Moonlit Minds

Shadows

Well, it has been some time since my last post here. Amazing thing is that having a blog makes you fell obliged to write something from time to time. Funny…
Anyway, it is OK – it motivates me, at least, to “share” what has happened lately here – at my end of the “net-space”. And it has happened a lot!

For the first, Santa is coming early this year – with a lot of “goodies” in his bag:

• Acer Aspire One
• Nokia 5310
• New hard disk (500 GB)…

Wow! I simply cannot wait to unwrap my new Blue Communication System!
Next – there is a lot going on in the WordPress world. Many theme creators are going Open Source which gives us, simple users, opportunity to try out some excellent themes, new version of Wordpess (2.7) is closer and closer, many interesting articles were published. My personal choice of last week WordPress-connected links worthy underlining:

• Blog Design That Works
• Hybrid WordPress Theme Framework
• Elevate Themes :: Free Premium WordPress Themes ::

Why am I pointing out those articles? Simply because in my humble opinion, the authors are doing a lot for WordPress and WordPress themes and they deserve much more publicity than they actually have – watch their sites – their design will be the future of blogging (hopefully!).

Now few words about Twitter. I am relatively new user of the service (and according to latest statistics – I should not be using it – too old… ). Well, I find it actually useful and funny. Again only in my modest opinion, it is something in between IM (Instant Messenger) and blog. Perfect tool to find out trends and – “make a buzz”. Remember though that it is relatively easy to make something “trendy”, make an excitement around new things – much more difficult is to keep interest of the public. This craves a real effort and… a real value. If you would like to learn a bit more of “wise tweeting” try following this blog:

• Twitip

Really good tips out there!

Talking about value, not so long time ago I started to use Zemanta service on the blog. Zemanta is a service which adds semantic value to your “writings” (suggests pictures, links, tags and so on). I am pretty satisfied with the service but today I “stumbled upon” Tagaroo (based on Calais powered by Thomson Reuters). It is not the first time I consider the service – it just seems pretty similar to Zemanta. And here I have a kind request – if you are reading this blog and you are/were using those services – can you, please, explain to me:

• The difference between Zemanta and Tagaroo?
• Could they be used side by side?
• And if not – what is an advantage of using one over the other?

As you probably noticed my questions are shy trial to invite you to leave a comments here. Why? Hm, because the real value of social web, in my belief, is in creating the space for dialogue, sharing points of view, knowledge.

It seems I wrote slightly too much… Anyway – I hope you enjoyed my Weekly and… hope to meet you soon again.

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• Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing through Microblogging
• Five Alternatives To Twitter

This is how (I spotted it yesterday while browsing the ThemeHybrid site):

October 14th, 2008 WordPress

Club memberships at Theme Hybrid for $10

And I can tell you – it is a bargain! Great offer – just check yourself! According to me, the membership is worth more and I was thinking of becoming a member for quite some time. The only reason I did not join Theme Club on Hybrid site earlier is that I was not convinced if I will blog here for a longer time (amount of time and effort needed for it – do I have it? or rather – will I have it still?). But Justin Tadlock’ s offer was too good to resist. This offer + my “aforementioned catastrophe” = new Theme Club member.

Check yourself – among other things you will be able to acquire this Child Theme:

I just downloaded it yesterday – and I have to tell you – it is beautiful. I just have to change the header (read it: spend some time playing in Gimp) – and you will see it here, on my site.

But it’s not only about what you can “get” for your money – it is mainly about supportng good cause. If you want Justin (and also other WordPress designers) to create those pieces of art – well, I think you should join their clubs. At least this is my meaning. And this is how Open Source works…

So, it finally happened – my dear, modest blog – clothed with Thematic theme by Ian Stewart – “exploded” on me. Well – it did not literally explode – it simply disappeared – together with the content.

Sad…

I spent whole night trying to recover the thing – but, shortly speaking, I did not manage. (I have a backup of a few first posts from September but not the last ones).

Why did it happened? He, he – my own fault – I was “tinkering” too much and experimenting with some plug-ins and themes. The poor, old blog did not obviously stand this amount of ill-directed “creativity”.

I strongly believe though that all events – especially of the aforementioned kind, have an aim. My “mini-catastrophe” made me thinking. Perhaps I was going the wrong way…? Well, certainly, I was! The thing I know a bit about is how to write and present things, which eventually become interesting for some people. It is definitely too early for me to write my own style sheets or PHP functions.I should rather keep for a while easier (from the user point of view!) blog theme.

I also realized that I need some kind of support – just like I had while starting with Linux (3 years ago) – and nothing beats the support one can get from the forum (Ubuntu, Arch, Sidux). That’s why I decided to try Options Theme right now – it has marvellous documentation and – you can browse forum on the ThemeHybrid site. Not mentioning the quality of the theme – splendid, a lot of pre-built functions and possibilities.

But Options is another subject – I feel obliged to write about this piece of software next time and a bit more than just few sentences.