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My criteria are simple but important.  The theme has to be unique, responsive, stable, and be easy on the eyes with a lot of white space.  Here are my options.

TA Magazine is decidedly one of the top free responsive magazine theme that I would recommend. No matter hat kind of website you are going for, whether news websites, online magazines, personal blogs or any type of editorial related website. Use this. Why? Here’s why.

Responsive / Bootstrap: It has been made with Bootstrap 3+ and the content adjusts automatically no matter what type of screen the user has.

Custom Widgets: It has a lot of amazing custom widgets. The kinds you would only get in a very expensive premium theme. Just this is good enough to make this theme a real winner. They are – Post Tabs, Ultimate Posts, Popular Posts with thumbnail support, Latest Comments, Silde Show, MailChimp Newsletter.

Theme customization: The theme has a ton of theme customizations. You can easily customize homepage modules and blog listing styles. So go ahead and try whatever you can do.

Hueman is a fully featured, responsive high resolution magazine & blog theme. Believe me, it has a whole lot of options that will make this theme one of the best you have used. Here are some of the features.

Flexible Layout: You can use a left, right or both sidebars. And they are easy to configure.

Social Sharing: This is such a big problem with so many blogs I have created on WordPress. You never seem to get the right plug-in. So, am I glad that they have integrated Sharrre Which not only has high-res share buttons but also counts for each posts!

Related Posts and Navigation: It has an awesome way to show the Related posts under every article. Not just that, the theme also comes with navigation for links to previous and next article in the sidebar.

Post Formats: We have a number of Post Formats for this theme – Audio, Aside, Chat, Gallery, Image, Link, Quote, Status, and Video. That’s a lot of stuff for free!

OptionTree Framework: It has fully integrated OptionTree, a fantastic theme options framework. It helps to use Theme Options panel locally with an easy to use drag & drop interface.

Point is a free theme with several premium functionalities.  It has custom post meta information boxes and styled widgets.  Point uses the Options Panel to tweak and customize the theme.

Flexible background: The theme offers the tool where you can set a variety of different backgrounds, from patterns to colors, and textures.

Related Posts:  The theme comes with an excellent and clean “Related Posts” functionality.

Trending posts and Nice Header with Menu: The Header with the menu looks very nice and it has a Trending posts options as well for the posts.

We would highly recommend this theme for your blog.

Expound is very clean responsive theme with a lot of white space.  It supports the post formats functionality.  Although it is a WordPress.com theme, still it can be downloaded and used for your own wordpress site.

Photopress is a beautiful magazine theme with a lot of amazing stuff.  You can download the theme from here.  It was recently released in March 2015.

• Responsive
• Retina Ready
• Featured Content Areas
• Main Slider
• 3d Slider
• Showcase Areas.
• Multiple Blog Layouts
• Built on Customizer for Live Editing of the theme.
• SEO Friendly
• Customizable Menu

The post 5 Amazing and Beautiful Free WordPress Magazine Themes 2015 appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

The three types of pages that WordPress is divided into are:

1. Front Page
2. Single Post page
3. Multi-post page (category page, archive page or search)

Now, each of these pages have typically these components within their code.  Remember: We are taking of a plain and vanilla structure.  We could get more complicated structures to do different things.  But this is the basic minimum!

Front Page has:

index.php
header.php
sidebar.php
footer.php

Single Post page has:

single.php
header.php
sidebar.php
footer.php
comments.php

And the Multi-post page has:

index.php
category.php
404.php
search.php
header.php
sidebar.php
footer.php

All these are neatly structured in one whole via the WordPress code overall.  The Rarst’s diagram explains the WordPress structure in the best possible way.  Check this out.

Diagram courtesy: Tom Macfarlin

Also please check out the following links for more information:

WordPress Semantics

Glossary ” WordPress Codex

Featured Image Courtesy: Flickr

The post How is WordPress structured and why is it structured as such? appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

While many articles are out there for bloggers on how to write titles that work best with the searches and key words, it is also important to be grammatically consistent.  Specially if you want your blog to carry weight in the minds of educated readers.  After all, those who have learnt English properly will find your writing jarring even when it carries important information.  Let us go through 8 important lessons in writing good headlines for maximum impact.

1. Keep ’em Short: Long Headlines hurt in many ways. Most importantly, they are truncated by several sites which may carry your articles. Also, it takes away the punch that may draw any reader to your article. As Ogilvy says, Headlines are 80% of the whole impact.

2. Don’t copy the lede: A lede is the introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story (or excerpt in the case of blogs). Don’t simply copy the words from the lede into the headline or it will be jarring and repetitive!

3. Should be here and now:  The headlines should be direct, straightforward, in active voice, and in present tense.  The idea is to make the headlines as powerful as they can be and not be “beating around the bush”.

4. Don’t be vague and inaccurate: Correct, consistent and factual headlines always help.  Those which are inaccurate, inconsistent and vague having little or no relationship with the body of the article and the points therein or just plain inaccurate on their own show the writer in a very bad light!

5. Headlinese has its own rules:  Headlinese is the word used for abbreviated writing style that is used in newspaper headlines.  Some of the rules, contrary to normal grammar rules in similar sentences, have become the norm around the world.  Editors have acknowledged the paucity of space and characters and the need to convey ideas in a short format.  Some of the important and interesting rules of Headlinese are:

• Articles are usually omitted.
• Most verbs are in the simple present tense, e.g. “Governor signs bill”.
• The future is expressed as “to” followed by a verb, e.g. “Governor to sign bill”.
• In the US (but not the UK), conjunctions are often replaced by a comma, as in “Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap”.
• To save space, a long word is sometimes replaced by a shorter word with not quite the same meaning, e.g. “attack” to mean “criticize”.
• Country names are often used instead of their adjective form, for example “Belgium troops deploy to patrol streets” (instead of “Belgian troops…”).

6. Capitalize or not to capitalize:  The jury is out there and it has become a matter of individual choice.  Whatever you do, follow it consistently.  So, the choice is – The first word in the headline should be capitalized as should all proper nouns vs capitalize the first letter of every word.  But surely follow the following – Capitalize the first word, capitalize the proper nouns, and do capitalize the first word after a colon.  If you choose to capitalize every word as per your choice, then follow it consistently.

7. Bring on the numbers baby: In the headlines, it is always recommended to use the numbers and not spelling them out.   Even if that number is below 10, you don’t need tto spell it out.

8. To be or not to be is the question: Verbs like to be, is, was etc are not necessary and should be omitted.  Unless it is absolutely necessary for clarity, these verbs shouldn’t be part of the headlines.

Image source: Flickr

The post 8 Rules for Writing Grammatically Correct Headlines appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

In those two pursuits – Creativity and Revenue – lies a conflict at times.  How do we create something awesome and make sure it sells?  This has been the challenge for every advertiser for ages as it is now for every blogger.

So, to get some help, I thought it would be useful to go to that icon of advertising, David Ogilvy.  In his book “Ogilvy on Advertising”, Ogilvy gives his top advise on how to do saleable creative work.  Sometimes ruthless, sometime simple, but always looking at the end in question.

Ignore this great advise at your own peril if you want to make your blog BIG!

1. Go Big or Go Home: Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.
2. Do Your Homework Well: Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
3. Never Talk down to Your Customers: A consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence, and don’t shock her.
4. The Headline is 80%: On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
5. Don’t Get Distracted from Making the Sale: If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.
6. Explain Why They Should Buy: The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
7. Your Copy Is Important. Treat It That Way: Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.

Image source: Flickr

The post 7 Amazing Tips from Ogilvy on Creativity that Sells appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

United States

Tech blogs
– Techcrunch.com
– Mashable.com
– Venturebeat.com
– Readwriteweb.com
– Arstechnica.com
– Businessinsider.com/sai
– Gigaom.com
– Webware.com
– Centernetworks.com
– TheVerge.com
– http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs
– Allthingsd.com
– Techland.com
– Lifehacker.com
– Slashdot.org
– Boingboing.net
– Techdirt.com
– Technologizer.com
– Dailytech.com
– Paidcontent.org
– Inquisitr.com
– Makeuseof.com
– Techweb.com
– Sitepoint.com
– Techvibes.com
– Killerstartups.com
– Networkworld.com
– Infoq.com
– Building43.com
– Xconomy.com
– Techrepublic.com
– SiliconAngle.com
– Splatf.com
– BetaBeat.com
– TechCocktail.com
– Tech.li
– Pandodaily.com
– GeekWire.com
– Medacity.com

Social news sites
– http://news.ycombinator.com
– Digg.com
– Reddit.com
– Metafilter.com
– http://buzz.yahoo.com/
– Newsvine.com
– Fark.com
– Mixx.com
– Dzone.com

Online tech publications
– Wired.com
– http://news.zdnet.com
– http://news.cnet.com
– http://tech.yahoo.com
– Oreilly.com
– Eweek.com
– Huffingtonpost.com/news/technology
– http://sciencedaily.com/news/com…
– Discovermagazine.com/topics/technology
– http://money.cnn.com/technology
– Osnews.com
– Infoworld.com
– Itworld.com
– Internet.com

Offline and online tech publications
– http://newscientist.com/blog/tec…
– Technologyreview.com
– Informationweek.com
– Pcworld.com
– Pcmag.com
– Fastcompany.com/topics/technology
– Scientificamerican.com/computing
– Makezine.com
– Entrepreneur.com/technology
– Popsci.com/technology
– Extremetech.com
– Computerworld.com
– Cio.com

General publications with tech sections
– http://online.wsj.com/public/pag…
– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com
– washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/technology
– ft.com/companies/technology
– http://brainstormtech.blogs.fort…
– usatoday.com/tech/
– newsweek.com/id/38590
– forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=308
– businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat
– http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/…
– sfgate.com/technology
– siliconvalley.com
– observer.com/tech
– idg.com/www/idgproducts.nsf/typeform?readform&type=website (273 tech related properties)

Twitter lists
Robert Scoble’s list:
– http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/te…

Mario Sundar’s list:
– http://twitter.com/mariosundar/b…

TECH PUBLICATIONS AND BLOGS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES

United Kingdom 
General publications with tech sections:
– guardian.co.uk/technology
– telegraph.co.uk/technology
– theregister.co.uk/software
– theinquirer.net
– bbc.co.uk/news/technology (and bbc.co.uk/news/business-11428889)

Blogs
– Silicon.com
– Thenextweb.com (UK/Netherlands)
– kernelmag.com

Spain
– wwwhatsnew.com

Germany
– T3n.de
– Gruenderszene.de
–

Deutsche-startups.de
– Basicthinking.de/blog
– Netzwertig.com

Ireland
– Siliconrepublic.com

India
– Pluggd.in

Israel
– Go2web20.net

Featured Image: photo credit: Jason A. Samfield via photopin cc

The post List of Top Tech blogs, Social news, offline and online publications from the Tech World appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

The post 25 Basic Styles of Blogging appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

Related articles from External Sites

• Looking for Guest Bloggers: Is That You?
• Guest Post ~ Run to Jesus by Naomi Fata
• I am accepting guest bloggers
• Guest Blog Post: Five Ways to Build Links With Quality Blog Content
• Google’s Current Stance on Guest Blogging
• 5 Tips for Building Great Guest Blogging Relationships

The post Benefits of Guest Blogging (Infographic) appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

A little more on Alfresco for the uninitiated.

Alfresco is a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Alfresco comes in three flavors:

• Alfresco Community Edition is free software, LGPL^[2] licensed open source and open standards. It has some important limitations in terms of scalability and availability, since the clustering feature has been removed from the community repository and is only available in the enterprise edition.^[3]
• Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially & proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.
• Alfresco Cloud Edition (Alfresco in the cloud) is the SaaS version of Alfresco.

I found a video on how to integrated both these applications and create a strong Document-Content Management platform for your company.

 

Related articles from External Sites

• Alfresco 4.2.d: The Public API & some CMIS changes you should be aware of
• Discover the full scope and power of Alfresco 4 with Packt’s new book and eBook
• Alfresco Summit 2013: Live coverage from Barcelona
• Nfocus Alfresco Event
• Alfresco Summit 2013 preview: 5 things you can’t miss
• Five of your favorite Alfresco-related presentations

The post How to integrate Alfresco 4.2.b with Drupal 7 appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

Crowdfunding theme

Here are some of the features:

• PROJECTS: Users can submit projects to your crowdfunding site, embed media (videos, photo galleries, featured image), set fundraising goals, and post updates.
• SPONSORS: Sponsors can register their own account to submit and manage projects, track contributions, and interact with fundraising contributors.
• ACCOUNTS: Supporters can quickly and easily register an account via Facebook, edit their profile, view receipts for past contributions, and earn credit for referring friends.
• ACCEPT PAYMENTS: Crowdfunding site utilizes the GBS platform and comes integrated with PayPal Adaptive Payments, PayPal Express Checkout PayPal Website Payments Pro, Authorize.net, and NMI Payments. More GBS payment gateway integrations can be purchased in the GBS marketplace.
• FUNDRAISING REPORTS: From the dashboard the administrators and sponsors can see how many contributions have been made, if minimum and maximum contribution limits were attained, and the expiration date of the project.
• SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of your fundraising business. Search engines must quickly and easily locate and index your content so people can find it. Our fundraising theme for WordPress utilizes proper standards to improve your website’s visibility.
• INSTANT UPDATES: Updating to a new version is a dead simple process. You just click on the update link that appears with a new version is available and you’re done. There’s not need to launch your FTP client and upload anything.
• SUPPORT: As a member you have access to the video tutorials and documentation. Our members forum is an active community where users can interact with each other and seek assistance from our support team.
• FACEBOOK & TWITTER INTEGRATION: Users can register and login with their Facebook account, share projects on Facebook and Twitter, as well as automatically post to their Facebook and Twitter accounts via RSS feeds.
• EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION: Our crowdfunding theme comes with MailChimp and Constant Contact already integrated. You simply signup for an account with either service provider and enter your API key to being capturing email addresses from subscribers.
• WEBSITE BLOG: Our fundraising theme for WordPress allows you to run your own crowdfunding site and blog on the same website. Blogs are an effective tool for communicating with your customers, growing a following, and improving your site’s influence as a market leader.
• PROJECT BLOGS: Each project has its own blog where sponsors can post updates for a given project and include embeddable videos or photo galleries from Flickr. The project sponsors can also reply to comments and questions from their project supporters.
• UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES: Our crowdfunding software utilizes the GBS platform and WordPress so you can easily add new features through the numerous GBS add-ons and WordPress plugins that are available. What’s more, the software is unencrypted so you can add your own custom design or hire a proficient GBS developer to build any custom feature or design you need.
• EASY WEBSITE MANAGEMENT: Our crowdfunding software runs in combination with WordPress providing you with a fully functional and easy to use website. There’s no technical skills needed to creating a project, add a new page, or write a blog post. You can easily upload images, paste embed codes from YouTube or Flickr into any page/post/project, and quickly add and modify text using the WYSIWYG editor.
• CUSTOMIZATION: Crowd Funding Site can be used to create a traditional crowdfunding website or customized to serve a single organization (e.g. charities, churches, etc.) with multiple fundraising projects. Administrators can easily change the logo, add a background, select font types, and choose from several color schemes. An experienced WordPress developer, can apply custom CSS/code since the software is unencrypted.

 Funder:  Crowdfunding theme (UoU Apps)

This theme uses the Astoundify Plugin and Easy Digital Payments, uses the Bootstrap framework.  The theme is very beautiful and user friendly.

Fundingpress: Crowdfunding

Fundingpress is a WordPress theme that allows you to create your own crowdfunding site.Users will be able to create projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others.

Fundify

This theme has many outstanding features and has multiple gateways to use.

• Front End Campaign Submission Form
• Embeddable Project Widget, Helps Gain Exposure For Your Campaign, Embed Anywhere On The Web.
• Split Payments Between Site Admin & Campaign Author (Using PayPal Adaptive Payments)
• Support For PayPal Standard Payments (Free Plugin)
• Supports Both Fixed Campaign Style & Flexible Campaign Style
• Custom Integration for WePay Pre-Approved Billing Gateway (Paid Plugin)
• Custom Integration for Stripe Pre-Approved Billing Gateway (Paid Plugin)
• Custom Integration for PayPal Adaptive Payments Gateway (Paid Plugin)
• XML Dummy Content Included For Easy Setup
• Responsive Design (Optimized for iPad and iPhone)
• Full Localisation Support (contains .po/.mo files)
• Full Design Customization i.e. Logo, Background, Text Colours See Here
• 4+ Custom Widgets
• WordPress 3.6+ Ready (Menus & Featured Images)
• Page Templates (Home, Archives, Full Width, Contact Form, Login Form)
• Built on the _s Theme Framework
• Compatible With Our Free Crowdfunding Plugin
• Extensive Documentation
• Supports 20+ Payment Gateways i.e. Stripe, Google Checkout, etc (From EasyDigitalDownloads.com)

Franklin Crowdfunding Theme

This theme is responsive, elegant, and light theme.  The main features are: unlimited colours with 6 pre-set colour palettes, 8 background textures, 5 custom widgets (Campaign Updates, Campaign Video, Campaign Pledge Levels, Campaign Backers, Sofa Posts), widgetzied campaign page, blog section and more.

The post Top 5 WordPress Themes for Crowdfunding Sites appeared first on Blogging Buddy.

Let us look at some of these.

Directory theme from Templatic

The Directory theme is by far the best alternative you have.  Although, predictably, a bit expensive.  Specially with all its add-ons, which make it extremely powerful!  It is a true Yelp alternative in many ways.

The features are really excellent and include the following:

The Add-ons for this theme which make it really powerful are:

Event Manager: $49

Ad Manager: $39

Multi-Rating: $39

Admin Dashboard: $39

Prevent Duplicate Entry: $9

The theme is for $99.  So the total of this entire package will be around $265.

Buy    Demo

Glocal Directory Theme

This is another excellent Directory theme.  The Glocal Listing theme has the following features:

The site is available from Themeforests.

Buy  Demo

Atlas Directory and Listings Theme

One can use the theme to register, login, edit your profile, submit listings, change your membership and so much more from the front-end as well as has a built in membership system.

Buy   Demo

Business Finder Directory Theme

This is another beautiful theme with a lot of great features.

• Easy Login via menu button
• Ability to change map color
• Top rated items section
• Newest items section
• Special offers
• Reviews section
• Social icons on item detail page
• Gallery on item detail page
• Easy Admin – beautiful frontend-like access to listing registration and administration without distractions
• Claiming a listing
• Geolocate support
• Frontend registration for guests
• Guests can administer their own listings
• Paypal payments integration
• Paypal recurring payments support
• Interactive Ajax Search
• Ability to get pointer on the map from address
• Administrator can define packages and set the price
• Advertising spaces
• Custom built Rating system
• Contact form on listing detail page
• Listing by location or category
• Featured items
• Listing sorting

Buy  Demo

Geothemes

This theme has taken many avatars and now it is a real kick ass theme!

Demo  Buy 

The post 5 Top Directory Listing Themes on WordPress; Create a Site like Yelp! appeared first on Blogging Buddy.