Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Consider that we have recommended that you keep no more than seven full-length posts on
the main page. Now think about how many column inches are taken up by a 140-character
post. That would be fewer than the last two sentences. You probably want to bump up that
post count so that it stretches below your blogroll.
Prologue and P2 are designed to support microblogging, which is great for simple link blogs,
too.
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Photoblogging
—The advent of the ubiquitous digital camera has naturally given rise to using
blogs to share photographs on the Web. The advantage blogs have over photo sharing sites
like Flickr is that you have more complete control over how an image is presented and
described. Restricted only by bandwidth cost considerations, you can caption your images,
include as much descriptive information as you want, and define your own sharing and licens-
ing rules.
Photoblogging is such a popular activity in the WordPress community that it has its own
search filter in the Free Themes Directory. Checking this box returns around 20 themes
tagged for photoblogging by their designers. One of these, Monotone, is also available to
WordPress.com users. Many of these move the traditional sidebar items (blogroll, recent
posts, and the like) into the footer so as not to distract from the impact of the images, and
so as not to unduly restrict their size.
Finding Free Themes Outside the Directory
So you've gone through the Free Themes Directory, and nothing grabs you. Perhaps you've selected
a theme to get started with—which we highly recommend, as it is better to blog with an imperfect
look than not to blog at all—but now you want to continue the search for the theme that sings for
you. What's next? A Google search for “free wordpress themes” generates millions of results
(nearly 49 million as we write, and Yahoo! finds 58 million)—far more than anyone could explore in
a lifetime. There must be an easier way.
The community again comes to the rescue, with many folks taking it upon themselves to review
some of the better free themes out there. To our knowledge, the best of these sites is the Weblog
Tools Collection (WLTC) at http://weblogtoolscollection.com. Three times a week, WLTC authors
review new themes submitted by designers who participate in the WLTC Community forum.
If you find a good theme outside the Free Themes Directory, you have to install the theme manually.
See “Installing and Activating a Theme” later in this chapter.
Finding Premium Themes
With hundreds of free themes to choose from, and the ability to tweak settings to get different col-
ors, layouts, widgets, and the like, why would you buy a premium theme?
Probably the biggest reason people use premium themes is to stand out from the crowd. It's been
estimated that there's one theme for every 6,000 WordPress.org users (one theme for every 3,000
WordPress.com bloggers). With millions of WordPress bloggers out there, there are going to be a lot
of people with a blog that looks a lot like yours.
