Check out the interview here!

Want more Pearsonified? Follow me on Twitter!

¹ That’s an Old School reference, didn’t ya know? ↩

We’re having a Black Friday Sale over at DIYthemes, and from now until supplies run out, you can get Thesis at an unprecedented 20% discount. To cash in, simply enter the following coupon code when you purchase or upgrade:

20D03977D0

When I say “until supplies run out,” I’m being completely serious. People who are great at promoting Thesis and explaining its benefits have already pimped this sale, and as I write this, there are literally only 94 out of 150 coupons remaining.

If you’ve been indecisive about getting Thesis and checking it out, right now is the absolute cheapest you’ll ever be able to get the theme.

Even though we’re closing in on the most pivotal presidential election in recent memory, the major news stories aren’t happening in Washington—they’re happening on Wall Street. With the Dow starting to look more like a roller coaster than a stairway to heaven, people’s fortunes are hanging in the balance of our economic system, which has been nothing if not grossly mismanaged by our government.

To be sure, the root cause of a majority of the US’s economic problems is a general lack of understanding of fundamental economic principles, both in Washington and in the average American household. Obviously, this is a huge problem, and the only real long-term solution requires an increase in the baseline level of economic understanding.

Educating the masses is no small task, but as the Internet continues to grow, so too does the efficiency of information exchange. The main benefit of this increased efficiency is that people have more collective knowledge at their fingertips, and therefore, they also have the ability to learn more things faster than ever before.

No matter what political party you choose to endorse, know this—the real hope for our future lies in education, not in tax breaks, health care reform, or any other “policy” you care to name.

So, why do I bring this up? Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lending a hand to the design of Tip’d, a new social community that is smartly positioned as a hub for emerging economic and financial news. The site bridges a fundamental communications gap in a very important niche, and on that basis alone, I would say it has a great chance of becoming a major player in the economic info ecosystem on the Web.

On top of that, when you consider the team behind the site, it’s pretty obvious that Tip’d is a lead-pipe lock for becoming the most efficient, comprehensive source for financial news and information.

More Tip’d news from major sites around the Web:

• Venture Beat
• ZDNet
• Mashable
• The Industry Standard
• More

Interesting Fact About the Tip’d Blog Design

While you’re checking out Tip’d, be sure to visit the blog. Believe it or not, the blog is running the Thesis WordPress Theme, and I was able to recreate the Tip’d design on the Thesis framework in a mere 1.5 hours.

Think about that for a second.

An entire custom design set atop a world-class, futureproof HTML framework… in an hour and a half.

Believe it. The Web design game is changing in a big way, and I’m doing everything I can to lead the charge.

Oh, and if you’re really a control freak, you can adjust the widths of the content and sidebars on the various layouts, too.

Seriously, folks… Stop looking for that one theme that is just right for your site, because it simply doesn’t exist! Instead, check out Thesis—it’s whatever you need it to be, and best of all, you get to call the shots.

And about that free premium theme? If you get Thesis before midnight August 31, 2008 (PST), you’ll receive Cosmo, a magazine-style premium theme, at no extra charge as soon as I’m done creating it. Don’t drag your heels, though, because I know you’re going to want Cosmo once you see it. Besides, I really don’t want to have to tell you “no” when you ask me if you can still get it for free even though you waited until September 1 to buy Thesis!

One of the most irritating topics that people seem to want to talk about ad nauseum is how to make money online. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of reading horrible advice on this subject, and I’m even more sick and tired of responding to people’s questions about Google AdSense, which is quite literally the worst monetization service of all time for people who don’t have millions of pageviews per month. In other words, AdSense ain’t gonna work for you, cowboy.

To rectify this abominable confluence of bad info and terrible services, I’m going to clue you in on two sure-fire ways you can actually make real, spendable, negotiable cash from your Website. Not surprisingly, both methods of earning money involve actual products, and while not necessarily falling under the “easy” category, they both find their roots in the “no bullshit” category, which I happen to love.

Method One: Sell Your Own Product

It’s no coincidence that the best way to make money offline also happens to be the best way to make money online. Selling your own product and living by the objective economic laws of supply and demand is by far the best way to generate cash and to protect yourself from all the crap that goes on in the world.

Unless you live under a rock, you’re probably aware of the fact that the US stock market is currently tanking. However, if you own a business and sell your own product, this shouldn’t make any difference to you. After all, you’re selling a product that has a nice demand behind it; you support your customers; and you’re still making sales and forging your place in the market.

Best of all, selling a product online has tons of ancillary benefits:

• You’re insulated from Google to some degree, so “big brother” can kiss your sweet ass. You literally own a piece of the market, and your vertical will persist regardless of Google’s opinion or influence (or anyone else’s, for that matter).
• You get to build your business by developing your product and responding to the marketplace, and the Internet is the most feedback-oriented marketplace there is. Talk about a harmonious situation—I hear doves chirping and violins playing in the background when I even think about this.
• You don’t need to compromise your site – or your users – with ads. Even beautiful ads are ugly, and given the choice, I don’t think anyone who would choose to fill up the real estate on their Website with someone else’s crap when they could be using the same space to promote their own stuff. You want absolute control over every pixel of your site while still making money? You need to sell your own product, my friend.

Now, I realize that not everyone has their own product to sell, so from the perspective of ubiquitous application, this isn’t a great solution. Fortunately, this is where the second sure-fire moneymaking method picks up the slack.

Method Two: Affiliate Product Sales

If selling your own product is the best way to make money online, then it should come as no surprise that selling someone else’s product is the second best way to make money online. In nerdy marketing circles, this practice is known as affiliate sales, and there are tons of average Joes out there who are doing this and making sustainable incomes.

As for the people who are a little more clever than the average Joe?

They’re making a killing.

If you want to find success as an affiliate marketer, the “secret” is simply to pimp a product that you not only use, but also genuinely like. The more knowledgeable and transparent you are, the better you’ll do; but if you can only be one thing, be genuine.

There are countless affiliate programs available online, so which one should you promote? The short answer here is to promote as many programs as it makes sense to promote! For instance, as a Web developer, I routinely deal with a few merchants who also offer affiliate programs:

• aMember — payment and subscription software that I use to manage my customer database on DIYthemes, my WordPress theme marketplace
• vbSEO — a clever collection of PHP scripts that turns vBulletin forum software into an SEO powerhouse
• MidPhase — Shared server Web hosting for smaller sites
• SingleHop — Dedicated server hosting for larger, more demanding sites (for instance, DIYthemes is hosted here)

Given the nature of my work, it makes perfect sense for me to promote these programs wherever appropriate. Now, I don’t really go nuts with these promos, but then again, I’m by no means a hardcore affiliate marketer. Despite this, 7% of my income in 2007 came from affiliate sales, so I’m living proof that even a half-assed effort in this area can produce a decent return.

How About a Hot New Affiliate Program?

If the dating game has taught me anything, it’s that hot and new are always fun, at least for a little while. Interestingly, the affiliate marketing industry exhibits a similar trend—new programs will get hot, generate tons of cash for those involved, and then slowly level off or die out depending on the quality of the product.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the new DIYthemes affiliate program, which I’ve opened in collaboration with Brian Clark of Copyblogger (and affiliate marketing) fame. Brian is literally the most genuine, transparent, and intelligent marketer I’ve ever met, so obviously, getting him on my team for this one was a no-brainer. He knows what it takes to be a successful affiliate, and I wouldn’t have bothered to open this program unless I knew I could help a lot of people kick ass.

We’re paying out 33% commissions, and based on initial sales and user testimonials from our flagship WordPress theme, this program is going to be hot.

So seriously, head on over to DIYthemes, sign up for the affiliate program, and replace that damn AdSense already. What have you got to lose, two dollars… this month?

See you on the site!

We bloggers have it rough. We live in a world full of more WordPress themes than you can shake a stick at, yet most of us are still tied to one old, worn out template. It’s unfortunate, but let’s be honest here—changing themes is a huge ordeal.

Generally speaking, whenever you opt for a new theme, you’re going to have to do a fair amount of customization to get everything just right for your site. By the time you get to your third or fourth theme, you’ll probably begin to grow a little weary of reinventing the wheel with each new design.

Fortunately, savvy users like you can solve this problem by creating a user-defined functions file that will work with any WordPress theme. The idea here is to place all of your common, customized design elements—like an author bio or a sales widget for your sidebar, for instance—within functions that reside in a separate, non-theme file. This serves a twofold purpose:

1. First, because your common design tweaks are isolated in a non-theme file, you won’t risk overwriting them whenever you change or upgrade your theme.
2. Second, using a separate functions file creates a much more organized and less intimidating environment for customizing your theme. You can add and subtract HTML from your user-defined functions file without fear of “breaking” your theme, simply because you aren’t trying to edit the theme files directly.

Before jumping into an example, I’d also like to point out that you can (and should) combine your user-defined functions file with a custom CSS stylesheet. Together, these two files act like a preferences panel for your site, allowing you to easily incorporate¹ your most common changes into any WordPress theme.

In the following example, you’ll create your own user-defined functions file containing one sample function. Once you’ve done that, you’ll use your new function in tandem with a custom stylesheet to output a del.icio.us bookmark link at the end of each post.

Step 1: Download Your User-defined Functions File

Your new functions file, user-functions.php, is just a normal PHP file that can be as simple or as complex as you like. Since we’re going to be working with a common example today, I’ve gone ahead and created a sample user-functions.php file that you can download here. Please keep in mind that you can use this same file for your own user-defined functions in the future (with or without the example function).

Step 2: Write Your Own Function(s)

As I mentioned earlier, the goal of our example is to output a handy bookmarking link immediately after each post. Although our sample function is included in the user-functions.php download file, it warrants a more detailed explanation here. We’ll start by taking a detailed look at the function, userfunc_bookmark_links():

function userfunc_bookmark_links() {
   global $post;
?>
<ul class="bookmark_links">
    <li><a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&amp;title=<?php urlencode(the_title()) ?>" title="Bookmark this post on del.icio.us">Bookmark this article on del.icio.us</a></li>
</ul>
<?php
}

The first thing to note here is the function name. Intrinsically, it makes sense to give the function a simple name like bookmark_links(), but in order to ensure compatibility with all WordPress plugins and themes, it’s best to add a consistent prefix to your own function names. Because all of these particular functions are user-defined, it makes sense to use something like userfunc for the prefix.

From a coding standpoint, userfunc_bookmark_links() is extremely basic. It contains no interior logic, and the only thing the function actually does is output some HTML. Also, because this function pulls in the $post variable, it will only work when called from within the WordPress loop.

Most of your user-defined functions should end up looking and behaving like our sample function here. For practical purposes, you’ll probably want to output custom HTML at various points throughout your theme, and you’ll find that user-functions.php is a fantastic way to accomplish this.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there is no limit to the number of functions you can define in your file, so be sure to go nuts with this.

Step 3: Activating Your New Functions File

Once you’ve created your functions file, the next step is to activate it within your theme. Begin by uploading user-functions.php to your active theme folder. Next, open your theme’s functions.php file for editing², and then add the following line of code (you can place it anywhere):

include_once (TEMPLATEPATH . '/user-functions.php');

After editing your theme’s functions.php file, simply save it and upload it back to your server. At this point, your user-defined functions will be available for use within your theme.

Step 4: How to Use Your New Functions

Although you’ve activated your new functions file, you won’t notice any difference on your site until you actually call one of your functions from within a standard theme file.

In our example, the goal is to output a bookmarking link at the end of each post³. In order to do that, you’ll need to open up your theme’s single.php file, and locate the call to the following WordPress function:

<?php the_content(); ?>

As you might have guessed, the_content() outputs a fully-formatted blog post. Because our goal is to include bookmarking links after the post, it only makes sense to place the call to your new, user-defined function immediately after the call to the_content(). Here’s how the code in single.php should look once you’ve inserted the call to userfunc_bookmark_links():

<?php
    the_content();
    userfunc_bookmark_links();
?>

If you’ve done everything correctly, when you visit a post’s permalink page, you’ll see that the post content is now followed by a clever little del.icio.us bookmark link.

Your next challenge is to style your new bookmarking links, and hopefully, you’ll find this to be a simple and straightforward task. By default, the list has been given a class name of bookmark_links, and you can use that class in your custom stylesheet to target this set of links directly.

Bonus Styles for Thesis Users

Are you a Thesis Theme user? If so, then you’ll want to try out this snippet of CSS on your site. Simply add the following declaration to your custom.css file, and boom—you’ll get instant, em-based goodness:

.custom ul.bookmark_links {
    list-style: none;
    margin: 3.14286em 0 1.57143em 0;
    padding: 0.57143em 0.78571em;
    background: #e7f8fb;
    border: 0.07143em solid #9ad5df;
}

The Bottom Line about WordPress Functions

I hinted at it earlier, but I definitely meant it—there really is no limit to what you can accomplish with abstracted WordPress functions like those you’ll define in your user-functions.php file. By taking advantage of this rock-solid coding practice, you’ll be able to inject customized, actionable items into any theme with ease.

One idea that immediately comes to mind is the creation of your own widgets (think sales boxes, special links, product descriptions, etc.). If you define functions for your most commonly-used widgets, you’ll be able to call them at any point in your theme’s code. This makes it much easier to test how certain elements will look on different parts of the page, which is useful for designers and amateur code-wranglers alike.

As a theme architect, I’m always trying to come up with solutions that make life a little easier and a little more bulletproof for users. Ultimately, though, nothing is more bulletproof than a savvy user, and that’s precisely why you’ll benefit from implementing your own user-defined functions!

¹ I’m the type who likes to split an infinitive every now and then to say things a little more smoothly. Teacher hates it, but I don’t care. ↩

² Your theme doesn’t have a functions.php file? Burn it, and then check out Thesis. You’ll love it, and you’ll receive added benefit from my posts in the form of Thesis-targeted advice and code. ↩

³ For the sake of clarity, I have chosen to isolate the single.php file in this tutorial. You should know, however, that the information here applies perfectly to other theme files as well, such as index.php, archive.php, and search.php (assuming your theme has all of those files). ↩

I really can’t believe how awesome the possibilities are.

Check out the new DIY Themes marketplace, and you might just find yourself a new WordPress theme.

Unfortunately, the true power of categorized content has been masked by the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you.

As luck would have it, that awful category list also turns out to be a very poor presentational strategy for your site… But why?

Why Your Category List Isn’t Doing You Any Favors

By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with too many options, end up selecting nothing at all.

Being presented with more choices, even good ones, can hinder effective action. In one study, doctors couldn’t make a decision when a second promising drug showed up.

— Fast Company, November 2007

Counter-intuitive? Maybe. Human nature? Absolutely.

Whether you’re selling products, writing copy, or designing interfaces, you can benefit from playing into basic human psychology. And interestingly, with Website categories, accommodating natural human behavior also turns out to be an excellent SEO strategy!

Automated SEO and Content Management with Categories

At first glance, it seems convenient that WordPress automatically creates category pages, tag pages, and just about every other type of page you can imagine¹. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that this form of page bloat is a remarkably poor site-building practice—it’s a condition that should be avoided whenever possible.

As far as blogs are concerned, categories are the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link dilution, two of the most abominable SEO sins. Ironically, when used properly, these same categories hold the key to efficient, automated site optimization and content management…

The difference, of course, is all in how you use them. Armed with a bit of knowledge and a few lines of code, you’ll be able to use categories to:

• display content however you like, wherever you like
• link directly to interior pages—not to interstitial “bloat” pages like monthly archives or category archives
• provide your users with a smarter, more intuitive way to browse content that may be of interest to them

WordPress Example: “Popular” Articles

Turn your attention to the sidebar of this site, where you’ll find lists of posts underneath subheadings like “Must Reads,” “Improve Your Blog,” and “Worth a Look.” As you might have guessed, I use categories to control the content of each list, and now we’re going to examine how you can do the same. For the sake of this example, let’s focus on the “Must Reads,” which are controlled by the “Popular” category.

The first step is to categorize each applicable post in an identical and meaningful way—in this case, “Popular.” Keep in mind that it makes no difference how many posts you lump under one category, simply because you’ll establish all display control through your code (which you are about to write).

Once you’ve categorized your articles, the second step is to determine what you want to display and where you want to display it. In this example, the goal is to display a list of popular posts over in the sidebar, so in order to do that, you should open the sidebar.php template file for editing.

Now that you’ve opened the appropriate theme file, it’s time to move on to the third step, which is the coding portion of our show. Here’s the code I used in sidebar.php to generate a list (<ul>, <li>) of popular articles: ²

<?php
   query_posts('category_name=Popular&showposts=5');
   while (have_posts()) :
      the_post();
?>
   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?> <?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></a></li>
<?php
   endwhile;
?>

Take a look at the following snippet from the above code:

query_posts('category_name=Popular&showposts=5');

This line tells WordPress to look through its database and fetch the 5 most recent posts from the “Popular” category. Once you’ve acquired the appropriate posts, all you need to do is loop through them, displaying only the information you want. Here’s the code from our example:

<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?> <?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></a></li>

In this case, I chose to display direct links to the posts, and I also embellished a bit to include the number of comments on each. The most important thing to take away from this is the fact that I could have displayed any piece of information associated with the resulting posts—I just tailored the output to my exact needs.

The Bottom Line

Categories are like a site’s DNA—they literally form the organizational framework that houses all of a site’s information. Like DNA, category structures are unique, and therefore, a one size fits all solution for handling them doesn’t make any sense.

The good news, however, is that you can help your users, improve your SEO, and gain absolute control over your content by implementing your own WordPress category solution!

¹ Other CMS platforms do this as well, but for this article, I chose to focus primarily on WordPress. ↩

² For the sake of brevity, I have chosen to show only the code that loops through the individual list elements (<li>). ↩