Free WordPress Theme Tip

Trim Theme Review

Costa — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:09:09 +0000

Trim Theme, is a minimalistic and simple WordPress Theme released by Elegant Themes. The Theme is available for free download to members of Elegant Themes only. This latest addition brings the total number of Themes that members gets to download to 76 Themes altogether and more are added almost bi-monthly without any extra cost to members. Here’s a review of the latest release called Trim Theme.

Trim Theme Is A Rather Simple Theme

Compared to other previous release, the Trim Theme can be described as “poor in comparison” in terms of glamour and sophistication. It is a refreshing change though as I think there are many, me included, who do not like Themes that are too flashy and would like to stick to simple and clean layouts. If you are one of us, then I feel you will like the Trim Theme very much.

The layout is quite standard among most WordPress Themes. It has your normal header area, with a logo followed by the usual navigation bar. You then have that common post slider followed by content columns below.

The Blog page and the post pages sports the usual two column layout though I must say the post excerpts in the Blog page is very nicely spaced out and very pleasant to look at.

Color And Font Options

The Trim Theme comes with a front-end background and font picker which slides open when you are logged in so you can see the changes in real time when you make changes. It is a feature unique to Elegant Themes and even then, not all Themes has this feature.

Background colors can be changed without limit using the color picker and after changing the color, you also have the option to add a layer of patterned texture over the color to make it look more interesting.

The post header and body fonts can also be changed by choosing from the font library drop-down menu in the options picker. Though the selection of fonts are not very extensive, it should be enough for you to play around with as there are over a dozen choices.

Trim Theme Is A Responsive Theme

As with all new WordPress Themes, the Trim Theme is also a Responsive Theme that can be viewed perfectly in all mobile devices.

It is also good to know that Elegant Themes is in the process of upgrading all the other existing Themes in their stable to become responsive.

Other Options That Comes With The Trim Theme

The Trim Theme comes with all the default options that comes with every other WordPress Themes released by Elegant Themes. These include the popular ePanel for easy Theme customization and the collection of shortcodes for additional convenience if you want to add extra stuffs.

You also have a collection of pre-made Page Templates that you can use for different purposes in your site.

Trim Theme Review Conclusion

This Theme is nothing like the Gleam Theme that was released before this. You will not be struck with awe the first moment you look at it.

The Trim Theme is a theme that needs time to be appreciated. The more and the longer you look at it, the more you will appreciate it’s simplicity and no frills layout. It is also a Theme you will not easily get bored with, reason being, it is already quite boring from the start.

If you are a member of Elegant Themes, you can download the Trim Theme for free with immediate effect.

If you are not, JOIN NOW FOR FREE ACCESS TO THE 76 PREMIUM THEMES AVAILABLE.

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Basics Of Creating A WordPress Child Theme

Costa — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:20:40 +0000

For those who cannot afford premium themes like the Catalyst where you can create child themes of your own on the fly, the easy alternative is to manually create a child Theme on your own. Though it might sound daunting for some, creating a WordPress Child Theme is as simple as creating a new CSS file and nothing more.

Why You Should Create A Child Theme

Basically, the WordPress Child Theme’s only purpose is to change the way the Theme looks without messing with the core files. Thus all you need is a CSS file which overrides the codes in the original. By doing this separately with a child theme rather than changing things in the original file, you have the assurance of keeping the original intact if ever something goes wrong.

Of course more advanced coders can go on to add many other files like custom functions file, page options file and so on, the purpose is still the same and that is to avoid changing things in the core.

For those who wants to try their hands at creating their own WordPress Child Themes, this video will give you a head start. Watch the video while following the transcript below will make it easier to understand.

TRANSCRIPTION FOR “BASICS OF CREATING A WORDPRESS CHILD THEME”

Having a child theme is very important and I even go so far as to say mandatory if you plan to customize your WordPress themes at all. You see, without a child theme you take the risk of all of your custom work going bye bye with every single update from WordPress. Yeah, maybe not so much now with the version 3.2.1 of WordPress onwards because of some of their newer methods of updating but hey why take the chance?

Now, what I mean by WordPress’ newer method of updating is that now only the files in their update are the files that have actually changed not the entire WordPress file set. But, if your customizations are located in the style.css and that happens to be one of those change files with the next update, then, poof! All of your custom work is gone. Okay, I think I’ve hit a pretty solid case as to why you should have a child theme. So let’s go ahead and make a child theme.

Now, since we’re going to be doing a lot of editing with code, I’d like to go ahead and suggest to you my favourite text editor and that will be notepadplus+. I say this is my favourite because well, one it’s free it has got a lot of bells and whistles and the lines are numbered so it’s easier for you to follow along with me so that I could just save along this line..such and such..You’ve to change this. This way kind of eliminates a lot of the S word. Oh and did I mention that it’s free? So, go ahead and download notepadplus+ if you did not already have your favourite text editor in play. So, (time stamp: 1:31) that out of the way, go ahead and get that done.

Now, I’m going to go ahead and open up my text editor, notepadplus+ and in this text editor, I’ve put in this style.css and you get this from the latest download from WordPress. If you head on over to wordpress.org, (time stamp: 1:49) another tab here, right here on the front page go ahead and download this if you don’t already have it and then unzip this on your computer and in that is going to be all the files you’re ever going to need. Even if you already got WordPress installed go ahead and have this on standby just in case something gets screwed up along the way. You’ve got this, you can just upload that particular file and overwrite the screwed up file. If that makes sense and then you’re back to where you were before you screwed up that file.

So, in this folder, once you’ve downloaded it and unzipped it is the style.css for the 2011 theme. Let me just pull this up real quick and I’ll show you what I’m talking about. Okay, once you’ve downloaded and unzipped your 3.2.1 folder, then it’s going to look like this. You just open that up, and inside the wp/content, you are looking for themes and you open that up. Look for 2011, open that up and scroll on down to the right bottom and you’ve got this style.css. Now, then you just go ahead and pull this out. Do not edit the original, pull this out and save it in another folder somewhere maybe folder title ‘customizations’ for example. In addition to that, we’re also going to take a screenshot. Kind of like this but as I hover over this one here and you see the dimensions are 300 x 225 and it’s a png file. Keep that in mind, that’ll come up later on.

Anyway, now that you’ve got that out of the way, I want you to close this out and come on back to our style.css file. Now, to create a child theme, what we want to do is copy some code from wordpress.org’s codex related to child theme. So let’s go back to my browser for a second and we’re done with this page but let’s go over to this one here. We are at url, http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Theme. Don’t forget to capitalize the ‘Child’ and the ‘Theme’ and the underscore, otherwise you are going to get a page not found there.

So, with that said, we want to scroll on down here to..right here. Yup, right here. We want to just copy this into our clipboard. Don’t worry about what it says. We’ll just copy that into our clipboard. I’ll get to what it says here in just a minute and inside our style.css that we’ve taken out of that one folder, we save it in another folder. As a matter of fact, we’re going to do that now.

Now, I’ve gone ahead and created a folder on my computer titled ‘WordPress’ and inside of that folder I’ve created another folder titled ‘2011-child’. Then, inside this folder is where I’m going to keep all my files related to my child theme. And if we just open this up, put that guy in there and here we are. Now then what we want to do is we want to delete everything in here so I’m just going to control key on my keyboard, hold that down, hit the letter ‘A’ as in apple, selects everything, hit the delete key. Delete everything as you can see we’re back to line one nothing’s on here and I’m going to paste that code that I copied from the wordpress.org site related to child theme. So let’s go over this real quick.

There’s only two lines in here that are actually mandatory. The rest of this suggests a fluffer eye-candy or you know, optional. The mandatory items are the theme name and the template. The rest of this stuff can be anything you want. I’d say leave it in there especially if down the line you might plan to say, flip this site or sell this WordPress site or theme and in the event that you do, then you’ve got some items here that might point back to you know, it might churn out some little extra business your way. But, for example the author (time stamp: 5:17), you can put your url in here point to the ‘about’ page to us folks a little bit more about you. Your name here and the description, you can be as wordy as you want or as limited as you want. Again, this is totally up to you, totally optional. I’ll show you here in a second where this is going to show up now.

Now, quick rundown is to how a child theme performs in the browsers. The child theme style.css file takes precedent over the parent theme. In this case, that’ll be the 2011 theme. In other words, as far as the browser’s concerned, the parent theme style.css no longer exists as soon as the child comes into the picture. There might be certain times especially the way that I’m going to be doing things when you want elements of the parent theme style.css to come into play and to do that we have this simple little line of code that you want to put in here and if we come back to the wordpress.org’s child theme paged. Let me see if I could find it in here somewhere. Right here we go. This pulls in the style.css from the 2011 directory within that folder. This brings to mind another important fact. It is that the child theme folder and we haven’t uploaded that yet but when we do, the child theme folder needs to be in the same directory or the same folder that contains the parent theme folder. I’ll cover that here in just a sec as soon as we get done making this and getting it uploaded.

But now, I got this in my clipboard and I’m back over to our notepadplus+ and right here we want to paste that little bit of code in there. Now this is another little tip, bit of info, there can be zero .css styling above this url right here. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Just bear with me. You don’t do it. Now you can’t put this down here and then have a bunch of css stuff up here. It’s not going to work. So, that’s why I put this underneath the head info right here. Let me see here, I think that’s basically it. This by the way is our child theme. Let’s go ahead and save this. Let’s upload this ‘2011-childtheme’ into our directory.

Before you do that, I want to show you something really quick. Go over to the actual WordPress site. I’m going to be demonstrating this on and logging into the dashboard. In the appearance sub-panel under themes, these are the default themes that come with your WordPress installation that being 3.2.1 anyway. That is the 2011 theme that we are going to be messing around with and the older 2010 theme.

And just a quick rundown, that head info, this stuff right here where it says the (time stamp: 7:58) of the author, the template, the version number, all this stuff here, the description. That is this stuff right here.

So, let’s go ahead navigate over to my ftp client, I’m using (time stamp: 8:08) in this case. I’m logged in to the root directory of my WordPress site. And you want to open up the ‘wp-content’ folder, directory folder, whatever and open up the themes folder and then right here in this same folder or directory as the parent theme is where you want to upload the child theme. This is right here. Let’s go ahead and select that and then left-click on upload, and tada! We’re done!

I mean there wasn’t much in there so it’s not going to take long at all. Head back over to the site and let’s go ahead and refresh this. We should have the new theme popped in here. Now as you can see here, this doesn’t look very pretty because there’s no image in there. That screenshot I was showing you earlier that we should also add but it’s not mandatory, it’s optional. You see the information that was in our notepadplus+ like your name here, that’s what showing up here. The author URI right here, so you kind of get an idea what are you can put in here comparing it to the other items that are filled out. If you go ahead and get an image shot or a screenshot in here then you know, we can add that later but this is something we are going to be working with. So, go ahead and activate this. Well, first before you activate this; let me show you what the site looks like right now. This is what it looks like right now.

Let’s go ahead and activate that child theme and you can see it’s activated now. New theme’s activated. Now before we get into this, one thing I want to point out though is the menu structure because really with a functioning child theme, nothing should change at all except since with this child theme we have not yet messed with the custom menu.

Let me just show you what it looks like. I’ll do that. Just refresh the page and you can see the…of course, the header image changed but that’s because it’s 3.2.1. But the rest of it is exactly the same title here. Same everything except for the custom menus is not working right now. This is all the pages that I’ve got on this site right now. So we come up back here and right now I’ve got..This is the original structure but with the changing of the theme, which is exactly what we did from the parent theme to the child theme. The primary menu has not been selected which it used to be main and it is now. And this is the main right now but this is the video on custom menus (I’m not going to go into that). But, if we come back here now and refresh, now it looks exactly like the original did because everything that is on the parent theme is being pulled in except for the style.css unless we have that one line of code right here, which tells the browsers to, ‘oh by the way, pull in everything from the parentthemesstyle.css that is not being loaded down here.’ Anything that you load down here will overwrite this information up here.

So, as we get into these series of videos on customizing our 2011 theme, if say for example, we wanted to change the background colour of the content area, well, the background colour of the content area is already defined in the parent theme, which is being brought in through this right here, but if we define this, (oh so we want it to be red) we want that background colour in the content area to be red by us having this in the child theme, browsers are going to allow the style.css within the child theme take precedence over that same coding within the parent theme so then it will overwrite that chunk of code from the parent theme and make the background red. Hopefully, that makes sense but as we go further into these videos, you’ll see just how much sense it does make and that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on how to create a child theme.

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Costa — Tue, 08 May 2012 03:03:40 +0000

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Where To Download Free Stock Images

Costa — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:15:57 +0000

Gurus say it is good to have at least one image inserted in your blog post. Visually, it will make your post less boring, especially if you tend to write long articles. The image will break the monotony and make reading more pleasurable. On top of that, the image or images will also add a little bit more search juice to your post if you tag your images properly.

Getting images for your blogs is easy and there are lots available for free online. However, each time you use one of those free images, do you get a feeling that the images you are using is somehow not on par with the images you see in those A Lister’s blog?

Royalty Free Stock Images

The reason these big timers can have images that are more professionally produced than the ones used by us is simply because they buy their stock images. Free images you find online are produced mostly by amateur photographers with no consideration for use in websites and blogs. Stock images that you buy, on the other hand, are specially created for use in Web publishing. Thus they look more professional and suitable.

These stock images are royalty free so there is no need for credits or credentials to the creator when you use them. However, royalty is where the “free” stops. You cannot use them for free. Though you do not have to pay royalty or give credit to the creator of these images, you still have to pay for the images if you want to download these images for use.

The most popular destination for web designers and bloggers who needs royalty free images is of course iStock Photos Their photo inventory is very extensive, running into millions of files and the cost is also rather affordable for the average web designer or any successful blogger,

Of course then there are also many alternative sites just like iStock Photos where prices of downloads varies.

Free Stock Images Download

My most recent hunt for free stock images led me to a site called Kozzi. Kozzi seems to have been around for quite sometime so I am quite surprise that each time I search for “free stock images” I somehow do not see this site in the results.

Anyway, this stock images download site operates a little bit differently from the others. Instead of purchasing credits to download your images, Kozzi uses the membership method where you pay a fixed monthly fee. The fees will depend of how many images you want to download daily, and I must add, it is very very affordable.

Membership fees goes for as low as 50 cents per month and for that measly amount, you are allowed 25 downloads per day, which is more than enough for any blogger.

If you are a cheapo or if you only have use for one image per day, you can also stick to the free plan which allows you one single download per day.

Quality Of Free Stock Images

Quality wise, the images are of course not as high as those you find in more established sites, but the images available are much more better suited for use in blogs and web sites. The range of images are also not as extensive, but for 50 cents a month and 25 downloads a day, I can see no reason to complain. What they have is already more than what I need daily.

I chose to pay the 50 cents monthly but if you want to stick to the free plan, you can increase you daily downloads by referring your friends to join. Every 3 successful referral, meaning they sign up for the free membership, will earn you an extra free download daily.

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When Google Penguin Sneezes, The Internet Trembles

Costa — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:30:42 +0000

It’s been quite a horrible week in the Internet or at least for those who depends on the Internet for a living. In fact, it has been horrible since the beast called Panda was released by Google. The Internet is changing so much, so often that it has become impossible to chart your course and where you should be heading if you are one travelling along the precarious Internet highway, most of which is controlled by Google. You can be stopped in the middle of nowhere and forced out of the road with no food, no water and no apparent reason, as reported by many.

For the past week, the Panda evolved into a Penguin. The Penguin, like the Panda though cute and friendly by nature, was never to be in it’s natural form when it has been bred, trained and released by Google. Against the forces of nature, these 2 friendly beasts has become rather ruthless, tearing their way along the Internet, crushing every site deemed offensive to them to oblivion.

It was an all out war and like all wars, there will be innocent victims and casualties of war. There will be collateral damages.

Check this Forum Thread.

Not The First Google Clean-up

For those who has been around long enough, you will know this is not the first time Google waged an all out war against Netizens who has created problems that Google saw as threats to their business and reputation. In 2007, Google went on a bitch slapping spree that had everyone crying for mercy. The 2007 war was a war against paid links and the penalty was your Page Rank getting stripped clean.

The tiny green bar was a big thing back then and to have a blog or a site with a bar that shows no color of green is one big ego buster. Another important thing was, unlike presently, the PR of your site is tied to your PR of your SERPS for your keywords. Without a high page PR, you are as good as dead in the Search Results.

Five years on, after countless smaller wars, came the Panda, something which is so well documented in so many sites that it will be all so boring if I have to repeat it here.

Now comes Penguin, another soon to be well documented Google affair as it is effecting too many people.

The After Effect Of These Google Algorithm Changes

Many have lamented their drastic drop in traffic and in the same tune, many have also boasted that their traffic remains unchanged or have even increased because Google have finally flushed out all those crappy sites that were competing for Search Space in the SERPs.

Whatever it is, since Google is leading the dance, you can never be too sure. So if you see a drop in traffic don’t despair and if you see a spike, don’t rejoice. Not just yet anyway. Nothing in the Internet can be taken for granted these days.

A friendly advise though. If you are fond of being a SEO guru while you are not in reality, stop giving SEO advises. What you said today might make you look real foolish tomorrow. Leave these things to the real gurus who has close proximity with real people in Google INC.

Making Money Online During These Hard Times

I think many will admit that this year has been a bad year. Traffic has dropped across the board for many, including yours truly. In tandem with the drop in traffic, the law of physics says your earnings will drop too.

The unfortunate thing is, in the Internet, if you want to make sales, you depend on Google for that traffic. Social traffic simply do not convert no matter what all those Gurus tells you. Social traffic might be undeniably valuable for other means, but certainly not for making a sale. Unless of course if you have tens of thousands of them licking from your palm, believing every single word you tell them. Then they will buy every damn thing you them them to buy.

For you, for me, if we want to see some sales, we must have Organic traffic. Without that, we will be dead. Or half dead at least. The Panda and now the Penguin has not made it any easier either.

Can You Avoid These Panda And Penguin Updates?

Web Pro News gave 12 Guidelines From Google to avoid being hit by the Penguin, but those are mainly aimed at black hatters and grey hatters.

It has become a tradition that each time there is an update like this, Matt Cutts will always provide you with a list of do’s and don’ts. Believe it or not, you will find that none of the thing in the list applies to you and me, so what is there to avoid?

Unfortunately, the update still effects us, or me at least.

So I have learned to accept the fate and be happy of living under Google’s shadows for the rest of my life in the Internet. Call me a weakling but I don’t have the ability to fight back. I am not wasting my time trying to fight back. There is no point fighting a battle you know you will never win.

But hey, who knows. Maybe there is no battle to be fought. Maybe this Penguin Update will be good thing. When all those crappy sites have been flushed out of the SERPS, there is a possibility that my sites will return to it’s former glory.

Hallelujah.

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