Sandbox · plaintxt.org Sandbox The Sandbox is a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned, so beginners will feel comfortable styling it since they only need to know CSS. More experienced themers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions. This looks like a good basic theme or style to start from when building your own design. Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick come together to create this theme.

Your regular favorite Mark is on vacation for about a week. The task of keeping this blog busy has fallen to me. I will try to maintain Mark’s standards and bring you the best of weblog tools over this period. Everything will continue normally, hopefully. I used to blog actively at WordLog until academic pressures forced me to take a break from blogging. Regaining lost rhythm is difficult, and that blog hasn’t been updated in months. Other more recent pursuits have taken the upper-hand now. So what is your strategy for maintaining the perfect blogging rhythm?, do you guys have a “Workflow” for maintaining frequent updates to your professional blogs? I’d love to hear from you. Write a post on your weblog and then pingback this post (just link to this post) so everyone else can also learn about your techniques. Optionally I will try to condense the best practices […]

Update: Version 1.1 has been released to fix a bug that caused a white box to be displayed in IE instead of the widget. The meebo me Plugin for WordPress lets you display your chat widget from meebo me. meebo me lets you chat with your site visitors using your Meebo account. Key Features: Generate perfectly valid XHTML code Set Widget ID and Size from within WP-Admin Read more and download >>

blummy: Bookmarklets on Steroids Steve talks about becoming a better blogger with Blummy. Blummy is a custom bookmarklet builder that launches a small AJAX page with pre-built bookmarklets for all kinds of sites, utilities and so forth. The possibilities, I suppose, are endless. Though I am not sure it can be done, there should be an interface to add your own home-grown bookmarklet as well. I personally tend to use many custom and home grown bookmarklets myself. For those that depend on and regularly use/add content to such sites as del.icio.us, Flickr, Alexa and the like, Blummy might be their path to clickage Nirvana. It is well written, fast and definitely worth a looksee. The most attractive feature of Blummy in my book is the ability to quickly try out Blummy without any user registration. I just wish Steve converted his titles into permalinks. 🙂

meebo me: Web IM Instant messaging for the web, can be integerated into WordPress as a widget. Apparently, WordPress.com is also bundling meebo.

Google AJAX Search API Just like it sounds, add an AJAXified search box within your blog with this experimental Google AJAX search API. You need to sign up to get an API key. I wonder if they will let you integerate AdSense for search with this.

WP Plugin: Simple Popup Images Add images to your WordPress blog posts with automatic thumbnail creation and simple popup windows. Easy installation.

WP Theme: Brighthouse Two column, bright colored theme for WordPress. This is a modification of the original Brighthouse theme for Typo. Could be reminiscent of the 37Signals blog.