Posts tagged Design

Like this design? – part2

Mar 9th

Posted by matt in Design

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Ok – so there are loads of different free themes out there for WordPress and I’ve tried more than my fair share. Thanks to the various lists all over the web, it’s easy to preview and demo countless themes quickly and easily. I did previously make a post about my old theme, Regal (HERE) – but have since come across a different design that I’ve opted for instead.

This one’s called Mystique – and it’s also a freebie theme, given away by the designer. You can download it through the WordPress site HERE or directly from the designer’s site, HERE.

The designer’s summary about the site says: “Mystique is a free WordPress theme that attempts to top commercial templates in terms of design and functionality. Some of its features include 4 theme widgets, page templates for different layout styles and a advanced interface for the theme settings…“

I’m still trialling it – but first impressions are good. The theme options don’t seem to be working on my version of IE that I’m on right now, but I’ll test it on Chrome and Firefox later… it certainly isn’t a dealbreaker in any case!

To be fair and fully attribute my sources, I found the link to this theme in this list of “20 of my Favourite Free WordPress Themes in 2009″ (link HERE).

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Like this design?

Mar 8th

Posted by matt in Design

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09/03/2010 Update – ok, I’ve changed the design now, so this post relates to my old design… it’s still a very nice, clean design but I’ve decided to use this one instead. The new one is called Mystique (available from this designer HERE).

If you like this web site design, you can get it yourself – all for free – from this very generous theme designer, HERE.

It’s called Regal – and in my mind, is a nice, clean design that is extremely usable. If you check it out with the TAC application too, you can see it’s a clean install without any encrypted code or hidden links… well worth it!

The theme is described as having the following attributes:

  • 2 columns layout based template
  • Tableless design and 100% CSS-based
  • WordPress 2.8+
  • XHTML 1.0 Transitional
  • CSS Validates
  • SEF Optimised Layout
  • 3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional
  • W3C CSS 3 Valid
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Free printing / artwork templates

Mar 4th

Posted by matt in Marketing

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I’ve found a good resource that I use regularly to source artwork  or printing templates for some design work that I carry out.

The site is affiliated with one of the low cost printing companies I use – Stress Free Print – and you can get to it HERE.

The site, Tom the Printer, includes various templates and sizes for the following generic designs:

  • Flat Leaflets / Flyers
  • Folded Leaflets / Flyers
  • Presentation Folders
  • Stationery
  • Business Cards
  • Greetings Cards
  • Tent Cards
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What is Open Source?

Mar 4th

Posted by matt in General

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Open Source is simply defined as a collaboration, predominantly online, whereby source code and software is made available under an open licensing structure with the aim of encouraging other developers and users to test it, tweak it and develop it further, reposting their achievements back to the community so that others can benefit from it.

What this actually means is that most generally available commercial software has an Open Source alternative – with the added benefit that these are available freely for anyone to download from the Internet.

Some of the good Open Source software available includes: WordPress, Joomla, Star Office, Open Office, Freemind… these are the obvious ones that spring to mind, that I’ve used, but there are far more!

Wikipedia define Open Source as:

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials—typically, their source code. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase “open source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

 A main principle and practice of open source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product (and source-material) available at no cost to the public.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

A good list of available Open Source software (top 20)  is available from Trip Wire magazine, HERE.

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Dynamic image resizing in WordPress

Mar 1st

Posted by matt in Design

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Some of the WordPress themes I’ve trialled include a dynamic image re-size option, which initially sounded quite good. However, after trying for hours to get the thing to work and searching countless other forums and WordPress guides, I still couldn’t get it to work.

That was, until, I stumbled across a web site (http://ravidreams.com/2009/10/wordpress-automatic-thumbnail-issue-with-hostgator/) that specifically covered by problem – and it wasn’t anything to do with my directory permissions either. It was a bandwidth protection measure from my host, Hostgator!

Anyway, following the instructions on the site (copied and pasted below, for ease) – resolved the issue nice and quickly… and now I have a fully functioning, image resizing WordPress installation!

Here’s what to do:

1. Login to your Hostgator control panel and contact Live Chat Support.
2. Ask the support technician to white list your thumbnail generation file for mod_security . You will need to give your file name and path.  The file name mostly will be timthumb.php or thumb.php. You can find this file inside the WordPress theme folder. An example file path wp-content/themes/theme_name/thumb.php

This is apparently a known issue with Hostgator’s WordPress hosting and all their technicians should recognize your request.

This problem will be solved by them in minutes.

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