Please be noticed, I myself am not 100% satisfied with what I've figured out, but the hacks have been working absolutely fine for over 2 months on my XP SP3 and Vista SP1. And as always, you do this at your own risk. Read on if we understand each other.

Photoshop CS4 (Extended)

1. Navigate to /Adobe CS4/payloads/.
2. Open /AdobeBridge3All/AdobeBridge3All.proxy.xml with a text editor.
3. Search for <Dependencies>.
4. Delete everything within <Dependencies>, except two blocks with type="critical", make it look exactly like screenshot #1.
5. Open /AdobePhotoshop11-Core/AdobePhotoshop11-Core.proxy.xml, repeat step 3-4, make it look exactly like screenshot #2.
6. Save both files. Oh did I tell you to backup first?
7. Run setup and wave goodbye to craps.

Illustrator CS4

If you already edited AdobeBridge3All.proxy.xml in a previous Photoshop installation and successfully got rid of Adobe Bridge, you won't need to touch the one in Illustrator. Otherwise, treat it the same way (step 1-4 of the Photoshop section above).

Then, yes, /AdobeIllustrator14mul/AdobeIllustrator14mul.proxy.xml, and here's screenshot #3 for your referrence.

Design Premium CS4

Files you need to edit are:

• /AdobeBridge3All/AdobeBridge3All.proxy.xml
• /AdobeDreamweaver10-mul/AdobeDreamweaver10-mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobeFireworks10All/AdobeFireworks10All.proxy.xml
• /AdobeFlash10-mul/AdobeFlash10-mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobeIllustrator14mul/AdobeIllustrator14mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobeInDesign6AppBase-mul/AdobeInDesign6AppBase-mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobePhotoshop11-Core/AdobePhotoshop11-Core.proxy.xml
• /AdobeVersionCue4All/AdobeVersionCue4All.proxy.xml

Edit how? You've already learned that.

One tip is, if you kept, let's say "Adobe XMP Panels CS4" in one of the xml files, you can delete it when you see it else wheres.

I don't use anything other than Photoshop and Illustrator, so I'm unable to tell you which components are required by other products included in a Creative Suite. Sorry.

Miscellaneous

I'm not gonna guide you through Dreamweaver or Web Premium or anything else neither. Hopefully you can draw inferences about other cases from the above examples.

You're gonna have to trust Adobe this time, what's been tagged as "critical" in the xml files are indeed critical. Sky falls down if you remove them. Here are my understandings (some are just superficial) to several important components. They are required by the CS4 apps or recommended by me:

• Adobe Anchor Service CS4
  The Lord that rules.
• Adobe CSI CS4
  The infrastructure that rules, too. I guess the VersionCue Client service which enables the "Open File" dialogs is also included in here.
• Adobe Type Support CS4
  Support for layers with texts/fonts.
• Adobe XMP Panels CS4
  Support for the "File Info" dialogs.
• Adobe CMaps CS4 / Adobe ALM CS4
  Required by Illustrator (?)
• Adobe Color - Photoshop Specific CS4
• Adobe Color NA Recommended Settings CS4
• Adobe Color CommonSetRGB
• Adobe Color CommonSetCMYK

At last, my apologies again for I didn't have time and energy to present a more detailed and refined tutorial. Hope as many folks as possible can benefit from this post. Merry Christmas.

ImgBurn has always been the perfect replacement. It's free, it's compact and it's powerful. I will also recommend to you the open source InfraRecorder. Ok, I won't go too far.

The official component (or say "plugin") foo_burninate.dll enables foobar2000 of burning discs, but it needs to invoke the Nero API, which means Nero is required to be installed. Canar from hydrogenaudio forum provided an alternative, yet it didn't satisfy me.

Let me get this straight: You want to burn discs using foobar2000 but don't want to keep Nero. You take all necessary files from Nero, then wipe it off your hard drive, and you cheat foobar2000 into thinking that Nero is still present.

I've been doing this for like 3 years, treated a ton of lossless stuff, and it's proved to be fairly reliable. Read on if you wanna know how, but you hack at your own risk.

1. Get Nero Burning ROM v6.6.1.15c, install it. I picked this version because it's relatively small. I haven't tested this with 7.x or greater.

2. Copy these 10 files from where Nero has been installed, put them to (for example) "D:\foobar2000\nero\".

CDROM.CFG / CDROM.dll / Generatr.dll / image.dll / MMC.dll / Nero.txt / neroAPI.dll / neroErr.dll / neRSDB.dll / newtrf.dll

3. Open notepad and ctrl c/v the following codes, save it as nero.reg, then merge them into Windows registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ahead\shared]
"NeroAPI"="D:\\foobar2000\\nero"

4. If there's a 4th step, it's only supposed to be the uninstallation of Nero. Happy burning with foobar2000!

Updated: I seem to remember that you can open the Nero6 installer with WinRAR and extract the necessary files without installing for even once. It's been years since I last used Nero, thanks znix for reminding me!

btw, The "last modified date", 11-June-2008, hints that the final version is actually RC3.

I've been using 3.0 since beta 4. And luckily enough, I've been able to get most of the compatible builds of my necessary addons via either the Firefox Addons site or the MozillaZine Forum. Here's the list of addons I'm currently equipped with:

• Access Flickr
• Custom Download Manager
• Enhanced Feed Preview *
  
• Extension List Dumper
• Fission
• IE Tab
• Minimize To Tray *
• Multi-proxy Switch
• Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic
• Personal Menu
• QuickDrag
• QuickRestart
• Save Image in Folder / Save Link in Folder
• SearchStatus
• Stop-or-Reload Button *
• Tab Clicking Options
• Tab Mix Lite CE

* Still incompatible with Firefox 3, but tested and worked after manually modifying install.rdf.

Addons I would also like to have: Autohide, Clear And Close, Copy Plain Text, Download With, Favicon Picker, Firebug, Show Image, SwiftTabs, Tab History.

One more thing, if you just hate the newly designed buttons for Firefox 3, you can download this classic theme which brings you back the 2.0 look, but I highly recommend the stunning Phoenity Aura theme.

Today when I was preparing for renewing my (dv), the logos were brought to my mind. I wonder if there are folks out there looking for some customizable (mt) logos like I did before. So maybe I should share what I have with everybody, unofficial ones though, you can easily make some yourself though.

Here are two (mt) logos in different patterns, both are super large with transparent background. And I also give you the Adobe Illustrator source file.

Download the (mt) logos - copyrighted by (mt) Media Temple, Inc.

Lightview is similar to Lightbox yet superior to Lightbox. Since version 2.0, Lightview has been able to overlay not only images but also videos, iframed webpages, and almost anything! It works with all popular browsers. The original Lightview JS is a project by Nick Stakenburg.

Demonstration

The first photo is an individual one, while the rest four are grouped together.

The above three images are linking to: 1). A Flash color scheme generator 2). A QuickTime movie trailer 3). A webpage.

Installation

1. Download the WordPress plugin, extract the "lightview" folder somewhere.
2. Download the Lightview script from its official website, put the 3 folders "js", "images" and "css" into the "lightview" folder from the WordPress plugin. Choose to replace if asked.
3. Upload the "lightview" folder to /wp-content/plugins/, then activate it.

Why so complicated? Please understand that Lightview is no longer free. Nick Stackenburg was generous enough to approve the redistribution of this WordPress plugin, so please respect his decision and pay for it like I did. Go to the official Lightview project page and you'll find the way to purchase a license and download the script.

How to Use

• For a single image:
  <a href="foobar.jpg" class="lightview">foobar</a>
• For a set of images:
  <a href="foo.jpg" class="lightview" rel="gallery[foobar]">foo</a>
<a href="bar.jpg" class="lightview" rel="gallery[foobar]">bar</a>
• For a QuickTime movie:
  <a href="quicktime.mov" class="lightview" title="">QuickTime</a>
• For a Flash video with title and size limits:
  <a href="flash.swf" class="lightview" title="Title::::width:320,height:240">video</a>
• For a webpage (iframe) with title and description, in fullscreen:
  <a href="http://www.google.com" class="lightview" title="Title::Description::fullscreen:true">Google</a>

Download

Lightview for WordPress (v2.41, 2009-09-07)

For the full documentation (more options, custom events, keyboard shortcuts, etc.) as well as the changelogs, please visit the official Lightview project page.

Last week, a very famous technical expert Chedong, who served Yahoo China as a senior product manager, announced his job-hopping to BlogBus. I would say that the 4 chief officers of BlogBus now forms an all-star team. I'm looking forward to seeing new actions from them in year 2008.

Back to the topic, I was also asked by their COO Mr. Wei Wuhui, a man of wisdom, to make a WordPress theme as a birthday present for his company. Hence this 3-column, right sidebar, neat and elegant theme.

Theme requires WordPress 2.3 or above, tested in Firefox / IE6 / IE7 / Safari. Oh, and it's widgets-friendly.

Download English version (v1.0)
Download Chinese version (v1.0)

For instance, if I activate too many plugins that have option pages under the "Options" tab, the "tail" of sub-menu items annoyingly protrudes from the left border (see screenshot). And the CSS style doesn't suit the updated menu in WordPress 2.x (see screenshot). I fixed the errors mentioned above, now it looks beautiful in my admin center (see screenshot). If you also want a copy of my fixed version, you can download it here. But please note this is not an official release.

A couple days ago I discovered Admin Supermenu by Chris Messina, a jQuery version of Admin Drop Down Menu, but it is still buggy. I think until Chris fixes the bug under the post-editing page and implement some more improvements, I will not switch to his jQuery version.

btw I already tried Admin Drop Down Menus, but it wasn't what I expected, though it exactly says the word "drop-down".

WordPress.com.cn came out in late 2005 as a FAKE official Chinese version of wordpress.com. The domain was registered in China by a Chinese and its server was located in Beijing. A couple weeks after they opened registration to the public, they deleted many user accounts without notices, which led to a large number of users criticising not only wordpress.com.cn but also wordpress.com. Matt then quickly responded that wordpress.com.cn was an imitation in no way associated with wordpress.com. The site then faded away silently.

Yesterday I received a spam e-mail sent from wordpress.com.cn, in the mail I was told that testers were wanted. I then followed the link and registered an account. No sooner had I logged into the admin center than I noticed that they had removed every backlink to the official WordPress sites there! Even worse, in all of their 330 available templates including some very famous ones, I could not spot a single credit link back to the theme authors!

Wicked and self-deceiving enough, huh? I don't want to believe that all these evil behavior, this fraud, was from a Chinese, my compatriot. WHAT A SHAME.

At last let's see some timestream of this FAKE SITE:

• 2005-12-07: Fake site launched, and was rapidly spread out.
• 2005-12-08: Fake site opened user registration.
• 2005-12-22: Fake site deleted many user accounts without notices.
• 2005-12-23: Matt debunked the fake site.
• 2005-12-27: Users discovered that DoNews might be the guys behind the fake site.
• 2006-01-19: DoNews started providing WordPress-based blog service which was apparently done by the same guy from the fake site.
• 2007-10-23: Fake site spammed a ton of maiboxes and returned.

Download Feedicons 2 at Zeusbox Studio.

Also see another 3 free iconsets from famfamfam, and bartelme's Microformats.

Aha, finally I have the chance to meet my good friend Scavin, he owes me one for his new domain name. But of course I'd like to meet more people there. Such as the foreign guy feng37 who currently lives in my city blogging about social events, and a Hong Kong blogger Sidekick whom I didn't realize that he's actually a she until lately. But too bad Tinyau's probably not going.

Meanwhile, I'll try to exchange some thoughts with some of those who also attended WordCamp Beijing 2007 but never eyed on me. Moreover, yet another joyful dinner with aw, Hu Yang and Yangyc is expected. I went to Google China last time, it's baidu's turn. And what else? I'll figure out. See you in Beijing.

By the way, Nicky will be going to Andy Lau's concert tour on the day I arrive, but I'll be running to Markus Schulz'.

I had waited so long for WordPress 2.3 to come and planned to change the permalink structure to better use the native tagging support. But I got stuck at the second thing. Neither of the two reputed redirection plugins worked properly. At last I had to manually add redirection rules to .htaccess. So I really need to remind you: NEVER change your permalink structure, unless it is really necessary and you fully understand how to do it. Or this risky task will definitely piss you off!

Theme was entirely rewritten last night, codes are now tidy, and satisfying. The design is not completely new, I had been using a similar one for a week or so around January this year. But I never had time to finalize it. It was formerly with bubbles in the post entries section, which made me want to vomit after using it for a short while. So no bubbles now. The bottom area has gone because I don't know what to fill it with. Also I plucked away menu tabs, simply because I'm seeing them too often. So no tabs, just a common list of pages at the right top corner. You may say the calendar-look date mark is what you've been seeing too often. I won't fight it but just let me try that at least once.

Any thought on this theme? Please drop a line.

WordPress 2.3 RC1 is out, the final version will not be far away. I have to catch up, hopefully by the time 2.3 arrives, I can finish my new theme and give this site a slight yet graceful reboot.

First, a bugfix version of UTW Final for the current WordPress has been released. Second, a beta version for WordPress 2.3 is out. And of course, the latter one is what I care about.

So far, three "sub-plugins (things)" has been unveiled to beta testers:

"Tag Suggest Thing", which benefited from the Yahoo! term extraction API, and dopes out keywords basing on the post content.

"Embedded Tag Thing", which allows you to include tags as hyper links in the post content.

Update:
"Tag Managing Thing" is out! I've been waiting for it! With this lovely thing you can rename tags / slugs, delete tags, and even split tags!

WordPress 2.3 will be coming with native tagging support, probably next week. What UTW can do from now on, is to have some additional functions for us. To be frank, I was not much interested in these two "things". The expected "tag cloud" has been integrated into the latest WordPress svn but is poorly customizable, Christine should spend some time on it. Another thing that has been worrying me is the "Add tags as meta keywords" function, I'm not sure if it's still necessary since we already have rel="tag". Am I misunderstanding something?

Oh I almost forgot about the "Related Posts" function. Those who are at the same time using UTW and other related-posts plugins, do you know UTW itself can do this like a charm? Just read the readme files inside UTW package carefully. By the way, a guy from China has worked out something already.

At last, if you also want to be one of the beta testers, send request to this e-mail.

For more information and the download link, read Tinyau's blog entry.

I will keep making WordPress themes and sharing with you. Thank you for your support. Best wishes to all my visitors and friends.

btw, I've started blogging in Chinese here.

Why to move again? Simply because (mt) is the best webhost provider on the planet. And very coincidently, my site became unaccessible in China a few hours after I made the order. It's been confirmed that my SurpassHosting IP address is blocked by those bloody devils for unknown reasons.

I didn't want to say "SurpassHosting sucks!", though the ftp connections were slow for me, and unstable, database sometimes went down, no ssh access. I requested SurpassHosting to transfer me onto an accessible server so that I can get my necessary data back, but they refused to help. Instead, they "kindly" offered 2 options: Purchase a Dedicated IP or Upgrade from shared hosting to a VPS/Dedicated Server. Suck? Okay thanks for the incredible solutions, I'm now on a VPS with a dedicated IP, but from another company which absolutely surpasses you SurpassHosting. lol

Pre-serialization and Suppression

Automatically enter your serial number during installation process.

1. Create a blank text file using (e.g.) Notepad
2. Ctrl+c/v or type the following:
   

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <Configuration>
   <Payload>
   <Data key="Serial" protected="0">1234xxxx5678yyyy4321zzzz</Data>
   <Data key="Registration">Suppress</Data>
   <Data key="EULA">Suppress</Data>
   <Data key="Updates">Suppress</Data>
   </Payload>
   </Configuration>

3. Save as "application.xml.override"
4. Put it into "payloads\AdobePhotoshop10en_US_volume\"
5. Run setup.exe and have fun.

To Choose Components during Installation

Add an "Options" step to installation/uninstallation process.

1. Open folder "payloads\AdobePhotoshop10en_US_volume\"
2. Open the file "AdobePhotoshop10en_US_volume.proxy.xml"
3. Search for "<Requires>" (at line #1770)
4. Delete the whole "<Requires>...</Requires>"
5. Save
6. Run setup.exe and have fun

These components are required or recommended:

• Adobe Anchor Service CS3
  The annoying "Bonjour" service and the licensing service.
  "Bonjour" (C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe) can be disabled manually after the installation but DON'T you delete it! The other one is needed to authorize the running of the application.
• Adobe Color Common Settings
• Adobe Color NA Recommended Settings
• Adobe Type Support
  You need this to add new text layers to existing PSD files which already contain text layers.
• Adobe Version Cue CS3 Client
  The "Open file" dialog gets errors without this component.

Note: If you're having Web Standard / Premium or Design Standard / Premium instead of stand-alone Photoshop/Dreamweaver/etc., please read this official PDF document carefully to find out the differences of the above two tricks.

Fixing an Installation Error

If you're seeing this error right after the initialization of setup process:

1. Press "Win+R" to launch "Run"
2. Enter "cmd" to open the command-line window
3. Type in "Regsvr32 C:\windows\system32\jscript.dll"
4. Type in "Regsvr32 C:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll"
5. Run setup.exe and have fun

Grabbed Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Windows, it was an SSG release. As they said in the nfo, their keygen generates VLKs so no activation is needed. Okay okay no more piracy talk.

Installation took more than 5 minutes to finish, I didn't get a chance to choose which components to install. What's worse, the un-installation refused to let me remove components I don't want! I'm not sure if there are parameters for setup.exe but anyway this is considered rude and compelling! As for CS2, the only way (I know) to prevent components that I don't like to get installed, is to delete some of the setup files. And I will try the same trick later.

Update: I made it, by editing an xml script. Now I can choose which components to install.

The app loads pretty fast and it's not sucking as much memory as CS2 does. I've been loving the new interface since its beta. This is the best version of photoshop ever.

I will be evilly happy if you admit that you were fooled, but I'll be even happier if you say you've been waiting all along for the real deal. Tags are no longer going to be a part of WordPress 2.2, so I changed my mind and the theme is now available for download. Thank you for your patience. Now I give you Wolfgang Bartelme's "dark" theme.

The theme has been tested on WordPress 2.1.3 with Firefox and Safari, may play well with IE6/7 too. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0, and supports the following plugins:

• flickrRSS
• Gravatar
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-PageNavi

Download dark v2.0

Change Log:

2.0 (2008-07-18):

• Requires WordPress 2.5+
• Added full widgets support (1 x sidebar + 3 x bottom)
• Added native tagging support
• Added native gravatar support
• Slightly tweaked

1.01 (2007-04-23):

• Fixed a CSS bug for Archives page
• Fixed the alignment bug for search results

1.0 (2007-04-22):

• Initial release

Tested with Firefox 2 and Safari, dropped support for IE6. Featured:

• Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
• Valid CSS 2.0
• Supports Widgets
• Supports flickrRSS
• Supports Gravatar
• Supports Ultimate Tag Warrior

Download the theme: Link Removed, Happy April Fool!

 TV - What's there before "TV"? You may see nothing, you may see a question mark or something else. But there's an apple with a bite missing - Yes, the Apple Inc. logo. Not everybody is seeing the character. However, you can learn that its decimal code for HTML is "63743" and its unicode code is "U+F8FF". More information about the character can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.

So, did you see the apple?

Perhaps you already know, that running a website in China is much more difficult than in any other countries on this planet. The Internet Censorship and the Realname System require your true identity when you order a webhost or sign up for a blog at any BSP. Your submitted infomation must be verified. The same goes for domain registrations. This certainly generates great dissatisfaction and negativities but the red devils won't care. They need to know your real info so that they can shut down your site or even put you in jail, if you say something bad about them online. So, I'm putting myself in danger now, you know. lol

However, I registered two earlier today, but I don't know if I'm gonna renew them next year. I may use one of them to start blogging in Chinese before long.

The idea is that if you are a human being commenting using a web browser with JavaScript enabled, you will get through with no problem. If you disabled JS, you simply type some confirming characters. Since a spamming robot is believed not to have JS support and it can't type, this plugin can be 100% effective. Try it out!

But Raven's Antispam can NOT stay together with AJAX Comments plugin! I reported this to Kahi and he said he would work on it when he's free (I wonder when he'll be free). Any Robin Hood?

p.s. I don't like something contains chromium & neodymium and I don't behave bad.

Update: No, things didn't settle down. My domain is banned forever.

Now I'm with SurpassHosting. In celebration of Valentine's Day, they've been running "The One Love Sale" in february, which is totally unbelievable - $1 for an entire year! Today is the last day, see with your own eyes and don't miss it!

I was helping Scavin with his WordPress migration to a new webhost when he told me about that $1 sale. The funny thing is, his new host is just the one which banned me (I recommended it to him)! After a very short discussion, we both ordered our own SurpassHosting. Why to hesitate? It takes only one dollar!

I signed up for an reinvigorate account last week, and received a registration code a couple days later, much sooner than I expected. Now that I've tested it for 3 days, so far so good. Thanks dancemoon for the information.

Google Analytics had been the only tool I use for tracking and analysing my blog. It takes more time to load every page, and its 24hours+ delay for the statistics is one thing I cannot tolerate. Compared to GA, reinvigorate is much more light-weighted and it hardly delays! They even provide a WordPress plugin so you don't need to mess with your themes. But people've been saying that reinvigorate is not gonna be free after it's done with the beta.

But it's just another year, isn't it? I guess I am too old or say too modernized to enjoy the festival. NewYear sounds so dull. Kinda miss the atmosphere in the past, when people had time, vigor and desire to hold on to traditions, and when I was so childish and innocent.

Okay, just hope all of you have also enjoyed NewYear Eve dinner with your famililies last night. My greetings and best wishes fly to all my dear friends, especially to those who flooded my cellphone with SMS.

FreeYourID.com provides the free lunch. They redirect your desired first.last.name domain and its e-mail account to your own ones. They will also active your .name domain for OpenID use. If you don't have a domain, they can still redirect it to your Pageflakes.

The service will be FREE of charge for the first 90 days. If you wanna keep using it after the free trial, I'd say that the price $10.95 per year or $2.99 for 3 months is quite reasonable.

Try mine: http://blog.lemoned.name or get yours!

Update: Free trial expired.

Desktopography is a website where quality nature themed desktop wallpapers can be found. Resolution of each wallpaper differs, from 1280 to 1600.

Check out the ZeroOneThreeA, what lovely bears!

Got a newsletter from NewWebPick today in which they announced Issue #08 of the world's most remarkable Art Design e-zine. I tried twice to subscribe last year, but their system seemed to have problems so I failed. But today I got my subscription done. Oh, I really need to mention the favorable price: only $3.99USD for one year!

There are a few screenshots from Issue #08 in my flickr album, feel free to take a look. And don't hesitate to download a Lite Version of a previous release to evaluate.

I updated the WordPress theme Greenery which I released last summer. Since then the theme has been adopted by serveral BSPs such as wordpress.com and donews. I feel much encouraged, thank you all.

Change Log:

• Added Widgets support.
• Fixed the page navigation bug that generates shit link when a pot file is used.
• Fixed an error that if no comments has been made, trackback and comment feed URIs would not appear.
• Removed the annoying borders for smilies.
• Adjusted comment form size.
• Some tiny tweaks.

Demo is temporarily unavailable, sorry. Download Greenery v2.0 here.

Merely one week after the release of v2.0.7, WordPress 2.1 "Ella" hits the ground with lots of essential features. I glanced at two beta versions couple days ago, but didn't notice the ever better AJAXified admin center, since I didn't post much.

I had been extremely carefully during the upgrade process today. The rich-editor failed to work properly after my first try, but immediately I figured out the problem (I had this experience once before). I then restored my database and deactivated some of the plugins, deleted a few rows in the "wp_options" table. The second try then returned out to be successful.

Here's the list of plugins I am using in WordPress 2.1:

• Admin Drop Down Menu 1.3
• AJAX Comments 2.7
• Akismet 2.0
• Brian's Latest Comments 1.5.8
• Extended Live Archives 0.1beta-r18
• FeedBurner Plugin 2.2
• flickrRSS 3.2
• Full Text Feed 1.03
• Google (XML) Sitemaps 3.0beta6
• Gravatar 1.1
• Quotmarks Replacer 1.20
• Reinvigorate Tracking Plugin 1.0
• Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.14159265
• WP-Grins 1.3
• WP-Lightbox2 0.5

To be frank, I am NOT happy with the partially re-written stylesheet for the admin center (plugin names too BIG, etc.). So I simply replaced it with the one in v2.0.7.

To be honest, I understand that Tom himself must be suffering much much more than anyone of us. Anyway, I'm glad to see that today some changes to the homepage have been made: A New Design. Hopefully the brand new Gravatar is really on its way arriving.

Now check out www.gravatar.com

Updated: Latest version 2.0 with full widgets support is now available.

A WordPress port of Bartelme's Fresh theme as I promised yesterday, is now here. Actually I had been requested by several of my friends to port it long ago. Since Bartelme now allows everyone to use this old design, I filled my buddies' requests and would like to make the port public.

My demo blog is now ready to serve, you can preview the themes there.

This port validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0, it is ready for plugins Gravatar and Brian's Latest Comments. Tested under Firefox / IE / Safari.

Download Fresh v2.0
Download Fresh-Compact v2.0

Changelog:

2.0 (2008-07-18):

• Requires WordPress 2.5+
• Added full widgets support (1 x sidebar + 3 x bottom)
• Added native gravatar support
• Added native tagging support
• Added support for wp-pagenavi (requires removing the plugin-bundled CSS)
• Fixed the blogroll bug for WordPress 2.3+
• Many tweaks

1.2 (2007-08-28): [...]

1.1 (2006-10-29): [...]

1.0 (2006-10-11): Initial release

As you can see, I've put on a new theme. This theme was originally designed by an Austrian genius whose name is Wolfgang Bartelme. Too many eyeballs had been attracted while Bartelme was using it on his own site.

The awesome design has now been ported to WordPress by me. But since WordPress is here and there different from the Bartelme's blog system, I had to do it the WordPress' way while dealing with the layout arrangement. So this is a theme combined with Bartelme's brilliant graphical design and stupid ideas of mine.

Perhaps you may just consider this a bad rip, or you may have flash ideas about how we can make it better with WP (the blog system we love!). Please just leave a comment.

I think I still need some hours to do the final adjustment as well as to clean up the css. After everything is done, this theme will be available for download.

18 icons in 128x128/PNG. Preview them all.

Download at deviantART or here.

Mappedup, the geographical rss feed aggregator.

Zeax put forward this website some months ago, but he didn't tell me about the launch of its public beta. I discovered the 'news' last night but was disappointed enough to find that only 25 new registrations are accepted per day. So I set the site as the start page of my firefox, and thank God I managed to get my account this morning.

Be sure to check out its download page. You won't want to miss the coolest screensaver and active-desktop in the world!

Finally switched to Firefox, just to remember this day. Guys had been saying that I would eventually come to this. Anyway, from now on I will use it as my primary web browser. However, this does not mean that I began to hate IE, I think IE is pretty good and I'm looking forward to try the brand new IE7. I just felt like having some changes, and after all, web standards are goddamn important.

Actually I have been collecting add-ons for a while already, today what drove me crazy was nothing but tons of existing bookmarks! I spent a great deal of time in arranging every single bookmark and even separator!

Five Ubuntu CDs, which I applied for earlier, arrived last week. Though I dislike the fact that I can't quite use a Linux, I will study it. And maybe I'll give a try to fedora some time.

Download at deviantART or here (67KB, zip)

As spring was on its way coming (already gone), I felt like having something fresh on my blog, thus I made this theme. And I think it will still look fresh and cool if I hold on to it in summer.

Perhaps you'd like to PREVIEW, TEST RUN and DOWNLOAD it at WRC.

Notice:

• Tested on WordPress 2.0.2/2.0.3, with IE 6/7, Firefox 1.5, Opera 9, and Safari.
• Fonts used: Trebuchet MS, Lucida Grande, Century Gothic and Verdana.
• Best view under 1024x768 or greater.
• Everything on sidebar is displayed by default, be smart to adjust them.
• 如果您使用firefox, 請打開style.css, 按指示修改第120行.

Features:

• Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict / CSS 2.
• Build-in 'Latest Posts'.
• Build-in 'Author Highlight'.
• Build-in 'Comment Counter'.
• Build-in 'Add to del.icio.us'.
• Customizable sidebar ul indicators.

Plugins Ready:

• Brian's Latest Comments
• Emotions
• Get Recent Comments
• Gravatar
• Quoter
• Sweet Titles
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-PageNav

Download the latest version - 2.0 : click here

This plugin has been tested only on WordPress 2.0.2 / 2.0.3, and it does NOT play well with Spam Karma 2. Before you use this plugin, make sure you understand what the author said.

Download the plugin: click here (v2.07, 49.3K, zip)

"Vinyl Tunes" icons by eastblu, an iTunes replacement dock icon with 6 color variations, plus 2 sleeves.

Preview: click here
Download: click here (144KB, zip)

Susumu's Samui iTunes CD icon was a nice choice, but I prefer a vinyl one because I've become crazily addicted to electronic music these days.

Tips: By adjusting the icons' Hue/Saturation using your Photoshop, you can get more color variations!

We've received a number of reports today that users in China can't get access to the Technorati site. Of course, we're taking these reports very seriously, and we're trying to get more accurate information. We'll let you know when we know more.