HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

Encyclopedia is an free new basic WordPress Web 2.0 theme designed to improve content presentation. This theme has SEO friendly headings, optimized content flow order, Google Adsense styling, and comes ready to activate. The theme requires no set up and can be used as is, optionally, by adding posts in a category called “Featured” will allow the use of the featured post function.

This theme has all the innovative features that we offer with all our newer themes. The theme works with all versions of WordPress up to date including the latest version 2.6.3

The theme offers among other things the following features:

Google Adsense styled - allows the easy addition of your Google Adsense code in pre-styled files without worrying about breaking the theme- another feature to help new users.
Zero set up, just add and activate and you are good to go.
Widget ready sidebars (3).
Search Engine Optimized, no need to worry about duplicate posts or rearranging title tags.
CSS3/XHTML validated.

Impress is an new free basic WordPress theme that offers the Web 2.0 feel to your web site and improves content presentation. This theme has SEO friendly headings, optimized content flow order, Google Adsense styling, and more. The theme requires no set up and can be used as is, optionally, by adding posts in a category called “Featured” will allow the use of the featured post function.

This theme has all the innovative features that we offer with all our newer themes. The theme works with all versions of WordPress up to date including the latest version 2.6.3

The theme offers among other things the following features:

Google Adsense styled - allows the easy addition of your Google Adsense code in pre-styled files without worrying about breaking the theme- another feature to help new users.
Zero set up, just add and activate and you are good to go.
Widget ready sidebars (3).
Search Engine Optimized, no need to worry about duplicate posts or rearranging title tags.
CSS3/XHTML validated.

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.

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.

The June 4th floods have raged for over 2 weeks now, and Bush finally made time to get there. In the mean time, Red Cross Midwest has set up a site on WordPress.com to provide updates, at some 240 posts over 10 days, this site provides updates that are brief and some very detailed instructions to those in the affected region.

Earlier, we studied how we can easily display a continuous list in two columns using just CSS. Today, we will use a similar technique to present a continuous list in two rows within a finite width. A common usage of this technique can be found in galleries such as CSS Mania or wpSnap, where the post is replaced by a thumbnail image in the home page. We can tackle this need using simple CSS magic.

Let us assume you are using WordPress to power your site where your typical blog post is generated using WP Loop as shown below. This will usually render a simple list of posts as shown in this image, click the image to view a live demo.

<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<h5>//<?php the_time(‘m.d.Y’); ?> at <?php the_time(‘g:i a’) ?></h5>
<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>
<?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’); ?>
<p class=”entry-meta”>
<span class=”cat-links”>Filed under: <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?><?php if (function_exists(‘the_tags’)) { ?><?php the_tags(‘, ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?><?php } ?></span> // <span class=”comments-link”><?php comments_popup_link(‘Post a comment’, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?></span>
</p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

We then replace the tag that generates the post, in this case, it’s the “the_content” tag with a source to a image file that is labeled identical to the post ID, for example, post ID 11 will have a corresponding image called 11.jpg in a select.

Using images in place of text can be tempting especially since an image can offer you more visually than just text does. However, most of us end up using text for the simple reason that Google and Yahoo’s search engines are not able to read your images effectively (even with alt text?). Here’s a quick, simple, tried and tested SEO friendly CSS only Javascript free fix for one such scenario; replacing your navigation menu text with SEO friendly images:

Let’s start with making our images that will be used in place of menu text, in this example I am using images 30px tall and of varying width. I make two images for each menu item, one for mouse-over or hover and second for all other conditions.