Ben Shoemate's Notebook

"Ladybower Reservoir, Peak District National Park"

"The Painter"

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Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz via Smashing Magazine shared by 4 people

Free professional WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present over 30 fresh free high-quality WordPress themes. All themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free — in personal or/and commercial projects. Please read license disclaimers carefully before using the theme in commercial projects — they can change from time to time.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:

• 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
  Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects.
• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
  An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
• 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
  A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
• 10 Fresh and Clean Themes
  The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.

30 Free Professional Wordpress Themes

1. Colourise
A two-column Wordpress theme with an ultra large header image, a dark backdrop and a fat footer.

2. Twilight Saga WordPress Theme
“There are so many books that hit the shelves these days that covers just start to blend together into one big mottled wallpaper. So it was a mild surprise when I encountered the stark black and minimalist cover designs.”

3. NewsWeek Wordpress Theme
“The theme is originally inspired from Business Weeek website. This is a three column theme having spots for advertise block, a featured video, and other functionalities. I might improve the theme in future but for now, you will have to do with this.”

4. Superfresh
“SuperFresh is a 3-columns theme based on natural green color. It contains 2 widget-ready sidebars, custom templates, with a featured post section on the main page. It’s compatible with WordPress 2.6 and has been tested in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Opera, and Safari.”

5. Our Rights WordPress Theme
Tested with WordPress 2.5, gravatar ready, widget-ready sidebar, valid CSS/XHTML, tested in IE6Win, Firefox 2, Opera 9 and Safari 3.

6. Thunderbolt WordPress Theme
Thunderbolt is a savvy, grid-aligned, magazine-style Wordpress theme with plenty of white space, impressive typography and sensible use of images. The theme has a beautiful custom archives page, showcasing the images attached to each post (to appear properly, the theme relies on the author to add images to each post).

7. WP Imagination

8. Resurrection

9. StudioWordpress Theme

10. Ashford WordPress Theme
“It is a theme for WordPress that makes building, customizing and maintaining a web site as simple as possible. A free WordPress theme that extends WordPress software with premium features making it as simple as possible to manage a web site.”

11. Vikiworks V5 theme

12. Lady In Green

13. The “Charred” WordPress Theme

14. MassivePress WordPress Theme

15. Portfolio Wordpress Theme

16. Outdoorsy Theme

17. Guzel Magazine WordPress Theme

18. Free Premium Themes Check Mate

19. Miniml - Free WordPress Theme

20. Ultimate Baseball Wordpress Theme

21. Arthemia 2.0

22. WP CODA Orange

23. Firebug WordPress Theme

24. Refreshed Wordpress Theme

25. Lightning Wordpress Theme

26. Dirty Girl Theme 1.0

27. Elegance WordPress Theme

28. Leon Paternoster » Posts » Introducing the “Into the White” theme for WordPress

Smashing Magazine’s Free Themes

29. Infinity: A Free Wordpress Theme
The theme has 3 fixed columns, thumbnails integration, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter integration as well as an attractive visual design. The theme was designed by Zhang Yichi, the creative mind behind Vikiworks Studio from Shanghai, China.

30. Wordpress.fun
The theme has 2 columns, thumbnails integration, a “featured” post section as well as a nice grungy design. The theme was designed by Maleika Attawel from Germany, purchased by Smashing Magazine and is now released as a gift for our readers.

31. Fervens: A Free Wordpress Theme
The theme has 3 columns of fixed width, comes in 3 flavours and is supposed to be a starting point for your projects. The theme was designed by Elena Gafita especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

32. Notepad Chaos
The theme has 2 columns, a quite vibrant design including “personal” design elements such as handwritten headings, stick-it-notes, clips and pins. The theme was designed by Evan Eckard.

Daniel via Disqus shared by 8 people

Comments Can Be Blog Posts

We think so too.

A lot of great conversation goes on in comments that shouldn’t be stuck behind the fold. Publishing these back to traditional blogs is a great way to bring attention to great content. It needs to happen more often.

That’s why we’ve been trying to make it even easier.

Announcing Reblogging on DISQUS

Now on comments throughout DISQUS, you can find a reblog link where you can publish a quotation of the comment to your blog. This quote is cited with the original author, the blog where it originally appeared, and a link back to the original comment to give the discussion full context.

At the moment, we’re supporting publishing to Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad, and Tumblr with more platforms to come.

So next time you see a comment that everyone really needs to read, give it a whirl. We’re excited to see more good content bubble to the surface.

Originally posted as a comment by Devin on A VC using Disqus.

Mother Jones launched an interactive map that shows US military presence around the world from 1950 to 2007. It's based on worldwide troop data from the Pentagon. From Mother Jones:

These numbers are often fuzzy: Some deployments are classified, others are temporary, and just because the Defense Department claims 30 US troops in Indonesia last year doesn't mean 1,500 didn't pass through on training missions. Even so, the map, and the associated research, should give you a good feel for what the Pentagon is up to around the world.

Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide (Mother Jones)

Kevin Purdy via Lifehacker shared by 4 people

The end of summer vacation season is a good time to take up the hunt for a new, better job, as hiring managers can look at firm schedules and determine what shortfalls need filling. Today and through the rest of this week, we'll be taking a look at tips for finding, interviewing for, negotiating over, and succeeding in a new gig. First off is making inconvenient, low-tech job listing sites—the kind without RSS feeds, email alerts, or any other technologies beyond 2001—much more manageable through a combination of a "page scraper," or RSS generator, and automatic RSS-to-email services to make sure you're never near the bottom of the resume stack. Photo by shadytrees.

Lots of state and government agencies list their jobs on static HTML pages that are updated manually, with no syndication feed or user tools like email alerts to help out eager job-seekers. We've covered a number of tools that "scrape" web pages that change regularly and turn them into RSS content, but many of those early-Web-2.0 tools, such as rssfwd, are either regularly down or have instituted limited free trials.

One good solution is the free Page2RSS site. Enter in the page you want to watch—if it's just a re-directing URL, Page2RSS automatically grabs the correct page—and then right-click on the "RSS 2.0" link on the right and choose "Copy Link Location" or a similar option. If you're going to be watching multiple sites, paste that long RSS address in a text document, separating the feeds on separate lines.

PageTiki is a similar service with a nicer, more user-friendly interface, but limits your overall watching time by making each site scan cost "TikiBucks." You'll likely have gotten your new job by the time you run out, but anyone watching a lot of sites might run out before they're ready.

If you're a Firefox user who isn't so hot on the whole feeds thing, the free Firefox extension Update Scanner, which we've previously written about, provides instant in-browser updates for quick response times.

If you're not already using an RSS reader—a web site or software tool that monitors and delivers feed updates—now's the time to get started. Free accounts are offered at the web-based Google Reader and Bloglines, and free software tools like the Newsgator RSS Suite are there for the taking. What's the difference? Well, our own Adam Pash has laid out the pros and cons of each.

Once you've set up your custom-rolled update feeds and loaded them into your reader, you might want to hedge your bets against a day where you're too busy to check it—or the new results come so fast and frequent that they don't show up on your start page. There are lots of defunct and not-free RSS-to-email converters out there—I can tentatively recommend FeedMailer as one that seems to work as advertised, and doesn't appear to be going dead any time soon. FeedMailer lets you set the frequency of your email updates, from as-it-happens to daily digests, and choose whether they arrive as HTML or plain-text mail.

Now you've got pretty universal coverage of low- and high-tech job sites, with a feed reader keeping track of everything that's new and email alerts arriving as a second-chance reminder.

What rss creation tools and email converters can our experienced feed-watchers recommend? What non-RSS page-monitoring tools have worked for you? Let's hear your recommendations in the comments.

Rob Diana via Mashable! shared by 4 people

Everyone seems to have their own website or blog nowadays. But do you want someone else to tell you your site is down? So what do you do? Corporate IT shops can install some fancy monitoring software suite that can track hundreds of types of software, servers, ports and hardware devices. That monitoring software also normally costs hundreds of thousands for dollars. Most likely, you want to monitor your website for free, or at least cheaply.

Not surprisingly there are a wealth of free and cheap website monitoring services available. Just do a Google search for “free website monitor” and you will get plenty of services to look at. For most of the services, you only need an email address and the URL that you want to monitor. Of course, when it comes to free and cheap you have a wide range of services offered. To make your job easier, we’ve put together this list of 13 services that will help you monitor your website.

Pingdom - Has a good set of cheap packages, but alas, nothing is free. They come highly recommended by just about everyone.

LiveWatch - A German service that allows you to monitor one server free. The free notifications package contains email alerts, 10 SMS notifications, and Yahoo Messenger. The only problem with the service is that it requires a script on the server in order to monitor it.

Observu - A really, really basic service. You register, add a website monitor with the text that should appear on the page and save the monitor. There are no reports and nothing flashy. You will be emailed if there is a problem.

ServerGuard24 - The prices are not that expensive and there is a free plan. However, the free plan only polls every 40 minutes and you need a banner ad for them as well. Otherwise, it looks like a very professional service.

SiteUptime - One free and two cheap premium levels are offered. The free plan allows only one monitor, but it does have a very clean and professional user interface. The service only monitors from location but it does fall over to another location if needed.

Host Tracker - The free plan enables monitoring for two URLs in two different domains. The main issue with the service is that the navigation is hard to work with. It does use the most distributed network of monitoring servers of the services listed, as it currently monitors from over 50 nodes.

mon.itor.us - Yes, it has a cute name, but cute does not mean limited. The service is completely free with email alerting. There are basic reports for uptime and response time. The user interface may look simplistic, but the service delivers with a more complete offering than most.

InternetSeer - “My site has been down for how long!?!” The free offering monitors one URL and polling every hour. The professional plans look to have some really nice features, but the free plan is fairly limited.

WatchMouse - You have to like a service that uses a mouse as its mascot. The free plan monitors one URL every hour. Disappointingly, the premium plans are more expensive than most listed here.

ServiceUptime - They have a nice free service that monitors one URL. There are seven different sites polling every 30 minutes to determine whether your website is alive. ServiceUptime also has a decent reporting package and very reasonable premium packages.

Montastic - Montastic allows free monitoring for up to 100 URLs! Your websites are monitored by two different servers about every 10 minutes. They also have a cute colored logo you can put on your site. Sadly, there are no cute colored reports.

FreeSiteStatus - The free service has nine separate locations monitoring you servers every minute. Various additional features can be purchased for little cost, as well as a service configuration wizard to help you create your monitoring service. One cool feature FreeSiteStatus offers is the ability to create one-time or recurring maintenance windows where monitoring of the servers can be suspended.

Site24×7 - It is free to monitor two URLs that are polled every 60 minutes. This is another service that allows you to create maintenance windows for your server. The premium plans also offer reasonable prices for various levels of monitoring.

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Gesù, che meraviglia

~ Our advertisers come back over and over and over again. Find out why. ~

Need to convince your friends of something?

Nothing works quite like, well, propaganda… Especially if it has your face on it.

Maopost, a site dedicated to an extensive collection of Chinese propaganda posters, will seamlessly paint your face (or your friend’s) from any of your photographs into a classic propaganda oil painting.

You supply the photograph and choose one of the 35 suggested posters (or from their entire collection, over 1,500 posters), an artist hand paints you as a socialist hero.

It’s never been easier to insert yourself into (socialist) history. And you’ve never looked so convincing.

Be a Socialist (Poster) Hero!

p.s. Take part in the traveling photo notebook or share your panorama photos or storm photos in our forum!

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