With the release of latest release of the Sandbox WordPress theme, Scott has announced a Sandbox Designs Competition.
I was already somewhat thinking of building my next design on Sandbox a couple of days ago when I downloaded v0.9 and installed it on FamilyGeek.net. Especially after reading the following description of the theme.
The Sandbox is a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned, so beginners will feel comfortable styling it since they only need to know CSS. More experienced designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.
Once the official rules are posted tomorrow on www.plaintxt.org, I plan on starting my rough layout.
I have only been working with web design (with php and css) for the last six months but I want to use this contest as a deadline for creating a new theme. I am sure their will be a lot of amazing designers competing so if all else fails at least we should all have some new themes to try on.
Today Microsoft released Microsoft Suface. I saw this technology demonstrated by Jeff Han in September 2006 and since then I have wanted this technology.
While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.
Give me this technology in a 42″ desktop surface running Mac OS X and I would be quite content (for a while).
Lifehacker has a great article on how to use Google Gears to access your Google Reader feeds offline.
What is Google Gears:
Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:
- Store and serve application resources locally
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness
Google Gears (BETA) is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I have been pretty busy lately with chores around the house and hanging out with the family over the holiday weekend. I hope to update the IAMWW w2 theme soon with some of the suggestions I have received.
So please be patient and stay tuned…
I have decided to release my first WordPress theme IAMWW w2. I originally modified the them to run on IAMWW.com. IAMWW w2 was built from the core of Upstart Blogger Minim by Robert Ellis.
Features:
- Horizontal top navigation.
- Right-hand sidebar.
- A JavaScript sliding drawer or shelf for browsing categories or popular posts.
- The ability to separate one of your asides or shorts category from your main content as a sideblog that is presented in the sidebar.
- An about me or about site blurb that is only displayed on the home page.
- A archives template page.
- Optimized CSS file.
- Compatible with WordPress 2.2.
- Left and right aligned images with wrapped text can be used by adding the class left and right respectively.
- Support for flickrRSS.
A preview of the theme:
You can try out the demo here.
Required plugins:
- Brian’s Latest Comments - Download and install per author’s instructions. No special configuration needed.
- flickrRSS - Download and install per author’s instructions. I used 5 square images and enter
<li> and </li> to the “Before / After” configuration boxes.
- Popularity Contest - Download and install per author’s instructions. I used 5 related posts and enter
<li> and </li> to the “Before / After (Post Title)” configuration boxes. needed.
- Related Posts - Download and install per author’s instructions. No special configuration needed.
- the_except Reloaded - Download and install per author’s instructions. No special configuration needed.
Inspirations
UPDATE: Head over to the IAMWW w2 theme page for full instructions, tweaks, and the download.
Google has released a new version of the Google Analytics reporting interface.
What is new? In the new version, your reports have been redesigned for clarity, greater visibility of important metrics, and ease of use. Here are just a few of the features you’ll notice:
- Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
- Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
- Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
- Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.
The new version seems to work much better in Firefox on Mac. I had some issues with some of the graphs displaying with the previous version.
Screenshot of the new dashboard:
Robert Ellis of Upstart Blogger is offering a free iPod Shuffle to individuals that refer traffic to his blog!
I decided I’d like to reward that, so I’m going to give some lucky person an iPod shuffle, just for the heck of it. Here’s how it works.
Mr. Ellis has gained a lot of traffic and fans through his WordPress and Pligg themes that he has made available to the public. If fact, in fact this site is currently running my modified version of Upstart Blogger Minim.
Robert is a great guy and I am willing to give him a link to his site; even if I don’t get the iPod. Robert if you read this, it doesn’t mean I want to be taken out of the running.
See the details.
