Dec 23, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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There are over 18 million WordPress publishers as of November 2009: 9.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 9.7 million active installations of the WordPress.org software. These nearly 10 million self-hosted WordPress.org powered blogs can utilize all the free WordPress themes and plugins available through the WordPress.org and numerous independent web sites.
These free WP themes can be downloaded and taken into use on any WordPress blog in matter of seconds (Go to Appearance >> Add New Themes in your WordPress Dashboard). There are over 1000 free themes available at WordPress.org alone and this post shows you the most popular of them.
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Sep 15, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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As I wrote back in early August, I entered The Best WordPress Design of 2009 contest and I re-designed this blog during those days just in time when the contest opened.
The contest has been open for voting a couple of weeks now and over 500 votes have been recorded already.
Many blogs on the contest are modified versions of premium or free themes, which is great way to get a theme looking like you want without going through the trouble of designing a whole theme.
Crazy me decided that it would be cool to create my own theme and design it from the scratch, so that’s exactly what I did, so the blog design is my own and I built the WordPress Theme from the ground up.
With that, now it’s a good time to go back to the design process and tell you a bit why the blog looks like it looks…
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Jun 07, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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I started building my own theme. I got it done and I’ve been tweaking it for some time now. I did the whole thing from ground down, taking the bits from various themes freely available, like Sandbox. I created the CSS from zero and I’ve been adding more settings while I’ve been adding more features to my design.
I was inspired by CSS Zen Garden, and the designers there accomplished using just CSS for the design. Another design principle was using no images on the theme itself. Thus, fast loading, very flexible theme.
First Version of “ZemalfZen” is Ready!
It’s an early alpha or beta version right now, so no downloads for anyone just yet. At this stage, I’m not ready to publish the theme to the public, as I have to tweak and debug it first, but perhaps one day, if I see interest to the theme, I will put it out there.
Today I started putting the pieces together and I got a version done I’m quite happy about, after many hours of setting the CSS layout and coloring settings just right. It can be a pain to get those correctly, so I had to refactor the whole css-file, as it was a bit cluttered from all the tests I’ve been doing..
But when I got this done, I started wondering, is it cool to duplicate the designs of other blogs?
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May 24, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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Google Custom search is a powerful tool to give your readers a chance to search for content from your blog, web or whatever sites you define for the search. Wordpress comes with default search which presents blog posts and/or pages with the search terms you used.
Remember to check Google’s Terms & Conditions when adding the Google Custom Search. You are not allowed to hide the fact that you’re using Google Custom Search. Reworked instructions are here How To Add Google Custom Search to Your Blog.
I wanted to combine these two. I like the default as the Wordpress search gives clear blog post links and integrates automatically into the Wordpress Theme and templates. On the other hand, Google Custom Search is more accurate in a sense and is “automatically” monatized through Google Adsense.
This article shows you how to get the best of both words, custom search results from Google, along with Adsense ads and the Wordpress search results that display the most relevant posts from your blog.
Note that the most simple way to add Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) to your blog, is to use a plugin and corresponding widget, but I rarely say no to a chance to mess with javascript and php, so here we go!
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