lately taken to Blueprint CSS and I might use it in all future contractual work, maybe eventually use it to design free themes.

What tools do you use?
As of now, I am using Photoshop and notepad, I hand code the CSS and XHTML, so I seldom use any editors.

How much time do you spend on each theme?
Anywhere between 3 to 8 hours to design and validate, again some themes never see the light of day, so it totally depends on my mood.

Why do you do design themes for WordPress?
Mostly because people have come to expect of HeadsetOptions and MandarinMusing. We started off making themes to develop relationship with our user base and we feel it is a good way to give back to the wonderful WordPress community.

What is your favorite snack while hacking away at your themes?
I barely snack, but I do drink tons of coffee. I sometime work with the TV on, just to catch the news or a rerun of Seinfeld while coding.

Not including your own themes; What is some of your favorites?
I like most of the themes by Design Disease. Theron Parlin and Derek Punsalan make pretty nifty themes; Brian Gardner, Darren Hoyt (who I found out recently is geographically the closest well-known designer to me), Small Potato are some designers who are consistently good, I like hoards of other themes, too many to mention, but pretty much anything that gets of wpSnap is in my opinion pretty high up on my list.

What are some of your favorite hang outs on the web?
Frankly I do not get online as much as I would like to, I usually hit my Google Reader to catch on feeds, visit Seth Godin at least once a day ever since I moved from being a researcher to a marketer at my day job, and the rest are usually for emails and site updates. I visit your site every time I see you on my MyBlogLog friends list; I seldom log into MyBlogLog myself though.

When not at your desk, what do you do for fun?
My wife and I catch up on our respective experiences each day, we usually end up discussing politics, books or just about anything our mind wanders into. We watch a lot of classic thrillers; we both are Hitchcock fans and have only a handful of movies to go before we have seen em all!

Do you design for any other CMS?
TextPattern and Joomla, however WordPress is my favorite.

Where do you see WordPress heading in the future?
Undoubtedly towards becoming the most popular and the best free CMS in the world. It’s only a matter of time.

Be sure to check out some of Sunny’s themes.

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1. Interview with ChiQ Montes
2. Featured Theme Designer: Moses Francis
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