In a blog post this morning, Page.ly announced a new product called Page.ly Vertical Platform that will allow accepted partners to run their own WordPress hosting.

Joshua Strebel, co-founder of Page.ly, describes the experience for a Page.ly Vertical Platform partner:

This PVP option will cost you a few bucks as a partner. It is essentially a limited use software license of our entire system so of course there will be more than few pennies in setup costs and fees. However a decent sized partner that makes a meaningful effort to promote their system will achieve ROI in a few months.

Page.ly's launch partner in this project is Graph Paper Press. Page.ly asks that anyone interested in being a partner should contact them for more details.

Full press release after the jump.

View full press release

Last night's WordPress dev chat included discussion of the goals for WordPress 3.1, which include:

• To have a very short dev cycle
• A decent amount of testing time
• A release in mid-December
• Low on new features and heavy on UI and code cleanup
• Avoidance of schema changes

Larger items, such as media overhauls or refactoring featured images, will be left for WordPress 3.2.

A few of the items that developers will be working on for the 3.1 release include:

• Advanced taxonomy queries
• Get_users() and friends cleanup
• Ajaxified admin screens
• Internal linking
• Separate network dashboard
• Fixes to the custom post types API

The full scope will be solidified during the next developer chat. For more details beyond what we've included in this summary, check out the WordPress development blog.

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If you have ever searched for a Wordpress theme before, you will have probably noticed that some theme designers use some weird text when showing off their themes which looks like Latin. I have always wondered what it was, why designers choose to use it and where it came from.

After a bit of research I have some answers.

What Is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is a group of text that people commonly use as filler text, or dummy text. It's basically a bunch of mumbo-jumbo (at least that's what it looks like) that people use to show what a design layout will look like when the proper text has been inserted.

Why Do Designers Use Lorem Ipsum?

What I kept asking myself is why they would use this jumbled up mess of a foreign language and not some English text? It all comes down to focus. It's a known fact that if they were to use actual copy, someone trying to look at only the design would be distracted by what the text says. That is one of the major reasons people choose to use Lorem Ipsum. With text that is unrecognizable, there's nothing to read.

Where Did Lorem Ipsum Come From?

As it turns out, Lorem Ipsum did come from Latin. It's actually a modified version of it. What does it actually say? According to Lipsum.com,

Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC.

Lorem Ipsum has been used since the 1500's. It was made popular in the 1960's and has survived into the digital age with desktop publishing programs like Aldus PageMaker. As we also know, it is still being widely used among web designers such as Wordpress theme designers to show different design elements.

Can I Use Lorem Ipsum For My Projects?

Sure, why not? It is still widely used so join the proverbial club. In fact there are many tools out there that make using it so easy. Here are a few of them.

Lipsum.com

I have already quoted from this site because it contains quite a bit of information on the subject. It also contains a tool to generate a portion of the text.

MakeUseOf's Directory contains a writeup about it. Since that time they have released both a Firefox plugin and a Chrome plugin.

Lorem2: Lorem Ipsum Text Samples

This isn't really a software program or tool per se. It's really a website containing different sample Lorem Ipsum texts. It contains short paragraphs, long paragraphs, short list items and long list items. Web designers should add this site to their tool belt.

HTML-Ipsum

This tool takes Lorem Ipsum usage to a whole different level for web developers.

They offer much of what the last tools offers but with the HTML tags included, making development that much easier.

Tell us, do you use Lorem Ipsum? If so, in what way? What tools do you use that we should know about?

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If you blog using Wordpress as your blogging software, you will know that it offers a lot of flexibility in design. You can run a blog, run a normal website, and even a create a social networking site. You can also run a newspaper or magazine site using Wordpress.

There are specific elements that make a site more magazine-isque (if that's a word). Some of which have to do with the layout of the front page. Another characteristic of a magazine that you can now implement on your Wordpress magazine site is that of multiple columns of text in pages and posts.

If you have ever read a magazine, you will know what I mean. A normal Wordpress site will typically have only one column of content text much like any blog. If you read a magazine, you'll notice how there can be multiple columns like in the screenshot below:

Now with the proper plugin you can do this with Wordpress in posts and pages. The plugin is called Magazine Columns and it can be found in the Wordpress plugin directory (author's blog post). We know though, that for plugins found on Wordpress, we can just install them via our Wordpress dashboard. If you search for magazine columns it should come up as first on the list. Make sure the author is c.bavota for this particular plugin.

After installing the plugin, all you have to do to create multiple columns in pages and posts is to insert <!column> where you want to begin the next column (up to 5 columns):

You'll also notice that there are added buttons in the HTML tab for easier implementation. Using the start columns and stop columns buttons, you can easily have text before and after columns. The result could look like this:

Here's a full screenshot of how my BloggerDoggie theme looks with multiple columns:

You may be asking, And that's all there is to it? Yes. Really.

Another cool part of this whole topic is that there is actually more than one plugin that does this for you. Similar plugins to try are:

• WP Post Columns If you visit the author's plugin homepage, you'll see that there are quite a few options via short codes. This could be a positive or a negative depending on how easy you want the process to be.
• WP Columnize This plugin also has buttons in the HTML tab. With them you can highlight the text and just hit the appropriate button. Check out the author's plugin homepage.

Whichever plugin you use, you'll find you have quite a bit more flexibility. Using Wordpress for other anything other than blogging becomes a bit easier. I know you can mess around with tables in HTML but why would you if a plugin can do it for you?

Do you use columns in Wordpress to make it less like a blog? What method do you use?

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These machines kill fascists (Thanks, Sara the Teacher!)

Three years ago I wrote How To: Bulletproof Server Backups with Amazon S3, a post where I showed off a basic cron job'd script I used to backup my entire server to S3 nightly. I have been using some form of that script since then to backup my blog. Fortunately, I have never had a situation where I needed to completely restore my blog, though it was handy for the few times I accidentally nuked my root .htaccess file or something. Ideally, I would keep everything under git version control and possibly have a nice WordPress Capistrano setup on my server for keeping WordPress and related non-media files safe and easily accessible (versus having to download then decompress a huge archive just to get to one file). In addition, I would have an rsync to S3 backup for media files and the database. But like many of you, I don't have the time to figure that out right now. That's why I became intrigued when I first caught wind of Automattic's turnkey WordPress backup service called VaultPress. Pay a monthly fee, set it and forget it.

My backup situation looked like this (and a terminal) before VaultPress.

VaultPress is a complete WordPress blog backup solution. Everything related to your WordPress installation from theme files and uploaded media all the way to the database will be backed up. Want to know the best part about it? Real-time backup. The second anything changes on your WordPress setup, be it a new post revision is saved, a new comment is created, a tag is added to a post, a new user registers, a plugin is added, an image uploaded anything, VaultPress gets pinged and that particular change is updated in your backup.

The VaultPress plugin uses WordPress hooks to receive alerts when any information has changed on your site and syncs those changes with our servers. Live ticker messages are displayed to show the status of exactly what's going on backing up a comment, adding a new post, changing an option, etc

There are some edge cases where VaultPress won't know if you changed something, such as manual file uploading/editing via FTP, so it does an entire site scan every evening to detect any such changes and sync the backup as necessary. Depending on the plan you are signed up for, VaultPress will be able to scan for potential security threats as well.

I don't think I need to explain the benefits of real-time backup. Having backups initiate the moment something changes is much better than having to wait hours for my old cron job script to kick in.

Setup

First things first: VaultPress is currently in a private beta and many of its features have not yet been baked in. The information in this review will very likely be outdated in a few months, so please keep that in mind.

Setting up VaultPress is as simple as installing their plugin. It's not just any plugin, but rather a custom plugin just for your domain and blog. You need to have a WordPress.com account to be able to log into VaultPress to get the plugin but it will work on any self-hosted WordPress blog. After the plugin is uploaded and activated it will begin the lengthy first backup. I did not experience any issues with my first backup. It took a few hours to backup 5 years of blog posts, images, et cetera. I was able to monitor the progress within the WordPress admin panel as well as see general backup information.

Access basic VaultPress info within the WP Admin Panel

Backup

After the plugin is setup there's nothing else to it. VaultPress will continuously backup your blog as necessary. Logging into the VaultPress Dashboard provides more backup details and is where you'll go when it comes time to initiate a restore or download backed up files:

This page provides a complete snapshot of each backup. Along with the date and time of each and every backup, you can review how many users, comments, attachments, pages, posts, revisions, safecss, authors, categories, link categories, post tags, uploads, images, themes, and plugins (whew!) are included in each of the backups.

You can also retrieve your data here by checking the box next to plugins, uploads, database, themes or all of the above and hitting that download button.

Restoring Downloading then Manually Uploading

What happens when something happens to your site and you need to fix something or revert to the most recent backup? Unfortunately, there is no automated restore feature built into VaultPress yet. At the moment you will have to download the backup archive to your local machine, decompress it, then use an FTP client to manually upload it to your server. Obviously a painful and very slow, manual ordeal.

VaultPress archives my uploads and then offers me a .tar.gz download.

Yeah, definitely not ideal. I went poking around the VaultPress blog for upcoming plans:

We have two things on the roadmap to address this. The first, and most important, is server-to-server restores. That means instead of you being in the middle, you give us a SFTP login and destination for your account and our high-speed servers talk directly to your high-speed servers and do in minutes what would take you hours or days. This is a high priority for us.

The second, to get around the archival problem, is allowing people to subscribe to get their backups on physical media, like a Blu-ray disk shipped to their office, or a USB stick.

A server-to-server restore that appears to be in the works would be ideal and I can image the Automattic folks will do a great job implementing this. Until then, I downloaded a complete blog backup from WordPress, complete with some 194,000 items. It took VaultPress 31 minutes to build the archive, then 2 minutes for me to download the 453MB archive and a minute to decompress it to 550MB. Inside the archive there were 5 folders: plugins, root, sql, themes, uploads.

Files & Folders in a complete VaultPress backup

The plugins, themes and uploads folders were a straight copy of their respective equivalents within wp-content. However, the backup lacked any .svn metadata folders that were in those folders on my blog server. The root folder contained 3 files: my favicon.ico, robots.txt and wp-config.php. I was disappointed to see it did not include my heavily modified .htaccess file. And finally, the sql folder contained individual *.sql files for each table in my WordPress database. I like how they were separated by table instead of one file. That makes it easier to selectively restore parts of the database. For example if only your options got hosed you can just import wp_options.sql into phpMyAdmin.

Verdict

Official VaultPress pricing is still in the works.

Okay so what do we have thus far? An automated backup solution for your blog. Assuming that VaultPress will soon provide an easy backup restore solution, I still have a few nitpicks. Most important: I would like the ability to tell VaultPress to backup other files and folders on my server that are not part of WordPress. For example, I have various folders in the root of my site that while not directly related to WordPress, are still relied upon by my blog and would need to be backed up as well. Perhaps this issue is a known shortcoming of VaultPress's offering that it is a blog backup solution, not an entire server backup solution?

VaultPress can't do real-time continuous backups for things that don't run through the plugin and set off one of its event handlers to initiate a backup/sync. At the very least VaultPress needs to backup the root .htaccess file and perhaps ask me what other files to backup on a regular basis. I hate when I do an automated WordPress update and it replaces my .htaccess file with a vanilla WordPress .htaccess.

That being said, VaultPress alone will not provide enough coverage for most advanced bloggers; bloggers that run self-hosted third party analytics suites, image galleries, host their own files for things like TinyGrab and more.

As for pricing, that is still up in the air but I have seen numbers between $15-40 per month online. Beta customers such as myself are currently on a discounted $15/month plan for the basic tier of service. A premium plan is also being offered and provides security scans as well. Personally, real-time database backup alone is worth at least $30 per month for me (I already pay $40/month for Amazon S3 for my various online backups and CloudFront usage). If VaultPress saves me only one lost/corrupted/PEBKAC/what-have-you blog post per year, it will still pay for itself. However it is rather unsettling that I will need to have multiple paid backup solutions in place to ensure I have all of my server data backed up. At this rate, I do not think I will be retiring my S3 backup script anytime soon.

At the moment VaultPress is clearly in the early stages of product development and it would not be fair to rate their current offering. A backup service without an automated restoration feature is rather half-baked. When this automated restoration feature goes live, however, I would not hesitate to rate VaultPress 8.5 out of 10 Stammys.

VaultPress provides a sleek backup solution centered around the ease of setup you've come to expect with everything created by the Automattic/WordPress folks. You'll just have to decide if its shortcomings are worth it to you based on how much you blog and what it means to you.

Thoughts? What is your current server backup plan like? Would you consider using VaultPress? If so, how much would you pay?

Disclosure: As of the time of this posting, Automattic currently advertises on this blog.

RSS ads (for the student loans, I promise!): PaulStamatiou.com runs the Thesis theme. View my usenet downloading how to then checkout my usenet host Giganews.

First Impressions: VaultPress (WordPress Backup)

Paul Stamatiou 2005-2010

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VMware is moving up the stack with an ambitious plan to offer an IT services environment that connects the end points between the data center and the cloud.

It's a strategy that we see emerging with other vendors in the space. Virtual computing has passed the inflection point. Virtual machines are now beginning to outnumber physical servers. Without a doubt, the future of the data center is virtual.

The effects are numerous. The enterprise is witnessing a totally new app infrastructure. If you are a leader in enterprise IT you have to take into consideration the rapid acceptance of technologies such as Ruby on Rails and lightweight Web services that provide the capability to offer a Web-oriented architecture.

Sponsor

That's what gives VMware the apparent confidence to offer up an agenda as ambitious as it did today at VMworld.

From ZDnet:

• The company launched its VMware vFabric, which is a cloud app platform that combines its Spring Java development framework and data management, app servers and load balancing. The product is targeted at heterogeneous IT shops.
• VMware announced six new vCloud products. The headliner here is the vCloud Director, which is designed to model and deliver IT infrastructure services. The idea here is to create virtual data centers and computing pools. There were other security products such as vShield and vShield Edge as well as vCloud Datacenter Services, interoperable clouds.
• Desktop virtualization was also a key theme. VMware pitched a vision where legacy desktops would be shed for more cloud delivery. The key theme was a "cloud experience for the enterprise." The big pitch here was VMware View 4.5. Desktop virtualization was a key theme on both the Citrix and VMware earnings conference calls.
• VMware also said that its ThinApp 4.6 is now available. VMware ThinApp is designed to deploy Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktop environments.
• The company also outlined its consulting services and partnerships with the likes of Hewlett-Packard to create private clouds. Verizon will also include VMware's applications in its computing as a service lineup.

VMware is challenging Microsoft with a stack that moves enterprise from client-based apps to a virtualized and multi-tenant world.

To do that you need simple app integration, a cloud infrastructure and security.

In this respect, what interests us is the acquisition of TriCipher, which VMware announced today. TriCipher provides OpenID services with MyOneLogin. In March, we wrote about how OpenID will transform the enterprise ecosystem. The acquisition proves how this is playing out.

The acquisition fits into VMware's Spring platform, which it touted as an on-ramp for IT to launch apps. The apps on Spring leverage the pooled resources that come with a virtual infrastructure. They can migrate from there to a cloud infrastructure. User name and passwords do not provide adequate security for apps in this kind of environment. MyOneLogin helps fill that gap.

Services like MyOneLogin provide infrastructure for security authentication markup language ( SAML) integration and single-sign on with multi-factor authentication. It positions VMware as an identity provider. With TriCipher, VMware can become a hub that keeps track of updates, new protocols and the other issues that come with keeping up to date with federated identity technicalities.

With the services in place, VMware can host third-party apps much like Google Apps Marketplace, which also supports OpenID. On that kind of platform an enterprise customer can also become a service provider. It serves as a platform for adopting SaaS technologies, fast becoming a fixture in the enterprise. Customers, be they employees or others, will be ready to buy without concerns about registering new user names and passwords. As we said in a previous post, it's like a club: You join once. That's it.

SpringSource is proving to be an important acquisition. Without it, VMware would not be in the position to make this identity play. SpringSource opened up the opportunity to partner with Google and Salesforce.com.

It also ties into the news about VMware's development of cloud platforms that are being offered through a network of third-party service providers. The service providers will adopt VMware technology. The same VMware virtual machines that run in the enterprise data center will also run on the platforms of third-party service providers.

It represents what VMware calls its VFabric, a set of integrated application services that include a lightweight application server, global data management, cloud-ready messaging, dynamic load balancing and application performance management. According to VMware, "The result is a complete cloud application platform that ensures performance and portability across heterogeneous cloud environments."

An OpenID infrastructure makes this kind of network a reality. VMware now can offer federated identity across a network that may be internal or extend into the cloud.

The TriCipher acquisition also points to VMware's new push to provide security services. It is now offering its own systems to prevent the infection of virtual machines. This is a new area of concern that we should hear more about as apps scale on virtual platforms such as what VMware is now providing.

VMware is extending its capabilities. Virtual machines are becoming a dominant part of the enterprise landscape. It is a logical time for VMware to be as ambitious as it is - even though it does have a few definite blind spots.

The VMware hypervisor can not be extended to different cloud platforms such as OpenStack and other competing providers. Citrix Systems, which today made its own acquisition, has an opening to extend Xen for companies seeking to use an open-cloud infrastructure.

The difference for customers will come down to trust. And of course there's the price factor. VMware has brought its prices down and has even started offering models that are based on the usage of virtual machines, a concept borrowed from the world of the cloud.

We'll see how this ambitious plan turns out. But if you were Microsoft, would you be worried?

That's me! ;)

Hey everyone. It's been a while. I hope you're doing great, and that your blog is doing just as well :)

A while ago I was asked to write a book about blogging. My editor ended up leaving the publishing house, and the project was never completed, so for some time I've had about 130 pages - approximately half - of a book on creating a popular blog, sitting on my hard drive. I had always wanted to use the content in some other way, and today I'm making it available for the first time. It's a little nerve wracking, but I know the content is high quality, and extremely thorough. It's an outpouring of everything I know about blogging.

At my company, Envato, we've just launched a new Tuts+ Marketplace - a site where you can buy and sell screencasts, tutorials and courses. It's now possible to make a passive income from teaching what you know. There's a category for Business and blogging, so I urge you to create something and get involved!

My Tutorials

I decided to split the three hefty book chapters I had written into three hefty tutorials, each coming in at over 40 typed pages worth of content. The series is called Blogging: From Zero to Hero'. I teach everything I know on each topic, and it's written so that both beginning and advanced bloggers can learn something from the strategies inside.

The first tutorial is Blogging: From Zero to Hero - Getting Started. It details the perfect planning and setup process for your blog, from choosing a niche, to defining your target audience, to selecting the content types that will work best on your blog. If you already have a blog, this chapter can help you refocus your blog to become more successful.

The second tutorial is Blogging: From Zero to Hero - Blog Design and Usability. This tutorial goes into detail on how to make your blog design as simple and effective as possible, making it much easier for your blog visitors to do exactly what you want them to do - from sharing your posts on social media, to leaving comments. You'll also learn how to unclutter your blog, helping it to look clean and professional.

The third tutorial is Blogging: From Zero to Hero - Awesome Blog Content. This tutorial is full of all my best advice on creating great content, from viral post ideas, to writing great titles, to making all your content unique.

Remember that if you use deposits to purchase the tutorials, each tutorial will be $5 rather than $7. You can save $6 across the series by using deposits, and can use any remaining credit on any other marketplace, such as ThemeForest, which sells WordPress themes.

If you already have an account on the Envato Marketplaces, let's Follow' each other :)

Thanks everyone! I'll have something else for you soon :)

(In other news, the blog network I manage - Tuts+ - was just nominated for Blog of the Year by .net Magazine. Woot!)

- : (via Craft)

Chime hits Steam Sept. 6 with Portal-themed level originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In this post we release a yet another freebie: Academica WordPress Theme, a free WordPress theme designed specifically for educational websites such as universities, schools etc. It's a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university, academy or non-profit organization. The theme is designed by ProudThemes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is free to use in private and commerical projects.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

• live demo
• large preview (.jpg, 0.6 Mb)
• download the theme (.zip, 0.12 Mb)
• download the .PSD Logo (.zip, 42Kb)
• release on the developer's site

If you want to be informed when an update to Academica theme will be released, consider signing up with ProudThemes (free).

Features

• The theme was developed for WordPress 3.0 (compatible with 3.0.1)
• Modern, three-column clean design
• Setting up Academica Theme is easy and takes just a few seconds. The theme can be uploaded directly from the Dashboard > Appearance > Themes page. No need to edit any files everything can be done from the Theme Options page.
• 5 built-in icons to share and link to your profiles on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube
• The theme allows enabling/disabling of a jQuery-based content slider on the homepage for showing your photos
• Academica Theme uses a jQuery-based drop-down menu with a fade-in effect
• 9 sidebars (widget areas) and 3 custom widgets developed for this theme
• 3 custom page templates and 2 custom post templates
• Dynamic image resizing (TimThumb script)
• Support for Custom Menus (WordPress 3.0+).

Screenshots

Drop-down navigation menu. See live demo.

Content blocks in the sidebar, defined with a custom widget. See live demo.

News archive page. See live demo

Comments area with threaded comments (reply-functionality). See live demo.

Behind the design process

As always, here are some insights from the designers:

Most theme developers create a lot of magazine and portfolio themes for WordPress, however the education niche is mostly ignored. We decided to do something about it, and create a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university/academy or non-profit organization. Of course, the theme can be used in other niches as well, no restrictions or whatsoever. After reviewing a ton of web-sites of educational institutions, our eyes fell on the web-site of Massey University of New Zealand. With a rather general layout and color palette, we decided to make the navigation and all styling pure-CSS, without any gradients, so that the theme can be customized much faster and easier.

Thank you for your great work, guys. We appreciate your work, your time and your contributions to the design community.

Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: free, Freebies, themes, wordpress

There are countless resources for finding free Wordpress themes, from Wordpress' very own repository, to professional designers who release themes for download on their sites. A handful of these designers have been generous enough to contribute their time and talent to bring us new, free, premium-like Wordpress themes, alongside their paid themes.

The following list features some of the best Wordpress designers, with free portfolio, magazine and minimalist themes, amongst many others, available for download.

Woo Themes

Woo Themes have some of the best premium themes out there, and every now and then they generously release a theme for free. One of their best free themes of all times is Irresistible, which is perfect for those of you looking for a lifestreaming Wordpress theme. Their other free themes include magazine themes, and straightforward minimalist blogs.

Graph Paper Press

Graph Paper Press has a small collection of free Wordpress themes, which are the perfect choice for those of you looking for a stunning portfolio theme. They do, however, require that you sign up to download their themes, which is really no price at all to pay for the freemium themes you'll get in return.

Press 75

Press 75 releases one new, free Wordpress themes theme every now and then. With Press 75, you should get it while you can, because they don't keep their free themes up indefinitely. At the moment, you can snag the theme, theSevenFive, a minimalist lifestream theme with native support for Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Delicious, and many more services that you can filter straight into your blog.

FrogsThemes

FrogsThemes showcases some of the best in portfolio WordPress themes, and they always have a couple of free themes on display. At the moment, the popular SimpleFolio and FolioGrid are available for download.

Templatic

Templatic has an impressive collection of free themes on offer on their site. They are behind the Twitter inspired LiveTwit, and the private team collaboration blog, GTD.

Moon Themes

Moon Themes only has one theme available, but it comes with two different home page layouts, and ten different colour schemes. Eye Gaze is a great magazine theme that can be adapted to suit your personal needs.

Theme Junkie

Theme Junkie provide premium themes, and have thrown in a couple for free. Both free themes, Channel and Fashion Press are the perfect magazine themes with inbuilt ad management, stat management and Feedburner support.

ThemeShift

ThemeShift have several themes on offer, and their free theme, deStyle is a clean, magazine style theme includes a Twitter/Flickr badge and ad management.

Shaken & Stirred

Shaken & Stirred released their first free theme, Shaken Grid, a great portfolio theme for designers, photographers and artists to showcase their work. The theme comes in two colour schemes white and black.

Padd Solutions

Padd Solutions have a stunning collection of freemium Wordpress themes available for downloading, with sliding featured posts, automatically generated thumbnails, and ad management amongst just some of the features included. And if you don't want to miss out on their newest themes, sign up for their newsletter to get them delivered straight to your inbox.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is a great resource for all things Wordpress related, with the occasional free theme featured, such as Agregado, Paper Wall and Gallery. They also put together an annual mammoth list of free themes, and the 2010 list is already out.

If none of these themes are exactly what you are looking for, you can always look for the ideal theme using the Wordpress theme search engine, SeekWP.

Where do you get your free premium-like Wordpress themes? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Koka Sexton

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Google adds more official themes for Chrome -- to the Extensions Gallery? originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Longshot magazine is going to create a magazine start to finish in the space of 48 hours. We'll announce a theme on Friday August 27th at noon, Pacific Time. Then, for the next 24 hours, we'll accept submissions based on that theme. We'll then use the next 24 hours to edit and design a magazine, based purely on your submissions. At noon on Sunday, August 29th, we're going to upload the finished product to MagCloud, where you can buy it.

Don't worry, we've done this before. Nobody got hurt (badly) and we came out of it without even getting sued (barely, although we did have to change our name from 48 HR Magazine to Longshot).

We also won a Knight-Batten Award. David Carr called Issue Zero A remarkable artifact. PBS said we were one of the most technologically interesting magazine projects today. The BBC said amongst the staff cutbacks and closures a new appetite for experimentation has emerged. One of the most ambitious is the newly created [Longshot] Magazine. The Village Voice, New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, Coolhunting, SF Weekly, USA Today, LA Times, Make Work Meaningful, and PSFK all seemed to dig us.

And when I say us, I mean you and me. Because this whole thing only works if you take part.

And so here we are. Again. Hoping you may want to join us. Again. We need writers, photographers, illustrators, videographers, information designers, editors, proof readers, fact checkers, baristas, chefs, bartenders, and carpenters. (Especially bartenders). We want submissions ranging from 140 characters to 4,000 words. Please send us your strongly reported narratives, design fictions, interviews, data visualizations, cartoons, family portraits, how-to guides, maps, obscure histories, recipes, war reporting, photo-essays, blueprints, ships' logs, scientific papers, charticles, wood cuts, curio boxes, product reviews, and box scores.

And just like last time: We want you to make it. We want to publish it first. We don't want your rights. And yes, we're going to pay every one of our contributors and staff.

Interested? We hope so. It's going to be the getdown. If you'd like to submit, be involved in any capacity, or just know what's up, you can sign up here.

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We are down. The refrain of change has faded or flared into anger. Life goes on, but that's all it's doing. The economy's story is told in lines that keep wiggling down and to the right. It's like we're part of the entourage of a fading rapper, watching an energetic kid step into the cipher and knowing our man just can't hack it anymore.

But today is the day we forget all that noise! We might be down. We might be out. We might have been cease-and-desisted by a powerful media conglomerate. But today, we're back. We're looking straight in the mirror, and fixing our makeup, and going out. Do call it a comeback.

And that's why, for Issue One of Longshot magazine, we're asking you to submit works based around the theme of comeback. You can find our submission page at http://longshot.submishmash.com/Submit

Interpret it how you want. After all, comebacks are morally neutral. Disgraced politicians, the Taliban, and Whooping Cough have all come back. But beautiful babies have too, their little kumquat hearts restarting just in time.

You can come back from anything, even death. This is a hilobrow concept. Sports teams stage comebacks. Skirts stage comebacks. Ideas stage comebacks. Even Lassie. Lassie always comes back home again. It is all theater, in a way, with very specific requirements. The preconditions are forever the same: you have to lose before you can win; it has to vanish before it can return; you must have faith.

Maybe some comebacks don't seem so serious to you. What is significant about a basketball team coming back from 16 points down in the fourth quarter to win? It reminds us to hope. What is meaingful about the fashionability of the length of a skirt? It's in the mechanics. Inch by inch, we get to witness change. It may seem like you're analyzing hem lines, but they are just a stripped down and convenient model for how the world happens.

And there's another definition, too. (Your mama probably knows it.) Maybe one time, someone said something to you that was real mean, and as you stood there, stinging, the most perfect retort rose into your brain and flew out of your mouth. It landed flush, and your opponent was staggered. You walked away proud, even though you don't like violence. There are those comebacks, too.

In any case, we're glad you're here, whether you're coming back to try again or are new to this game. The theme might be comeback, but for all the world's eternal returns, every once in a while some genius puts something new out there. Maybe that's you. We're here in LA with the good people of GOOD Magazine, and we can't wait to find out.

Come back to us.

Jane Henson, Brent D. Glass, NMAH director, and Dwight Blocker Bowers, NMAH curator'
courtesy of erin m'

Kermit the Frog and Oscar the Grouch have long been popular attractions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. On Wednesday morning, courtesy of a donation by Jane Henson and the rest of the Jim Henson family, they gained a few new fuzzy friends: the original puppets used in Sam and Friends, one of Jim Henson's earliest TV projects.

Kermit and friends'
courtesy of erin m'

Washington has its fair share of natives who go off into the world to do good things, but few have the longevity and appeal of the characters created by Jim Henson. In the 1950s, as a teenager living in Hyattsville and later as a student at the University of Maryland, Henson found work at local TV stations creating puppets for children's shows, learning from an incredibly early age how to earn laughter and smiles from an audience. DC audiences were his test tube for the kinds of characters, humor and storytelling that would come to define the Henson Company for millions of fans; one of the most notable and successful such creative projects was Sam and Friends, which ran from 1955-1961 on WRC-TV.

The main character of the show was Sam, a bald papier mache lip-syncing singer in a suit who bore an uncanny resemblance to Henson friend and fellow WRC employee Willard Scott. But the one who would become Henson's star was a fuzzy, green not-quite-a-frog-yet character named Kermit, made from the fabric of Henson's mother's discarded winter coat. The Kermit on Sam and Friends looks familiar enough, with his ping pong ball eyes and lanky build, but he's missing a couple of the later version's key attributes: webbed feet, and the spiked collar. Kermit and Sam are joined by other characters in whom we can see other hints of the characters who would eventually populate Henson's later projects: Pierre the French Rat, who looks an awful lot like Rizzo the Rat; Mushmellon, in whose grouchy face you can see the kernel that would eventually become Oscar; Yorick, a Shakespearean-themed purple skull with a happy enough expression that you can trace his evolution to Cookie Monster. In all, there are 10 puppets from the show who will be going on display in the museum's pop culture gallery in November.

It is a bit of a homecoming for the characters. Jane Henson, museum Director Brent D. Glass and Curator Dwight Blocker Bowers all noted the local beginnings of the characters who would eventually take the world by storm. I am sure these guys are really pleased to be home, Henson said.

Jane Henson and Willard Scott'
courtesy of erin m'

The Muppets and other characters are most identified with Jim Henson personally, and indeed 9 of these original puppets were made by Jim himself as a teenager (the 10th, Mushmellon, was made by Jane). Like so many great projects, though, the work was the result of a fruitful, lifelong collaboration between Henson, his wife, Jane, friends like Willard Scott, and the many, many other puppeteers and builders who worked with him from his teen years until his death in 1990. Jane Henson and Willard Scott were on hand for Wednesday's donation ceremony, and watching them together was a charming glimpse into the creative energy that must have existed around these friends when they were getting their start with shows like Sam and Friends.

Looking back on the Henson legacy, Scott, himself no stranger to longevity, reflected on the enduring popularity of the Sam and Friends characters and the ones they would later inspire: People come and go in TV, but not the Muppets, Scott said. They just went on and got better and better and better.

Sam and Willard Scott'
courtesy of erin m'

Sam and Friends'
courtesy of erin m'

Sam and friends'
courtesy of erin m'

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Filed under: Music, Culture

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Filed under: Music, Culture

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