A neat idea, usable if you’ve also installed the WordPress.com Stats plugin.

This site’s current design sucks when it comes to showcasing new comments, so in the meanwhile here’s Matt clarifying on a old post about whether Gravatar slows down page load speed and hurt search engine rankings:

…Gravatars (or any images) aren’t going to hurt you in the Google rankings or we would have seen a massive drop-off in traffic on WP.com.

True, because as far as I know page load speed isn’t taken into account yet. And when it is, Gravatars will be just one of the many other factors that influence load speed anyway.

It looks like Pico wins something (yay!), so to celebrate here’s an update for it, bringing it to version 1.0.7. The improvements are:

• The home page now shows previous and next posts navigation links.
• Better top header menu, now using the bulletproof Page-based navigation technique.
• Better 404 page. Now shows a search box and some useful links.
• New widget area, Pico Single Bottom. It’s located right below a single Post, great for things like social sharing widgets, related posts, and so on.
• Style for Visual Editor (a.k.a WYSIWYRG), so the text you see on the editor looks more similar to the actual design, thanks to Oz’s guide.
• A bunch of typographic and design tweaks.

Download Pico directly here, or visit the theme’s landing page.

Enjoy!

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.

Read more →

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?