Zack LiveBlog and WordPress | Best Premium WordPress Themes - Zack Live

CreatvieStore.co: Find Amazing WordPress Themes

Zack — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:21:58 +0000

WordPress is the most popular blog platform. Every WordPress blogger needs a theme for his own blog. You can find a lot of themes from WordPress Theme Directory. There are many nice themes there.

But these themes are usually basic ones, they don’t have rich functions for advanced bloggers. This is why we have more and more websites offering premium WordPress templates.

Creative Store is one of these websites, they are collecting great WordPress themes, as well as some amazing icons, vectors and stock photos.

You can find a lot of useful information for both WordPress bloggers and WordPress theme designers on this website. As bloggers, they offers you stock photos and premium WordPress themes. If you want to buy WordPress themes, this is a good place to find some nice ones.

As WordPress theme designers, you can find beautiful icons, vectors and backgrounds to improve your designs. And those premium themes on Creative Store are also good reference for theme designers.

The website of Creative store itself is well-designed, it’s a good example for a professional WordPress blog.

So if you are using WordPress, you should take a look on Creative Store, you will find something useful for your own blog.

Website: http://www.creativestore.co/

WordPress Complete Tutorial 08: WordPress Links

Zack — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:00:14 +0000

This is a post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

What is Links/Blogrolls

The last thing I want to talk about WordPress.com is: Links. You can see there are some other sections that I didn’t mentioned, like Polls, that’s because these sections are only available on WordPress.com, you won’t find them in your self-hosted WordPress. And they are very easy to understand, just go try out if you’re interested. Links are URLs on your blog that you want to share with your readers, for example, if you’re blogging about iPhone, you may like to put a link to Apple.com on our blog. Or mostly you can put a link to your friends’ blogs. We usually call blog links as Blogrolls.

Add New Links on WordPress.com

It’s very easy to deal with links on WordPress. Let’s go to the Admin Panel and click on Links section. Here you can find all your links on your blog. By default, WordPress will set up several links to websites related to WordPress. You can delete them if you don’t need them any more. Everything looks familiar here, right? It’s just the same as the Posts/Pages/Comments sections, so you know how to play with it. Let’s try to add a link to my original blog: ZackLive.com Click on Add New under the Links section. This is how we add a new link: Enter the information of the link:

Name: Link text to display
Web Address: Link URL
Description: One line description

Link category can be set under the Links section, or you can directly add a new category here by clicking on Add New Category, it’ll be just the same as creating a post category. Target defines how to get to the website of the link – open the link in a new widow or tab(_blank) or in the currant window or tab(_top & _none). The difference between _top and _none is that _top will break all frames(if there is any) and display the page as a top page. That’s all we need to set for a new link, if you don’t want others to see this link, you can check Keep this link private, and then click on Add Link.

Link Widget

Links will not be showed on our blog automatically, we need to add a Link Widget to our theme to display links. Go to Widgets under Appearance. We’ve talked about widgets in our earlier post. Find a widget call Links, drag and drop it to Sidebar, you can change the order of widgets. That’s all, now refresh the blog to see our new link.

Conclusion

That’s all about WordPress.com. From the next post, we’ll talk about self-hosted WordPress, you will learn how to install WordPress on your own server.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 07: WordPress Commments

Zack — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:11:10 +0000

This is the seventh post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

Comment is one of the most important things for a blog, I always believe that comment make a blog a blog.

Let’s see how comments work on WordPress.

Editing Comments

Login to your Admin Panel, here use: http://zacklive.wordpress.com/wp-admin/, click on Comments section, here we can see all comments on our blog.

We have one default comment by Mr WordPress, this comes with the installation of WordPress, just like the default post. You can edit it or delete it.

Here you can see comments are arranged in four categories: Pending, Approved, Spam and Trash. I guess you can understand what they mean, right?

Now move the mouse over the comment content, you’ll see the edit menu:

You can Approve/Unapprove comments, Reply to comments, Edit/Quick Edit comments and set comments as Spam or Trash.

Click on Reply, you can reply to the comment here, and of course you can reply at the post where the comment is posted to.

The difference between Edit and Quick Edit is that Quick Edit allows you to edit the comment right here on this page, and by clicking on Edit, you will enter a comment editing page just like editing Posts and Pages.

There are two drop down menus: Bulk Actions and Filter.

With Bulk Actions, you can edit multiple posts together. It offers four options: Approve, Unapprove, Mark as Spam, Move to Trash.

Two filters are available, Comments and Pings. Pings are trackbacks which will be generated when other bloggers mentions your post.

You see the Check for Spam button, you know what it does.

Conclusion

That’s all about comments for now, and remember all comment settings are located on Settings -> Discussion. If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to let me know, and you know how to do it. Yes, comments.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 06: WordPress Pages

Zack — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:44:26 +0000

This is the sixth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

I am going to talk about Pages today.

What’s the difference between Posts and Pages?

Posts are articles we published everyday, and Pages are information of the blog, such as About Us, Contact information.

About Us Page

WordPress creates a About page for every new blog with some example data, let’s modify it to fill our need.

There is a default About page here, let’s edit it.

This is the Page Editing page, looks familiar? Yeah, it’s almost the same as Post Editing page. Just a little different settings on the right sidebar. Try to make some changes and click Update. Now check out the new About page on your blog. This is what I’ve done:

Some themes use Pages as Menu, which means you Pages will automatically shows on the Menu. Others use built-in Menu functions, in this case, you need to add your Pages in Menus editor under Appearance. Otherwise, you will not see your Pages on your blog.

You can also add your Pages to your blog using sidebar Widgets.

Add New Pages

Adding new pages is just the same as adding posts. Click on Add New under Pages section, and you know what to do.

There are three Page Attributes you can set on the right bottom.

Parent: Set a parent page for the current page. For example, you have a page called, Authors, which introduces all authors on this blog. And you want to have a separate page to talk about one specific author, you can create a new page and set the page Authors to be its parent page.
Template: You can have a specific design for a particular page using template. You need to create a template file in your theme to do this.
Order: Define the order of pages to be show, less number goes first.

Conclusion

Pages are useful to provide static information to your readers. Use your imagination to create unique page to surprise everyone.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 05: Publishing on WordPress

Zack — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:12:12 +0000

This is the fifth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

In the previous tutorials, we’ve set up our blog, changed the theme and get all the settings ready. We are going to do some publishing in WordPress today.

Creating & Editing Category in WordPress

Let’s login to the Admin Panel. Before we go for posts, we need to create a category for our posts. Click Categories under Posts section.

We create a category called, “Testing Category“, it’s a top category, we don’t specify any parent category to it. Most of time we don’t need Description, you can input whatever you want. Click Add New Category.

Now we have two categories, one is the default category, “Uncategorized“, the other is “Testing Category” that we just created.

Move your mouse cursor to the name of the category, it shows four links. The first and second, “Edit” and “Quick Edit” are for editing, you can change the name of the category.

And then comes the “Delete” links to delete the category. You can’t delete default category where you set in Writing Settings. Posts under the category you deleted will be move to default category if they don’t have any other category.

The last link is “View“, you will find all posts under this category when you click on this link.

Post Editing Page in WordPress

We’ve got our category now, let’s publish our first post. Click Add New under Posts section.

This is where we add and edit posts. In the middle of the page is the post editor. You can see the title box and text area for content.

There are three useful sections that help us in editing posts.

Upload/Insert Media(Red): this is where you upload images and other media for the post. The first icon is for uploading and editing image, we’ll use it all the time.
Editor Mode(Blue): Visual mode is what you see is what you get style, it shows everything in the post, like images, videos. And HTML mode shows the HTML code, you can make small modification via editing HTML code, for example, changing the border of a image.
Editor Button(Yellow): this will only show in Visual mode. They are useful functions for editing content, like making bold text.

On the right hand side, you can see a Publish section where you can preview your post, save your post as draft and you can also specify when the post should be published.

Categories section shows all categories you have, you can choose which category this post should be, you can choose more than one category and you can create a new category here as well.

Post Tags section is for adding tags for the post. Tags are keywords of the post, you can insert several tags related to your post, so that readers can find the post via these tags.

On the top right of the page, there is a Screen Option where you can choose what to be showed on this page.

If you theme supports Featured Image, there will be a Featured Image section under Post Tags section, where you can set a thumbnail for the post.

Publish a New Post in WordPress

Let’s try to create a post. Enter whatever you want in the title and text area, and then I will insert a image from my computer, click on Add an Image icon in Upload/Insert Media section, it shows a popup window for adding image.

The first tab is From Computer. You choose a file from your computer and upload to WordPress. The second tab is From URL, means you can insert an online image by provide the URL of the image. Media Library contains files you have already uploaded to WordPress.

Click Select Files to choose an image from computer, upload will automatically start, you see a processing bar showing the percentage of uploading.

When finished, you are able to edit the information of the image.

It’s recommended to enter Title and Alternate Text, because they are useful for SEO(Search Engine Optimization).

Link URL is what to show when readers click on the image. You can choose None that makes no link for the image, File URL is direct link to the image, we usually use this one, it shows the full size of the image. Post URL is the link to the post where the image belongs to.

Size can be changed in Media Setting. We’ve talked about this in the last tutorial.

Remember to click Insert Into Post to insert the image, if you don’t want to insert, click Save All Changes.

Here is the result.

Choose “Testing Category” as category of the post and insert some tags. You can input tags one by one or all together with comma to separate.

Last thing I want to talk about is Permalink right under the Title. This is the link of the post, you can change it by click on the highlighted part. It’s a important element for SEO, you should use some main keywords of the post, skip those meaningless word like “to”, “and”, “an”.

Ok, everything is ready, click Publish. Refresh our blog to see the new post.

You see the new post under the category of “Testing Category” with two tags of “Testing” and “WordPress”

Let’s go back to Admin Panel, click All Posts under Posts section.

You can see all you posts with some basic information. This is where you manage them, you can delete or edit several posts at once via Bulk Actions. You can use Quick Edit to modify basic information of the post, like Tags, Categories. Or you can click on Edit to change a post content.

Editing Post Tags in WordPress

Let’s go back to Admin Panel, I want to talk about post tags.

Click Post Tags under Post section.

This is quite similar with Categories page. You can add or delete tags here. Deleting tags will not cause the posts to be deleted.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you’ve learn:

Managing Categories.
Managing Post Tags.
Publishing and Managing Posts

You are able to write your blog posts and publish them to the world now. And in the next tut, we’ll learn how to manage Links, Pages and Comments.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 04: WordPress Settings

Zack — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 06:55:39 +0000

This is the forth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

We have our blog created and a nice theme installed. The layout of the blog is basically ready, so we are going to talk about some other settings of WordPress.

General Settings

Let’s go to Admin Panel(http://YourBlog.com/wp-admin), we will take a look at Settings section. The first Item is General settings.

Here are the basic settings of the blog. You can change the name of the blog(Site Title), your slogan(Tagline), timezone and date time format.

Writing Settings

These are the settings for writing and publishing content.

Size of the post box is the size of the editor, 20 lines means you can type 20 lines in text area, there will be a scroll bar when you pass 20.

Formatting is about graphic emotion and XHTML formating. It’s not recommended to check the second option.

Default Post Category and Default Link Category sets which category to used when a post/link is not specified to any category.

Press This is a tool let you easily grab content from other website and post it to your blog, you can try it out following the instruction.

Post by email: there is a detail instruction can be found here.

If you host your own WordPress blog, you’ll see some other settings in this section, like Remote Publishing and Update Services. we’ll leave them to later when we talk about self-installed WordPress blog.

Reading Settings

Reading settings are about what to be showed to readers. You can set how many posts to be displayed on the home page and how many in RSS feed.

Email Settings is only available on WordPress.com, it’s a email sent to your subscribers. You won’t find this in self-hosted WordPress blog.

Discussion Settings

There are a lot of options in this section. They are mostly self-explained. We’ll go through the most useful items.

Default article settings: you should check all three items of this part.

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: This means we will ping other blogs which are linked in our post. This is a good thing, it tells other bloggers that we are talking about them, they might come to our blog to continue the conversation.
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.): Opposite from the first one, this allows other bloggers to ping us. We should allow that, so that we will be noticed when someone are talking about us.
Allow people to post comments on new articles: Comment is the most important thing to a blog, the more comments the better.

Other comment settings: these are optional and personal, choose what you like. I suggest you to check the first item, “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail“, this make sure you can communicate with commenters.

The second item, “Users must be registered and logged in to comment“, is not recommended, because it’s kind of wasting their time, they have nothing to do after registered, besides commenting.

E-mail me whenever: it’s better to check “A comment is held for moderation“, it will send a email to you when a comment is held for moderation, you should either approve it or delete it. You should reply to comments as soon as possible. This will make commenters feel like you’re concern about them.

Before a comment appears: check “Comment author must have a previously approved comment“, this means you need to approve the first comment by a commenter, if one has a comment approved before, his comments will be showed automatically, you don’t need to approve them again.

Avatar: is an image that represents you. WordPress uses Gravatar service. This service allows you to use your avatar in different websites/blogs without uploading again. WordPress will recognize your avatar via email. So if you set up your Gravatar with the same email on your blog, you can see your avatar here.

Default avatar is for those who have no Gravatar/Avatar.

Media Settings

Media settings are about images and videos.

You can set default image sizes, there are three types of image size, you will be able to choose them from editor.

Auto-Embeds: will convert video URL into a video. For example, you post a link of a video on YouTube in your post. WordPress will embed the video into the post, so that you can watch it on the blog.

Privacy Settings

There is only one option in privacy settings, it’s about visibility of your blog.

Conclusion

There are some other settings I didn’t talk about, because they are only available on WordPress.com. If you install a blog on your own server, you won’t see them. So that I skipped them, and I guess you can figure them out by your won, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to comment here.

And there is one more important setting, Permalinks, that I didn’t cover, because it’s not available on WordPress.com, I’ll talk about this later in this series.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 03: Using WordPress Themes on WordPress.com

Zack — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:04:31 +0000

This is the third post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

In the last post, we created a blog on WordPress.com. We will continue working on that blog, the topic of today is the themes.

Change Your Theme

How the blog is displayed is based on the theme used. Let’s go to the blog we created, ZackLive.WordPress.com, At the bottom of the page, we can see this blog is using a theme called, Wu Wei which is designed by Jeff Ngan. Let’s try some other themes.

Go back to Admin Panel, you can visit Admin Panel by adding wp-admin to your blog’s URL, in this case, it will be: http://zacklive.wordpress.com/wp-admin.

Click Appearance->Themes. There are a lot of great themes listed here. Most of them are free to use, some Premium themes require you to purchase.

We go with some popular themes. Click Popular under Browse Themes in the middle of the page. These are the most popular themes on WordPress.com. You can find some well-designed themes here. We will try INove theme for this time.

Scroll down the page to the bottom, you’ll find INove theme. Or type INove in the search box to find it.

It shows the name of the theme, a short description and tags. Tags describe the features of the theme, such as two-columns, right-sidebar.

Now click on Preview to see how it works for your blog, or click on Activate to use this theme. I’ve activated INove theme, let’s see what’s the difference.

A totally new blog! Just one click you’ve got a new design of your blog. And it’s all free, what can be better?

Sidebar and Widgets

You may notice that INove has a right sidebar, which is different from the default theme. We can edit the sidebar from Admin Panel.

Click Appearance->Widgets.

Widget is one of the most amazing things of WordPress. It’s a small tool which contains different features, such as showing latest posts. You can add or remove these widgets to your blog by drag-and-drop. You don’t need to edit any code to change the layout of your blog.

Widgets are usually used in sidebar. Sidebar is like a container for widgets, you put widgets into a sidebar so that the widgets can be functional.

Some themes have only one sidebar, others may have several, there is no limitation to the number of sidebars, it’s all based on the design of the theme.

INove theme has one sidebar, right sidebar. You can drag-and-drop your favorite widgets into it. It’s better that we put some thing that will help readers to find out more about our blog in the sidebar. Like Categories, Recent Posts and so on.

After modifying the sidebar, we need to refresh our blog to see how it works.

We’ve got the new sidebar now. If you want to remove any widget, just drag and drop it off the sidebar area.

WordPress Menu

Let’s set up the menu for the blog.

Go to Admin Panel, click on Appearance->Menus.

The left hand side is inactivate, because there is no menu for now. We can create a menu by entering a name for the menu and click Create Menu. Here we use “My Menu” as the name.

Ok, we’ve got our menu. We need to allocate the menu to theme – select a Theme Location for the menu. There is only one menu location in this theme, the Primary Navigation. We choose My Menu for this location and click Save.

We can set up items for the menu now. The first item we need is a Home button which is a link back to the home of the blog. We will add a Custom Link to the menu. Enter the URL of the blog, in this case, it’s “http://zacklive.wordpress.com” and “HOME” as Label. Click Add to Menu.

We have our first item for the menu, let’s add more. Check the Page of “About” and click Add to Menu. Do the same to our only category, “Uncategorized”. So that there are three menu items. We can edit and remove them by clicking the triangle on the items.

Remember to click Save Menu when finishing editing. Refresh the blog to see the new menu.

Everything works fine.

Concludesion

In this tutorial, you learned:

Changing WordPress Theme
Editing Sidebar and the concept of Widget
Editing Blog Menu

In the coming tutorial, We’ll go through other settings of WordPress.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 02: Your First WordPress Blog on WordPress.com

Zack — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:28:57 +0000

This is the second post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

I am going to guide you to register a free blog on WordPress.com today. We will use this blog as a testing blog, you can try out the power of WordPress with it.

WordPress.com is a blog service website run by the company behind WordPress, Automattic. They offer free and paid blog service powered by WordPress.

Register a Blog on WordPress.com

This is the homepage of WordPress.com, it shows latest posts on WordPress.com. You can select your language from the drop down box on the top right.:

To get our free blog, click on Get Started Here. You need to provide some information about your blog.

The first thing is to select your own domain, you can use a domain under WordPress.com for free, which is like: YourName.WordPress.com. Or you can register a .COM/.NET/.NET here. WordPress.com will host your both your domain and blog. It’s very convenient, you don’t need to worry about the setting of your domain. The only thing is that it’s a little bit expansive, $17 per year, usually a domain company charges for a price under $10.

Here we choose WordPress.com to get a free account. I use ZackLive.WordPress.com as my domain, and ZackLive for username. And then enter your password and email. You can select your language in the drop down box as well.

After clicking Sign Up button, a activate email will be sent to your email, you need to click the link in the mail to activate your blog:

You will be redirected to the Dashboard of your blog’s admin panel.

Dashboard of a WordPress Blog

Here you will see the basic information of your blog, like how many posts and comments on your blog. You can drag and drop to re-arrange the Dashboard, and you can select what to be showed in Screen Options on the top right.

The video provided by WordPress.com is the best way to understand the Dashboard.

Let’s check out our blog.

Your First WordPress Blog

You can visit your blog by clicking on My Blog on the top Admin Bar. Or directly type your URL in your browser, for my blog that will be zacklive.wordpress.com:

On the top of the page, you can see a Admin bar, that can only be seen by the owner of the blog. You can use it to go back to Dashboard or publish a new post quickly.

Right below the Admin bar is the blog Menu. We have two links, Home and About. You can change this in your admin panel(Appearance->Menus).

The big title, zacklive, is the name of my blog, and followed by a default slogan, “Just another WordPress.com site“. You can change these in your admin panel(Settings->General).

And here comes the post, you can see the post title(Hello World!), publish date and content. Post category is under the post.

There is a blank area at the bottom, that’s where sidebar is placed. There are usually three kinds of sidebars: Left, Right and Footer sidebar. For this theme, we have footer sidebar(at the bottom of the page), you can edit sidebars in admin panel as well(Appearance->Widgets).

Conclusion

So you have your first WordPress blog, you can try it out in Admin Panel.

In the next tutorial, I’ll show you how to work with themes to make your blog looks better.

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to talk to me via comment.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 01: Introducing WordPress

Zack — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:05:41 +0000

This is the first post of my Complete WordPress Tutorials series. For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

What is WordPress?

I suppose you have the concept of blog, or you can figure it out in Wikipedia.

WordPress is originally designed for blog, but now it becomes a full-featured CMS(Content Management System) , which means you can create all kinds of websites with WordPress.

So if you want to have your own personal website(blog), or you’re looking for a tool to create and manage your websites(CMS), I will suggest you to try WordPress. It’s one of the most popular CMS and blog platform in the world(Top 3 CMS: Drupal, WordPress, Joomla) .

Full features of WordPress is described here. And here are some of my favorites:

Everything of a Blog: Post, Page, Comment, Trackback, Tag…
Theme and Plugin System: Theme and plugin are separated from the core. So that you can change as many themes as you want, or install plugins to get new features without changing(re-installing) WordPress.
Easy to update: You can upgrade WordPress, themes and plugins with one click in Admin panel, rather than re-installing or uploading files.

Why You Need a Blog?

There are a lot of blog posts telling you why you need a blog. I’d like to suggest you to read this post by Mark Suster. He’s talking about startups, but you can figure out the power of blog, here are two examples from that post:

Example 1 : Mint.com

Think Mint.com. In their early days they had an enormously effective blog on the topic of personal financial management. They created a reason for their customers to aggregate on their site on a regular basis. They became both a thought leader in the space as well as a beautifully designed product. They created inbound link juice on topics that drove more traffic to their site. Type “personal financial management” into Google. Mint.com is the second result. Smart.

Example 2: Magento

Think Magento. They are an open-source & SaaS provider of eCommerce solutions. They are the fastest growing player in the world in this space. They achieved all of this before they raised even a penny of venture capital. eCommerce is an enormously competitive search term. Yet type it into Google and the third result (behind the Wikipedia entry and ecommerce.com) is Magento. Magic. They did it by creating a blog, discussion board and hub for eCommerce advice and information.

WordPress.org and WordPress.com

There are two WordPress websites: WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

What’s the difference?

WordPress.org is for the open source project of WordPress. Here you can download your own copy of WordPress and install it on your server. And there are a lot of great themes and plugins can be found here.

WordPress.com is a blog service website run by the company behind WordPress, Automattic. They offer free and paid blog service powered by WordPress. You can have a WordPress blog by signing up on their website. The disadvantage is less flexibility. You can’t edit everything, and they have limitation on themes and plugins.

That’s It for Lesson One

I guess that’s enough for the first lesson. In the next post, I will guide you to go through WordPress.com. You will understand how to blog in WordPress.

WordPress Month Special Offer from PacktPub

Zack — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:03:03 +0000

WordPress is a flexible and powerful tool that’s ideal for creating both blog and non-blog websites. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plug-ins with ease.

To celebrate the publication of the WordPress 3 Ultimate Security, Packt is offering a series of attractive discounts on all WordPress books.

* Buy any WordPress print book and get 20% off

* Buy any WordPress eBook and get 30% off

This offer will last for a limited period only. Grab your copy now !

WordPress Month

Free WordPress Theme: Innovation Theme

Zack — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:06:55 +0000

Theme name: Innovation Theme
Version: 1.0
Author: NewWpThemes.com
WordPress Version: 3.x
Support website: NewWpThemes.com
Tags: Widget Ready, Fixed Width, Threaded Comments, Magazine Style, Two Columns, SEO Optimized, Two Columns

Description:

Innovation is a free WordPress theme with featured content option and supports the post thumbnails. Suitable for any niche. Theme Options at admin panel.

Features:

Options Page
Post Thumbnails
Featured Content
125×125 banners ready (easy editable from admin options)
468×60 Header Banner ready (easy editable from admin options)
Three columns
Gravatar on Comments
Compatible with latest WordPress versions
Widgets Ready
SEO Optimized
Fixed width
Logo .PSD file and font files are included in theme folder.
Tested and compatible with all major browsers: IE, FF, Safari

WORDPRESS THEME DEMO

DOWNLOAD WORDPRESS THEME

Health Check for WordPress 3.2

Zack — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 04:56:55 +0000

It’s for sure that WordPress will no longer support PHP 4 and MySQL 4, WordPress 3.1 is the last version that support PHP 4. It requires PHP 5.2 since WordPress 3.2.

That means some hosting on which your WordPress is running now, may not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2. Thus WordPress releases an official plugin Health Check to help you to find out if you host is capable for WordPress 3.2.

How to Health Check?

Go to the Plugin page in your WordPress Admin, search for Health Check plugin, and install it.

This plugin only does one thing, to check if you host is ready for WordPress 3.2. So if you see this, you are ready to go.

And then, you can Deactivate the plugin and Delete it.

60 Free Calendar Wallpaper for January 2011

Zack — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:02:38 +0000

Here is a collection of 60 Free Calendar Wallpaper for January 2011 from Smashing Magazine. Get one for desktop and remember to say thanks on Smashing Magazine.

Black Friday Offer: WordPress Hosting as Low as 0.99/month

Zack — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 05:16:31 +0000

The Black Friday 2010 Promotion of HostGator will be the best DEAL in 8+ years of hosting!

Check this out from HostGator:

We’re offering 50% OFF EVERYTHING From 12:00AM CST – 5AM CST
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Name.com Promo Codes

Zack — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 03:32:00 +0000

Name.com Promo Codes

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WordPress 2.9.2 Released – A Small Fix for Trash Posts

Zack — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:59:26 +0000

WordPress team just released the 2.9.2 version of WordPress, this is a small bug fix version, as Thomas Mackenzie reported that logged in users can see other users’ posts in Trash. You can fix this problem by upgrade your WordPress to 2.9.2 version.

You can find the official announcement here.

Four WordPress Theme Frameworks

Zack — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:35:15 +0000

I found four WordPress theme frameworks which worth to try out.

Hybrid
Hybrid is a WordPress theme framework designed with content in mind. There is no other theme that will display your content in a meaningful way like this one does. It’s all about getting your information out there to the world. Without all the fuss. That’s what Hybrid does.
Thematic
This is more than just a WordPress theme: Thematic is a highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins and more. The coding, functionality and support rivals the best in “premium” themes. With one, important, difference—Thematic is completely free and open source.
WP Framework
WP Framework is a “blank” WordPress theme that empowers you to create awesome WordPress Themes in little to no time!
Sandbox
The Sandbox is a powerful tool available for WordPress theme designers and developers. The Sandbox can be easily designed just with CSS, so beginners will feel comfortable not bothering with PHP.

Experienced developers and designers can accomplish almost anything with minimal work, thanks to the rich, semantic markup and profusion of classes dynamically generated by the Sandbox.

How to Choose Paid Blogging Networks

Zack — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:10:53 +0000

After reading A Ddfinitive List of Paid Blogging Websites by Maki, I realized there are so many paid blogging websites out there for blogggers to pick up and dive in. I tried to categorize websites in that list for helping bloggers to choose the right one. All these websites below support PayPal.

First Class: there are three websites in this category, which are websites I am using now. This first one is PayPerPost. As Maki said, “ If you only want to sign up for one paid blogging network, I would highly recommend using PayPerPost above all the others.” This is the largest paid blogging network, offers a lot of assignments for you, and also pays good. The other two websites are ReviewMe and SponsoredReview. These two networks are include in first class because of their high payment and offering enough jobs for bloggers.

Fast Payment: These websites are good for beginners to test if paid blogging networks suit you, because they pay within one or two week. Blogitive pays weekly with a flat rate of $5 per post; Smorty also pays weekly with $1 more than Blogitive, $6 flat rate. Blogging Ads pays weekly. PayU2Blog pays every two week.

Worth Trying: the first one I will suggest LinkWorth. Because you can not only write sponsored posts, but also sell contextual links. Other websites worth trying are Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch and BloggerWave.

Paid blogging network is the easiest and fastest way for you to get paid by blogging, which may also encourage you in blogging. It’s good for beginners, you may like to try paid blogging networks before you find better ways to make money from blogging.

Added Four WordPress Plugins to My Blog

Zack — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:48:12 +0000

Just finished reading Darren’s post about WordPress plugins, I found four plugins are useful for my blog.

Simple Tags: the most attractive function to me is the Tag Suggestion. Suggestions come from Yahoo, Tag The Net and your old tags. Another useful function is the Auto Tags.
WordPress.com Stats: I have Google Analytics on my blog, but it’s said that WordPress.com Stats updates in real time, I would like to give it a shot.
WP-Polls: it’s time to poll. This is an Ajax poll system, very easy to use. Update: I found that the WP-Polls can only use in Sidebar, not for single post. And you need to create a page for it. I don’t like that, so I deactivated this plugin.
Ajax Edit Comments: allow users to edit their own comments for a limited time.

I will create a poll for my WordPress Theme, Black n White, to find out what visitors think about it. You can check out my theme and poll it here.

How Fast Your Blog Loads

Zack — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:18:34 +0000

As a blogger, you may want to know how long does your blog take to load and render in visitors’ browser. WebWait is a website for you to measure the speed of your blog.

Just enter your blog address, for me, it’s zacklive.com, and click the Time It button, you will see the loading time in the box. I got 2.73s for my blog, means it tokes 2.73s to load my blog. How long does your blog take to load?