And I just read a great post on 10 Free WordPress themes.  There’s some really appealing options in that list.  Despite the fact that we’ve been digging into Thesis lately – we’re using it to rebuild this very site and I recently built Ticketfly’s site with Thesis – and we’re liking it, Thesis is a premium theme that will cost you some dollars. Are those dollars worth it?  That depends. 

If there’s one free theme mentioned in that post that I would personally recommend, it would be Thematic.  Especially if you are building a WordPress site that will have a more traditional page and subpage information architecture instead of posts. 

Here’s I typically put together a post.  Or at least how I should.

It starts with an idea for a post and those often come while I’m driving for some reason.  To capture the idea, I’ll leave myself a voicemail.  Then when I’m at my desk listening to my voicemails, I’ll stick an item on my to do list in Remember the Milk with the label “Blog post – working title goes here”.

But sometimes it comes while I’m reading something online.  In that case I’ll bookmark it in Firefox in bookmark folder called “Blog post research – working title goes here”

(Hopefully you grasp the fact that I’m replacing the term working title goes here with the actual working title)

Then a couple things have to happen.  Sometimes in a linear order, sometimes in parallel.  I need a quick and dirty rough draft.  I open up Windows Live Writer on my netbook or desktop and crank out a quick outline or super fast draft.  I then do some web surfing to find reference materials, photos I might want to use, links to go into the post, and more and save into that Blog post research folder I created in Firefox.  I use the XMarks synchronization system so if I’m switching from my desktop to my netbook, my reference materials are there.

When I need a photo, I prefer to use some a picture that I’ve taken.  But since 85% of the pictures I take these days are of my children, that’s pretty rare.  So I use the Flickr photos search tool Compfight to find a photo with a usable Creative Commons license.

I then take my second pass at my post, expanding the outline into a decently constructed piece of writing while also adding in my photos, hyperlinks, and more. 

Then I walk away.  Or at least I should.  Two hours at a minimum.  Ideally at least a day.  When I return to the post its time for a last iterative read, while also making sure I have good spelling grammar.  To be honest, I don’t do this part of the cycle enough.  With two kids, I’m always amazed when I get anything done, so when I’m done with that second pass, I like to feel good about myself and hit publish.  That is a misatke.

Finally, it’s time to categorize the post, tag it…then hit publish.

Ideally, I perform the “one to four” routine on the post.  After publishing a single post, go leave 3 or 4 comments on other blogs.  There’s a lot of reasons for this.  If you want to know more about that strategy, you should check in with Dave Peck as he’s the one who shared it with me. 

There you go. My blog post writing workflow.  What’s yours?

The client?  HP.

The primary goal of the project?  Not to create fun greeting cards for people, but to encourage the use of ink.  The creative process around that project actually explored the use of colors that required more ink.  When you have to use more ink, then you have to buy more ink.  And thats how HP makes money on printers. 

Inkjet cartridges are to razor blades as inkjet printers are to the Gilette sensor razor.  Inkjet printers are a loss leader.  They are a device to force you to go out and buy inkjet cartridges – the product that holds the real profit margins for HP.

Tabbloid is a service that allows you to take a number of RSS feeds that you read regularly and format the RSS content in a newspaper of magazine styled layout that is delivered to you pdf email attachment every morning.  The idea being that you print it out on your inkjet and read it in your breakfast nook while you sip coffee and munch on a bagel. 

When I first saw Tabbloid, I thought it was a pretty unique service.  I still don’t think it’s half bad.  Not for me probably.  But something that I could see catching on with my parents.  And make no mistake, from HP’s perspective this is good business.  A sound strategy.  Provide something useful for people that help your bottom line.  That’s what business should be about.

I do recommend that you give Tabbloid a try.  I’m not exactly sure why it’s important for me to inform you that Tabbloid wants to force you to buy more ink, but it is.

Alternatively, try Feedly. Which is a similar service but with a screen based content delivery mechanism instead of encouraging print outs. 

But in a multi author blog, you can’t use the main RSS feed in all of your outposts.  Facebook is a good example.  Holly imports the feed of this blog into Facebook so they are republished as notes in her news feed.  Biggest problem with that is that it brings in posts I write into her news feed.  I don’t terribly mind, but every once and awhile I write a very personalized post.  Like the one I wrote last week on my most significant tweets ever.  Or when my son Jude was born.  So now Holly’s news feed that goes out to all of her Facebook friends has an item in of my most important tweets.  I’m not sure her social graph is terribly interested in that.

But you can easily remedy this by using the feed of the author archives that are built into the WordPress.  To get to an author archive page for a particular user on your blog, type in http://yourblogname.com/author/username.  You can get an RSS feed of all the posts from the author by ammeding that URL with the /feed.  So it would look like http://yourblogname.com/author/username/feed

Take that feed URL and import into your Facebook profile.  Or setup Twitterfeed with it.  Or tumblr or any other outpost you are building. 

While that still may be the case long-term, Disqus is stretching its lead in commenting system features.  In December, they integrated Facebook Connect logins.  IntenseDebate has yet to even address that as far as I know.  And most recently, Disqus integrated Friendfeed comments related to a particular blog post. 

It may be time to admit a previous error in judgement and switch to Disqus.

Twitter is a microblogging service that…oh, forget it.

Point is that though Twitter approached mainstream status as a communication medium in 2008, but still doesn’t replace the “online homebase” that one’s blog site can be, especially when served up using a self-hosted version of WordPress.  The Mashable post presents legitmate trends that we may being to see in blog designs, from simple features such as Twitter rolls (similar to Blogrolls) to complex features such as Tweetbacks (integrated Twitter responses to a blog post within the posts comment listings). 

But most of all, the Mashable post speaks to the continuing trend that our blogs exist as the best aggregators of all of a blog owner’s online activity, from Twitter to Flickr and beyond.  2009 also saw the rise of aggregating services such as Friendfeed and storytlr, but these services lack the customization and branding that one can include in a self hosted property such as a blog.  A blog where the posts exists as the primary, featured content with our short 140 character bursts, Flickr photos, Seesmic videos, and more revolving around like planets orbiting the sun.

Tim O’Reilly on Why I Love Twitter – Great post from a great thinker on the web and emerging media

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Blog by Jason Falls – if you’re new to blogging (perhaps we built one for you), Jason has a post that’s worth your time.

Social Web’s Big Question: Federate or Aggregate – Om Malik reflects on online identity managment as Facebook takes the wraps off of FB Connect

Life is Binary, neither is the Social Web – A really fantastic post from the always insightful Deb Schultz.  Best line: “..looking at the current version of the web with an old media lens ain’t gonna fly.”

Gorillaz Avatar Maker – Check this out if you feel a need to refresh your Twitter avatar.

In the left column of the superfooter, I wanted a tag cloud.  Recent versions of WordPress have tags built in and you can use the wp_tag_cloud function to display a tag cloud on your site.  My code is

<?php wp_tag_cloud(‘smallest=8&largest=22&number=20′); ?>

The attribute number=20 limits my cloud to only show the most used 20 tags in Red Pill.

In the middle column, I’m using the Recent Comments plugin to provide a list of (duh!) recent comments on Red Pill.   The Recent Comments plugin is built by the same developer who built the Similar Posts plugin I wrote about on day 2 of this series.  Like that plugin, Recent Comments has a ton of powerful configuration and display options that can be set from within the WordPress admin dashboard. 

In the right column, I wanted to bring in the RSS feed from our Tumblelog – Blue Pill.  I’m using the SimplePie RSS classes to grab the RSS feed, parse it, and display it.  There’s a number of plugins utilizing SimplePie for WordPress (and tons of other content management systems out there), but I like the official SimplePie plugin that the SimplePie team maintains.  I like the built in template system within the plugin that seperates the functionality from the markup and design.  Once I installed the plugin and used the dashboard configuration page to define a new template called ‘tumblr’ that removed the descrition feed from the display, I added the following code to the superfooter php

<ul>
                <?php
                echo SimplePieWP(‘http://shinynewtoy.tumblr.com/rss’, array(
                ‘items’ => 5,
                ‘cache_duration’ => 900,
                ‘date_format’ => ‘n/j/Y g:i A’,
                ‘template’ => ‘tumblr’
                ));
                ?>
</ul>

And with that, my superfooter was no full of some initial goodies.

So here’s how I added the 3 column superfooter onto Red Pill.  All it takes us some clever CSS that blends up ID and CLASS selectors.

Here’s how I did it.

First, define a ID selector for the area in which the 3 columns will go

div #superfooter-columns {
        margin: 0 auto;
        width: 730px;
        font-size: 1.1em;   
        width: 730px;
        clear:both;
        text-align:left;
        z-index:1;
    }

Then, add a class that will be used on each column

#superfooter-columns .footercol {
    float:left;
    overflow:hidden;
    position:relative;
}

Then, add some css for each column – A, B, and C

#superfooter-columns #footercol_a {
    margin: 0;
    width:229px;
    padding: 10px 2.5px 30px 10px;
}

#superfooter-columns #footercol_b {
    margin: 0;
    width:229px;
    padding: 10px 2.5px 30px 10px;
}

#superfooter-columns #footercol_c {
    margin: 0;
    width:229px;
    padding: 10px 2.5px 30px 10px;
}

Adjust the widths and padding appropriately for your site layout.  Once you have that basic skeleton in place you can start filling the divs in your XHTML with the content you want.  I’ll talk about the features I stuck into the superfooter in tomorrow’s post

Excuses?  Nah, I don’t have any of those for you.  But I’m happy to share what I’ve been up to.  My offline life has been hectic and consuming recently.  There were a couple weekends when I was carting my two little kids all over the place.  A long weekend in Tahoe and a 4 day trip to Boston to visit with family.  Those were pretty taxing.  Especially flying cross country to Boston and back in a 4 day span with a 2 year old and a 2 month old.  That was simply excruciating. 

Then there’s baseball.  My  beloved Red Sox are in the playoffs. October baseball and the Red Sox have always been pretty consuming.  F

And when I’m not tuned into the playoffs, I’ve been tuned into the presidential debate season.  Let me tell you, there’s a lot of unintentional comedy in these things.  But the best news on that front, is the outlook is looking good for our guy.  Think he’s going to win and I’m spending less time considering moves to Vancouver or Amsterdam.

Oh, and I even managed to take in some live music this past weekend at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.  Got to see one of my favorite artists – Iron and Wine.  I would strongly recommend that everyone give them a listen.  Here’s a little taste…

But still…you deserve more attention from your proud parents then you’re getting.  We know you’re still a little toddler, so big terms like “Editorial Processes” and “Content Calendars” don’t mean a whole lot to you right now, but they will.  And after reading this post at Smashing Magazine, there’s whole bunch of stuff I want to add to you so you’ll grow up to be big and strong.