Also for those that don’t know and are looking for WordPress inspiration, check my css gallery.

I learned a lot from his blog and one particular series of posts that helped me a lot was called “So you want to create WordPress themes huh?” However, since this series was written more than 2 years ago, Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper.com felt the need to create a new series teaching how to create a WordPress theme. So, if you always wanted to create your own WordPress theme and didn’t know how to, go check this series out!

One last topic that I want to talk about in this post is the redesign of this blog. As you can see, I’ve designed a child theme using the Thematic theme framework created by Ian who I’ve mentioned earlier. I actually wanted to create my own theme again at first, but after I played around with Thematic for a few weeks, I just decided to design a child theme and I’m happy with the result. Hopefully with the redesign, it’ll be a new start and I’ll be updating the blog regularly.

By the way, feedback on the redesign is appreciated. It could be constructive criticism, tips, or whatever you want to talk about it. I think they will all make me a better designer, so they are all welcome.

I apologize for the lack of updates, downtime, and mess. I’ve made a few changes to the blog:

• The web hosting has been changed to (mt) Media Temple;
• WordPress has been updated to version 2.7;
• And the theme has been changed to Busy Bee by WooThemes.

I also have an announcement. ‘Top Blogs About WordPress’ will be back this month. So, feel free to suggest new blogs to the list. (:

Oh, and the blog is now using IntenseDebate for the comments.

I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t been following too well what has been going around in the WordPress community this past few weeks, but I did pick up a few things:

• Weblog Tools Collection described 24 ways to contribute to WordPress;
• Quommunication released a new WordPress theme for videos;
• WP Elements released and added TV.Elements, which is another video theme, to his collection of amazing themes;
• Adii posted a tutorial on how to create a YouTube Video Tabber.

Another thing that I think is worth mentioning is Smashing Magazine’s post: 40 Professional Icon Sets For Free Download. Circular Icon Set by Pro Theme Design, which I wanted to mention before but didn’t, is listed in that post along with other great icon sets.

About this week, WordPress will turn 5 years old on this Tuesday, May 27th! There will be a birthday party in San Francisco and other locations.

I’m entered into a competition by Alpha Blog Designs and the prize is a custom WordPress theme, which I’m going to give out to one of my readers if I win!

Why am I posting about this if I still haven’t won? Because I need your help! I definitely need the support of my readers in order for me to win this competition.

All you have to do to help me out is go to the post and vote for me! :)

If I do win, the custom WordPress theme will go to one my readers that have voted for me. So, if you vote for me, leave a quick comment to this post, so I know. ;)

/* edit */

Well, since I had no idea what the problem was, I had to do some research. Through Google, I quickly found out that other users were having the same problem and that it had to do with a certain version of MySQL. So, my guess was that my blog’s host had recently upgraded the MySQL to that version, which means that there was nothing much I could do. A few support tickets mentioned that the solution to this problem was to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, but I already had the latest version.

As a temporary solution, I used a workaround for the past few days. Setting one of my posts as an announcement, using the WP-Sticky plugin, changed the order of the posts back to reverse chronological. Then, today, I decided to check if the blog was still displaying posts in the wrong order without the workaround and to my surprise, it wasn’t! (:

What’s up with the title then? Last week, I’ve announced the launch of iThemes, a premium WordPress theme site, and had mentioned their first themes series, which is called Essence. However, what I had failed to mention is that iThemes also has a blog, where tips and tutorials for using WordPress can be found.

Their first tip is “3 Ways to Use WordPress Pages More Effectively” and there’s already a good amount of tutorials posted in the site that are definitely worth checking if you are new to WordPress. They are pretty basic, so if you’ve been using WordPress for awhile now, they are definitely not for you.

Congratulations to Automattic and WordPress for winning in two categories yesterday at the first annual Crunchies! Toni Schneider for Best Startup CEO and WordPress for Most Likely to Succeed.

More News

• Automattic launched the WordPress Publisher blog and their goal is to help publishers get the most out of WordPress.
• Small Potato from WPDesigner announced that he’s going to launch a WordPress themes club on January 23rd and the membership fee is only $5 for 12 months!
• Adii released UnGrid, a grid-based WordPress theme designed by him with coding help from Magnus Jepson.
• After the release of Dilectio several weeks ago, Elena Gafita from Design Disease has released another theme, the College Theme.
• Moses from WPThemesPlugin recently wrote a post warning everyone that blinger.org is distributing themes with added links in the footer without permission! If you are a designer, take a look and see if any of your themes have been affected (SP and Elena, I saw your themes there).

News:

• DavidAirey.com has been hacked, so David is currently using DavidAirey.co.uk.
• I’ve signed up for an Entrecard and will post more about it once I finish testing it.
• I want to create my own database of tutorials, so expect several tutorials in the next few days.

I’ve been working on a new design for this blog in the past few days and I plan to start using it at the end of this week. The design is 80% complete and it’s looking good so far. The theme is not amazing, but at least WPThemesGallery will have its own theme soon. There are no previews, so you will have to wait till it comes out. (:

Other bloggers that have redesigned their blogs recently: WPDesigner, WPThemesPlugin, and Justin Tadlock. Adii is still not done, but he has posted a preview of his new design.

News

• Justin Tadlock released a new News/Magazine WordPress Theme called Structure;
• Graph Paper Press has released Visualization and Gridline (Magazine, Lite, News). Gridline Lite is free, but the others are $19.99 for personal use and $99 for developers.
• Need inspiration? Best of CSS Design 2007 – a list of 50 websites hand-picked by Nick La from Best Web Gallery;
• Need more inspiration? My 53 Top Blog Designs of 2007 – a list of 53 blogs chosen by Adii;
• I had my 20th birthday last Thursday.
• I’ve been lucky lately. I won a Home Theater DVD at a raffle last Friday and a movie ticket from Blingo this past Monday (For those who don’t know, Blingo is a search engine that gives away prizes).