Category: OpenSource

As I said yesterday, I was off to play with the WordPress theme generator. It took me a few minutes to figure out what the various labels on the forms controlling the selections meant. I couldn’t quite squeeze the whole page plus the theme preview on the right into my available screen real estate, so I was doing a lot of scrolling around to see the effects of my choices. It took me about 15 minutes to create a red, white, and blue theme. I confess I didn’t carry through with the next step. I did not download and install the theme. So I cannot report on how that goes. Here’s a picture of my 15 minutes of effort

If you have the ability to add some background graphics and other customizations to the code and material you get from the theme generator, you could no doubt make a nice looking blog.

On the other hand, if you have the ability to do that, you may not need the help you get from a wizard that will generate a theme for you. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: WordPress theme generator

Those on a budget (aren’t we all) will love some of the suggestions for free software, site designs and other tools at Design Vitality’s The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Resources, and Template Sources. There are some open source HTML, CSS, and image editing tools listed that might appeal to web designers and to teachers who need updated software in their teaching labs.

The tool I’m going to try out the minute I finish posting this is the WordPress Theme Generator. The options for a wordpress theme include setting body size, sidebar location, number of columns, menu layout, and colors. You end up with a WordPress theme zip file to install.

I’m thinking about switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. Have you tried it? What was your reaction and opinion? How well does it work when you are exchanging .doc files with other writers and making changes?

Thanks for any comments and advice.

Paul Graham gave this talk, What Business Can Learn from Open Source, at Oscon 2005. It is long, but worth the time. His points relate to the passions of the unruly and unpaid who create open source or innovative weblogs. It ties right into the point I was making in my previous post about the woman who sleeps with babies.

Here’s an excerpt of what he said, “So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging
have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they
like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive,
and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down. . . . When I say business can
learn from open source, I don’t mean any specific business can. I
mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene
pool does. . . . I think the big obstacle preventing
us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people
working for you have to be employees. But think about what’s going
on underneath: the company has some money, and they pay it to the
employee in the hope that he’ll make something worth more than they
paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. . . . “

The Web Credibility Project – Stanford University: “As
part of the Persuasive Technology Lab, we are investigating such questions as:

• What
  causes people to believe (or not believe) what they find on the Web?
• What
  strategies do users employ in evaluating the credibility of online sources?
• What
  contextual and design factors influence these assessments and strategies?
• How
  and why are credibility evaluation processes on the Web different from those
  made in face-to-face human interaction, or in other offline contexts?”

In addition to the research results, an email newsletter and credibility teaching materials are available. Qualified academics receive a free two-week credibiity training course outline and materials that go for $1500 commercially.