Testing Shades of Blue theme on this site for a client.
Also testing a 728×90 leaderboard.
Updated: Oct 8, 2009 11:00am – Fixed banner ads. To run until next replacement.
Experimenting with WordPress.com blogs
Since about 9 nine months or so, we have ventured into testing WordPress-specific themes and plugins. Most of our testings have been focused on self-hosted WordPress installs.
Some of our friends with blogs hosted by WordPress.com have requested if we can extend the same tests to their sites. Because we are very nice, ehem, 
, we created blogs at WordPress.com and here are some of them:
Working and WordPress-ing – Tutorials and other goodies
When on the road – Quick and dirty notes from a mobile phone
WORKPAPERS – Focused on accounting and business
How to re-skin a WordPress site
One distinct advantage of using a standard blogging platform like WordPress is its facility to re-skin and change the looks of your site.
You can change the theme of your site without touching your database. In addition to making changes to the theme’s graphics and typography, all you need is to transfer or copy across your codes eg, analytics and other codes to call your plugins to the relevant templates.
Today, we did a quick re-skinning of our site. The free Excellent WordPress theme by BlogOhBlog was a natural choice for us. It took us about 2 hours to complete the job.
To avail of Excellence’s layout, we were able to install a new plugin to display 125×125 ads (more on this in our future updates) still making our site with its previous clutter-free look.
As usual, our friends at Compucentric had to make sure that our site documents checked out as XHTML valid by reviewing and modifying the theme’s framework codes.
We hope you enjoy our new theme.
Google News
Just checking how good this Google News 2.4 WordPress plugin is.
Based on the plugin’s sales pitch: “This plugin allows you to define a number of Google News feeds and have them displayed anywhere in content, in a widget or in a theme. Any number of inline replacements or theme inserts can be made… To use the feeds insert one or more of the following special html comments or Shortcodes anywhere in user content….”
After installing, we played around with it using the following settings:
First group, the settings are title=”Entertainment”; type=”with image”; location=”US”; length=”long”; entries=”5″
Second group, the settings are title=”Business”; type=”with image”; location=”US”; length=”short”; entries=”5″.
Business
- Another shot at GM as Hyundai re-ups for Super Bowl - USA TODAY
- G-8 Says Greece Should Stay in Euro as Differences Linger - Bloomberg
- New York penthouse sells for a record $90 million - CNN
- Discord at Key JPMorgan Unit Is Faulted in Loss - New York Times
- G8 vows to supply markets despite Iran oil embargo - AFP
What do you think?
The plugin is available for download at the WordPress Extension Plugin directory.
Twittering with tweet tools
We have looked into Twitter and we quite like it. We have also tried Twitterberry and Twitter Tools which work great. For those who would like to write light and short blogs like SMS, we recommend Twitter. Good for personal and commercial blogs. Twitter allows web promotions and links. You can follow this link for a sample Twitter page.
Another clients’ service
ShowcasePage.net aims to be a showcase of our clients pages as well as a tutorial site for applications that our clients would like to install in their sites.
We are currently working on this site, so please check back again.