Golden Bloom is a simple but rich and elegant theme that has fluid width and columns, right sidebar, and a vertical menu rather than a horizontal menu to enable the cohesive, clean appearance of the header. Good is a mobile friendly theme that comes with built in breadcrumbs, pagination, single post stylsheets, Jigoshop e-commerce plugin integration, and simplicity.

New plugins Leaflet Maps Marker allows you to pin, organize & show your favorite places through OpenStreetMap/WMTS, Google/KML, GeoJSON or Augmented-Reality browsers. Speed Trap is a simple lightweight plugin to track all WordPress pages and load times, including the admin area. WP Marketplace is a marketplace plugin with everything you need on a easy interface and competible with all themes, no modifications required. WP Tabular will help you to generate html tables simply using a GUI. Updated plugins Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things. Page Links To lets you make a WordPress page (or other content type) link to an external URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress URL. Tallyopia Analytics provides analytics that you can embed into your site using shortcodes or view in your admin dashboard. WordPress Text Message allows people to subscribe to SMS […]

One of the easiest things that you could do to customize your blog, besides change your header image, would be to change your background image. Sure, you could just set a background color, but why not bring in some texture? Using full images can be problematic, as for the most part they will not conform to the size of everyone’s screen. Viewers with smaller screens will only see part of the image, and viewers with larger screens will see the image surrounded by white space. Even if you could get the image to stretch for larger screens, it would be distorted and pixellated, and this is where patterns come in. In a sense, a pattern is a small image file which can be tiled seamlessly, thus adapting to any screen size. In WordPress, you can do this by uploading a small pattern image at Appearance -> Backgrounds in your Dashboard […]

picolight is a neutral, light, clean and professional looking theme. Retina is an elegant, versatile, magazine style theme featuring a custom menu, header, background, fixed-width, widgets and threaded comments. Underscore is a warm, simple, neutral theme in taupe or beige with cream and just a touch of red as an accent color.

WordPress 3.3.1 has been released. This is the first minor update since the release of WordPress 3.3 and contains 15 fixes, as well as an important security vulnerability fix. This update is recommended for all users, and can be done from the Dashboard -> Updates section of your blog’s Dashboard.

It’s the new year, so what does that mean for you and your blog? Are you going to pick a new theme, maybe customize the one you have, perhaps blog about more things and spice up your posts with some added media and links, or maybe something as simple as just blogging with an up-to-date browser? Last year, I made a resolution to blog more often on my personal blog. I definitely met that goal with 107 posts in 2011 vs. a meager 28 in 2010. This year, I’m aiming for even more. How about you? What’s your 2012 blogging resolution?

New plugins WordPress Ultimate CMS is an easy to use plugin to create, customize, and manage custom post and page types, custom archives, and custom taxonomies. Updated plugins BuddyPress Mobile is a mobile BuddyPress theme optimized for viewing on iPhone, iPod touch, and will also work on Android and some Blackberry devices. Twitter Blackbird Pie allows you to add awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts just by adding simple shortcodes. Ultimate TinyMCE beefs up your visual editor with a plethora of advanced options.

Admired is a stylish and fully customizable theme. Blaskan is a responsive and accessible theme that uses modern web technologies. Dotos is a minimalistic theme in the sense that it puts complete focus on the photos, not text blogging.