This marks my first post, back from a 4 year hiatus. I’ll make a follow-up post to re-introduce the blog and my goal with it, but in the meantime I wanted to share some interesting information with everyone.

For many years I have let choicethemes.com sit untouched. I checked it a week or two ago to find that there are over 59,000 registered users and that it’s still regularly visited by quite a few people. I was pretty shocked.

It doesn’t take a degree to figure out that there is an inherent value in a website with that many registered users, so I started thinking of ways to monetize the site. I could start selling WordPress themes again. I could focus on PSDs, or pure HTML/CSS/JS templates. I could focus on providing themes for frameworks. I gave it a lot of thought and figured I’d ask the people who were actually downloading the existing (and very, very old) WordPress themes with a poll, and here’s what I found:

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In my quest to understand all things interface related I stumbled across this TED Talks video of Beau Lotto. His insight into optical illusions and how our brain processes the visual information it receives is well worth the 15 minute watch.

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I’m not big on negativity, but that’s how I feel about it. I’ve expressed my displeasure with the WordPress.org plugin repository before, (it’s gotten slightly better since then) but now it’s time to gripe about the theme directory — and it sucks.

I’d like to post a few themes from Bustatheme.com to the directory, but I have a few issues as does nearly every other WordPress theme developer that offer premium WordPress themes for free. There’s a reason we all offer our themes from our own sites: We work hard and strain our brain of all its creative juices when producing AAA themes and we’d like to benefit from that hard work.

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Let me preface this post with the fact that I am not an iPhone App reviewer, and I didn’t take the time to check out every possible option for every function I needed. These are the iPhone Apps I bought for the purposes listed below. If you have another App that does the same something better, let me know in the comments section.

For IRC: Rooms
One way I stay constantly connected to my developers is through IRC. If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that if you need IRC on your iPhone, you need Rooms.

For FTP: FTP On The Go
As far as an FTP client for the iPhone, FTP On The Go is pretty much your only choice. At $9.99 it’s on the upper end of the price spectrum, but well worth it in my opinion. Manage multiple FTP accounts: download, edit and upload. My only complaint with this app is the built-in text editor: There is (currently) no option to turn off word-wrapping which means any structure you have to your markup is useless and it makes editing files more dubious than it already is.

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This is a short one. A gripe about a few of the more annoying things when searching the WordPress plugin repository…

1. The search is truly pathetic. I’ve commented on my lack of enthusiasm for anything Automattic does beyond WordPress before and how they seem to love doing things half-assed, but you would think they could get it together enough to make the repository a useful resource, ya no?
2. Screenshots are resized (poorly) to fit in their fixed-width layout and no full-size examples exist.
3. bbpress is functionally challenged at best, but the integration into the repository is abysmal and rarely returns all the related topics to a given plugin
4. On the subject of WordPress/plugin compatibility… You’ve got to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky? Well do you, punk? …seriously.

The solutions are simple enough…

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I had a few extra minutes last night and today and added a few things to this script including Direct download links (with :hover for easy selection)

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I’ve been wanting to make a simple script that was entirely self-contained for a while now, but I haven’t been sure on exactly what I wanted to do. Something I’ve done more times than I care to count is write code that reads a directory and displays the files in some form or fashion. It’s something I know inside and out so I figured why not make a directory listing script that uses icons to represent individual file types and embed those images into the script itself. So I started coding.

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Warning: If this post sounds much more sinical than usual, it’s because the lack of attention this particular area of software has received from the OS community is unacceptable and half-arsed attempts make it all the more frustrating.

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So this is kind of cool. SkeletonCMS has been included on OpenSourceCMS.com.

I’ll definitely have to spend some time to flesh it out, but since it’s an official OSS project, those of you who would like to contribute to the Skeleton flat file CMS please leave me a message.

This is most likely the last – or one of the last – posts I will make before the Greg-J.com redesign. I love this theme, but the site no longer reflects my interests or represents my thoughts the best way it could.

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