Welcome to the new Tim Yang’s Geek Blog

You know what would be a really cool name for a blog about comment spam? Yup, Iamspeechless.com (or the other four-word variation Thismakesmespeechless.com). I get dozens of these comment spams a week with just those three words and a bunch of irrelevant links.

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I’m really happy that Ozh recommended Akismet.com to me. It’s a comment spam catcher for Wordpress. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more comment spam every day — the kind that looks like it was sent by a real person and doesn’t use any of the comment blacklisted words.

Akismet caught 26 for me in the last 24 hours. Zero false positives. If you aren’t using Akismet yet, all you need to do is sign up to Wordpress.com.

Technorati Tags: Spam Wordpress

If you tried the Problogger Clean theme for Wordpress and you had problems with it, please do leave us a comment.

We have had some comments by email about problems with IE. But we’ve had inconsistencies with replicating the problem. The comments have revolved around the sidebar being misplaced in the single post pages.

If you have had this problem, please let us know the browser and platform you are using. A screenshot would be most helpful. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: Webdesign Wordpress

This theme is based on my own blog design. But in many ways, this theme release is better (and with neater mark-up too). It has been tested on Firefox, Safari and Windows IE. Seven things are significant and quite unique about it.

1. Monetised

   This is one of the first Wordpress themes that comes with Adsense blocks built in. The adsense blocks have been tested to have optimised positions and optimised colours.

2. Featurised

   Unlike other themes which come sans-features, this one has built-in features using a single functions file that comes with the theme folder. So it does not rely on any plugins.

3. Corporatised

   It is a bit of a serious theme with a very corporate colour scheme, not usually the kind preferred by personal bloggers.

4. Search engine optimised

   Heavy interlinking for search bots to easily find pages. And page titles are automatically customised to the post titles.

5. Promotion optimised

   There are a few features that allow you to promote yourself and allow visitors to the site to share it with others if they find it interesting.

6. Stickitised

   Ok, that’s not a real word, but it simply means particular attention was paid to the internal navigation. Links to other posts are placed prominently and throughout all the blog pages to invite visitors to click on them.

7. Prioritised

   The positions of the sections, colours and font sizes have been prioritised to the immediate communication needs of the first time visitor. The theme is space sensitive and is thus very content focused, keeping much of the important details at the top or near the top of the fold.

And those are also the reasons why the theme is called Problogger Clean. If you choose to use this theme, please do email me or leave a comment about it on the support forum. We’d really like to see how you use it so that we can get more ideas on improving themes.

Proceed to download Problogger Clean or view the documentation.

(Click here to read the rest on the article page…)

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Watch this space. On Wednesday, Ozh and I are releasing a new Wordpress theme. But this one is made for bloggers who are interested in having a monetised blog — the theme has Adsense ad positions and colours built into it (I think it’s a historical first, but I could be wrong). It also has numerous functions built into it too. It comes out on Wednesday.

Technorati Tags: Webdesign Wordpress

As soon as I emailed Ozh about a plugin that automatically sends your new posts to del.icio.us, than I find someone has just released one. As soon as I finished reading the description, I suddenly realised what a bad idea this is. Del.icio.us will be flooded with posts from Wordpress blogs — blog spam from this plugin’s users.

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Mark at weblogtoolscollection.com is asking if there are any Wordpress themes out there that are optimised for Adsense. Well, there’s going to be one soon. Ozh and I have been working on something for a couple weeks. It grew from an Adsense-optimised design to a full-featured theme with built-in utilities (no plug-ins required).

It does not make sense for themes to come without optimised Adsense positions and colours for two reasons. First, making money from blogs is now more prevalent than not. It is no longer a point of differentiation, it is a point of parity (or at least it should be). Second, there are so many blog advertising services for publishers vying for real estate that designs are starting to look like a cross between women’s fashion magazines (more ads than editorial) and Dr Frankenstein’s pet project.

Theme designers need to take ad-space into consideration and take charge of ad-placement before their theme users get their grubby amateur hands on them. Designing themes with ad space built in will stem the trend of poorly-optimised and ugly ad-placement and re-direct it toward more measured and more aesthetic layouts.

The theme we’re working on is taking a bit longer because now there are so many features (we keep getting ideas for more every day). We’ve even got a single admin control panel to simplify the configuration of everything from the feed url to Adsense IDs. No need to open the theme editor any more. Geez, whoever heard of a theme with a config panel? Bizarre! ;-) Ozh will probably release the whole thing as a standardised themekit for theme-developers to add the same features to their themes, along with the theme config panel.

Watch this space.

Technorati Tags: Webdesign Wordpress