Add Google Analytics to your WordPress site with Ease
June 27, 2009
Easily add Google Analytics to your WordPress site by using Yoast’s plug-in appropriately named Google Analytics for WordPress.
This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. You can choose where it tracks those links too! It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where. I also have an explanation of how to extract your outbound click and download stats from Google Analytics.
— from the Yoast site
Artisteer — Create and Configure Themes for WordPress, Drupal, & Joomla!
June 27, 2009
Artisteer2 looks like it is interesting software allowing you to create and customize professional looking themes for WordPress, Drupal, HTML and Joomla! Support for Blogger coming soon! I’ve viewed their demo and overview: color me intrigued. Note: this is Windows only software. Possible Mac version in the future. (As a very wise man once told me, anything is possible. But is it likely?
Artisteer2 features full customization with 1,000’s of options. Included are built-in color schemes, clip art, backgrounds, buttons, menus, tabs, blocks and more. If anyone reading this has any experience with this software, let us know what you think about it the comments.
22 WordPress Hacks from instantShift — List Most Popular Posts, Twitter Hacks, Create Picture Galleries
June 27, 2009
Here’s a nice set of preformated code snippets that you can use to modify your WordPress site from Anders Ross over at instantShift. They call them mixed quality, perhaps not referring to their coding but to the signifigance of their function. Like displaying random images on your blog’s header? I’d label that not in the top 10 most important revisions to your site. Also by Ross is this piece with 10 Twitter Hacks for Your WordPress Blog.
There’s also a link to an interesting article, 21 Reasons Why Readers Don’t Like Your Blog by MsaNkadI. Lots of them are obvious like don’t have pop-ups on your blog, don’t have a one-hour Flash intro, don’t use blinking text. But I’m sure I’m guilty of one or two of these errors myself.
However, admonitions like “Don’t use center aligned text, maybe use it for headers” is absurd. A long, center aligned, scrolling jumble of unsupported claims, conspiracy theories, slander, personal invective and complete absence of logic or reason is the perfect way to express an extremist rant.
Like those insane people urging us into a War Against the Cows. (It’s madness, I tell you. They’d wipe us out in a week! It’d be the Cedar County Cow War of 1931 all over again).
Looking at the vicious beasts! Disgusting. Photo © 2003 Dennis Flood. Click for larger image.
Using lots of ALL CAPS SENTENCES, exclamation points!!!!!!!! and -ooh- different colored type, is also recommended to make certain you come across as a loon.
Or how about this reason people don’t like your blog, “Don’t force your readers to open a dictionary, they wont [sic]” ? But we think so highly of our readers, bright, intelligent and good-looking, most of them.
500+ FREE Watercolor Brushes for Photoshop from Designm.ag
May 30, 2009
The good folks at Designm.ag have collected over 500 free high resolution water color brushes for some program called Photoshop.
Have you ever heard of it? You have? Well, then this link may be of some use to you.
Seriously, there are some outstanding brushes here. Definitely worth checking out and downloading a few sets to play around with (see samples below).
One thing I know is we’ve come a long way from Mac Paint 1.0 in January, 1984. . .
50 Best Premium WordPress Themes chosen by Design Reviver
May 30, 2009
Design Reviver has a numbered list.
Everyone has a numbered list these days.
It’s the 10 Best iPhone Apps for Marine Biologists;
42 Simple Ways to Increase Productivity Using Mentholated Caffeine;
3 Lamest Video-Game-to-Movie Franchises directed by Uwe Boll*;
7 Funny Things You Didn’t Know About Open Heart Surgery (And the Madcap Surgeons Who Perform the Operations!).
We are in the List Making era of the Internet’s life. Will we ever evolve beyond this stage? I live with a List Maker and I believe soon they’ll have us all making numbered lists of things.
Lists, in their most useful form, are really just collections of resources or information. Collections of opinions or rankings of Hottest, Worst, Lamest, etc. interest me not at all.
Except for Worst Celebrity Plastic Surgery Nightmares — that stuff’s great.
Still, it is surprising how often Cracked.com gets high ranked on Digg with their 13-Stupid-Movie-Continuity-Errors type posts. (Hey fanboy, you want realism? Go watch a documentary).
Design Reviver offers a list that has value as a collection of resources; a set of 50 premium quality WordPress themes. The designs range from blog and portfolio styles, corporate and magazine and all the way to specialized themes for video and photoblogging.
If we must have a deluge of numbered lists on the Internet, they should all be as useful as this one.
_____________________________________________________________
* Uwe Boll has been compared to Ed Wood as a film director — except for the fact that Boll gets multi-million dollar budgets and stars like Sir Ben Kingsley for his movies. I sort of like the idea of imagining Ed Wood, wearing an angora sweater, directing Ben Kingsley. . .
Yellow Mug software’s SnapNDrag – A better, free screen grab utility for OS X
May 29, 2009
The good folks at Yellow Mug software have a great little shareware screen-grab utility called SnapNDrag for Mac OS X. It improves on Grab with a better interface, more options and improverd functions (you can more easily capture timed screens).
Sometimes it’s the little things that add productivity to your day. Highly recommended!
TypeDNA’s Fontshaker: A Must-See Online Font App
April 20, 2009
Oh-my-freaking-God if you have any interest in typefaces at all, you’ve simply got to check out the TypeDNA web site and their Fontshaker online app, accessible through your browser. Just as the Chocolate Math email I recently received described itself: “this is not one of those time-wasting things, this is fun!”
You can visually browse and discover all the fonts installed on your local machine (and open them in Photoshop) along with other neat tricks. You really have to experience their interface to see how much much fun it can be to play with your fonts. Click on the image for a larger size.
50 Free Fabric Textures
April 20, 2009
Designm.ag offers a nice collection of 50 Free fabric textures here and in these recessionary times, free is just the price we all want to be paying for our fabric textures, isn’t it?
Below are small sections of two I grabbed:
Add Crispy Bacon to any Web site — The New ‘Must Have’ Web App
March 24, 2009
Of course, you and I have longed to be able to add thick, crispy bacon to our web sites and those of our frenemies for years now, ever since we first uploaded that flashing GIF animation that told the world our site was “UNDER CONSTRUCTION.”
And now you can! By the good graces of those fine folks at Bacolicio.us.
While we’re on the subject of wonderful, crisp, delicious bacon we have to give a shout out to Michael Kupperman’s fantastic creations, Snake ‘n’ Bacon. If you haven’t read any of Kupperman’s work, do it now! before it’s too late. You’ll thank me later. . .
101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts from 1stwebdesigner
March 24, 2009
1stwebdesigner has put together a selection of high-quality, professional XHTML and CSS templates that are free to use (check the licenses that come with each for specific instructions and restrictions). You can learn a great deal from checking out the coding on these, as well as using these layouts for inspiration for your own designs.