HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

My personal site WP Pro just underwent a CSS reboot, the design is still built on Blueprint CSS but with a better and more robust framework that will eventually made public. This framework follows the Blueprint CSS except it is highly customizable for WP and from with WP Admin. Check the redesign and let me know what you think.

The theme currently skinning our site is available for download. This is the WordPress version of the grid-based Habari theme by Thomas The Undersigned. Theme demo and downloads are available at WP Pro.

We wrote about the issues being experienced with scrapping our RSS feed, numerous spammy sites have been republishing our work and we are clearly feeling the pinch. We decided to revert from using Feedburner to the default WordPress feed (later tonight) to try a work around to fix this issue. We have a few hundred readers subscribing to the feed, we request you to update the feed URI to http://www.headsetoptions.org/feed/ if you stop seeing update from our site feed. Also, I have a personal site which you could subscribe to that will predominantly provide WordPress and design related information. Thank you.

Are you an Obama fan? Here’s a free download that you would love. This is a eBook version of a paper back that sells for $30. They are giving this book away to promote their print edition, the download is a PDF which is approximately 7MB, so be patient while it downloads.

Here’s a free Obama/Biden sticker from MoveOn to go with your Free Obama Button. Sign up and get your own stylish sticker now and proudly show who you support!

Sarah Palin is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for Vice President of the United States in the 2008 presidential election. Yesterday, someone close to Palin made a whole bunch of edits to her Wikipedia entry making it a little more palatable for the centrists. For those who are interested in the old page, check Google’s cached version or download screenshots (might be slow to load due to file size) from August 21st 2008 and August 29th 2008 and compare the notes for yourself.

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British Prime Minister’s #10 blog is apparently not honoring the copyright agreement of the theme developer, in spite of the Creative Commons licensing. Theme copyright infringements are a serious issue that many non-themers overlook, mostly because it conveniently services their purpose. The old theme viewer was plagued with this issue that eventually led to creation of a new admin monitored repository. With the growing popularity of WordPress, this issue left unaddressed will only lead to more such goof ups or worse, blatant rip-offs, which will eventually lead to a decline in free quality themes.

Here’s a fluid bubble chart of the Olympic medal count, the coolest online map ever. Move the scale on the top to get a feel of how powerful this flash powered application really is.

One interesting note in the geopolitical context is how in 1980, USSR, the eastern block, Cuba and all the communist governments dominated the show (in the absence of US), but China, which we believe was strongly influenced by USSR, did not medal at all.

As for this year, the larger dots are mostly represented by developed nations, with only a few exceptions.

Two stats caught my attention this afternoon, according to Matt, WordPress page views apparently grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month. That is billion with a B. At almost the same time, according to IBM’s X-Force 2008 Trend Statistics, WordPress, as a blog platform is the 9th most vulnerable application vendor. Go figure.

Have you noticed lately that certain keywords you traditionally scored high in Google are no longer driving traffic your way? Chances are that you lost the spot on Google SERP. Since the changes that started late July and continued into early August, most all web sites that relied on Google SERP have in one way or the other been affected. Case in point, we are no longer ranked for the keyword “Web Design”, it has been replaced by sites like About.com, WikiPedia.org, forums and directories, all of who basically provide no web design service, instead merely provide the definition of the same. Less than half the SE results are for actual providers of web design …