Basic Maths WordPress Theme

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Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole have created Basic Maths, an excellent grid-based theme for WordPress that includes features like microformats, color-scheme control, full widget support and a key shortcut to display the grid. Not to mention it’s beautifully designed.

You can purchase it for $45. Well worth the price.        

A Redesign is a Comin’

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UPDATE

I just flipped the switch and moved everything over so it should all be done. Let me know if you find anything that looks weird, especially those of you on a PC. Enjoy.

Yup… again. I’m starting to grow out of this current design. I need something more flexible with more real estate for the posts and for side widgets. Better typography and usability as well.

You’ll notice that I’ve also begun to prepare the most recent posts to work with the new design. I’m setting some visual standards. A slight change in how I write out the headlines. Previously I use to capitalize all the words in a title including “a”, “the”, “of”, “is”, “on” and so on. Now I’m using a form of Title Casing where the first and last words in the title are capitalized as well as any word four or more letters. I’m also setting an image height of 700px for consistency. You’ll see what I mean when I launch the new design.

It’s pretty much done, I’m just making some final tweaks and I’ll probably flip the switch tomorrow evening. I hope you guys dig it.        

You Might Be Subscribed To The Wrong RSS Feed

I use this great plugin on this site called FeedSmith which redirects all of my default feeds to my FeedBurner feed. It works well but I just found a bug in Safari. If you click on the blue RSS icon in the address field at the top, the default feed doesn’t get redirected so you end up subscribing to a basic default feed. This is the only instance where I found this problem.

I’m looking into the problem but in the meantime if you’re subscribed to the AisleOne feed could you please double check to see if the feed URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/aisleone/

If it isn’t please update it. Thanks.        

What Do You Think Of The Current Design For The Site?

I don’t know about everyone else out there but I’m the type of designer that gets tired easily of my own work, especially when it comes to the design of my sites. Historically, I’ve updated my designs every 6 months to a year. Recently I’ve re-designed my personal portfolio which I’m really digging (we’ll see how long that lasts) and now it seems like it’s time to update the design of this blog. Not really because I’m sick of it, just that I feel it needs to be freshened up. Maybe mess around with a new layout instead of the standard nav on the left, content on the right format. Also there are some functionality flaws that I think need to be addressed as well.

So, I want to hear from all you readers out there. Let me know if you love this design or if you hate it. What could be done to improve it or what you’d want to see in the new design. In the end I want the design to be something that everyone is comfortable with and is easy to understand and use. So let me have it, I won’t get offended. Leave me a comment below and together we’ll re-design this blog.

Oh one more thing… if you know of a really nice WordPress theme let me know about it and maybe I’ll use it.        

Comment Notification Feature

Just wanted to let you guys know about the a new feature I added to the site. You can now be notified whenever a new comment is added to a specific post. When leaving a comment, under the “Submit Comment” button there is now a check box labeled “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”. Check this before submitting your comment and you’ll subscribe to that post. Once you’re subscribed, you will see “Manage subscriptions” in it’s place. This is where you can manage all of your subscriptions.

I see that some of you are already using this, which is great.        

FFFFoundRSS Plugin For WordPress

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For all you WordPress and FFFFound users out there, here’s a sweet little plugin called FFFFoundRSS. I had an idea for a plugin that would pull in your personal feed from FFFFound and display it on your blog. Since I have no idea how to create WordPress plugins I started to search for someone who could. That’s how I found Dave Kellam, who’s created a similar plugin for flickr and has done an excellent job with the FFFFound plugin. It’s easy to install via a widget or a php include and it has some nice features like image caching. Go to Dave’s site to download and get more info.

You can see the plugin in action in the sidebar to the left.