I’m very pleased to announce the launch of wpliving, a new site devoted to WordPress, to helping newcomers discover the platform, its themes and plugins. This is a sister site to osliving (hence the similar naming convention).

Yet another WordPress site I hear you say? Well yes it is focused on WordPress, however the content will mark a departure from the usual “10 things you need to know” type lists and “30 great WordPress themes” lists that are the common currency of most WP blogs right now. Instead, wpliving will offer useful insights into how themes work, how they can be put to use and how to go about finding the right theme for your project. In short, it’s a site that helps people navigate the vast WordPress landscape.

So go and take a look at wpliving and if you have any suggestions for improvements, changes etc. I would be very grateful if you could either contact me or leave a comment here.

I’ve been using WordPress almost since day one and I remember the arrival, circa 2008, of the first main Premium Theme developers. Among those was a one-man band by the name of Elegant Themes. One of the things that set Nick Roach’s company aside from its competitors was the particular type of premium model he put in place.

Rather than selling themes on a single unit basis, he opted for a theme club. That in itself was nothing new, but it was undoubtedly the low cost of entry to the club that made all the difference. The initial price was $29 per year for full access to all the themes. That has has since gone up to $39, but it still remains one of the cheapest price points on the market.

Almost 80 themes later, and Elegant Themes is still going strong. In this review, I take a look at one of Nick’s most recent offerings. A theme called Chameleon that was designed to be a CMS theme. In my video review below, I look at some of the highlights of this theme and point out a couple of areas that I would have liked to see a little more flexibility. You can check out the Chameleon demo here. Enjoy!

I received a tip by email the other day from a reader asking me to check out a theme by a fairly new Premium Theme company called Rockable Themes. The theme in question is called Briefcase and it comes in two versions: one free the other paid.

On first glance, the theme looks pretty much like many of the other portfolio themes on offer at the moment. However, on closer inspection, there were a number of nice surprises that make this theme an interesting proposition for a new blog or personal portfolio site.

Take a look at my video review to find out what those cool features are. You will also get a sense of the differences between the free and pro versions. Or go straight to the Briefcase Demo here. In any case please let me know what you think. Also, stay tuned for a brand new sister site to Open Source Living entirely devoted to WordPress.

Welcome to the latest edition of my WordPress theme reviews. In this episode, I take a look at the latest theme by ThemeTrust called “Hero”. It’s a clean and user-friendly portfolio theme with a responsive layout and it comes with a range of customisation options.

This is the third theme by ThemeTrust that I’ve reviewed. If you haven’t already done so, please check out my review of the Craft, Solo and Filtered themes. The Hero theme is fairly basic in terms of features, particularly when compared to the sheer range of portfolio themes on offer across the various premium theme market places.

My review points to a few areas where some expansion would be helpful. It also highlights the high points of the theme, so go ahead and watch the review or dive straight into the theme demo.

Following on from the popular free seamless wood backgrounds post, the next installment in our free web resources series is a grab bag of blog header graphics. Each image is set to an 820×125 pixel ratio. Each one was personally crafted using images from a range of stock image sharing sites.

Please feel free to download the images and use them on your blog or website. All I ask in return is to post a comment and a link below to the site on which the graphic is in use. Enjoy!

(Download via Mediafire)

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′.

Mobilesynth

Mobilesynth is an open source classic monophonic synthesizer, designed for live performance. Developers are encouraged to visit the website and contribute.
Visit website »

Frotz

Frotz lets you play hundreds of free works of Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. text adventure games) on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It includes several built-in games, and includes a web portal for downloading new ones.
Visit site »

LED Strobe Flashlight

Using the iPhone 4′s great and powerful LED technology, you are able to turn your iPhone into a LED flashlight, strobe light and a screen flashlight. Allows the screen to be a flashlight as well by using several different colours.
Visit site »

Simple RSS Reader

A Simple RSS reader for iPhone using PureMVC Standard for Objective-C licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Visit site »

Task Coach

Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to keep track of personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a frustration that most task managers do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities.
Visit site »

Tweetee

Tweetee is a cute Twitter client for iPhone released under the new BSD License.
 
Visit site »

Plain Note

Plain Note allows you to create, edit and delete notes using the standard iPhone user interface. You can sort notes by date and make use of the in app mailing system.
Visit site »

Doom Classic

Relive the First Person Shooter that defined a generation with DOOM for iPhone. As a space marine stationed on the planet Mars, you are all that stands between the armies of Hell and their invasion of planet Earth!
Visit site »

Colloquy

Colloquy brings the popular IRC client for the Mac into the palm of your hand with this mobile version. Built on the Chat Core framework, Colloquy Mobile is a full featured client optimized for the on-the-go experience.
Visit site »

Phone Monkey

Books.app is a simple eBook reader for the iPhone. It reads HTML and text files stored in your ~/Media/EBooks folder, and is smart enough to enter subdirectories, if for instance, you’ve broken a book down by chapters.
Visit site »

Phone Gap

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages well-known web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript.
Visit site »

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.

A few months ago, I came across the Standard theme via a very useful and well written blog called TentBlogger.com. If you’re interested in the art of blogging and working your way towards monetization at a pro-blogger level, then I strongly recommend that you subscribe to John Saddington’s blog.

John is the lead developer of the Standard Theme and he uses a default installation of the theme on his site. What immediately struck me with his blog was the power of its content. The material “spoke” to me straight away. Sure that’s the result of good blogging (timely post titles, clear image choices, and pertinent topics), but it’s also the result of a clutter-less and content-focused theme.

In this review, I take a look at the Standard Theme’s key features and discuss who and what this theme is best suited for and what the pros and cons of buying into a one-stop-shop blogging solution are.

WHY WOULD YOU USE THIS THEME?

The Standard Theme is set up to work like a Tumblelog with content divided among core types (text, photos, video, audio, links). But it can just as easily be used as a simple blog theme. The theme’s two main axes – the navigation bar and the content stream – make it a little too simple for someone looking to run a magazine, newspaper or multi-author community site. Standard is far better suited to solo bloggers.

Much in the same vein as Tumblelogs, the Standard Theme allows you to upload a personal portrait image in the sidebar giving your blog a sense of intimacy and persona. It also comes pre-packaged with a twitter and RSS follower count widget. This is a useful device for attracting new subscribers (though it would be good to make the widget clickable with immediate subscription options).

Simplicity is perhaps the strongest string in the Standard Theme’s bow. Simplicity of layout and navigation; simplicity of administration and simplicity of design. Coupled with clean code and two excellent SEO-oriented templates (the must-have sitemap for search engines and the archives template), Standard is a strong solution for content-focused, solo bloggers.

KEY FEATURES

Blogging Essentials: the default installation of the theme comes with everything you need to start blogging, including WordPress 3.0 navigation integration, changeable logo and favicon, an array of social links, essential sidebar widgets and the ability to manipulate elements of layout and style. All of these attributes are accessible via the theme’s admin panel.

Admin Panel: As you can see in the image above, the admin panel is easy to understand with clear labels and contextualised functions and the 8bit introductory video to the theme does a good job of walking user through the key admin tabs.

Layout and design: Design customisation options are fairly minimal as WordPress themes go, you have the ability to change background colour or to add a background image; you can shift the sidebar from left to right; you can also shift the top level navigation bar from above to below the site logo. Each of these manipulations happens in the admin panel, as does the ability to add your own logo image and define your favicon (the tiny 16×16 icon that appears in your browser’s url bar). This limited customisation is not necessarily a bad thing and is very much in keeping with the ‘ethos’ of the theme. The more options you have, the more difficult and time consuming it is to come up with an overall coherent custom design. With the Standard Theme, a few small changes will be enough for most people to differentiate their site from the hundreds of other people using this theme.

Ad Spots: The theme comes with multiple ad spots integrated in the design. These include a top level banner ad, a large square sidebar banner and 4 125×125 badge banners. Each ad spot is configurable in the admin panel. Good ad placement is a staple for any serious blogger and the developers of this theme have taken that into account.

Templates: As mentioned previously, the Standard theme comes with 4 custom templates which include a full width page, archives and redirect pages, and a site map page. Setting these up is as simple as creating a new page in the WordPress admin panel and selecting the relevant template from the composition screen. It’s a shame that 8bit didn’t develop templates for a gallery and a contact form, but that can easily be remedied with a couple of plugins. If anyone needs help with that, give me a shout in the comment section and I’ll be happy to oblige.

PROS AND CONS

So having had a quick look at the intended audience and application of the theme as well as its core attributes, it’s time to sum up with some of the main pros and cons that came from my demo installation test. Let me begin with the positive notes.

PROS

• + Very fast to upload and easy to use
• + Main emphasis is on content
• + Good ad solutions
• + Clean code and easy to customise for client work
• + Easy to use admin panel with ability to save and export theme settings
• + Excellent SEO potential with a dedicated sitemap template, archives and semantic coding
• + Well developed and evolving framework
• + Strong support package and active community forum
• + Total package including support and unlimited updates is cheap at $99 compared to a bespoke solution

CONS

• - Generic theme used by hundreds of people (although for most people this won’t be an issue)
• - Lacking dedicated gallery and contact templates
• - Would benefit from more bespoke sidebar widgets (perhaps the developers would consider implementing John’s own widgets in a future release?)

CONCLUSION

The Standard Theme certainly lives up to its name and by no means in a negative way. I found the theme easy to use and quick to master. Compared to other blank canvas type themes such as WooTheme’s Canvas for example, the number of custom options are clearly limited. But those limitations are not a bad thing since it by-passes the problem of lengthy configuration and optmisation time. The Standard Theme does at least two things very well: it works straight out of the box and it makes content presentation quick and attractive. For anyone seriously thinking about full-time blogging, this is a definite contender.

I leave you with a full screenshot of the demo version of the theme. Click on the graphic to go straight to a working demo version of the theme and stay tuned for more WordPress theme reviews.

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.

ANDTWEET: AndTweet is a light-weight open Twitter alternative for Android. It is optimized for fast operation allowing the user to quickly navigate tweets and respond to them in an instant. Get this app »

VIDIOM: Vidiom captures MP4 video and allows you to publish your takes to a range of video hosting services. The app can also import previously recorded videos on your phone’s SD card and publish them. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Videobin, and more. Get this app »

ANNOUNCIFY: Announcify reads out loud various kinds of information, like events or whole documents, for you.
It means that you don’t haveto take your phone out of your pocket anymore everytime someone sends you a message. Get this app »

MILEAGE: Mileage is a neat little app that helps you track car mileage, gas costs, etc. It allows you to import and export data in various formats making it easy to sync with your existing logs. Get this app »

SHUFFLE: Shuffle is a personal organizational tool, styled around the Getting Things Done methodology. It is a dumping ground for ideas and tasks. It lets you rapidly create and organize your actions and helps alleviate the stress of a busy schedule. Get this app »

FEEDGOAL: FeedGoal is an Open Source RSS/Atom feed reader for Android devices. It is an Android Library that allows you to build easily and quickly your personal news mobile app. Get this app »

COLLECTIONISTA: is an app to keep track of your collections. Not only of collectibles but also of more plain day-to-day items, such as a “wardrobe” of clothes. Each collection has some special functions to handle its items. Get this app »

ANDNAV: AndNav is a fully featured turn-by-turn navigation app that supports Location-Lookup, POIs, Text-2-Speech Instructions, Traffic-Feeds, Contact-Search, 4-day Weather Forecast, Via-Points, Avoid-Areas and more. Get this app »

DROID SAFE: Droid Safe is an easy to use anti-theft software for android. You can provide it with a phone number of a close friend or a relative along with a message, Droid Safe will send this message in the event of your SIM being replaced. Get this app »

YAAIC: Yaaic (Yet Another Android IRC Client) is a free and open source Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Android devices. Get this app »

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.

Despite the quiet sentiment conveyed in its name, the Unspoken theme packs a feature-rich punch. It comes with enough bells and whistles to power a fully-fledged news website. In fact the design very much reminds me of the The Guardian Online website in terms of its treatment of content by media type and thematic field.

Whenever I visit the Guardian website, I instinctively know which areas of the front page to scope out relevant to my interests. The Unspoken theme offers similar content curation potential with the ability to color-code specific content groupings such as an Editor’s pick or Featured posts section for example. It also makes great use of integrating content carousels, multiple widget areas and extensive advertising spots. A lot of thought has gone into creating optimum ad spaces that are prominent without being intrusive.

But before we get carried away with complexity, let’s be honest for a moment, how many of us are likely to commit to the development of a new online newspaper or magazine? How many of us will actually make use of this degree of sophistication in a theme, brilliantly executed though it is? Very few, right? But this is where Unspoken starts to get interesting, because aside from the main newspaper layout there are two other templates to choose from: a blog layout and a magazine layout.

The magazine layout is essentially the same as the blog layout except that it features a gallery carousel at the top of the front page. What I absolutely love about the blog layout is the ajax switcher between list view and gallery view of posts in the blog stream. It is this ability to pair content down to a simple stream that opens the Unspoken theme up to a much wider audience. In fact, I think WPShower should have been even more radical in this shape-shifting exercise by allowing for the removal of complete sections of content such as the extended footer and secondary layer of navigation for example.

WordPress theme development today is a difficult balancing act. Not only do developers need the ability to balance the general with the specific, the aesthetic with the functional, mass market with niche market, but somehow they also have to make this experience as open to the WordPress beginner as possible. While the Unspoken theme excels in most of these tasks, there is still some work to be done in adding to the user-friendly admin panel so that the level of complexity displayed so brilliantly on the front-end becomes even more exploitable on the back-end!

As it stands the options panel is more than adequate and simple enough to use. It allows users to manipulate general settings such as theme styles, font types, custom logos, footer text and analytics code. There are also some neat single page options such as the ability to switch on or off social bookmark links, author bio blurbs, related post sections and ad spots.

Other noteworthy features include six unique styles ranging from serif to sans-serif font styles and black, blue and grunge backgrounds. The theme also comes with some bespoke page templates including a sitemap template (a must-have in terms of SEO), an innovative tag cloud template with an alphabetic listing of content tags, a wide layout template and a gallery template that taps into the native WordPress photo gallery function.

One final aspect of the theme I want to mention before rounding this review up are the number of bespoke widgets on offer; 10 in total! These range from the more conventional twitter and flickr widgets, popular and recent posts, comments and archives, to the more elaborate front page content and ad widgets allowing you to shape and position the newspaper/magazine elements with freedom and ease.

Overall, WPShower’s Unspoken theme is a feat of WordPress engineering that marks a very promising foray into the premium market. The theme’s ability to handle the complexity of a newspaper or magazine website and the simplicity of a solo blog, coupled with an elegant and clean design grants it a place at the top of the competition in this theme category. I look forward to seeing more work from this dynamic duo from Eastern Europe, and a hint at the next project has recently been announced on the WPshower Facebook page. All that’s left for me to say is: Go and check out the Unspoken Theme yourselves!

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.

For a long time, I’ve been firmly in the E-reader skeptics camp. I’m a book fiend. I love the experience of book design, the smell of paper, the possibility of manual annotations, the sense of partaking in an age-old tradition and all the other idiosyncrasies that make up the relationship between humans and paper books. However, I’m also aware that E-Readers are of course much more than simple book emulation devices. They are interfaces with a vast distributed network of online content from blogs to newspapers and beyond. They are also the product of the digital revolution, just as paper books were once the product of the printing press revolution.

I recently came across a site that made me think twice about the whole thing. Actually, it’s less a site and more a collection of free e-books. The publisher is called Dodo Press and they’re based in the UK. Their growing collection of free e-books can be found on a number of online book seller sites. I prefer to access them via The Book Depository and they’re easily recognisable by their bright orange and black book covers.

But before I list some samples of Dodo Press books, let’s take a quick look at what sets this publisher apart from other collections of free e-books, which is also what prompted my own change of heart. Here’s the publisher’s mission statement:

Of the 30 million titles ever printed in the English language only a few million of these are in print. We are seeking to make available as many of these titles as possible (and working to do the same with foreign language titles). This way, we will have the largest breadth of titles available in the world.

Where books are no longer in print or poorly available we are seeking to make them available again by republishing. We do this through our Dodo Press imprint. At present, our Dodo Press imprint is re-publishing over one hundred out of print or difficult to find titles every week. We’re making tens of thousands of titles available to readers that were previous impossible to get hold of.

The section I’ve highlighted sums up my excitement over this project. Whereas most collections of free e-books are essentially repackaged versions of texts already available from the excellent Gutenberg Project, Dodo Press is committed to bringing out of print books back to life – hence their name. This is fundamentally important to the enrichment of knowledge and to diversifying the circulation of titles in our literary ecosystems.

So without further ado, I recommend you go and take a look at some of these amazing free ebooks yourself. Feel free to download them. If you have an e-reader then I’m sure you’ll be busy uploading titles to your collection. If you don’t have one, this could just be an initiative that helps you make that first step. If you’re still sticking with print books then the good news is that Dodo Press also offers print editions. Whatever your preference, let me know what you think.

Here are some of my personal favourites from the Dodo Press collection (click on the images to go straight to the book pages):