racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

If you’re looking for a theme to spice up your WordPress blog, try out Rubidious, Performancing Themes’ June release.

Rubidious is a three-column theme sporting deep hues of red and blue. The theme name is based on the chemical element Rubidium, which comes from the Latin term for “deepest red”.

Two light-on-dark sidebars sit on opposite sides of the main content. The left sidebar is called “menu” in the Widgets configuration page (WordPress 2.5), and is ideally made for navigational elements like links various subpages. The theme supports WordPress 2.5’s avatar features, though it should work with WordPress 2.3 just fine.

I have a few new personal blogs I’ll be launching and I think I’ll be giving Rubidious a try.

I reported on the Blog Herald how Blogging Pro has released its latest InSense theme under a sponsored scheme. This means a sponsor paid for a link at the footer of the theme. The benefits? Users get a great DesignDisease-designed theme, the designer gets paid good money, and the sponsor gets inbound links.

I know several designers who give away WordPress themes to blog hosting services for free, so long as they get a link back to their sites. Now this seems to be a great business model for people who want to monetize their theme creations. Not all bloggers can afford to pay for your themes. But there are companies and businesses that would be willing to foot the bill. In the end, everyone’s happy: users get great themes, designers get good money, companies get inbound links.

There are some who aren’t too happy with such an arrangement, and view sponsorship as a sneaky way to get backlinks. However, Blogging Pro is quite candid with the fact that their theme is sponsored, and the theme license even allows for the removal of the sponsor link if a user chooses so.

Fellow Blog Herald writer Lorelle VanFossen has this to say about sponsored themes:

Actually, this was brought up over a month ago and was seriously slammed. People were digging into their WordPress Themes to remove these. There was a huge backlash against Theme designers and sites which sponsor such links.

A link back is considered appropriate. A link to a “sponsor”, aka advertising, is very much frowned upon by serious bloggers and WordPress fans. The average blogger won’t care or even notice, as you say, but the ones who do have spoken loudly that they find this bad manners, poor taste, and, for some, criminal.

Personally, I would think there is no harm in having themes sponsored, as long as this is stated explicitly outright, and not done in a sneaky manner. Even better if the user can opt to remove the link.

What do you think?

It’s up to you if you want to go in the buff in person that day. But I’m talking about the annual CSS Naked day which will come this April 5th.

In 2006, Dustin Diaz declared April 5 to be the annual CSS Naked Day, a chance for the web world to be reminded of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages. They would also have a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

CSS, after all, was meant to separate content from the aesthetics. And being naked will help you know if your site or blog’s markup is usable and accessible (and yes, even compliant). Remember the tables and frames of olden days? I hope you ditched them a long time ago.

The fact of the matter is, if you’re writing good solid markup to begin with, it shouldn’t be all that bad anyway. It will be a test case to see how usable your website is to others without a design. So in the meantime, don’t hesitate to prepare your site for the big day.

So I’ll see you (your site, at least) naked on April 5th. If you’re running WordPress, here’s a plugin that automatically disables your style sheet every April 5th.

I have (finally) updated to the latest version of WordPress, 2.1.2. Now I’m thinking of overhauling the site’s look. I’ve been favoring the Blogging Pro theme, which was recently released to the public by my former colleagues at the Bloggy Network (actually we’re still working pretty closely together on some projects). Check out Study Driving. After a couple of theme changes (including Cutline and Torn), I’ve settled with the pleasing three-column layout that is the BP theme.

Now, I’ve always strived to keep the J Spot as simple and straightforward as possible, and with the best possible usability in mind (I try). However, sometimes I think the narrow theme (optimized for 800px) gets too constricting.

What would you say to a blog overhaul?

I won’t exactly throw away everything and build up from scratch. I mean that’s bad for SEO. I’ll likely still be applying the same elements (text, navigation links, etc.) but over a new layout. I’ll be experimenting with a new look sometime within the day (while my FTP client does some WP uploading/upgrading across a bunch of other sites).

Jhay Rocas has already done it. His blog used to sport the same Hemmed theme. Now he’s using the Blogging Pro theme. (And incidentally, his blog is now more popular than mine, according to use.com.ph ).

Then again, I’d still prefer a mid to large font theme like the one fellow blogheralderLorelle on WP uses. I probably need to tweak Elena’s (of Design Disease) BP design a bit.

I’d love to hear from you.

I’m trying to import my old posts from my jangelo.i.ph blog, which I’ve since relegated as my archives blog. Thing is, I want to centralize everything and use racoma.com.ph for my old content (which I consider to be very relevant), for the following reasons:

• Search engine optimization – My i.PH blog had lost its optimizations when i.PH upgraded to Calliope version 2.
• Monetization – Same as the above reason, I’m no longer able to put up AdSense ads on i.PH. And i’m trying to experiment with monetizing racoma.com.ph (Against my minimalistic design stance? Not really.).

One big problem: there’s no easy way to import from i.PH. There used to be a means to backup all content using the old Blog:CMS backup feature, but WordPress simply does not have a WordPress-to-WordPress. And i.PH is now running a modified version of WordPress as its content management system.

So for now, I’m doing it manually, part-by-part. I’m saving the RSS 2.0 file generated by jangelo.i.ph (at http://jangelo.i.ph/blogs/jangelo/feed) and using this with the WP import tool to import ten posts at a time. Then I delete the ten posts from jangelo.i.ph, so the RSS generated would be for the next ten posts, and as these would be considered dupes by Google (very un-SEO).

Hopefully I’ll get to do enough moving in my spare time, and I hope I get to finish the total migration within a few weeks.

Update: I found an easier way

I found an easier way. Not exactly an easy way but one that’s relatively easier than the save-import-delete method. I access the RSS feed by page, by using this URL:

http://jangelo.i.ph/blogs/jangelo/?feed=rss2&paged=(insert page number here)

So this means I can easily view and save the feeds by batches of 10 without having to delete the items first. Once I’ve finished doing this to all my posts (more than a thousand) then I can delete all the posts on the original blog.

Sweet.