Monthly Archives: February 2012

My Answer to Which are the best WordPress Themes for Social Media Blog?

When choosing among best WordPress themes for social media blog, or any other purpose there are a few rules that one should follow. These rules are applicable to almost all cases. 

  • What things you want to do on your blog.
  • What kind of content you will be posting
  • How lengthy your average posts would be
  • How many images you will be uploading do you need gallery and jquery effects for your galleries. 
  • How you would like to showcase content on your main page. 

I myself use a simple pencil and paper approach to create initial sketches of my websites before going out and looking for themes.

There are several hundred free themes available in the official wordpress repository. Some of them will fit all the requirements you have for your website in your mind. After finding those few, you need to eliminate the ones you don't like. In the end you will have no theme or just the one theme that will probably need a lot of configuration to be exactly like what you want it to be. 

There is no theme that will fit all your needs, no such theme has been created by anyone yet. So you need to find a theme that provides the basic functionality you desire and then start modifying and configuring it to meet your needs. 

Now since you asked for Themes Specifically, these are the themes that I like the most and I think these themes are flexible enough to easily modify for many different kind of websites: 

  • Twenty Ten – The most downloaded WordPress theme of All times, also look around for TwentyTen child themes. This theme is probably the most powerful Free WordPress theme ever. 
    http://wordpress.org/extend/them… 
  • Thematic – A theme framework with many child themes available. Thematic is very powerful and can be fully customized via child theme. 
    http://themeshaper.com/thematic/
  • Arras Theme – It is a nice magazine style WordPress theme with sliders featured posts and a lot of features. I don't know why it isn't in official theme repository.
    http://www.arrastheme.com/ 
  • Minimatica – A nice minimalistic style wordpress theme with a lot of options. supports featured images, custom header, custom menus, etc. 
    http://www.onedesigns.com/wordpr…
  • Grisaille – A simple nice wordpress theme with an elegant emphasize on visual appeal and typography. Supports featured-images, custom headers, menus, social media icons on top, etc. 
    http://wordpress.org/extend/them…

For a more wide variety of themes you would probably want to consider some premium themes. ThemeForest has some good collection of premium themes for different kind of websites. There are also a lot of blogs that publish lists of premium themes (with affiliate links) for different kind of websites.

Which are the best  wordpress theme for social media blog?

Highly Educated Population = Higher GDP per Capita

Read this article on Yahoo! Finance, Canada The 10 Most Educated Countries in The World. Clearly, the countries which invest heavily on education, are also the countries with the highest GDP per Capita. This list includes a country called Finland. It is a tiny snowy little country in the Northern Europe.

Finland has a very low population around 60 lac people (6 Mn). It has a GDP of $239.232 billion. I researched a little about the economy of Finland and found that the country has low resources. It faces challenges in agriculture and energy sector. Most jobs are created in services sector.

On the other hand we have Pakistan, a country with a population of 18 Crore (180 Mn), it has a GDP of $210.8 billion (29bn less than Finland). Pakistan has a diverse landscape, plenty of natural resources, a powerful military, a diverse population. Pakistan also facing the energy crisis.

Finland’s Education Budget in 2011 was €11.1 billion. Pakistan’s Education Budget in 2011 was $1.5 billion.

I am not going to write anything about the importance of Education. I think anyone who can read this is already aware of that. I am also sure that people in the Pakistani Government are also well aware of the importance of this issue. My concern is that it seems like no one in the country is really worried about this issue. It should be our top national priority, but sadly it is not.

Yoast’s Review of WP-Types

Yoast’s review of WP-types plugin. Types is a plugin for WordPress, it allows you to create custom post types, add custom fields for that post type and makes it easier for you to publish different kind of content easily. Types is available for free but there is an accompanying plugin called Views or WP-Views, which allows you to customize your template to display your post types differently.

Link: http://yoast.com/types-wordpress-plugin/