Changing the theme of an established blog is never a trivial undertaking. It’s a decision that requires a lot of thought and planning before you even get into the actual redesign. A lot can go wrong, not the least of which being a poor reception from your readers.

If you spend any sizeable amount of time researching blog redesign or searching for quality Wordpress themes, you’ve probably stumbled onto Thesis. I’m not going to get into why Thesis is a remarkable Wordpress framework; I’ll let the video on the Thesis site do that for me.

I’d wanted for a long time to use Thesis on Astro-Geek:3000 for all the reasons discussed in the video – power, flexibility, and support. But the theme I’d been using for months had features I wanted to keep, in particular the featured post box in the upper right. I eventually found the plugin version of what had been built directly into the theme, so I used that as a sign. It took me a couple days of tweaking and nudging things to get it the way I wanted, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

I’m a minimalist when it comes to design, but I want as much functionality as I can get. Thesis is the same way. Its design is simple, but when you get under the hood, the things you can make it do are virtually limitless.

Thesis is a premium theme framework, and it does cost money. It costs $87 for the personal option, which will allow you to install Thesis on one blog. Or you can go with the developer’s option for $164 (the cost of two personal licenses) and install the theme on an unlimited number of blogs.

Now I know that’s a hefty chunk of change, but when you think about the time and effort that’s gone into Thesis, and the potential it has for optimizing your blog, it doesn’t seem so bad. Plus, if you purchase Thesis, you can join their affiliate program and earn money by referring others.

I am a part of the affiliate program, and if you use this link to purchase your license of Thesis, I’ll get a bit of cash to burn a hole in my pocket.

You can follow the developer of Thesis, Chris Pearson, on Twitter – @pearsonified

Some time ago, Google acquired Feedburner, and for a while, it worked normally. Recently, however, Google has been more active in getting Feedburner users to migrate their feeds to Google. The interface is still basically the same, but now you have to go to feedburner.google.com, instead of just feedburner.com.

I made this migration some time last week, and for the most part I think it’s been seamless. However, I think I may have fubared. When moving to Google, I was logged in to the wrong email account, and my feedburner feed got moved to that one. I just now burned a feed under the correct email address, but I’m not confident in Google and Wordpress to see the change.

So, just to cover all the bases, I’m asking you now to please update your RSS subscriptions to this address: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ag3k

I apologize for the inconvenience, but I appreciate your loyalty.

And while we’re on the subject of subscriptions, please notice that I’ve added a link (upper right) to subscribe by email, as well.

Over the past few years, I’ve installed Wordpress on a handful of sites. Some have seen the light of day, some have not. I’ve done numerous searches for various plugins, or have come across other blogs that recommend certain plugins. Some plugins are incredibly useful – dare I say essential – and some are more for fun.

Going through the plugins I’ve installed for this site, I realized that there were several that I always install in my new blogs. A few of these you’ll recognize and will probably already have installed on your own blog. But there are some here that most people don’t know about. Despite their relative obscurity, I’ve found them to be essential to running my blog(s) efficiently.

• Akismet – This is one of the ubiquitous plugins. There just isn’t a better comment spam filter. It requires a Wordpress API key, so you’ll have to sign up for a username at Wordpress.com and use the API key that’s shown on your profile.
• All in One SEO Pack – This plugin streamlines SEO optimization for your blog. It automatically manages titles, descriptions, keywords, and more. It’s ready to go practically right out of the box; there’s just a little minor tweaking once you get it installed. Then in each post, you can override the defaults with more specific keywords, title format, or description.
• Contact Form ][ – This is one of the lesser-known plugins, I’m guessing, but no less important. A way for readers to contact you is essential for anyone serious about blogging. What this plugin does is makes it ridiculously simple to create your own “Contact Me” page. You’ll want to fine-tune the settings, but once you have it the way you want, all you have to do is create a new Page, then click the “Insert Contact Form” button on the formatting bar. That’s it. This plugin was used to make my Contact Me page.
• What Would Seth Godin Do? – Seth Godin once said: “One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies….” This plugin takes that idea and runs with it. WWSGD will display a message to readers that have visited your site less than five (customizable) times, based on their cookies. This message is fully customizable with inline CSS. You might have already noticed my WWSGD-powered welcome message; the one inviting you to subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Wordpress.com Stats – This is the traffic metering plugin that’s built into Wordpress.com blogs. It provides up-to-the-minute stats, as opposed to Google Analytics, which only updates once a day. WPStats uses an easy to read layout, provides information about how your visitors arrived, and what links they click from your site. This plugin also requires an API key; you can use the same one you used for Akismet.
• WP Database Backup – Everyone knows that they should be backing up their blog on a regular basis. But unless you automate it, it’s just too tedious and time consuming to do it on your own. This plugin backs up your database without you having to do a thing. Just tweak the settings when you install it, and that’s it. You can set it to email the backups to yourself on a daily or weekly basis, and you can even have it send one whenever you want. Believe me, this plugin could save your a** some day.
• WP Dash Note – This is another obscure plugin, but now that I’ve used it, I don’t think I could ever run a Wordpress blog without it. All it does is add a text entry field on your dashboard. You can type whatever you want into that field – notes, reminders, post ideas, grocery lists, etc. – and they’ll always be displayed in the “Right Now” module of the Dashboard. It comes with a crinkled paper background, but I edited the CSS for the plugin and took it out. You can also adjust the height of the box, background color, and other attributes. It’s a simple plugin, but I’ve become dependent on it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these plugins, and suggestions for any other plugins that you feel are “Must-Have”.

If your Wordpress blog uses a home page or a landing page of some kind, featuring a random post on that page can serve a couple useful purposes. For one, it gives the reader an idea of what they can expect from your blog, especially if you make use of the Excerpt feature. Another benefit is that it helps keep your old archived posts visible. Normally people will only read the latest handful of posts, and ignore the rest. So this helps to open up the reader to even more of your valuable content.

I came across some plugins during my search, but I didn’t try any of them. I was just looking for a simple bit of code that would do the job. At first I didn’t think it would be that difficult; surely Wordpress has a random_post template tag, right? Well, they don’t. Everything I was finding required a plugin of some kind.

I happened across a post at RiteTurnOnly.com that had just what I was looking for. It requires a certain level of PHP knowledge, however – it involves adding a bit of code to The Loop.

A bare bones Loop for a page will look like this:

< ?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Basically, it keeps checking to see if there are posts to display, depending on criteria. Then it assigns formatting code to each post that meets those criteria.

Well, this random post code that I found simply adds a query_posts function and some variables to this loop. It looks like this:

< ?php query_posts(array('orderby' => 'rand', 'category_name' => SomeCategoryName, 'showposts' => 1)); if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

When putting this into your own page code, all you have to do is change SomeCategoryName to whatever category you want to pull the random posts from. You can also change the showposts variable to however many random posts you want to show.

This will only retrieve the data – you still need to display the data. So after you start the loop, you’ll need to insert some formatting and template tags to get Wordpress to show what you want it to.

Once you’ve got that all figured out, just close the Loop:

< ?php endwhile; else: ?>

< ?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?>

< ?php endif; ?>

This will probably take some tinkering on your part to get the output to display the way you want it to, but for ease of implementation, this Wordpress hack can’t be beat.

Thanks again, Len!

I don’t really have any useful information for you in this post. I just wanted to take a moment and kind of rewind through this past week in my world of technology.

Last Saturday I got a new iMac. I kind of prefaced this with my Switching to Mac – Prologue post, and I’m hoping to continue that saga with tales of valor, struggle, and adventure. Barring that, I’ll just talk about how I chose which Mac to buy, my experiences with it so far, and what I’m hoping for in the future.

Macworld 2009 was this week, with the Apple Keynote on Tuesday. I kept up with it a little bit during the day, mostly through Twitter. I have to say, I’m glad I didn’t invest more interest and anticipation into it. It was a big let-down, in my humble opinion, considering all the hype about new Mac Minis, the iPhone Nano, and such. Some of those rumors seemed pretty feasible, but alas, still no official word from Apple. I was hoping to write up a post about the Keynote, but it got pushed onto the back burner before I could make much progress on it, and by the time I could get to it, it was Thursday and the moment had passed.

CES was also this week, and I don’t really have much to say about it. There aren’t really any other gadgets besides the ones I have (iPhone and iMac) that I need, or even really have a personal interest in, but I will probably keep an eye on the Palm Pre. It made a pretty big splash at the show, and sounds like it’s going to be a solid competitor in the ever-evolving smart phone market. I wish Wil Wheaton was still doing InDigital on Revision3; I always enjoyed his gadget reviews, especially when they covered events like CES and E3.

This past week also saw a 50% increase in my number of Twitter followers, particularly over a ~24 hour period. I’m still not quite sure why, but I’m not really complaining. I’ve met some interesting people, and my Twitter stream is richer for it. I keep telling myself that I need to get out and follow some more tech-minded people, people who might find even a tiny nugget of value in Astro-Geek:3000, but I never seem to be able to take the time.

Between work, school, children, and sleep, I need to find some way to cram blogging, marketing, development, and World of Warcraft into about 3-4 hours of free time a night. And I wonder why I don’t get enough sleep. No wait… I know why I don’t get enough sleep; I wonder why I do this to myself.

For next week, I’ve got some ideas lined up for posts. Hopefully I can get those written up in a timely manner. I’m always on the lookout for ideas, but also for like-minded blogs, forums, and other sites that I can read and interact with. If you have such a site, or know of one, I’d appreciate a link. Likewise, if you were able to get even a little bit of value from my posts, please consider sharing a link on Reddit, Digg, or your own site, maybe Stumble it up, or whatever your social site of choice may be. Oh, and don’t be afraid to leave comments!

Thanks for reading and hope to see you again.

In my previous post about making an iPhone-friendly website, I talked a bit about the growing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch in regards to surfing the web. Just like any other browser, you can bookmark your favorite sites, but on the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can save bookmarks to the Home screen as well.

When a bookmark is saved to the Home screen, the iPhone or iPod makes an icon for it. By default, it will use a snapshot of the web page. But what if you want your visitors to see a custom icon instead of a micro-view of your blog?

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a PNG image that’s 57×57 pixels. Ideally, this would be the same as your favicon or your site logo if you have one.
2. Save the image with the filename apple-touch-icon.png
3. Upload this image to the root directory of your blog.

That’s it. Now when readers bookmark your site to their Home screen, they’ll have a shiny, eye-catching icon. Go ahead, try it with this site. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch yourself, it doesn’t take much effort to offer an extra bell/whistle to those that do.

“But Chris, what if I don’t have the ability to upload to the root directory?”

Good question, Chris. If you’re hosting your blog on Blogspot, for example, there’s another way to do this.

1. Create your icon as mentioned above.
2. Upload the icon to your favorite image hosting service – Flickr, Photobucket, or TinyPic for example.
3. Go to Edit Template – how you do this will vary depending on your host – and insert the following code between the <head></head> tags:
   <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.location.of/your-image.png"></link>

Please note that in the Blogspot example, the filename of the image doesn’t matter; the rel="apple-touch-icon" attribute tells the iPhone or iPod Touch what to look for.

Also note that if you’re using the WPTouch addon to create an iPhone-friendly version of your Wordpress blog, then you don’t need to worry about any of this. Choosing an icon for the “Logo & Home Screen Bookmark Icon” in the plugin’s settings will take care of this for you.

As iPhones and iPod Touches continue to fly off the shelves, it’s becoming more apparent that spending the time to make your website or blog iPhone-friendly is worth the effort.

Even with (arguably) the best mobile browser in the world, the iPhone’s small screen can make it difficult to read information on some websites. Its zooming and panning abilities make it easier, but it still limits your peripheral browsing vision. Many mainstream sites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have mobile versions of their content that allow easier browsing, but what are us little guys supposed to do?

While Astro-Geek:3000 displays fairly well on my iPhone – well enough to read, anyway – there are some elements that are a little off. So, I looked around a little bit to see what kind of options were available to me for making an iPhone-friendly version of the blog.

InterSquash is a web-based service that creates an iPhonization using your RSS feed. It’s a good idea, but it didn’t work for AG:3k; I keep getting String could not be parsed as XML errors. Maybe you might have better luck.

The only other real option I found is a Wordpress plugin called WPTouch. It allows different customization features including colors and icons; there are some icons included in the plugin, but it also explains how you can include your own custom icons. Another nice little touch is the section at the bottom that shows you any incompatibilities between plugins.

The plugin creates a nice iPhone theme that’s easy to read and navigate, but doesn’t stifle your blog. For instance, because InterSquash uses your RSS feed, visitors would still have to visit the main site to leave comments. With WPTouch, visitors have full commenting abilities right at their fingertips. WPTouch also supports pages by displaying their links under the Menu dropdown.

WPTouch is a solid plugin that does its job well.