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WP Theme Review: Dictum

Jaypee Habaradas — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:11:35 +0000

Haven’t done a WordPress theme review in a while and I know many of the regulars here on JaypeeOnline look forward to these posts so I decided to do one this week. The theme I’m sharing with you today is called the Dictum WordPress theme, designed by Jai Nischal Verma of Blog Oh Blog.

From the theme author:

This is a WordPress 3.0 + compatible theme with a professional slideshow that you can use to display or highlight any of your categories’ posts. This theme also comes with a social sharing bar in the single post view that will help your users easily bookmark the useful articles from your blog. The widgetized sidebar comes with ready to configure feedburner, twitter and facebook icons that can be setup in the theme’s admin options. The thumbnails are auto-generated and use the default thumbnail size that wordpress generates when you upload an image with a post.

Features:

2-column
Widget-ready
Gravatar-ready
Threaded comments support
Built-in social sharing bar
Auto-generated thumbnails
Compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome

Screenshots:

SLIDESHOW USAGE/INSTALLATION
1. Activate Dictum theme
2. Go to Appearance > Dictum Options
3. Configure slideshow category
4. Set custom field for each post.
5. Set custom field to “label” (without the quotation marks)

My Take:
The Dictum theme is a simple, clean and professional looking WordPress theme. It has the basic functions/features that most users will need in a theme – widget-ready, gravatar-ready and threaded comments support. Then aside from those basic functions, it also has some extra features like the professional slideshow with auto-generated thumbnails so users won’t have to manually resize photos and the social sharing bar which enables blog readers to easily and quickly bookmark or share content. It also has a very easy to use and configure built-in buttons for RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook.

With it’s simple design and layout, the Dictum theme can be used for different types of blogs – personal blogs, sports blogs, non-profit organization blogs, company blog, small business blog and other special niche blogs.

Dictum is 100% FREE and can be used any way the user pleases as long as the footer credits are kept intact.

Preview or Download the Dictum WordPress theme.

NOTE: This theme was scanned using the Theme Authenticity Checker and doesn’t contain any hidden or encrypted code.

Weekend Roundup #74

Jaypee Habaradas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:45:34 +0000

Hello everyone! How are you all doing? Hope you all had a good weekend. Mine was okay. It wasn’t that busy and it wasn’t boring as well. Had a few parts in the church program and had a church building committee meeting so I had to stay a while at church til late afternoon. Today, Sunday was spent mostly at home with my family. Watched the Lakers vs Magic game and was disappointed that the Lakers lost by 2 pts. It’s all good though, I believe they can still win this year’s championship. They just have to work harder and get/find their groove back. Also watched the 82nd Annual Academy Awards or the 2010 Oscar Awards on TV. Was expecting Avatar to win most of the awards but surprisingly, The Hurt Locker came out winning 6 Oscars out of the 9 nominations it got, including the most coveted one – Best Picture.

Have fun and enjoy reading this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup.

Blogging

WordPress

Technology

Gadgets

Pinoy Blogs

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Thank you for your time and hope you guys have a great week!

Blog Updates 01.10

Jaypee Habaradas — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:23:38 +0000

This is the first blog update for 2010 which covers most if not all the changes I’ve made/done to JaypeeOnline since my last blog update back in November. Most of the recent changes were done to improve page load times for JaypeeOnline. Why the sudden focus/concern about page speed/page load time? Because these past couple of months, I’ve read several articles that talk about page speed becoming a ranking factor this year and Google’s recent release of the Page Speed Report Tool in Webmaster Tools. With that, I checked JaypeeOnline’s page load times and identified the files, scripts/widgets that sends a lot of requests or extra DNS lookups, adding to the overal page speed/page load time.

Uninstalled Plugins

SexyBookmarks – adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each post.
TweetMeme Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.
Where did they go from here – Show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page. Much like Amazon.com’s product pages.

Uninstalled the SexyBookmarks and TweetMeme Button plugins because they make several large connections in order for them to do their job, which amounts to a higher page load time. If not for the issue of page speed, I wouldn’t have removed these plugins as I really like them, they’re very useful and they go well with the design/layout of my blog theme. I was able to hit two birds with one stone on this because I was able to get rid of two plugins and I was able to reduce the overall page load time. The Where did they go from here plugin worked well but I had to remove it because I had to move back the Adsense unit to that spot.

Installed Plugins

Clicky for WordPress – Integrates Clicky (analytics) on your blog!
WP Minify – this plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

Re-installed the Clicky for WordPress plugin (blog statistics/analytics) because I needed something that would let me check my blog stats on the iPhone. There’s a Google Analytics app on iTunes but I prefer Clicky over Google Analytics. I installed the WP Minify plugin to help me compress JS and CSS files in order to improve JaypeeOnline’s page load time. The first time I installed (a couple months back), I got errors, so I decided to uninstall it. I gave it another try and this time it worked fine without any errors.

Other Changes

Removed the JaypeeOnline Facebook Fan Page widget from the sidebar.
Edited the Author Info section and added/removed some stuff.
Added Chitika Premium ads which show up only to visitors referred by search engines.
Created a custom social bookmark section, located at the bottom of every post (BOOKMARK or SHARE IT!). This is not a plugin. I’ve manually coded it into theme.

I removed the Facebook Fan Page widget because it was erratic. There were times when it was messed up and somtimes it won’t load at all. It’s javascript and it really slowed down the page load time. I would’ve kept it if it at least brought in some traffic from Facebook, but it didn’t. So it wasn’t really worth having. Edited the Author Info section and added my Twitter and Facebook links. I added the Chitika Premium ads two months ago, but I wasn’t able to include it in my blog update. Because I uninstalled the SexyBookmarks plugin, I had to find an alternative social bookmarking plugin but decided to create a custom social bookmarking section. I downloaded some social bookmarking icons and created the “Bookmark or Share It!” graphic using Adobe Photoshop. Hope you guys like it. Let me know what you think about it, okay?

I’m also thinking about reinstalling the WP Polls plugin and having a weekly or monthly poll here on JaypeeOnline. What do you think?

If any of you guys have comments, ideas or suggestions to make JaypeeOnline better, please don’t hesitate to share it with me via the comments section or if you want to remain anonymous, you can send me a message via the contact page. I’d also appreciate it if you could inform me of any errors or issues that you may encounter on the blog. Thank you!

WP Theme Review: Amazing Grace

Jaypee Habaradas — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:23:51 +0000

Here’s a simple, neat and fresh looking theme from Vladimir Prelovac. You might have a hard time pronouncing or remembering the author’s name but I’m sure you won’t have a hard time liking this theme. Amazing Grace as the theme name goes, is Vladimir’s first WordPress theme. Not bad for a first time if you ask me. Are you wondering why he named his theme like that? He got it from the title of one of his favorite songs, a gospel song entitled Amazing Grace.

Screenshot:

Basic features:

Optimized for speed and loading time
SEO optimal titles
SEO optimal page layout and headings
XHTML/CSS valid
Customized 404 page
Link to admin menu from home page
3 column theme
Integrated Social bookmark buttons
Integrated Multi Page widget (http://www.taragana.com/site/)
Prints parent category in title
Incoming Google image searches are expanded to site
Integrated Chunk URL (http://www.village-idiot.org/)
Adsense ready

My Take:
I love this theme! If I had a personal blog, I’d use this theme right away. Btw this theme is not only for personal blogs because it’s SEO optimized, Adsense ready and includes social networking support which are ideal features for a niche blog.

The two level navigation is also a nice integration into this theme because it can save space and provide a way for the user to highlight the important categories of the blog. Vladimir also made two very good choices: the color scheme and the font types. The colors used in Amazing Grace has a cool and soothing effect to the eyes and the font types are easy to read. It’s also widget-ready which makes it appealing to more WordPress users. One more thing I love about this theme is how fast it loads. As mentioned earlier, the author optimized it so it loads faster than a regular theme would.

The Amazing Grace WordPress theme is easy to install and if you have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, you’d be able to customize this theme to your liking. I love this theme so much I give it a 4.5 out of 5. Excellent work Vladimir and we hope you make more WordPress themes soon.

Do you like this theme and consider using it on your blog? Why or why not? If you’re already using this theme, what made you decide to use it?

Preview or Download the Amazing Grace theme for WordPress.

Blog Updates 06/07

Jaypee Habaradas — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 04:12:24 +0000

It’s been almost a month now since I posted about recent changes and updates here on JaypeeOnline. Well, here’s a list of the plugins that I’ve newly installed or upgraded since the last update.

Newly installed plugins:

Comment Relish – Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ relishing type message to users when they first comment on your weblog.
Actually, I’ve had this plugin installed before but I forgot the exact reason why I uninstalled it. Anyways, I’m using it again and I hope that it works. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed if you aren’t subscribed yet.
Landing Sites – When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, they are definitely looking for something specific – often they just roughly check the page they land on and then closes the window if what they are looking for isn’t there. Why not help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog? This plugin/guide lets you do that, works with a long list of search engines!

I luckily came across this plugin a couple weeks ago. I installed this plugin because I get a lot of hits for certain keywords from search engines and this plugin helps the visitor find what he’s looking for or provide alternative posts that he/she might be interested in. This plugin helps your site/blog become more “sticky”.

WP Social Bookmarks – Adds links to social bookmark sites to your blog.
Previously, I was using the Share This plugin by Alex King. The reason why I ditched it was because I saw that more blogs use the Social Bookmarks plugin and that it’s more effective as the reader can see the options right away, compared to Share This which needs to be clicked before you can see the available options.
Do Follow Trackbacks – Dofollow Trackbacks plugin removes the rel=”nofollow” attribute in Approved trackback links to share some link love!
This plugin works exactly like the Do Follow plugin by Kimmo Suominen but instead of comments, this plugin removes the rel=”nofollow” attribute from trackbacks that you’ve approved. It’s a good way of sharing link love and a good incentive for your readers and other bloggers to link back to your posts.

Updated plugins:

WP DB Manager – Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
Changes:
» Sort Database Backup Files By Date In Descending Order
» Added Repair Database Feature
» Automatic Scheduling Of Backing Up And Optimizing Of Database
WP Post Ratings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
Changes:
» Ratings Custom Fields Will Automatically Be Created With The Creation Of Each New Post/Page
» Added AJAX Style Option: “Show Loading Image With Text”
» Added AJAX Style Option: “Show Fading In And Fading Out Of Ratings”
» Removed Ratings From Feed If Ratings Is Embedded Into The Post Using [ ratings ]
» Wrong URL For Page Under Top Rated/Highest Posts Listing
» Next/Previous Paging Bug In WP-Admin -> Manage Ratings
» Sort Most Rated Posts By Number Of Voters Followed By Post Average Ratings
WP Useronline – Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).
If you’ve noticed, all of the plugins I’ve updated/upgraded come from one source. That’s because the author, Lester Chan recently updated most of the plugins he’s created. I just thought that it would be better if my plugins were up-to-date.

Btw, here’s a friendly reminder. Whenever you install or upgrade a plugin, make sure that you read the changelog or read me file to prevent any unnecessary errors or problems. Better safe than sorry!

The most obvious change that I made is the new theme. What I’m using is the 3 columned version of the Silhouhette theme from Brian Gardner.

I’ve been wanting to change my blog theme for quite a long time but I’ve never found something that I like. When I found this theme I immediately knew that it was the one. It’s neat and simple but doesn’t fall short on usability and functionality. I wasn’t able to use this theme right away because it took me quite a while to customize some parts of the layout like the Top Commentators section. I’m not CSS ninja, so I had to rely on trial and error methods. Hehe :D

That’s all the updates that I have for now.