That’s about it for now, I’ll see what else I can come up with, soon. Expect it to be baseball related … Opening Day is almost here!

I began thinking that I really don’t need all those widgets lining the sidebar and for some reason, I’ve always been a bit partial to one column blog designs. I can also remember a few of my early, early attempts to design my own, were one column. Anyway, head over to FearlessFlyer.com. Michael Soriano has some really nice themes there. In case you were wondering, this theme is called ‘Kubrick on Crack’. Of course, ‘Kubrick’ refers to the default WordPress theme that comes with every download from the WP website. Let me know what you think and if you run into any bugs or glitches. I think I need to get the contact page working again. That’s obviously next on my list. I did change the background image to something just a bit different, but amazingly it seems to fit quite well.

I say this nearly every time, but maybe I’ll stick with this one for a while, this time. We’ll see …

A light on top of dark, background and 2 column design, it brings the standard blog elements while adding an area on the sidebar to link your twitter account and the logo changer where you have the option of the usual WordPress text title or inserting a logo of your choosing.

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Definitely wanted to pass along that the latest release of WordPress, v2.9.1, dropped this evening. Always keep your WordPress updated.

Fore more info, check out this link from WP Blog.

Happy Monday, err Tuesday even.

• Block Bad Queries by Perishable Press: A simple plugin that consists of a total of 849 bytes (which includes the plugin declaration all WP plugins contain). This is to help thwart malicious URL attacks the like of which attacked many WP blogs back in September ’09. A little more protection never hurts.

I’ll mention right from the start, that there are quite a few other plugins out there that I probably won’t mention, mainly because they are things I don’t use. On with the list:

Edited @ 9:15pm, 1/2/2010

• Simple:Press Forum by Andy Staines: As the name implies, a simple forum plugin, well designed and integrated directly into WP, as opposed to a lot of 3rd party forum that people attempt to bridge into WP, some having better results than others.
• Sociable by BlogPlay.com: A plugin that sits nicely at the bottom of your posts which make it easy as pie for visitors to share your stuff with social network/media sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook and many more
• WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson: A box that sits atop your posts when a visitor arrives greeting them differently based on who referred them to your site. Many referrers are built in already and you have the ability to add more
• WP-PagiNavi by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: Rather than have your blog pages list newer/older links at the bottom of each page this nifty little bit of code can replace those links with Pages instead similar to how Google and Yahoo display links to the next pages of search results. I find it to be a much cleaner type of interface that can add character to your blog.
• WP-Polls by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: An AJAX polling system that can be added to individual posts as well as to your sidebar. Multiple polls can be used and active at the same time.
• WP-Print by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: Something to make printouts of your posts look quite nice. If you’ve ever tried to print directly from your browser you’ve probably come across something that looks like a dog chewed up you page and spit it back out in some random order. With WP-Print everything is neatly placed with annotations of links, the choice to print comments, images and videos.
• Zemanta by Zemanta Ltd: If you’ve ever been writing a post and finish thinking its missing something, Zemanta just may help. It suggests content for you to add into your post and even places it there for you, with just a click. Zemanta recommends related articles, in-text links, images and SEO optimized tags. If interested here is a demo of Zemanta.
  • • Edit: After giving some thought to it, consider using the Firefox and/or Chrome browser extension, Internet Explorer plugin or Chrome/Safari/etc bookmarklet versions of Zemanta. I’ve switched to the Firefox extension as that is my browser of choice and there is very little visual difference between it and the WP plugin and no difference in how it performs.

As I mentioned before, I’m sure I’ve left out some really good plugins and themes from this post and the previous two posts, please feel free to contact me with suggestions.

Probably the two most important plugins, for me especially, after my web hosting snafu are:

• WP-DBManager by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: It manages you WP database, allowing you to optimize, repair, backup and restore your database. You can schedule your backups and the database optimization. Backups are stored on your site and can also be emailed to you, if you so choose.
• WordPress Backup by Blog Traffic Exchange: Like WP-DBManager, except this will backup your uploads, current theme and plugins directory. Backups are stored on your site for easy download or can also be emailed to you.

The next plugin you don’t even have to download, as it comes prepackaged with WordPress:

• Akismet, the spam killer. A must for any blogger who gets sick of the usual mess of spam comments littering your comments administration. An API Key from WordPress.com (signup is free) is all that is needed to get this working. Set it and forget it. It catches nearly every spam comment and those that it doesn’t delete outright, will end up in the spam section of your comments for you to review for yourself to decide if its good or bad.

Some Google related plugins and a little Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

• Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold: While it has Google in the title, the sitemaps this plugin generates comply with Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com as well. Always a good thing to make it easier for the most popular search engines to crawl your website.
• Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk: Easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code to your blog. Also can tag and segment your outbound clicks so you may see where your traffic is going.
• All-In-One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert: SEO is the name of the game and this will take care of just about all you need, right out of the box. Extensive options for you to set to your liking, if you’d rather not use the presets.

I’ll finish off with just 2 more plugins:

• Maintenance Mode by Michael Wöhrer: A simple plugin that displays a splash page to your visitors to let them know your blog is undergoing maintenance. Logged in Admins retain full access to the blog.
• Redirection by John Godley: Useful for pages/posts that you may have deleted or moved to another address, you designate the page and tell it where you want it to redirect to. Especially useful if you are migrating pages from an old website or are changing the directory of your WP installation.

There are more to choose from than these. Though in my opinion, these are the best at what they do. I’ve used most for a while now and find them to be invaluable and a must upon any new WordPress installation. If you feel I missed something, let me know, I’ll be glad to give it a spin.

Yes, I only mention wordpress. Why? Because. I’ve been using WordPress since its early days, its the easiest blog platform I’ve ever run across and between the talent in theme building and plugins in the WP community, just about anything you can think up, can be done, or already has.

I just ran across Site5 as I was getting my websites back up and running and since I never stick with one design for very long, it seemed the perfect chance to change to what you currently see here, the Colorbold theme. They’re actually a web hosting company, but have released 5 fantastic themes. Everything from a Holiday theme (Xmas), to a business theme (Wise Business), with a couple designs more typical of standard blogs (Colorbold and Rockwell) as well as a web portfolio theme (Webfolio) which really caught my eye, but there is no way I could do it any justice if I was to attempt to use it here.

Also, Woo Themes. They create some incredibly unique, professionally designed themes, for sale. They have quite a nice variety of for free themes, as well. By looking at them, you’d would swear the free themes belong on the pay side. A few of my favorite WooFreebies are TypeBased, Bueno, Mainstream and Meta-Morphosis. If I could afford it, I would have purchased some of the for sale themes by now, I’m sure.

I’ll dive into some of my favorite plugins a little later on. Just make sure to check out these two sites when searching for a professional or premium, free wordpress theme. If none of those are your cup of tea, there are many great looking themes at the WordPress Free Theme Directory as well.

Happy Hunting …

If I missed other sites offering well designed, premium themes for free, let me know.