Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.

Check out everything included in this theme, and download it to try it out for yourself. New2WP.com has all the information about the features and capabilities it has.

You can read more about 3.0 Basics here. Or check out the tutorial for making the custom post type used in this theme in the OOPost Types: Making a WordPress 3.0 App post series.

No matter the season, day, time or reason, it’s no exaggeration when I say I can easily snap over 1000 photos in a single day, and that’s just during my commute to and from work. I mean, every time I bring my camera out with me anywhere, it’s dead by the time I get to the place I was going. This is very annoying too, since once I get where ever that may be, there are tons of pictures I miss out on while there. But what can ya do.

For your visual enjoyment, here are 30 of my most recently taken photos, some I shot while driving, which is usually the case as you may already know, and others are taken at a friends house, one of those rare times I happen to bring my camera with me when I go to a new, cool photographic location.

Tell me what you think!!

Post a comment below with any thoughts or feedback you may have. I’d love to hear what you think.

That doesn’t have to be the case with jQuery though I’ve found, because it is a lot more simple, and even more simple than I think it is too. It’s still programming yes, but it’s more “normal” than what I consider Php to be. Though, despite all that, I have still found myself not sitting down and actually learning it. I’ve tried, but when I do, I tend to get distracted with all the millions of things on the internet that are there to distract me. Have you had this problem ever? It can be annoying at times.

Many times when I try to focus on stuff like this, I start by looking up sites and finding resources which I can use to help me learn. Well, that’s when the distraction starts. I then start finding more and more and more, until I find myself basically creating a resource roundup that I can make a new blog post with, for others trying to learn the same stuff, instead of using the resources to help myself learn.

I apologize if this is the cycle which you have found yourself in right now too. I did not intend to distract you, but providing you with a ton of resources which you want to learn about, but have yet to do so. On that note, here is the list.

How Do You Learn jQuery?

Here are 14 ways you can start learning it.

With the release of jQuery 1.4 today, I’ll start with:
14 Days of jQuery.

I have found the best and most useful of these to be the sites that have video tutorials showing you visually since that’s how I learn. That’s why jqueryfordesigners.com and jQuery for Absolute Beginners 15 Day Video Series were the most helpful for me in my quest to START learning jQuery, instead of gathering information about it, in hopes that someday I might actually learn something about it.

I think I was hoping that the more resources about it I found, I would somehow magically know how to do it without putting in the work and learning how to do it.

So how did you learn jQuery?

Leave a comment with any tips you might have.

The site I am designing this for is New2WP.com, which is owned by my friend Antonio, a Web Developer and WordPress guru. We are combining forces to bring this site together. Between my design knowledge and his development knowledge, you can be sure this will be a fantastic combination. If you are interested in learning WordPress and all that it has to offer, or just love awesome websites then subscribe to the RSS feed to stay updated on the launch of the site and all the future news and information we will bring you.

There is just so much you can do using WordPress and it’s very flexible and easy to work with even for people with no knowledge of PHP or blogging software. Most people who have a WordPress blog don’t utilize it to its full capabilities. We want to help change that, and show you that it’s not only simple to do, but that it takes no time at all to do it.

Here is a view of the entire home page design.

Here is the posts page layout

If you have any feedback about this theme please post a comment and tell me what you think. It is my first theme, and definitely not the last.

Don’t forget to check out New2WP.com and see this theme in action once it is live!!

Now that I finally got it working, I am going to start working on making it a plugin for WordPress that I can release if I ever finish it, or can even manage to learn how to develop a WP plugin for that matter. I’m still rusty with Php and the development side of things, but I will do my best to create a plugin to release.

Since I had a hard time in finding information on how to do this, I wanted to share my code. What it does is dynamically display posts from the ‘Featured’ category, using the easySlider jQuery plugin. It’s easy to do, and adds a nice animated and dynamic feature to your site.

What you will learn:

• using the WordPress WP_Query() funtion
• retrieve posts from a specific category
• display post titles and excertps in jQuery slider

Getting started

For this you will need to download the jQuery easySlider plugin. You will also have to be able to edit the header.php template for your theme. Go here for some information about using WP_Query() function here.

For the latest example usage of easySlider with just static content you can download the files. I used the example from that, and just altered the CSS and made the list of content dynamic instead of static, so you may want to start from there since my CSS is different.

These are the arrow images I used for my slider. Feel Free to save them.

Here is the CSS styles I have.

Next you need to add this before the closing head tag in your header.php template, which inlcudes the external JavaScript files. Change the path to the files according to where you save them.

Now for the fun part.

This works in a similar way as the query_post() function does but that was conflicting with the WordPress loop and making all the posts on my site to ONLY display the posts in featured category. This creates a new instance of query_post(), and allows you to do various things while within The Loop.

First you need to open the div and unordered list.

Then you need to set up the query and get the number of posts from the category you want to get. Then create the loop.

In this example, showposts=5 will get 5 posts, and cat=7 is getting the posts from the category with the ID 7. If you can’s find the category ID, go to Categories in your WP admin, and hover over the category links. You will be able to see what the link is in your browser window, and the end of the URL will say &cat_ID=X.

Next, display the list of posts. This will show the post title with using the_permalink() and the_title() functions, and the_excerpt() to display a short summary of the post. You would have to make sure that all posts in the Featured category have a summary in the Excerpt field when you create new posts.

Close the loop. Add the closing list and div tags and that’s it!

If it were a perfect world, this would work for you on your own site just by copying and pasting, but if you have ever developed anything before, you know it’s never that simple. If you have any questions or issues with this let me know.

Here is the entire code.

If you want to see a demo of this, just look at the top of this site, I am using almost this exact code to display the featured post slider in my header. So it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement yourself. There’s always a bump in the road though.

Questions or comments? Post them below.

This is one that I made recently. I wanted to try a couple of different things out but in the end it wasn’t even close to what I was going for. Click on the image to view the full version.

This list of photo manipulations is so breathtaking, I don’t know how else I can better describe them besides simply astonishing. I collected this list a while back in just one visit to Behance, and it didn’t take long to find all of these either. I know you will enjoy these amazing works of art, and creative design masterpieces.

Have a Favorite?

Which of these are you favorites? I’m sure you can’t pick just one.

If you are unfamiliar with what vector is exactly, here is a great explanation of what vector and raster means, and what the difference between the two is, as well. After reading that, you should have a pretty clear understanding of why vector can be so much better to make designs in, but just in case you need another example. Not to discredit raster images, but vector are much more sharp and better looking for certain things. Plus it is also scalable, which can also come in handy at times. If you really want to get into vector design, Illustrator is the program to use, but it is possible to do vector art in Photoshop, it’s just more limited.

- Halloween Special -

Vector Halloween Pumpkin with Illustrator

Hope you have a happy and safe Halloween today. I wish I was still young enough to trick or treat. Well, you’re never to young to trick and I did buy 2 bags of candy at the store, which I have been eating myself. Anyways, have fun today, whatever you may be doing! Watch out for zombies!

25 Spooky Halloween Vectors and Icons

This list isn’t completely exclusive to Illustrator tutorials, but the majority of the tutorials are done using Illustrator. There are some Photoshop tutorials in the mix, and I even through in a couple of flash vector tutorials since Flash is also a vector design program. I even through in a link for Paint Shop Pro basics for vector design at the end, too.

Alright, here’s all the vector tutorials you might ever need, at least for a long while anyways.

Now I want to see your amazingly crisp and clean vector designs. Post any additional tutorial links or resources in the comments, and show me your designs you create with these tutorials!

You may have noticed that these browser extensions don’t block 100% of the ads you see on the internet though, am I right? Maybe not even any, unless you create a filter for a certain ad, in order to block ads from a certain site, which is sometimes annoying to do when an ad is a flash banner or an embedded javascript or something like that. As a long time user of Adblock Plus, I know how much of a pain it can be to block some ads, and I sometimes just say screw it, and don’t bother, making Adblock useless. Keep reading if you want an awesome solution to do more than just blocking ads.

This will do a lot more than just block advertisements, it’s also an effective way to protect you from many types of spyware viruses and other malware, plus reduce bandwidth use, block pop-up traps, prevent user tracking with use of “web bugs” embedded in spam, and provides partial protection to IE from certain web-based exploits, and basically all things you would otherwise be subjected to on the internet that you don’t need.

This is totally safe to do, I have done this on my own computer, and am totally satisfied with it so far. It isn’t an entirely hard thing to do, but you do need to actually read what to do so you are completely aware what is going on, and what it is you’re doing.

What this is about is your computers hosts file. Dan Pollock created the ultimate hosts file, that can be found at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, which is updated DAILY. It will do all that stuff mentioned above, and I use it, and it works. There is also a version of this file that uses 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 available at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/. On some machines this may run minutely faster, however the zero version may not be compatible with all systems.

If you don’t already have your explorer set to show extensions for known file types, open up your Windows Explorer, and in the menu go to Tools > Folder Options > and click the View tab. Uncheck the box for Hide extensions for known file types like the image below.

This will show all file extensions for files on your computer (it is better to have file extensions showing as a rule, too). Now you want to backup your current hosts file, incase you ever need to switch back to it, or whatever. Always keep a back up of EVERYTHING, something I have learned way too many times.

To get to the hosts file quickly, for Windows NT, Win2K and XP users (refer here if you have another OS), go to the Start Menu > Run > copy and paste the following into the form and hit enter:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

In case you’re confused at this point here is a visual, lol.

Now change the name of the file, ” hosts” to “Backup_hosts.txt” or whatever you like. Open up a new notepad document, and on Pollack hosts page, highlight all the text on the page starting with the first line that begins with a #, and ending with the last line that begins with a #, don’t highlight the page title or the navigation text. Copy and paste this into notepad, and then save the file as hosts.txt in the directory listed above. Close notepad, and then right click the new text file, and rename it, removing the .txt so it is just named hosts. I am trying to be as crystal clear about the naming of the file as possible because it is the most important part of this, that the file be named with no file extension.

I highly suggest you read through this file, and get an understanding of what it does, and I would also suggest skimming through the entire list to see if there are any sites you might possibly want to comment out because there are some sites, ie: ebay, yahoo, etc., that may have services you use this file may interfere with if not commented out. It will also give you some knowledge of this stuff, that you may find interesting, or would not learn otherwise. I learned quite a lot from reading through this, and found it very interesting, but I’m not like everybody, I’m special

I have also uploaded my personal customized version of this file which has a few changes to suit my needs better. I uncommented and commented out a few things, that I may or may not need depending. You can download the file I use here, just be sure to change the name of it from “hosts.txt” to “hosts” when you want to put it into place. Anyways, I hope you find this useful, and would love to hear your thoughts of it. I am aware that it doesn’t block the text ads like on Facebook, but it does block the other ads, like the flash banners Facebook has now. But please let me know what you think still

Update: Pollock said in an email to me, “The hosts file complements Adblock pretty nicely. It’s good where Adblock is weak, and vice versa.” So If you do use an Adblock extension of some kind, continue to use it, as well as this hosts file.

Do you know any other cool tricks like this that are extremely useful? Do share…

It can be good to use excerpts to increase page views, since visitors can see more posts at one time instead of having to scroll down through an entire post. Which is mostly the reason I wanted to make my homepage display excerpts, so I didn’t have to scroll all the way down just to see the second post. So, you will need to edit the file where you want to display them.

Showing excerpts on your homepage.

The template that displays on the home page in WordPress is the index.php file in your theme directory. Open that up and find the following code:

The code may vary depending on your theme. It may also look like:

All you do is simply replace  “the_content” with “the_excerpt” like this.

This will make your homepage display only the first 55 words of the post, and strip any images or formatting.

You can override the limit of 55 words if you want two different ways.

1. The More Tag: After you’ve written a post, go to the code view in the post editor and click where you want the excerpt to stop, and then click the More button.
   
2. The Excerpt Field: Copy and paste part of your post into this field located below the post editor. This is good if you want to display links or images in your excerpt and it is what I personally would recommend using.
   

Using excerpts can also be useful on your archive pages, category pages and author pages as well.

Custom Fields

Another feature that is extremely useful, and easy to use is custom fields.

I won’t go into using this feature right now, because it deserves a separate post. You can do things like set an expiration date for posts, choose to display either an excerpt or full post on your homepage, display thumbnails next to your posts, and many other things.

Here is a great article 10 Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress. You will see that custom fields can do some some really cool things.

Do you use excerpts on your blog?