This theme comes has 6 awesome colors ready for you to choose. You can also switch the sidebar position from right to left with only one single click. You also able to switch sidebar position from right to left or the other way round.

It also provide a highly demand user link feed to allow your reader to submit news, example http://psd.tutsplus.com/ and http://kailoon.com. My WordPress provide up to 9 ad slot for your needs. Include a leaderboard, 2 rectangle ad and 6 small (125px) ads.

Features:

• 6 Colors
• Feedburner Integration
• Powerful Theme Option Page
• User Link Feed Ready
• Able to switch sidebar position by a single click
• Auto image resizing
• Flickr Showcase
• Wp-navi and breadcrumb integrated
• Ad Management System
• Social Linking (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Modern footer display
• Smooth tabbing system
• SuperFish for dropdown menu ( Both pages and Categories )
• Unique author and search result page
• Unique threaded comment styling
• Trackbacks and comment separated
• 2 Column Tabless (CSS Layout)
• Sidebar Widget Ready
• Gravatar ready
• Valid CSS and XHTML
• Browser compatibility: All Major Browsers
• Related Posts
• Popular Posts
• SEO Friendly
• Print Ready
• Many more!

The Idea

This is purely inspired by TUTs sites and CNET. I try to make it direct, simple, clean and effective. You can check out the demo too.

Winners

• Heather Flyte

  I think this theme is exactly what our magazine site needs. It’s got all the features, from clean ad-placement to easy navigation between features. I think it will really help in the redesign.

• Aaron

  Like: I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to design a template that looks similar to the Tuts web designs (aka PSDtuts, Nettuts, etc); the our magazine theme looks quite similar to what I want. A+ design in my opinion.

  Usage: I’d use this theme as a starting point for my iphone game review blog/site. It’s got everything I need built right in to the default layout – video, blog, and flickr rss in the sidebar.

  Thanks and good luck with the contest!

The winners will receive their prizes soon via email. Thank you everyone who participated. Don’t give up, we will have another giveaway soon!

To Display Feedburner Subscriber Count In Text

Copy paste the following code into your template, replace feedburner-id with your Feedbuner username.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

Paste this anywhere you want and it’ll display a Feedburner subscriber count in text.

echo $fb;

To Display Feed Counter For Google FeedProxy In Text

Use the previous code. Change this:

$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

Into This:

$whaturl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

Full Code:

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id"; 

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

The Tutorials

The tutorials are divided into 3 parts. It will cover from Structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully css based html, and finally wordpress implementation.

Below is the table of content:

• Structuring, Designing in Photoshop.
• Slicing and Coding.
• WordPress Implementation.
  • header.php
  • sidebar.php
  • about.php – a custom file for the about section in the sidebar.
  • footer.php
  • index.php
  • featured-post.php – a custom file for the featured posts.
  • page.php
  • single.php
  • comments.php
  • archives.php, links.php
  • search.php, searchform.php
  • function.php
  • image.php

The Theme Features

• Featured Post area in the main page.
• 2 widget-ready sidebar.
• about me section in the sidebar which link to the about page.
• customized gallery page (image.php)
• Special comment fields with avatar.
• custom templates:
  • archives
  • links

Demo and Download

You can preview the theme here and download by today. Cheers!

More information on obtaining a blog host and how to install the WordPress theme to your site can be found at web hosting search.

Key New Features

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
• Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
• Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

There are also some small features which I think is useful including Word Count, Image captions, Bulk management of plugins and a completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.

The brief Video

I’ve already upgrade all my sites. How about you? If you find any problem while upgrading your wordpress. Drop me a comment here, I will try to help. But remember, backup before upgrade! Good Luck!

Actually, there is over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Not Competitive

I study multimedia Technology for my degree. I really don’t know which field I can go for after graduate. Come on, Multimedia Technology, what is in your mind when you heard this? Video Editor? Animator? Motion graphics? Flasher? Web Developer? Designer? Well, as I know. You need some decent skills in related field and also a strong portfolio before you go for an interview. This is what we need in the advertising or multimedia field. People will not interested into you even you got high grade in academic.

Our skills and knowledge are just too wide and too general. I come from local university and I have to admit this. The first interview I attend is in an advertising company. I interview for the animator. I just too shine to show my final project after I watch their previous works. For your information, the final year project is the only portfolio for us to bring into our job interview. We only have one and also the only one. We are not competitive enough compare to the student from private colleges. They got their portfolio(s) and also market value before they graduated. Some more, they know what the market want better than us.

Professionalisms

Right people for the right job. Most of the employer hire within this concept. Below is some example:
For Video Editor, you need to know about production, preproduction and post-production. For skills wise, you need to know Adobe Premier and After Effects. Well, I used that before and my final project is also a Video Animation. The most wanted students in this field are still from The One Academic (for local sources).

For Graphic Designer, you need to have the sense of art and good visual. You need to master 2 shoftwares – Photoshop and Illustrator. Further, you might need to have your very strong portfolio before you graduated. You can put your works in your personal website or upload to flickr. Basically, people will look for people who studied in art school for example MIA, Dasein and The One Academic.

What To Do?

So, it is no room for us who study Multimedia Technology which is too general and also can consider not professional. Before I graduate, I heard that there are few of our seniors doing well in 3D graphic and now working in Cyberjaya (MSC) company. However, I saw their works before in school. It is good but how many of us manage to do that? Only 2 – 3 people out of 200 ++ people mange to get such related job. So, what the rest are doing out there?

I contacted them before (those senior), some of them work as admin, some even work as customer service in bank or other company. The worst case I heard is they can’t get a job even after I graduated. Can you imagine that? no income for 1 year? I can’t get myself into such situation. Scared …

So, What Am I Now?

I work as graphic designer before and now as web designer. I like web design since I started this blog. I just can’t stop from blogging stuffs and addicted to those comments I got from my posts. It is interesting to let people know how we think and also anything we did wrong or right. However, I only learn HTML before in my course. I took about 1 week to master the tableless CSS structure. After practice and practice, I started to love it. I like simple and clean stuffs. I think CSS have all the attributes I like. simple and clean. Further, it is so easy to use and also more organized.

So, how can I start my freelance without any portfolio? Every time I get a job via this blog, they ask for my portfolio. After that I say I don’t have. Then they still want to ask price, I replied. Then … no reply anymore from them. Well, can you tell me why you still ask for price after you know I don’t have portfolio? You expect something FREE is it? OR you think I will accept something like a backlink from your website to produce your big project? I just don’t understand what they really thinking. I admit that I don’t have portfolio and I also not charge high. I calculate based on the hours consumed for the project and also the requirements.

This is even harder than those who already have their portfolio and also certain amount of clients. I am new and I need portfolio also, why not you help me on this while I will also put 200% effort to complete your stuffs because I need a good portfolio for the future. How people see your portfolio? I really not sure in this, they always say “I like your style, but can you create something like this for me” then put a link to a site that totally different from my style. Then I wonder what make him send this request to me?

Haha..looks like out of title already, ok, let back to our title. Well, I think I am not a web designer because I don’t know JavaScript, ASP, MySQL and so on. What I know is only CSS, PHP and WordPress. Now, I can’t even create a table. Haha… I am so shame of this, I can’t answer my friend when he ask me what is td and tr. Well, I think this is good thing as we no need table for the future web design … I think so…

Conclusion

So, since I know wordpress. I consider myself as a WordPress Designer. What do you think? Is this ok with you? A WordPress Designer – Kai Loon.

What’s New?

Well, you can read it from here and I am not going to comment or act like pro in this point of view.

Review

The interface is absolutely far far better than the old version. It look lighter and smooth. Simple and clean are always the best description for WordPress Admin panel. They put all stuff all in their own group and I think this may help the development in the future. Personally, I count the time I spent to make this post and it take longer. Well, I think we all need time to make us adapt into the new layout and interface.

Few-click plugin upgrades � They will do the downloading and installing the upgrade for you. Sound cool right? but it is still depending on your host setting. You can check it out more from here.

I also tested my latest WordPress theme with the new WP version and it work well too. So lucky …

Conclusion

It is a big step from WordPress Development Team and it make the future of WP Development brighter. I just can’t stop my myself from using wordpress as it is too good to be created. After I read The Future of WordPress Theme I was a bit afraid because I think I am too slow to start. But now, I think I am not afraid at all as I know that even not much people will use my themes but I still honor to be part of the WordPress Developer (although I am only the theme designer) Cheers!

Download

Download Latest Version here

Theme – Blue Blog

Blue Blog is the name for the theme and the targeted user is mostly for blogger. As you can display your nice photo on the top of the page. It is widget ready, tabbing system and with my own icon set. It is a 3 column WordPress theme too. More info will be show when the theme is released.

Survey

Well, it is not free. However, the price will not be so high as I only need money to pay my hosting and sure the hours I spent for the theme. So, I may need your help now to give me some idea of how you think about purchasing a wordpress theme?

All in One SEO Pack

If you are a newbie for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), like me, this is a good one for you to monetize your blog. It is easy to use and manage.

Get Recent Comments

This is a great one to display excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks in your blog. There is another useful plugin for the same purpose. Simple Recent Comments

Intouch Ajax contact form

I’ve been using this contact form for my blog and some others site. It works very good and filters all the spams. Seriously, NO SPAM at all. It also allows you to customize the email subject, thank you messages, and adds addition form fields. It is considered a must use plugin from Kai Loon. There is also another popular contact form, Secure and Accessible Contact Form by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley. I have never try this before but I’ve been told it has a good rating, so, give it a try.

WP PageNavi

WP PageNavi adds a better paging navigation to your WordPress site. It is nice if you have a lot of posts because it allows your visitors to skip from page to page.

Ajax Polls

A flexible polls plugin. The layout is completely customizable via Admin panels. It also allows you to archive the polls. A good way to do some survey on your blog and to know your reader well.

Paged Comments

This plugin is useful if you get a lot of comments on your blog. It breaks your comments into a number of pages. Imagine if your blog gets over a thousand of comments? You definitely need this plugin. You can see how it works in LoonDesign here!

Subscribe to Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It is useful to get the back the readers for the second visits to your blog. It also help readers to stay updated of those post they’ve commented. It is a must for any blogger.

Most Commented

To show the hottest entry in your blog. The highly discussed contents of your blog can be displayed in a list.

Gravatars2

As you can see in LoonDesign, there is a guest gravater for whoever comment here but not yet register their own gravatar. It is useful to get yourself easily been recognized by others when you comment in others blog.

Admin Drop Down Menu

It basically makes your secondary menu activate on mouseover. It save your time on writing or editing in wordpress admin page. A must installed plugin for all wordpress blog.

Adsense Deluxe

The simplest way to insert adsense into your post content. First you define your ad code through the Admin options, then insert a HTML snippet (“< !–adsense–>“) into anywhere of your post content, and it will automatically replace it with your ad code.

Got Banners

For those who wish to sell banner ads on their blog. You can try this out. Got Banners is a simple plugin for rotating banners (especially 125 x 125px). Unlike other banner rotators, Got Banners rotate all of the banners putting them in a random order each time.

Google XML Sitemaps

If you need to generate a XML compliant sitemap for search engines, Google Sitemap Generator is the best choice (supported by most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and MSN).

New Tag Cloud

The plugin provides an widget which shows a tag cloud with the tags used by the new WordPress own tagging feature. Again, it is easy to use and you can set the maximum font size, font size different between sizes and others easily from the admin page.

NoFollow Free

To encourage your users to submit comments it has some options to replace the nofollow only when the author posted X comments before and put back the nofollow when some blacklisted words are matched. The replacement of the nofollow is also based upon the users type (registered and visitor users). Every option can be customized by the options page “NOFF“. You can also refer to my previous post here.

Sociable

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience. I tried this before and it works well. So, why not give it a try?

KG-Archives-Plugin

A simple and nice sortable archives plugin.

WP eCommerce

This is a great plugin for someone who wish to sell stuffs on blog. It is a Ajax powered shopping cart, very easy to use. I not yet fully try this out but will implement it in the future for LoonDesign Wordpress Theme shopping cart.

If you think this is not enough for you or I missed out something important, you can find more from:-

• Official WordPress Plugins
• Plugin.net
• Bloggingpro plugin list
• Weblogtoolscollection plugin list

Please Vote, if you think it worth a vote
So, anyone who think this blog deserved a vote from you then I will be glad of that. Your feedbacks are always welcome. I will change the poll question once a week or in 2 weeks. I wish to collect more date before I redesign the layout and decide what content I should continue and what shouldn’t. Actually I don’t really care what you dislike here but I think I can’t be selfish here. I need to consider my reader’s feeling also sometimes. Right? If you also wish to own a poll in your blog. You can grab it here ( There are many useful and popular plug in there. )

Comic
The comic as I said before was finally came out in draft and I still try to make it better. I also try to make more characters now. Frankly, this is my first time to make a comic. I found that it is pretty hard in drawing and getting idea as well. Many things need to be take into consideration. Then, I came out with this idea. I wish to include my readers, friendly bloggers (who linked me) into my comic. Well, maybe it is not a popular comic but I really wish to own it. It will be in 4 boxes comic like what you read in the star newspaper. It may be in a storyline based or may not be, still thinking of it. So, whoever wish to get involve, you can send me some of your details, a photo ( any size as I can see your face ), any idea what you want your character to be, anythings. For those who review my blog to own their personal comic character, I may put you in. But still, I wish to have your permission first.

I found this useful as I always subscribe to comments in any blog that providing this feature. I bet that most of you check mail everyday but not visit blogs everyday, right. So, this is a good way to get update to your commented blog via email. here are some of the key features of the plug-in :-

Features

• Rudimentary security
• Recognition of subscription status
• Themeable subscription manager
• Ability to let users change notification e-mail address
• Easy integration into comments form
• Subscription without leaving a comment
• Customization
• Internationalization

You can read the features here and download the plug-in if you want it. So, happy commenting!!!

The plug in called NoFollow Free. It help to remove the follow attribute from your wordpress blog’s comments and the comments text. Start from now, you start earn a link from my blog when you write a comment. You also can comment more to be the Top Commentor to show off your name in side bar to claim a link!

You can also try this useful tools and looking for more comments in your blog. As a return, you are giving your visitors’ a link. Kind of good deal right? It is easy to install and manage. I can’t say that it is good to have a link from my blog as my PR prediction is still zero but who knows? Maybe one day I get a PR 5 from Google? Anything can happen just like that in this digital web (Internet, if you can’t get what I mean…).