Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Good Wordpress theme are hard to find now that the market it deluged with sponsored-link bearing crap. A search for “wordpress themes” in Google brings up advertisements to the max, most of which seem to be created by color-blind SEOs looking to get link-love and a buck with Google. Still, there are truly great new themes being made, you just have to be able to separate them from the noise.

Why? I want to add something to the WP Theme Community, which is my selection of the best themes. This post is intended to cut down on the noise.

It looks like Wordpress’ default theme should have. Simple, with three columns, nice blue colors, and big text. It’s also got the Kubrick inspired top header image for your customization or monetization delight.

The thing that got me about this one is the brilliant use the left and right column whitespace to put up a patterned background / extra-wide border.

Iceburgg, dogg. The one thing that can be said about this cute, blue, cold, colorful theme is that it suits–and only suits–a winter season. If you were to use this as your general theme, you should probably customize and genericize all the graphics to taste.

The only thing I don’t like about gridlock is the large, grey right hand column, which seems out of place with the rest of the theme. Overall it has a very magazine-style text-based approach that works well.

Unique, this theme is thick. It’s got Web 2.0 written all over it, with big regions of text and color. The innovation is in the massive right-sidebar and header which wrap the content with text, rather than widgets or images.

Yep it’s the same theme directory again, but this one gets a nod for its well-done colorspace and menu bar. The image overlay hovers are beautiful, and the blue colors make it look as good as Windows Aero.

Bartelme, again, shows us how it’s done. I thought I’d end this list with BIG BANG, and here it is. This is the theme that powered his site until he recently redesigned it into a sleeker, sharper look. If you like wide, you can’t get wider than this. And, it’s professional–this guy’s a web designer by trade!

I just had a brilliant idea to really slow down the spammers. First, go install mod_limitipconn. Then, add something like this to your .htaccess file to limit the number of simultaneous spam comments:

<IfModule mod_limitipconn.c>
<Location /wp/wp-comment-post.php>
MaxConnPerIP 1
</Location>
</IfModule>

This will prevent them from streamlining requests, essentially denying them the right to post multiple times at once. This is good, because it means that you have turned spammers from parallel to sequential machines!

Google just did a makeover on their Google Analytics package, completely revamping their UI. We won’t get to play with it for a while, though, because they’re slowing rolling out the new version across all their myriad users. Undoubtedly this strategy has two business-centric side effects:

1. With a slow rollout, they can fix any bugs in the application which they might have overlooked. By the time the 95% start to use it, the 5% will have made it perfect.
2. They can make it sure it scales. As they add site after site, they can accurately measure how much of their distributed grid will have to power the new, heavier UI.

I don’t have access to a live version, but this screenshot looks a lot the newly announced free stat tracking app from Wordpress. For comparison, here’s a screenshot from their web page:

I won’t argue that they’re the same, but the style is similar–and Wordpress came way first. Copying or unconscious emulation? You decide.