Comfy news theme is a free news / magazine style theme for WordPress. It looks really clean, stunning and professional. Comfy comes with many features, some of them are basic magazine features such as dropdown navigation, feedburner subscription, advertisement spots, featured entries, ajax tabs, widget-ready, gravatars built-in, and more.
One important feature is that your visitors have full control over your home page and sidebar widgets, utilized jQuery to make the widgets fully controllable, you can minimize, maximize, or close any widget from homepage. Comfy displays posts from your selected categories, the user can easily increase/reduce the number of stories shown to him on home page which makes your blog look like a real news site.
Design Disease has released a brand new theme called Compositio. Compositio is a two column theme, made to for those who want to put their content at the front with a unique light blue design. Random square shapes are the defining graphics of this theme. They are used throughout the background, bringing a special rhythm to the theme.
A special feature of the theme is the logo changer. If you want to activate this option go to: Administration Panel > Appearance > Logo Options, and select logo type. The theme is widget ready so you can use it as you like. Also they customized the CSS for the default widgets to match the site style better.
WooThemes has just released a new Free theme called Irresistible. It is a visually-rich personal blog, with a little bit of a multimedia focus. Incorporating some nifty video-options and widgets, Irresistible should meet all of your personal blogging needs. Just add your content to the mix.
Pricing: Free Requirements: - Source: Download Now
We have just mentioned WP e-Commerce Plugin earlier. Now we are introducing a free WordPress theme for your WordPress e-Commerce store called Crafty Cart that requires the WP e-Commerce plugin for shopping cart functionality, but works as a fully functional blog on its own.
The design of Crafty Cart features custom made ‘Add to Cart’ buttons and a beautiful shopping cart widget design. It’s a fresh flavoured retro style for selling t-shirts and handmade items, designed to be a starting point for your online shop.
Magazeen is a free wordpress theme which was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. The Magazeen theme is packed full of cool features to really encourage your readers to explore new posts and similar items. The first thing you might notice is the jQuery image showcase at the top. The other cool and fully automated feature is the related posts drop down effect.
The sidebar area’s have been created to give you a lot of control over the featured posts, and recent posts. The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. You may modify the theme as you wish.
Imprezz is a simple and beautiful 3-column free WordPress theme. The theme can be used in various setting for various purposes - in magazine-blogs, but also in corporate and private blogs. The theme supports WordPress 2.7.1 and works well with the zdcomments widget (which is used to display the top commenters).
The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions.
Scarlett is an elegant wordpress theme designed for bloggers who like light colored or bright colored themes. This theme is suitable for any niche. The theme layout is stylish and dynamic contents elements are built into it. Scarletts is also WordPress 2.7 ready with threaded comments.
OneRoom is a beautiful three columns theme with fixed width and widget-ready free wordpress theme. It has built-in author section in sidebar and gravatar support for comments. This theme has been tested in all the major Web browsers (Firefox, IE6+, Opera, Google Chrome, Safari).
WordPress.tv is your visual resource for all things WordPress. To make it easy for you to find up-to-date, WordPress-themed video content within a couple of clicks. Without having to wade through spammy promotional videos, out-of-date content, and missing chunks of presentations. WordPress.tv is there waiting for you, you can learn anything related to WordPress by watching the videos there.
WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. We are proud to offer you a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform, with sensible default settings and features, and an extremely customizable core.
More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. WordPress is publishing software with a focus on ease of use, speed and a great user experience. WordPress is blessed with an active community, which is the heart of open source software. It has the following excellent main features.
Locally Installed
WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control over the weblog. Unlike third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your weblog, in case you need to. This also means that you can install WordPress on your desktop or home computer, or even on an Intranet.
User management
WordPress uses user-levels to control user-access to different features, so you can restrict the ability of individual users to create or modify content in your weblog, by changing their user-level.
Dynamic page generation
No rebuilding of all your pages each time you update your weblog, or any aspect of it. All pages are generated using the database and the templates each time a page from your weblog is requested by a viewer. This means that updating your weblog, or its design is as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.
Template Driven Design
WordPress uses templates to generate the pages dynamically. You can control the presentation of content by editing the templates using the Template Editor tool and the Template Tags.
Moderation
For the control freak in all of us, WordPress provides an array of moderation options. You can moderate
all comments before they appear on the blog
comments with specific words in them
comments posted from specific IP addresses
comments containing more than some specified number of links.
All these moderation options keep spammers and vandals in check.
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including
Community web portals
Discussion sites
Corporate web sites
Intranet applications
Personal web sites or blogs
Aficionado sites
E-commerce applications
Resource directories
Social Networking sites
Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL (”General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.
Textpattern is a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system and it is both free and open source.
When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the worldwide web – a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations – ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, the patience of a saint.
Those who soldier on anyway may find themselves further held back by the web’s purported inflexibility with written language, with its reluctance to cope with all but the plainest of text, or by the unpredictable results brought about by using “WYSIWYG“ web editors.
Textpattern is a web application designed to help overcome these and other hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.
Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams with the following main features.
Simple Admin Interface
Built from the ground up to be as simple as possible, Radiant features an elegant administrative interface that centers around three key components: pages, snippets, and layouts.
Pages
Pages contain the meat of the content for a Web site and may use Markdown, Textile, or plain HTML. Pages are composed of multiple parts such as a body and sidebar.
Snippets
Content that is used in multiple places can be stored in a snippet. Snippets are very similar to PHP includes or Rails partials.
Layouts
Layouts generally contain most of the HTML for a page’s design. Layouts can render pages parts in any way they choose. One layout could choose to render the body and sidebar of a page, while another layout (a print layout) could render only the body.
Flexible Site Structure
Unlike many other blogging engines Radiant allows you to arrange pages according to any hierarchy. A Weblog in Radiant can be as simple as a collection of child pages underneath a parent page.
Radius Template Language
Radiant has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages, iterate over page children, and display content conditionally. Radius tags are available in pages, snippets, and layouts.
Custom Text Filters
Radiant ships with support for Markdown and Textile, but developers can easily create text filters for any markup language such as RDoc, BBCode, or Structured Text.
Intelligent Page Caching
Radiant includes an intelligent caching mechanism which allows content to be cached for a maximum of 5 minutes. This ensures that content is always fresh and provides an optimal level of performance.
Built with Ruby on Rails
Radiant is built using Ruby on Rails. This means it’s easy for developers to extend Radiant because it’s built on a widely accepted (and understood) Web application development platform.
Licensed Under the MIT License
Radiant is licensed under the MIT License. This means that Radiant is free for commercial and non-profit use. It also means that you are free to modify and distribute Radiant as long as you don’t remove the appropriate notices from the source code.
Frog CMS is a PHP version of Radiant CMS, a well known Ruby on Rails application. Frog CMS share the goal to simplify content management, and offer an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions and all what you need for your files management.
Frog requires a MySQL database with InnoDB support, a web server (Apache with mod_rewrite is highly recommended) and is distributed under the MIT software license.
Frog is unique because of is simple templating code, that does not need to learn a other scripting language, because it use directly PHP. I have found this approach interesting for 2 reasons:
In general, it is not use in article pages, so it does not scared the writer that does not want to learn PHP.
The webmaster of the site, the one that will code some basic condition or loop to add more dynamic on is website generally know a little PHP. Just enough to add some dynamic latest news part, latest articles or photo gallery.
XOOPS is an acronym of eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System. Though started as a portal system, XOOPS is in fact striving steadily on the track of Content Management System. It can serve as a web framework for use by small, medium and large sites.
A lite XOOPS can be used as a personal weblog or journal. For this purpose, you can do a standard install, and use its News module only. For a medium site, you can use modules like News, Forum, Download, Web Links etc to form a community to interact with your members and visitors. For a large site as an enterprise one, you can develop your own modules such as eShop, and use XOOP’s uniform user management system to seamlessly integrate your modules with the whole system.
Key features of XOOPS
- Database-driven XOOPS uses a relational database (currently MySQL) to store data required for running a web-based content management system.
- Fully Modularized Modules can be installed/uninstalled/ativated/deactivated with a click using the XOOPS module administration system.
- Personalization Registered users can edit their profiles, select site themes, upload custom avatars, and much more!
- User Management The ability to search for users by various criteria, send email and private messages to users through a template-based messaging system.
- Supported World-wide XOOPS was created and is maintained by a team of several hard-working volunteers working from all over the world. The XOOPS community has more than dozen official support sites around the world for support of non-English speaking users.
- Multi-byte Language Support Fully supports multi-byte languages, including Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, etc.
- Versatile Group Permissions System Powerful and user-friendly permissions system which enables administrators to set permissions by group.
- Theme-based skinnable interface XOOPS is driven by a powerful theme system. Both admins and users can change the look of the entire web site with just a click of a mouse. There are also over 60 themes available for download!
The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open source version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products. Listed below is a comprehensive list of new features that you will find in Movable Type 4.0.
A customizable dashboard to display just the information you find valuable
Kick-ass documentation — over 100 printed pages’ worth, with an exclusive book-length Business Blogging Guide offering details on exactly how to help your company communicate with blogs
Powerful listing screens with quick keyboard access keys and the ability to work with multiple selections of entries, comments, or authors
Quick Filters on every listing screen let you jump to the most-frequently-accessed views of your information
Better Publishing
Smarter defaults throughout the system, offering more power with fewer configuration settings than MT 3.0
A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates — never lose a half-written post again
Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs
The world’s smartest blog template language, with boolean logic for choosing which content to display. (”Show me posts by ‘Jane’ in the category ‘food’ with tags ‘meat NOT fish’.”)
Live preview shows you your entry before you publish, with full fidelity to your live blog
Smart controls like auto-complete for tags, a calendar selector for scheduling future-dated entries, and a completely redone UI for selecting and creating categories
Support for publishing standalone pages that automatically use blog templates and designs
Better plain-text entry with built-in support for Markdown and Textile, and conversion of MS Word “smart” quotes to HTML entities
Even more search-engine-friendly with customizable URLs per entry, per-template, or per-page
A simple IDE for templates, with color highlighting for editing tags and smart error reporting for template typos
Paginated archives — easily walk your users through posts by date or author or category
MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts – hence Ajax CMS. It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated MooTools, Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. If you’re a CSS designer or Ajax aficionado, this is the CMS for you; and if you like what you see today, you’ll love what’s coming.
Techies call MODx a Content Management Framework (”CMF“): equal parts custom web app builder and Content Management System (”CMS“). With a flexible API and a robust event override system, MODx makes building engaging web projects straightforward — or changing core functionality without hacking the core code possible. Custom tweaks won’t leave you pulling out your hair when it’s time to upgrade.
Not only does MODx help you build sites quickly, but it also is both robust and simple. As far as end-users know, MODx is just an easy-to-use online application; for developers there’s freely available resources and a fantastic end-user community.
SilverStripe is a Content Management the way it was meant to be. It is powerful enough for any website or intranet design and simple enough for anyone to use with the following main features.
sNews is a completely free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven content management system. Consisting of only one small core file, sNews is extremely lightweight, easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface.
With sNews you can create a website that consists of dynamic pages and have a blog at the same time. sNews has a front page option and categories for you to categorize your articles. Corporate CMS or a personal blog - your choice.
sNews uses search engine friendly URLs throughout, to make your website truly loved by Google and other search engines (as well as your visitors). This makes a sNews driven site highly Search Engine Optimized from the get-go and will greatly assist in your site obtaining a good SEO ranking.
OpenCms from Alkacon Software is a professional, easy to use website content management system. OpenCms helps content managers worldwide to create and maintain beautiful websites fast and efficiently.
The fully browser based user interface features configurable editors for structured content with well defined fields. Alternatively, content can be created using an integrated WYSIWYG editor similar to well known office applications. A sophisticated template engine enforces a site-wide corporate layout and W3C standard compliance for all content.
OpenCms is based on Java and XML technology. It can be deployed in an open source environment (e.g. Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) as well as on commercial components (e.g. Windows NT, IIS, BEA Weblogic, Oracle). As true open source software, OpenCms is free of licensing costs.
Ellington is an online publishing system designed from the ground up for media sites. Featuring rich metadata, clean separation of content and presentation and an elegant web-based interface, Ellington makes it easier than ever for you to create, organize and publish your content online.
Ellington handles all kinds of content — including stories, blogs, user comments, polls, entertainment listings, photos, audio, video, static HTML pages, and much more. Each type of content has its own unique metadata and can be assigned meaningful and relevant relationships with other types of content.
And because Ellington’s state-of-the-art template system is a clean bridge between data and presentation, multiple sites can share content but still look vastly different.
From small newspapers and niche publications to widespread publication networks, Ellington’s streamlined content-management tools and powerful development platform give you everything you need to make your content come alive on the Web.
Symphony is a web publishing system made for web developers. It gives you all the power and flexibility you’ll need, while keeping out of your way.
Symphony lets you organise everything the way you like, from your publishing environment to your website’s URL structure. Built to be versatile and customisable, Symphony really is what you make of it.
Symphony’s templating engine is pure XSLT goodness. XSLT is a standard recommended by the W3C, so learning Symphony means that you’re learning skills that you can also use outside of the system. If you already know the XML and CSS standards, then chances are you should be able to quickly pick up XSLT.
Symphony lets you to create small blocks of XSLT code called utilities, which you can use as building blocks to construct your site’s pages. Due to the nature of XSLT, these utilities are highly reusable, so the next time you’re developing a website you’ll probably find you’ve already done half the work.
ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website. If you’re tired of the limitations of your current CMS then take ExpressionEngine for a spin.
Unlike most other publishing systems, ExpressionEngine doesn’t force you to work a certain way. It adapts to your creative process. Examine our portfolio of featured sites and you’ll find that each one uniquely fulfills the creative and artistic vision of its designer. No cookie-cutter sites here.
ExpressionEngine is modular by design, enabling you to easily add new features and capability with add-on modules, plugins, and extensions. Included by default are 17 add-on modules, access to over 100 plugins, and dozens of extension hooks.
Squarespace is an exceptionally tuned publishing system for managing websites and blogs. Need to create a blog? Build a website? Our software helps discerning individuals build stylish, easy to manage websites complete with state-of-the-art blogging tools. Squarespace hosts thousands of high-quality websites — both large and small.
The Squarespace Journal, which can represent either a piece of your website, or the entirety of your site, is an ideal way to create a professional blog. Squarespace’s professional-grade blogging tools feature spell checking, ATOM, RSS, feed auto-discovery, XML-RPC pinging, comment management, member registration, timed publishing dates, multiple authors, and more.
Squarespace comes pre-loaded with a variety of professionally designed, search-engine friendly templates that you can customize and tweak to create a unique site. With Squarespace’s style editor, you can use one of our professional starting points to begin a design of your own.
dotCMS Core is the most feature complete open source web CMS available today. Available under the GPL, you can freely download the dotCMS system and get up, running and managing web sites and web content in a matter of minutes. Unlike many other “open source” cms, dotCMS is in no way crippled. When you download the dotCMS system, you are getting all of the functions and features needed to begin creating customized, manageable and scalable web sites. This includes so called “advanced” features such as LDAP/AD integration, clustering support, online templating, Web2.0 Calendaring and the structured content engine.
If you are looking to get a head start in getting your new web sites off the ground, they offer accelerators - starter sites - that combine the power and flexibility of the dotCMS system with cutting edge information architecture, compliant HTML and pre-build functions. These accelerators are designed to be easy to customize and brand with unique graphical design.
Markup Factory is a web publishing platform that helps you create great websites and keep them fresh and useful and alive. Plus, you can easily start an email newsletter, publish a calendar or blog, or take online registrations for your events. The Markup Factory Template Engine can support native XHTML / CSS code. Simply copy and paste, or use the Markup Factory scripting engine to add life to your template.
The other unique component to Markup Factory is that it provides a powerful set of web applications ready to deploy with minimal effort. If you want to deploy dynamic of data driven functionality on your website, most of the heavy lifting is already done for you so that you can focus on the implementation. Optional add-ons include some very powerful utilities that convert your website into a powerful communications tool. Learn more about the Events Engine, Online Store, Newsletters, Membership Module, and Online Database.
The only disadvantage is that Markup Factory is not free. However, all plans are pay as you go. There are no long-term contracts, no setup fees, no termination fee, and you may cancel at any time.
It’s true that there are tons of blogging software solutions from which to choose. Each has their place, and their legion of ardent followers.
Habari is being written with a firm understanding of the current state of blogging. Most other blogging packages have been around long enough that their responses to things like comment spam and Digg site overloads are bolted on after the fact; whereas Habari is being written from the beginning to take these things — and more — into account.
Habari strongly favors open, standard, and documented protocols. Atom, being both open and documented, is the prefered syndication format, and the Atom Publishing Protocol is the prefered means of remote communication with your site. This is a core feature, and not a plugin.
Habari is being written specifically for modern web hosting environments, and uses modern object-oriented programming techniques. Using these recent but well-established additions to the PHP language allows Habari to make use of PDO, enabling prepared statements for all interactions with the database. This greatly reduces the system’s vulnerability to SQL injection attacks. This is just one of many benefits of modern object-oriented techniques.
Those are just a few of the technical differences, but a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a consistent level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.
Posterous lets you post things online fast using email. You email Posterous at post@posterous.com and they reply instantly with your new posterous blog. If you can use email, you can have your own website to share thoughts and media with friends, family and the world. You can attach any type of file and we’ll post it along with the text of your email. They do smarter things for photos, MP3’s, documents and video (both links AND files).
Email can easily be spoofed, but Posterous has come up with some ways to figure out if the email we receive comes from you. If they think it might not be you, they ask you to confirm the email before they post it. No matter what, you always get an email notification of every post we put online for your blog, with an easy link to remove the post if you didn’t do it.
After all, Posterous is enthusiastically a free service. Later, they will be adding premium features they know you’ll love, but there will always be a useful free version you can use.
So you signed up for Facebook, added friends and photos, joined a few groups, and updated your profile status. But now what? Isn't there more to Facebook? There is.
Here are ten tips to tweak your profile and get more out of Facebook. These tips go beyond the typical and include ways to stay better connected to your friends and look good doing it. To compile this list I searched high and low and even called on Facebook for the best tips. Most are easy to do and all will add some Facebook pizzazz to your profile.
Tip One
Dig up demographic dirt on your friends with Socialistics: If you want to know the demographic breakdown on your Facebook universe of friends, this application does a nice job at breaking it down. Socialistics can show you information about your friends' ages, the languages they speak, their country of origin, and lots of other interesting information all within Facebook.
Socialistics data does not show up on your profile pages and you are not able to share Socialistics information with your Facebook Friends through your wall. However, if you want to take a look at the trends for your personal network, then add Socialistics to your profile and you can access it privately.
Tip Two
Power search tips: Just like Google and other search engines, Facebook has some built-in power search tools and terms to help you find people. Want to search your Facebook network or friends list, but you want to narrow the results to fall within an age range? Just enter a term using the "name," "y1" and "y2" search filters. For example, I wanted to find my buddy Colin from college, but I can’t remember how old he is. To find him I just entered in “name: Colin Bauer y1: 25 y2: 40” and voila! The search string asked Facebook to look for people named Colin Bauer between the ages of 25 and 40.
You can also use two search terms at once by dividing the terms with the "pipe character" (|) (the pipe is found on the same key as the backslash).
If you want people to easily find you when they search, fill out your profile as much as you can. That way your profile interests -- music, books, movies and so on -- will move you closer to the top of Facebook search results for those keywords. Check out Facebook's help page for more handy search terms.
Tip Three
Integrate Facebook information with Gmail: The Firefox add-on called Xoopit is designed to streamline browsing and sharing of files, photos, and videos with friends on other social networks via Google's Gmail service. One of Xoopit's handy features (seldom touted) let's you see who among your e-mail contacts is a Facebook member and displays their profile photos, status updates. The Xoopit add-on also lets you update your status inside Gmail via a nifty little Xoopit box that integrates into the Gmail interface.
Here is a Xoopit video that walks you through how it works.
Personalize your Facebook URL: SocialToo allows you to create a custom domain for your Facebook profile page such as username.socialtoo.com. This allows you to share your Facebook site with other people without requiring them to search for you on Facebook to find your profile. Granted, you might have to explain to your friends that even though Facebook.com isn't in the Web address it's still takes you to your Facebook page. The domain is much easier to remember than an eight-digit profile ID.
Signing up with SocialToo is quick and free. You can set up your Facebook settings under “preferences” on SocialToo’s Website. Just remember to choose your SocialToo username wisely.
Another way to create a custom domain for your Facebook page is go to your Profile page in facebook and copy the Web address that appears in your browsers address bar. Then head over to Tiny.cc. Now paste your Facebook profile Web address in the Tiny.cc's "Enter a long URL you want to make tiny" form field. And directly to the right you'll see a Custom option. Here you can create a custom URL that follows the convention http://tiny.cc/username.
Tip Five
Hack your profile photo: Want to juice up your profile photo? Check out AllFacebook.com's "5 Creative Ways To Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo." You'll learn how to maximize your picture size to 200 pixels wide by 600 pixels high, and how to create some neat effects like making it look like you're hanging off your profile Wall.
In my tests, the specifications for this effect took some careful tweaking but the payoff was worth it. If you're handy with a photo editor this will be easy for you. If you don’t have Photoshop, you're going to need to get yourself a photo editing program to take advantage of this hack. There are pleany of good free photo editing programs to get the job done such as such as Paint.Net. You'll find more free photo editing software at PC World's Download section.
Tip Six
Put Facebook Chat in your browser sidebar: Is Facebook your main IM tool? You can place it in your browser's sidebar. For my tests I used Firefox, but this also works in Opera. In Firefox just go to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks and click on Bookmarks Toolbar. Select New Bookmark, and name it Facebook Chat. Then paste in this URL: http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php. Make sure you've selected "Load this bookmark in the sidebar" and hit Save. Now you're ready to go. Sorry IE fans -- this is not for you; however, you can paste the URL into a new browser tab if you like.
Tip Seven
Get back the old Facebook look (more or less): Ever feel constrained by the Facebook layout and look? You can actually change the look of your Facebook page with some tinkering and a little help from a Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey that allows you to use Java Scripts to change the Facebook look. The only catch is the new look is something only you can see -- your Facebook friends see the same old Facebook page. Once you’ve added Greasemonkey to Facebook, visit Greasemonkey’s companion site UserScripts.org and browse dozens of layout options for your Facebook page. Click "install" on the new Facebook layout you want and let Greasemonkey take care of the rest.
A word of warning: Before you go nuts downloading Facebook layouts like crazy be carefull. Greasmonkey scripts for changing your Facebook layout use JavaScript. JavaScripts can be malicious and harm your PC if created by a sloppy or crooked coder. Scripts on UserScripts.org can be submitted by anyone and are not reviewed by Greasemonkey. Before you download a new Facebook layout check out the user reviews and exercise caution before installing.
That being said, here are a few of my favorites:
Remove Facebook Clutter: This is a close approximation of Facebook's previous look and feel. This hides the filters on the left side of the "stream" and the "highlights" section, and takes away the rounded corners on profile photos.
Facebook Color Changer: Pick a color scheme and change your FB colors. This script used to let you change the Facebook icon on the top left of the screen as well, and the developer promises this feature will be back.
Facebook Twitter Style: Have you heard how Twitter supposedly inspires Facebook’s new look and feel? Why not take this concept to its logical conclusion and view your Facebook homepage as if it really were Twitter?
Upload mobile photos or videos straight to your profile: Just took a great picture or video with your cell phone and want to post it on your profile right away? Set up your profile settings to allow mobile uploads.
Go to the Mobile tab under your Facebook account tab and set up your phone to send photos to your Facebook page directly from you mobile phone. A word of caution if you set up Facebook to do this.Take heed of your Facebook mobile settings and adjust them properly.
When Facebook Mobile is activated you also let Facebook send text messages to your phone for those sending you friend requests, e-mail messages, wall posts, and status updates. That could become an astonishing text message bill if you’re not careful. This feature is only available in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Tip Nine
Tweet your status: This is one of my personal favorites. Adding the Twitter Facebook application to your Facebook profile gives you the option to turn your Tweets into your Facebook status updates. Not only that, but Twitter is smart enough filter out @replies so that personal messages don’t end up on your profile.
Tip Ten
Use these third-party apps: There are many Facebook third-party apps that help you keep tabs on your Facebook friends. Some are barebones, while others give you more in-depth information. Here are the ones I like the best that will give you the biggest bang for your buck (actually they are all free).
Digsby (Windows Only): Digsby is a nifty little Facebook app that sits in your PC's system tray and can pull in Facebook Chat and other IM accounts, e-mail alerts and Facebook updates from your network of friends.
MyFacebook (Vista): This widget adds your Facebook information right on your Windows Vista desktop sidebar. With this little app you can, “change your status, see your friends’ statuses, groups, notifications, albums and events.
Facebook Dashboard Widget (Mac): Similar to Windows Facebook Desktop, this widget will notify you of friend requests, messages, pokes and group and event invites.
Facebook Exporter for iPhoto (Mac): If you don’t plan on buying iLife ’09, but loved the idea of posting photos directly from iPhoto then this plugin is for you. Pick or create a new album, tag your friends and add captions right from iPhoto and then send your work straight to your Facebook profile.
So that's my ten Facebook power tips to take your Facebook time wasting to the next level. Try them out and me know what you think. And if you've got other tips post them in the comment field and share.
Are you interested in developing some plugins for Chrome too? We have seen lots of browser plugins for Firefox at the moment, it would be nice if we can see some nice plugins for Chrome as well.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, has published an article about “How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps“. Here is a brief introduction of how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps:
1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome It takes maybe 3-4 minutes, you basically run a small program to indicate your preference. The developer version also gets new features (such as pressing “F11″ to get full-screen mode) way before the beta/stable releases of Chrome.
2. Read the initial documentation Extensions currently have very Greasemonkey-like functionality: you identify which web pages should be modified, plus JavaScript to be added to those pages. Your plugin has to have a unique identifier. And you have to bundle your extension directory into a “.crx” Chrome Extension file.
3. Try it out If you’re running the developer version of Chrome, you can install the “hello world” plugin from the extension howto page just by clicking to download the .crx file. Then type “chrome-ui://extensions/” .
Everyone knows that WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, popular blogging systems on the internet today. With its out of the box features, plugins, and great theming community, its no wonder WordPress has been accepted as today’s standard. However, sometimes you just want to add a little more.
It seems the latest fad to hit the WordPress scene is adding thumbnails into a blog post. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress, or blogging. Function taught us how to create custom write panels with add_meta_box.
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