Flickr.

Note WP-Adminstrip’s natty new OS Xish semi-transparent black background.

Still working on it, and I’d ideally like some sort of pop up semi-transparent div for quick posting from the adminstrip similarly to the excellent Tumblr posting system, also quick editing of comments etc all from the adminstrip.

Eli Horne has compiled a list of his 10 mission critical wordpress plugins which mentions my very own Nice Related Posts (a mod of another plugin). I gave a few of them a go: Wordpress Reports gives easy access to Google Analytics and Feedburner stats in WordPress; Flickr Photo Gallery seems quite useful but for me at least incompatible with the more critical UTW; WP Cache, I used an older version of some sort of WordPress cache plugin a while a go and had problems with it but I’m trying this version.

Ill try and add a few to his list: Also mine, WP Admin Strip for all your quick admin access which Brendan is now updating and Instant Upgrade for one click WordPress upgrades.

Image on Flickr

I have made a style for the K2 WordPress theme based of the look of my current site, Blanc. In a fit of originality I’ve dubbed it Mt Blanc, you get it?

It’s my first style for K2 and is heavily based on the bundled ‘vader’ style. It likely has a few bugs, leave notes on this post and I’ll update it.

Download Mt Blanc

Installation, chuck it in “wp-content/themes/k2/styles/mtblanc” and activate in the K2 control panel.

Following closely on the tail of the first giveaway - here is my second theme giveaway of most of my previous designs. This was an inverted version.

As before, note that these are given away as-is, or Caveat emptor. I offer no support for these and no promise that they will work in your system, though they should do. I have removed all my personal information, links and images so you will have to do some initial digging around in the code to put in your information but it should be fairly clear.

If you do decide to use the design or elements of it please credit me. You can redistribute it with credits to me, but not commercially.

Once again, please enjoy my very messy code and download it from here. More is planned so keep an eye out.

As promised I’m giving away WordPress theme folders for most of my previous designs. For starters here is the one cunningly dubbed “sflwa-sept06”. This is the pinnacle of a design I started about a year and a half ago and has evolved gradually to what I’m giving away here.

Now, note that these are given away as-is, or Caveat emptor. I offer no support for these and no promise that they will work in your system, though they should do. I have removed all my personal information, links and images so you will have to do some initial digging around in the code to put in your information but it should be fairly clear.

If you do decide to use the design or elements of it please credit me. You can redistribute it with credits to me, but not commercially.

That said, enjoy my very messy code and download it from here. I hope to upload some more theme folders over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out.

I won’t say any more initially, just have a wander around. Leave a comment if anything’s broken or even email me. I have a little surprise planned to go with ‘blanc’ but hopefully it won’t take me quite as long as blanc has. I shall also start gathering up my old designs for those who would like the raw (slightly preened) files.

And this design never made it

I plan to update this page frequently

I mentioned I’d been work on Blanc, my site’s new design now for about a month so I thought it was time to keep a page with it’s current status. Im still planning on giving away my current site’s WordPress theme styles when Blanc is done. AND another little surprise is planned but not entirely confirmed yet, I’ll see how I go.

I’m quite excited about this design but I want to make it right. I have also gone down some certain design routes with it then had an idea for an alternative way of doing it and so to some degree scrapped the last design. Most of the last month or so has also been purely on the home page, trying different layouts and colours, making sure I still liked it the next morning, pressing the delete key alot, not and seeking ideas. There was no use of Photoshop (CS3 beta o_O) for layouts - just an idea in my head and diving into CSSEdit 2 for CSS, TextWrangler for code and Cyberduck for ftp. Only in the last 1-2 weeks have I endeavoured to tackle any more pages and the majority of those 1-2 weeks was the single post page. The Stickies widget in Dashboard has been a useful place to save little to-dos so I remember my ideas.

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Some of you may be wondering what digital voodoo it is that I’ve been employing to create those wonderful date contextual messages you see under the navigation just like that seen above. Well wonder no more brave digital pioneer, I shall put an end to your head scratching wonderment.

Firstly, choose yourself a date and secondly choose yourself a message for that very special date you just chose.

Here’s one I made earlier:

<?php
$specialday = (date(‘md’)==’1222’);
if($specialday) { ?>
<p>What a special day this is!</p>
<?php } ?>

Where ‘1222’ is the date (22nd of December in this case) and ‘What a special day this is!’ is your message. If you have a specific year in mind change ‘md’ to ‘mdy’ and and the year on the end of ‘1222’ - so ‘122206’ is this year.

That’s all, enjoy this simple yet fun tweakage.