Theme Lab

I thought I would take this opportunity to let you all know of my semi-new site, that has just opened up for business today at PowerTheme.

Yes, this is yet another one of those “premium” WordPress theme sites. At the moment it has only 3 themes, but hopefully I’ll be able to build up that number in the future, while still maintaining high quality. The two paid themes are priced competitively in comparison to other premium theme sites and offer a lot of extra functionality you would expect to see from a paid theme. There’s also a free one entitled Elegance you may want to check out.

Now, will I be spending less time on Theme Lab because of my new site launch? The answer is: not really. I’ll still post tutorials and release free themes here regularly, so don’t worry.

Just a quick update to let you all know of the new WordPress Tutorials page which has a list of all of the tutorials on Theme Lab with a short description. Hopefully it will be a little easier to navigate than through the category archives.

I just disabled ShareThis on Theme Lab. It was making the website load incredibly slow all day today. Sorry it took me so long to figure out what the issue was, but I couldn’t believe a little widget like that could bring down an entire site to a crawl. I guess I was wrong, because as soon as I disabled it - no more slow load times whatsoever.

If anyone has ShareThis enabled with accompanying slow load times, I suggest you turn it off until the staff at ShareThis can get this problem resolved. Until then you may want to try out AddThis as a similar social bookmarking alternative.

Update: I have just received a very nice e-mail from JB of ShareThis, assuring me this issue has been resolved. Apparently their servers took on an “unprecedented” overload which caused these problems across the entire network. I’ll see how things progress for the next few days, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to add the ShareThis button back with confidence.

I’ve been wanting to get a new wider 3 column layout for Theme Lab for a while now, as I felt the single sidebar was far too crowded. Thanks to designer Ben Swift’s assistance I was able to make it happen.

I also wanted to point out the more prominent sponsors area to the right, which is highly visible on all pages. You can check out the advertising page for more information. The price is currently $50 / month for the 125×125 ads - all 4 slots currently open.

There may be a few kinks here and there so please let me know if there are any issues with the new layout if you notice any. Hate it or love it, feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 last night, everything seemed to go smoothly - or so I thought. Overnight I received several e-mails from people saying the downloads weren’t working. So I looked into it and realized the download manager plugin wasn’t working properly, returning 404 errors for all the downloads. I figured out a solution. It may not have been the best - but it works. If anyone finds any other issues with the site don’t hesitate to send me an e-mail. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’m not sure how many of you have used the tag cloud in the sidebar to find a certain type of WordPress theme here, but if you did you would have noticed the tag archive pages were pretty difficult to use, until now. Before it would just show an excerpt of the post content, which doesn’t do much good if you’re quickly looking for a theme. You probably want screenshots along with demo and download links. Well with the use of custom fields I created a new tag archive template. Take a look at the themes tagged with a left sidebar (for example) and you’ll see it’s much easier to navigate. Hope you like it.

Okay, someone just left a very strange comment (or at least tried to) on the first post I’ve ever made on this blog, dated several months ago. Not sure what exactly this script kiddie was trying to do, but here’s the comment information:

Author : Bill961356476','879919671billy@msn.com','','50.68.176.182','2008-03-20 00:04:45','2008-03-20 00:04:45','','0','lynx','comment','0','0'),('0', '', '', '', '', '2008-03-21 00:04:45', '2008-03-21 00:04:45', '', 'spam', '', 'comment', '0','0' ) /* (IP: 124.217.227.127 , svservers.com)
E-mail :
URL : http://None
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=124.217.227.127
Comment:
<strong>None...</strong>
None...


Looks like some lame SQL injection attempt (notice the emphasis on lame and attempt). Banned the IP they were using, even though it looks to be a proxy based in Malaysia. Let this serve as a reminder to keep your WordPress installation up-to-date and make sure there aren’t any vulnerabilities through active plugins (or even themes) you may have installed.

Someone alerted me to the fact that the comments for certain categories weren’t working. What happened was the comments that were being displayed on all of the posts in these categories were from a specific post that didn’t match with the post the comments were on. I know, it’s pretty hard to explain, so if you didn’t notice anything, the previous sentence probably made zero sense to you. If you tried to comment sometime within the past couple days, I apologize. I figured out the problem and it should be fixed now.

Just wanted to let you all know we added a couple new pages to the site, which you can see in the top navigation now. The resources page will have inks to WordPress-related sites. The new sitemap was added so visitors could more easily navigate the site.

If can see this post right now, then you’re viewing the site from our new host, JaguarPC. I became completely fed up with the previous host, HostNine (not going to give them a link), and decided enough was enough. Earlier today you may have noticed lots of issues accessing the website, especially the demo server, which I know was completely inaccessible for me for quite some time. Just a few tips when getting hosting:

• If a host says they have a “99.9% uptime guarantee, never believe it.
• Do your homework. Read verifiable reviews, testimonials, etc.
• Try to avoid “overselling” or hosting plans offering way too many resources than are actually available.
• Go with established hosts with solid reputations and stay away from the “fly-by-night” hosting companies.
• Don’t choose the absolute cheapest host you can find. Chances are these cheap hosts will cause more headaches than its worth.

Hopefully I won’t have to run into these hosting issues in the future. Theme Lab has really been growing fast and traffic is increasing by the day. JaguarPC has been around since 1998, they have a great reputation in the industry, and I’m confident to have this site hosted with them. Let me know of any bugs you come across while browsing the site, although I should have everything taken care of.