One of my favorite designers (that I only know about due to his blog) is Jon Hicks and he’s just released an amazing Google Reader theme.

The theme cleans up Googles interface so that it makes a better use of the space and polishes it up quite a bit. Jon has re-worked Bloglines in the past and was hoping he’d re-work Google Reader eventually. I tried to create a custom theme for Google Reader once, but gave up a short time later. My CSS skills are good, but Jon’s are amazing.

The Google Reader theme is Mac like (which is one reason why I really like it) and very professional looking. A great makeover!

You can download the files and the install instructions from hicksdesign and have a fancy looking Google Reader in no time.

[tags]google,google-reader,css,hicksdesign[/tags]

Now it’s time for a few links from around the web. Here is what has caught my eye in the past few days.

How to Backup Your Blogger Blog - This article shows step-by-step instructions on using the DownThemAll Firefox extension to get a copy of your blog. Looks quick and easy to me.

Post to your blog via Zoho Writer - Zoho makes some excellent web based applications including Word and Excel. It seems that their ZoHo Writer can post directly to Blogger or Wordpress or other blogging systems. If you give it a shot, please let us know how it goes.

83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen - Great post showcasing some unique and fun Wordpress themes. I have used a few of these in the past so they are not all new to me but a great list none the less.

The past few days have been great for the FB StandardsStats plugin. Not only have I been in communication with the FeedBurner folks, it also got mentioned on the FeedBurner buzz blog. That gave the plugin some great exposure and uncovered a few bugs. It’s since been updated and re-packaged and FB StandardStats 1.0b is now available.

The biggest update is how the plugin displays the FeedBurner code. It seems that I was showing it not only on blog posts, but also in the feed. This could cause issues and confusion with feeds burned at FeedBurner. So I added a few lines of extra code to ensure that it only adds the StandardStats code in the browser version of posts and not in the feeds.

Other than that, there were a few download issues that could have come from web server issues or other formatting oddities. I think those are all worked out now.

Ohh and one more, if you get a 404 error when trying to update the FB StandardStats options page, that means that you uploaded the entire directory. The only file that needs to be uploaded is fb_standardstats.php. No folders.

While working on a review of StandardStats from FeedBurner, the only real negative thing I could come up with was the fact that the install wasn’t simple for non-techies. Sure it’s easy for some, but I thought it could be easier. So I created the FeedBurner StandardStats Wordpress plugin.

FB StandardStats makes installing FeedBurner’s stats code simple. No files to edit and no wondering if you got the code in the right place. Simply put in your user ID and the plugin will do the rest.

As a bonus, the plugin can also be used to show FeedFlare links on each blog post.

To Install:

1. Download FB StandardStats 1.0b
2. Upload fb_standardstats.php to the /plugins/ directory of your blog.
3. Activate via the Plugins area in Wordpress’ admin.
4. Go to the FB StandardStats options page and enter your StandardStats ID. Instructions on finding this ID are on the FB StandardStats options page.

That’s it. The plugin automatically enters in the code to the template files and you’ll start getting stats as soon as you get visitors.

Let me know what issues you run across and any success stories too. I’ve got it running on three blogs including this one and it seems to work fine.

Wordpress 2.1 has been released and one of the biggest changes has to do with plugins. Reading 10 Things You should Know About WordPress 2.1 they said “many plugins will no longer work in 2.1“!

Ok, that freaked me out a little. I like to stay up to date, but I can’t live without some of my plugins.

The good news is that there is a plugin compatibility page where they are trying to list all the plugins that work, or don’t work, with Wordpress 2.1. The biggest red flag I saw was Ultimate Tag Warrior. Give it a few days though and it’ll be ready to go.

If you don’t see a certain plugin on the compatible page, and you can’t find updated information from the author, drop the plugin name below with a link to it and I’ll see if I can’t get it tested for you.

Overall Wordpress 2.1 looks nice, but I’ve only had it installed for 10 minutes on my test blog.

There is a lot of discussion about a few bigger named bloggers getting hacked recently. The good thing to come out if this is that it’s bringing backups into the spotlight.

Back on October 13th I declared Blog Backup Day and I’m working on spreading the word. If your posts are backed up, it’ll be a lot easier to recover from such an attack. I’ve even outlined some techniques to backing up your blog. Including the extremely easy way to backup a Wordpress blog which seems to be the platform under attack.

Wordpress does acknowledge the security issue and has *hopefully* fixed the security bug in the latest releases . All users should upgrade as soon as they can!

I feel bad for the sites that got hacked as I know that they don’t deserve it. But lets all take this as a warning that we are not immune and that blogs, and all digital information, needs to be backed up regularly.

I’m off to backup my posts and upgrade my Wordpress install. How about you?

While listening to the Daily SearchCast the other day, Danny mentioned that OPML has an icon. It was news to me, yet I guess I haven’t really found a need for an OPML icon yet.

It looks much like the feed icon only in blue and you get the whole circle for the logo.

Actually, I think it should have the dot and two outer circles. That way people don’t associate it with Target and it’ll more accurately tie in with the feed icon as the feed icon is 1/4th of the circles.

If you don’t know what OPML is, it’s just a list of feeds pre-packaged in one file for easy portability. It could be a list of 3 feeds or 300. All feed readers should be able to import and export OPML files just like how a browser can import and export bookmarks.

After the success of the feed icon, I’m pretty sure the OPML icon will catch on quite fast. That is unless you put it on a red background and Target yells at you.

[tags]OPML, searchcast, icon[/tags]

Technorati announced tagging just two years ago! I found it hard to believe that tagging is only two years old. But on the web, I guess two is much longer than I think.

“Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy outperforms more structured approches to classification”
- Technorati’s Tag Announcement two years ago.

Tagging revolutionized the web with it’s take on organizing information. Now, instead of categories, some sites are just using tags. Instead of folders, places like Flickr organize in tags. It’s one, almost universal, language. The only sticking spot is Google and their labels. Same thing, different name.

Technorati was one of the first big players in the tagging revolution. Now today, most blogging platforms, along with most social sites, support Technorati tags and they are being adopted more and more each day.

Yesterday I discussed options when installing Wordpress isn’t an option. Quite a few included domain mapping and phydeaux3 informed me that Blogger is now offering domain mapping for free.

Domain mapping allows you to buy a domain and have it show content that is hosted someplace else. Basically, you’d buy a domain and then map it to your BlogSpot account and it’d appear that you’d have a fully hosted website. No one would see http://you.blogspot.com anymore, they’d see http://www.cool-domain.com.

The plus side to this is that you don’t need to buy hosting. Just keep using Bloggers webspace and resources. All you’d need to do is buy a domain, usually $9.99 a year, and work with your registrar to map that domain to your BlogSpot account.

Domain mapping Blogger blogs must be inline with Google’s hosted applications idea. You just need a domain name and you can map your website to your BlogSpot account, your email to your Gmail account and keep everything organized with Google Calendar.

Has anyone tried domain mapping with Blogger yet?

[tags]domain-mapping[/tags]

If you’ve checked out your feed stats recently, you may have noticed that Pageflakes readers are growing; fast! To bad it’s not a reality.

It turns out that there is an issue with Pageflakes or that someone is spamming in the name of Pageflakes and inflating the subscribers.

Check out all the details over at Techcrunch and don’t forget to read the comments as they have good points there too.

[tags]pageflakes[/tags]