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Tutorial : How to separate Comments and Trackbacks

I’ve always felt that showing your comments and Trackbacks separated adds a bit of professionalism to your blog. It’s hard as it is to follow a long conversation, but also having to weed out the Trackbacks makes it even more difficult. I could never really understand why people don’t do this because honestly having those two separated takes only a minimal amount of coding effort and only 2 or 3 minutes of your time but has a great impact on your readers.
To get started, make sure you back-up your comments.php file before starting to edit anything.

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Media Pressroom Theme

A clean, minimalist theme designed for use as a media pressroom.  View a Demo of this free theme.

Developed by Fathom SEO this theme is a new theme for WordPress,  slightly different from the typical WordPress theme. It is a complete package with documentation for creating an enhanced pressroom using WordPress as the backend.

Download

If you download and use the theme let us know how you get on - add your comments below.

Wordpress 2.5.1 has been released

I must say I’m no longer surprised as the guys over at Wodpress.org have gotten accustomed to having a big release and soon afterwards releasing an update. I’m really impressed by their work and how fast things move with them, but nevertheless here’s what Wordpress 2.5.1 gets fixed :

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

9 free Wordpress themes

It looks like Brian Gardner, the developer of the Revolution theme series has decided to release one for the public. It’s a blueish 3 column widget-ready theme designed more for the end-user than being used as a web template for a designer.

Here’s a screen shot of the theme :

As you can see this theme is designed with 2 sidebars on the right, a big AdSense box below the related links area - not a very high CTR area, a big header and lots of space for the content . The banner in the header is well placed but I don’t think that the AdSense ads in the post, at the bottom of the post  serve their purpose quite well because it’s an area with a very low CTR. Aside from that, it features a series of things that most themes lack, like :

• A cross-browser compatible navigation menu. ( I’m really a sucker for these menus )
• The possibility of choosing your layout, either 2 sidebars on the left, content in the middle and one sidebar on the left and one on the right or the layout you’ve seen in the screen shot, 2 sidebars on the right.
•  The layout works flawless in IE and FF ( latest versions).

From my point of view, it’s a really nice release but it’s nothing compared to the premium Revolution themes. As an aside to the Wordpress Revolution theme, it looks like iThemes have also release a set of 8 free Wordpress themes. Have a look : iThemes Wordpress themes

Tutorial : How to install and configure Wordpress for a first-time run

Installing and configuring Wordpress for a first time run might not be that hard, and yet some people aren’t that skilled when it comes to installing scripts for the first time. This tutorial is written for those that need a bit of guidance with Wordpress installation and configuration. This article will actually be the first in a series.

Step 1

The first thing you’ll have to do is to go to this link Wordpress download and download the latest version of Wordpres. Be sure to check if your hosting meets the minimum requirements to run Wordpress before going to step 2. Also note that many hosts will have an easy install process for scripts such as Wordpress.

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