Ever since I compiled the original Open Source iPhone Applications post on this blog, I’ve kept an Evernote folder specifically for new open source apps. The list is long and I’ve simply selected some of my favourites and put them into a tidy list. I’d love to hear what sort of Open Source apps you use for your iPhone or Android smart phone. Please let me know via the comment section below and I’ll update the post with your suggestions and/or save them for ‘Part 3′. Click here to continue reading
One of the questions I get asked quite a lot in relation to my WordPress theme review series is the following:
“Could you recommend a simple and clean WordPress theme for a new blog I’m about to create?”
The first thing I do is ask the person what they want to achieve with their blog and what their blog’s primary focus will be. The response to these questions usually helps narrow down the choice of themes. More and more, however, I find that there’s a strong demand for one-stop-shop blogging solutions: simple and professional themes with little to no set up required.
In a market saturated with daily theme releases from all sorts of developers, offering all types of support and legacy packages, it’s no wonder that functionality and reliability are qualities that are beginning to out-trump originality of design and bling. So what are some of the themes that meet this demand?
One of them is without doubt the Linen theme by ThemeFoundry, and you can read my review of it here. Another option (a review will be coming soon) is the excellent Canvas theme by WooThemes, but in this post I want to take a closer look at a third solution, it’s called the Standard WordPress theme and it was developed by a company called 8bit. Click here to continue reading
If you’re an Android smart phone user then you’re probably already using a range of free and open source apps. If so, then many of the following will already be familiar. But if you’re new to Android and/or Open Source then you might want to take a look at this selection of 10 essential free and open source Android applications. Each one was selected for practical use in daily life.
From communication and organisation tools to social media and vlogging apps, this small selection of software covers a range of activities and interests. If you’re an iPhone user, check out my selection of open source iPhone apps and if you’re an iPad or Blackberry user then watch this space for more excellent apps coming soon. Click here to continue reading
Last year I did an interview with one of the co-founders of WPShower. At the time, this fledgling theme production duo from Eastern Europe had released a handful of clean and functional WordPress themes and had begun to garner a considerable social media following. Their work was picked up by several key online design outlets, including Smashing Magazine and WordPress Theme Garden, and rightly so since their free WordPress themes offer excellent solutions for anyone looking to set up a simple and functional blog.
Then in late 2010 everything fell silent. Despite the occasional murmur on Facebook, there was very little indication of what their next move would be. Had they stopped producing themes altogether? Were they gearing up for a major announcement? Had they been abducted by aliens? Such was the storm of questions swirling above the WPShower rain cloud. And then bam! WPShower staged its 2011 comeback last week by launching a complete overhaul of their website, and with it, a brand new premium WordPress newspaper and magazine theme called “Unspoken”. In this review I’m going to take a closer look at the Unspoken theme to find out whether it lives up to its $59 price tag and to get up to speed with WPShower’s latest endeavor. Click here to continue reading
If you’re a book lover you will at some point have given some thought to the idea of an E-reader or electronic reading device; if at the very least as a way of tapping into the growing supply of e-books, many of whose print counterparts are simply not available. The book industry remains one of the hottest flash points in debates on the digital/analogue divide, and there are a number of key reasons for this.
The concept of the book is still firmly rooted in a tactile, physical experience. The book as an object of knowledge has a firm historical and cultural standing. Its shift into a digital medium, no matter how close the simulation of digital paper to pages of a book – as in the case of Amazon Kindle’s E-ink screen for example – is still deemed by many a compromise not worth making. The E-reader is simply not a book, it’s an E-reader. Click here to continue reading
One day last week the thought suddenly occurred to me that I had mislaid my iPod. Gripped with panic, I spent the next 5 minutes rummaging through bag, coat and jeans pockets. Nothing. I tried remembering the last time and place I had used it. I checked that place. Nothing. I then began to reconcile myself with the fact that I might never see my iPod again.
As it happens, a kind soul had handed the device into reception and on leaving work that day, all was good again. I got lucky. But my relief wasn’t so much at having recovered the physical device itself – pleased though I was to see its beautiful, sleek allure once more and it’s cost is certainly not negligible – but more about the fact that I had been able to retrieve my collection of music and data. Not only the data, but its classification: the playlists and file structures I had spent time creating. Click here to continue reading
Ok so let me begin with a few simple truisms: 1) Blogging is still very much alive. 2) WordPress is still the preferred blogging platform. 3) Bloggers still need WordPress themes for their blogs. If these points are true, why is it that aside from a handful of exceptions (see list below), there are so few clean, professional and SEO optimized blogging themes being produced by premium developers?
What we have instead is a theme market awash with eye-candy, with graphic-heavy, jQuery-loaded, ajax-sporting, spinning, whizzing, all bells whistling WordPress themes that look great for about 5 minutes but prove utterly useless in the long term for serious bloggers!
And no, I’m not talking about a shift to ultra minimal, over white space designs either. What I am talking about are clean, user-friendly, uncomplicated themes that give a serious blogger the best chances of getting his/her content to an audience right out of the box. Click here to continue reading
This is a short post I dreamt up while my finger hovered over the mouse button for an order of 30 sets of index flags. Yes, that’s right thirty. These are no ordinary index flags by any stretch of the imagination, these are 45 x 8 mm multi-coloured polythene index flags and there are very few places that stock them any more.
You may be wondering what I use all these index flags for. Well that’s very simple. I write tiny notes on them and insert them into books that I’m reading so that next time I need to find a thematic strand in a particular book, I check the index flags and find my page. Click here to continue reading
If you publish content online and you’re not a photographer then chances are that you will at some point have searched for images to illustrate your work. Finding the right photo to accompany a blog post, a magazine article or a new website is often crucial to the success of the project.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but of course the reverse is also true. In this post, I want to highlight a number of excellent free photo sources; places you can bookmark and visit to find that perfect image that brings your work to life. Where possible, I’ve opted for sites that release photos under creative commons licenses to avoid any ambiguity regarding copyright. So here goes… Click here to continue reading
After more than a decade of intensive web usage, I’ve accumulated so many resources that I am into terabytes of hard drive memory! Today, I began to look back at parts of my collection and I came across some very neat tileable wood backgrounds, ideal for web designers or for anyone who wants to add a natural feel to their site’s background.
I’ve decided to create a new series of posts on this blog devoted to releasing parts of my “terabyte collection” under a GPL license. For the first post in this series, I’m giving away 3 seamless wood background packs. These are free to download and reuse as you see fit. If you do use them and want to share them too, please link back to this page so other people can enjoy this resource.
And be sure to follow this free web resources category for more goodies in the near future! Alternatively you can follow updates on Twitter or Facebook. Click here to continue reading
