binarymoon

I have recently been working with Darren Hoyt on a new version of his popular theme, Mimbo, and it is finally released to the public (release post here) as our first Premium theme, Mimbo Pro

The theme is available on the new blog design website - Pro Theme Design

So far the feedback has been really positive and we’re overjoyed at the reception. Hopefully things will continue this way

If anyone is interested in making some money out of our hard work then you can check out the affiliate page for more info.

I have spent some time recently working on an update to Regulus. In short the new features are…

• New colour scheme
• Various Bug Fixes
• Header link
• Home tab alterations (adjust the text)
• Support for tags

I have been talking to (pestering) the kind folks at wordpress.com to update the theme here, hopefully it will be online in the not too distant future.

You can read the full release post on my main site. If you have a self hosted blog then you can also get the download from the same page.

Over on Binary Moon I recently published 10 top tips for reducing your online readership.

In brief the points are…

1. Snap.com
2. Excessive Ads above the fold
3. Overlay & Expandable Ads
4. Inline Ads (those double underlined ones)
5. Del.icio.us/ Twitter in feeds with no opt out option
6. Bad/ No navigation
7. No/ Hidden archives
8. Tiny/ Low contrast text
9. Long lines of closely spaced text
10. No individual post information

You can read the my thoughts about each of these points on Binary Moon

I have recently made a couple of posts on Adens and optimising it, over on my main blog. Thought it might be worth a look for some of you bloggers out there, so had to mention it

• My top 5 tips for increasing adsense earnings (without increasing traffic)
• How to Optimise : Time based Adsense

Any questions? Just ask over on the relevant post(s) and someone is sure to respond.

I published my first wordpress plugin today. The plugin is very very simple. It’s basically a way for you to customise the look and feel of your wordpress login screen. The best use for this is on sites that you design for other people, where you wish to add that extra touch of personalisation and polish.

You can see examples of my custom wordpress logins on the custom wordpress login flickr group. You can also read the release article, and download the plugin for yourself.

I have recently finished reading the new Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book, and have written a review over on my “other blog”. To save the click I think that the new book is really rather good and finishes the series off nicely. I wish there was a bit more coming but, well, you can’t have it all.

I am constantly amazed by the sheer amount of spam that is showing up on wordpress.com. Surely the spammers realize that all the blogs on the site use Akismet? I am currently getting around 100 spams a day, despite the fact I only blog here once every month or so. It’s absolutely crazy!

WordPress.com is actually surprisingly good when it comes to spam on the site. Very little gets through, although there are occassionally the odd one that slip under the radar, but those are trivial to deal with.

I really wish the spammers would just give up

I was browsing around my dashboard here today and I noticed firstly that I get visitors, and secondly that I have people subscribed too, or at least reading, my feed.

I wonder why?

I post on binarymoon.wordpress.com sporadically at best. I only really use the site to talk about personal projects, or to mention new things relating to wordpress.com or my theme (soon to be themes).

If you are one of my mystery feed readers then please comment and let me know why? I’d love to know the reasons.

Over on Binary Joy there has recently been information disappearing from the custom field section of a number of the posts. I thought I had fixed the problem but today I noticed it hasd happened again so I went searching and, thanks to Mark Jaquith, have now got the answer

The issue occurs because the plugins assume that every time edit_post is triggered, their inserted form field will be included in $_POST. This isn’t the case. edit_post is called for requests that do not originate from the post edit form and for requests that are not initiated by a privileged user. Comment submission in WordPress 2.1 is one of these cases. Editing of a post in 2.1 (and earlier versions) via XML-RPC is another case.

Now I need to make sure that all the plugins use this code so that the problem does not continue to happen.

Found this plugin today and thought it was interesting.

My comments on the wordpress wysiwyg editor before shows the problems I was having and this plugin fixes those issues. Essentially what this does is enable the firefox spell checking in the text area - the one feature I really wanted added to the editor.