WP Garage » unique

Park your new domain with the LaunchPad WordPress parking theme

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:18:41 +0000

Here’s a new and interesting WordPress theme idea: LaunchPad is a WordPress theme for people who like to buy domain names, but don’t always put a site on them right away. On many hosts, if you don’t create a site, your domain name hosts a page full of ads for them. LaunchPad was created according to the author to make it clear that “I’m not your billboard.”

LaunchPad is smart and pretty. It includes the ability for visitors to stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed and email updates.

New Twitter-like WordPress theme released by Automattic: Prologue

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:54:49 +0000

Matt just announced the release of a new theme that will make your WordPress blog into a Twitter-like environment. The theme is called Prologue, and is available on WordPress.com and as a download under Open Source GPL. (If you click on this link, it will take you to a page where you can download each theme file one by one. It would be a little more user friendly if it was all in one zip).

Update January 31, 2008: The theme is available in one zip file download at Sizlopedia.

In case it’s not clear, Prologue does not run on the Twitter engine; it is simply a WordPress theme that uses the WordPress platform to emulate Twitter’s functionality, with a few extra WordPress blog features thrown in.

This is amazing (and is another reminder as to why I love WordPress) because:

It is another example of the innovative brains at Automattic. Twitter has its uses, but can have many other applications with some tweaking, and currently has a few drawbacks. Automattic saw the potential, and created Prologue.
Prologue has the following benefits that Twitter does not:
- Privacy: It can be private so it can be used for online project management or other types of business collaboration that should not be public. As Matt says, this type of tool can be extremely useful for communication in virtual companies, and could even replace online project management tools like Basecamp.
- Publicity: You can create your own Twitterish network on a specific topic: you love canaries and want to connect with others who share your love? Create a dedicated online site where registered users can express themselves and share information at will on caring for canaries.
- Comments: The ability to add comments to any item means that the main conversation contains the primary information so it stays neat.
- Multiple RSS feeds: As Matt says, “There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.”

Check out the demo here. I love the idea, and I can’t wait to try it out.

Introducing Prologue « WordPress.com

Hail all WordPress plugin creators – Reuters will pay you $5000 for a plugin

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:25:55 +0000

Reuters OpenCalais project is looking for a plugin developer who can create a plugin or application for WordPress that can do the following:

Offer automatic blog content scanning
Support rich meta-tagging
Create and maintain a Semantic tag cloud for each blogger to post
Embed the related Calais URI.

The price? A measly $5000. I bet that’s the most anyone’s ever offered or will be paid so far for developing a WordPress plugin.

So if you’ve got the brains and the time, this seems like it’s worth checking out. As for me – well, I believe I’m lacking in both qualities for this particular project, so I’ll have to pass.

Would we use WordPress if there were no plugins?

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:30:21 +0000

Garry Conn over at Blog Tips about Blogging asks an interesting question: Would you use Wordpress if Wordpress Plugins weren’t available?

Basically, the question is: would WordPress be our preferred blogging platform if there were no plugins? Or, we can ask an even more difficult question: would WordPress be worth anything without plugins?

My personal opinion is as follows: if there were no plugins, I would not necessarily use WordPress. What I mean is, without the plugins, WordPress becomes a plain vanilla blogging platform and I’d have to see how it measures up to the competing blogging platforms. Maybe it would still have advantages over the other blogging software, but maybe it wouldn’t.

Thanks to plugins, we WordPress users can easily create highly optimized blogs and sites that search engines love, add features that help us retain readers and monitor stats, and become more efficient bloggers. (See my post on “Things I do to optimize and secure every WordPress site and blog” to see all the wonderful ways we can improve the basic WordPress installation thanks to plugins.)

But luckily, we don’t have to seriously consider this question because plugins exist and new ones are being developed all the time. And that is why, at least for the foreseeable future, nothing can compete with WordPress. Viva la plugin developers!

Make your WordPress blog look like a Linux/Unix terminal – only for the uber-geeks

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:52:21 +0000

If you are not an uber-geek, read no further; this is not for you. Even I, who consider myself semi-geeky since I find code fun, cannot understand what possessed someone to do this. But since I try to overcome my own tastes and present stuff here that I think is weird since someone else might find it exhilarating, here it is.

Someone has created a WordPress theme that makes your blog look like a Linux/Unix terminal. You in the back, stop drooling.

To me, the Linux/Unix terminal is one of the most confusing and un-user friendly interfaces I have ever seen. The font, colors, and all the dollar signs and slashes make me dizzy. Why someone would want their WordPress blog, which can be oh-so-beautiful and fun to read, to look like that is beyond me.

But if the thought of this excites you, head on over to Stii to see what he has to say about this.

Alright, here’s how to see the theme:

Click here: http://blog.elinc.ca/.
Click on the rod (CLI) button. It’s the rightmost button at the top.
Type help at the prompt. The available commands will appear.
Enter any of the commands. For example, to see a random post, type random.

After trying it out a bit, I have to admit it’s kind of a cool concept. Uh oh, uber-geekhood approaching…