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Archive for March, 2006

Can now add a shopping cart to your Wordpress blog

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Cool new plugin, WP Shop allows you to add a shopping cart functionality to your Wordpress powered blog. It comes with PayPal integrated. I was playing around with the plugin in my admin backend, it’s pretty simple, you just need to customize it to suit your needs.

Nice plugin, you’ll have to check it out and see if it suits your needs, not sure what you will sell on a blog, but I am sure you’ll come up with something.

Getting started with Photoshop

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

If you ever wanted to learn how to make web graphics, read on.

I’d advise using Adobe Photoshop CS2, which you can download free for 30 days, so get your trial now.

After you have the Photoshop software downloaded, installed and running, you may feel overwhelmed by all it’s features, I know I was. That’s why I had a hard time letting go of Jasc Paint Shop Pro for so long.

To ease the learning curve, it’s best to do some beginner tutorials, this will help you to familiarize yourself with the program’s interface and basic features.

We have plenty of basic tutorials for you to try out at Retro Tutorials - Photoshop Tutorials. It’s best to go through the tutorials at least once, if you get stuck, just return to Retro Tutorials and try another tutorial, you can also just come back to this post and let me know where you’re stuck…. hey I still get stuck sometimes myself, so don’t feel bad. I can’t even teach myself Flash… I have a much better chance with my PHP dreams. :)

When you’re feeling courageous, hop on over to the Web Graphics category and give the “Advanced Orb” tutorial a whirl, orb’s are always great fun to create and play around with…did I just say “great fun”… I think I did. :D

If you do make an orb, please share it here, especially if you put your own spin on it, that’s always fun…I may even make some of my own and share them.

Retro Tutorials - Photoshop Tutorials from basic to advanced

Flawless Imperfection - Wordpress 2.0.2 Theme Debut

Monday, March 20th, 2006

Flawless Imperfection - Wordpress 2.0.2 Theme Debut Many thanks to Chuck S for helping me with the collapsible sidebars and for the butterfly poem, what a lovely surprise. :)


View the demo: Flawless Imperfection.
Download this Wordpress theme here: http://www.mystical-twilight.com/wordpress-themes/flawless-imperfection/

Wordpress 2.0.2

Monday, March 20th, 2006

We’ve upgraded the blog and the theme viewer to Wordpress 2.0.2. This is a security upgrade so be sure to upgrade your Wordpress powered blog when you get the chance.

I’ve found someone who seems to not realize you can actually download the themes here. They just went to the theme viewer and copied the source of a theme and put it on their site, I am not sure how they got it working, but it’s quite annoying as they have my stat tracker in there as well, I like to keep track of where people come from, how they find the site, etc…and this site is adding to the stats. There was a piece of code I put in to stop it, hopefully it’s working. All their post titles, links, etc, link back to my theme viewer, sorry folks… but what a dumbass. I need to start a dumbass of the day category, I am sure I will find plenty.

Please note that the Wordpress themes can be downloaded here, do not take the source from the viewer and stick it in your blog, that’s not how it works.

Template Monster’s Free Wordpress Themes

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

So, Template Monster now offers free Wordpress themes, with the intention to obviously profit off them no less. I am sure this is just to see how well they do and if they’re worth creating along with their billions of other templates for sale.

Well I say, don’t bother folks. The coding is atrocious! Wow, how they messed up the templates, what an effin disaster.

See, I have this little technique… something I include in some of my Wordpress themes and the Adsense on it gets a lot of clicks, well some people like me to add this to their existing theme.

I tried on this person’s Wordpress blog, which is using a Template Monster Wordpress theme, so that is how I know the code is a mess.

Just try validating one of those things, good God. They may look attractive, but why bother… I am sure the search engine spiders sent to index your page would get lost in there as if it were a big friggin cobweb.

I was going to say, well it’s good enough since they’re free, but I changed my mind. I’d stay away from those if I were you, unless they get their designers to actually code them properly. It seems they hire strictly designers with no coding ability.

I am proud to say I can do both, but I lean towards coding. ;) If you want me to make something similar to one of those and offer it for download, all you have to do is ask.