Nowadays pretty much everybody is using pretty permalinks while also using the much shorter url.com?p=page_id format for the short URL of the same post, usually on Twitter. You can also use the various URL shortening services, of course, but Zeldman’s article explains why it’s good to roll your own short URL:

Rolling your own mini-URLs lessens the chance that your carefully cultivated links will rot if the third-party URL shortening site goes down or goes out of business

This post will show you a few more unique keywords (not just “p”) that you can use to shorten your URL with WordPress. You don’t need to do anything to get these keywords to work; they’re available to any WordPress install and will still work regardless of your Permalinks setting.

p

Links to a certain Post / Page.

Usage: url.com/?p=(Post or Page’s ID)
Example: wplover.com?p=1426

m

Either links to Posts from an entire year or an entire month.

Usage:

• To link to a certain month’s Posts: url.com/?p=(YYYYMM)
• To link to a certain year’s Posts: url.com/?p=(YYYY)

Example:

cat

Links to Posts from a certain category.

Usage: url.com/?cat=(Category ID)
Example: wplover.com?cat=3

tag

Links to Posts tagged with a certain tag. Note that you use slug instead of ID here.

Usage: url.com/?tag=(Tag slug)
Example: wplover.com?tag=awesome

s

Links to search results for your supplied keyword.

Usage: url.com/?s=(Keyword)
Example: wplover.com?s=design

Any other short URL keyword I missed?

This small tutorial will try to replicate the famous and recently popular Date Display Technique with Sprites, but opting to do it with CSS 3 instead. The advantage of the CSS 3 method is that:

• You don’t have to create CSS image sprites.
• No more sprites limitation. With image sprites the year is limited, the font selection is fixed, the month name is limited to English words only, and so on. With this technique everything can be shown.
• The CSS is much shorter and understandable.

This only works with modern browsers that support CSS3, of course.

Read more →

Sounds silly, I know, but here’s a nice quote on “Great products are triumphs of taste” by 37signals:

Want to build a great iPhone app? Go listen to Billie Holliday. Trying to design a piece of hardware? Visit a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Aiming to write great marketing copy? Read Aldous Huxley. Need a color scheme? Go to the museum and check out some Mark Rothko paintings.

So. Super Mario Bros.

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I’ve talked about this on WPTavern before, but Leland’s tweet made me feel that we should talk about this more.

Remember when LogoMaid ripped of Dan Cederholm’s logo? Everybody pretty much agreed that that was illegal. And so imagine my surprise knowing that there are WordPress themes that are direct copies of Twitter, of Facebook, of Basecamp, and what have you. Heck, we even have a theme describing itself as “The exact Facebook clone theme for Wordpress” in the official Theme Directory. This I believe is a case worse than the LogoMaid issue.

Please stop this. The freedom in GPL does not mean the freedom to steal copyrighted design. Stop making clones of popular websites and turning them into WordPress themes. It doesn’t matter if you release it only for personal use, or under GPL, if you code the CSS yourself, if you painstakingly recreate the graphic elements in Photoshop. It’s still, as Ryan Hellyer puts it, “illegal, immoral, and unethical.”

Instead of doing that, go and read this article by Cameron Moll, “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal“, and learn how to “steal” a design in a much better (and ethical) way. Learn what makes them work, and improve it:

This article wouldn’t be complete without a warning to be careful when copying well-known sources. If I were to summarize this warning in one sentence, this would be my golden verbiage: copy the inspiration, not the outcome.

Or teach us. Write an article on how you do that AJAX load more posts wizardry. Or how to make that rounded corner work on every browser. Show us how to recreate your favorite website’s cool feature in WordPress.

Now that will be awesome.

Update: Another discussion is up at Theme Lab, WordPress Clone Themes – Your Take?

Last weekend I was looking for an excuse to play around with JQuery, CSS3 and designing in general. After looking around for a bit I decided to make a more interactive version of the Theme Development Codex on WordPress Codex.

My version formats that list for better readability, adds checkboxes and counters so you can track your progress, editable labels, and so on.

You can also download a copy for your own use. Click on the image above (or here: WordPress Theme Development Checklist Tool) to check it out.

Any ideas, comments, bug reports, let me know in the comments area.

A question: how do you guys keep track of sites that use your theme?

I find that Google’s Webmaster Tools show links to my site, including those from the link on the footer area of my themes, but its update can be quite slow and incomplete.

What about you guys?

Just did some small CSS tweaks to this site. Added more breathing space and removed some unnecessary elements. Went wider (990px) over the old one (960px).

This is more a “here’s when I played around with Firebug and ended up making the site look different from the local one” personal reminder post, not a “come over and take a look” one, but if you do find something breaks somewhere, kindly let me know.