Couldn’t take it anymore, folks. I had to redecorate. Again. (sneaky grin)
Several factors were at play this time:
- WordPress release version 2.6 this week, with lots of cool new features.
I had the pleasure of gaining a new client for vAS this week who wanted to start blogging. She has a gorgeous website and was referred to me by a good friend of mine to have a blog built. Long story short: turns out her website was built in WordPress! Wow – easy peasy! Not.
It seems whoever built her site for her built the theme from scratch but didn’t write any functionality for blogging! Who does that shit?? In WordPress, particularly! Talk about ass-backwards! Sheesh!
So, yours truly had to figure out how to write the missing pieces (the post page template, the comments template, and I still have the archive template to write) so she could actually blog on her site built in WordPress. Learned a LOT.
- Drunk with my new WordPress creative powers, I thought, “Ya know, Suz, you could probably take the pieces you like from a couple of themes and combine them together to come up with the theme you really want to use on Suzanne Says…” So, I did.
I really liked the other theme, but all that blue was gettin’ to me. So, to those of you who don’t appreciate white space like I do – I’m sorry. With this custom blend, I get the pieces of the other theme that I really like (the header, mainly, and the color scheme, in general) while gaining the ‘elbow room’ of the Cutline theme.
Oh!
I almost forgot!
I wanted to tell y’all how you show your face around here when you comment. WordPress 2.5 introduced integration for Gravatars, which I didn’t really pay too much attention to until one of my clients asked me to implement them on his blog. So, of course, I implemented them on my own blogs, too.
What are Gravatars you ask? A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog, appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.
All you do is associate an avatar (picture) of your choice (or of your own creation) with your email address at Gravatar.com. You can register multiple email addresses with the same avatar, or associate a unique avatar for each email address. So, it doesn’t matter if you don’t own a website or blog of your own. You can still share your smile around the web by creating a Gravatar.
To set up your own Gravatar:
- Go to Gravatar.com and register your email address. (This link opens a new window so you don’t lose your place here.)
- Click the link in the confirmation email you’ll receive and set yourself a password.
- Log back in and upload and save the image of your choice (you’ll be able to crop it after you upload it)
- Come back here and leave a comment and you’ll see your Gravatar beside your comment!
If you don’t have a Gravatar of your own set up, this is the Gravatar that will be used for you here when you leave a comment.
Note: Gravatars are not specific to WordPress, and can be used not only on other blogging platforms, but on websites and even desktop applications!
So, go set up a Gravatar, and come back and leave me a comment. Tell me what you think of my new diggs and let me see your face at the same time! Come on….pretty please?
Wow! I love the little cups as bullet points too :o)
So do you recommend the switch to WordPress? I am happy with Typepad but it can be unreasonable on occasion.
I appreciate the white space. While some of my themes use dark or busy backgrounds, most of them go back to the same basic white background theme. The header & other colors are just changed up a little.
I just switched to WordPress. Now I am trudging through the process of converting all of my themes to work with it. Maybe one day it will all click and won’t be such a time-consuming issue.
Madame Meow – Thanks! I thought the little cups would be cute, too. And, they’re rather representative of how much coffee I drink. lol Well, ok, maybe there are more cups here than that. Imagine half of them being little Diet Mt. Dew bottles and then it’d be right.
Do I recommend the switch to WordPress? Not only yes, but HELL YES! I can’t believe I waited as long as I did, and now that I’m here I’m like – you idiot…you shoulda BEEN over here a long time ago. And that’s just from my blogger perspective.
From my web designer perspective, it’s an even bigger HELL YES! WordPress is just so freakin’ awesome for so many reasons. It’s usable ‘right out of the box’ and it’s customizable til your eyeballs fall out of your head. You don’t have to be a programmer to have a really fine WP blog, and if you want to build your entire site in WP, you can. With 2.6 out now, I foresee some amazing sites being built on the WP platform. (Maybe even some of them by me! LOL)
Ok, so I really like WordPress…. lol
Bonnie – what platform are you switching from?
Nice…I like the ‘white space’…hehe…and thanks for the 411 regarding the gravatar…let’s see if it works for me. š
xoxo
Yasmin! I see you!! š
Yippee…it worked.
xoxo
One of the most reliable ways that I have found of building links is to syndicate my blog with other like minded individuals. If you look at the Google Friend Connect panel on my blog, you will see that I presently have 44 āFriendsā; of these, 36 are people with whom I syndicate.
Whenever one of us in the group makes a new post, we, as a group, have agreed to give some credibility to that post on one or more of the social media web sites. This either by way of a save, digg, clip, etc., and sometimes a comment on those social web sites. All this social activity by our group serves to increase search engine visibilty and rankings, which in turn means that our posts receive greater attention by people outside our group (i.e. traffic).
Every time I post, I get more social activity and visibility – more visibility = more traffic = more visibility
As one of my colleagues puts it āWe have a Perpetual Internet Traffic Machineā
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