1. Remove both pedals from the bike.
2. Lower the seat all the way.
3. Let the child scoot along with the bike using her feet for as long as she wants. This helps the child learn to balance and feel comfortable on the bike.
4. When the child asks for the pedals (my daughter asked for the pedals after two days), reattach them and raise the seat again.
5. Now give the child a little push and off she goes.

I was absolutely stunned at what happened. Whereas before she’d been wobbly and would crash after about 25 feet, now she began riding like a pro. Within 5 minutes, it seemed like she’d been riding her bike for years. For a father who felt a certain responsibility in helping his kids learn to ride a bike, watching her cruise down the street with confidence filled me with tremendous pride and gratitude.

My second oldest daughter is almost four. You can bet that I’m already thinking about taking the pedals off her bike.

I’ve been invited to speak at the DITA Tech/Comm Conference at the beginning of next month. I’ve got a free conference registration I’d like to give away, and I wondered if you’d like to give it away on your blog. (I don’t think I get enough traffic on my blog for that.) … It’s a full 4-day registration, with a retail value of $795 dollars.

Do you need a free ticket to the DITA Tech/Comm Conference in North Carolina this November 3-6? Check out the conference website for details.

Paul has only one free ticket. If you want it, leave a comment below this post with your most creative rendition of what DITA might alternatively stand for (other than Darwin Information Typing Architecture). On Monday morning, I’ll pick the winner — based completely on my subjective judgment about which DITA re-acronym I like best.

Paul also adds,

Anybody who wants to attend the conference, can get $50 off the price of registration by using my name “Paul Pehrson” as their discount code on the conference registration page.

By the way, if anyone else has free conference tickets, products, or other services they want to give away through my site, let me know.

I’ve listed Ten Technical Writing Stereotypes — tell me if the stereotypes hold generally true for you or not. You can take the survey here: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/70615/stereotypes. Additionally, you can respond in the comments below this post.

1. Technical writing is boring.

Technical writing is a generally boring activity, involving repetitive, structured writing that requires the same types of sentences over and over (click this, select that, choose this, press that). You spend a good part of your day yawning, editing the same lifeless instructional material while looking out your window and yearning for something more. True or False?

2. Technical writing stifles your creativity.

Because you spend all day immersed in writing instructional text, your own sense of creativity declines. You feel fewer flashes of inspiration and generally have less creative drive and desire. You even find yourself adopting the same techniques of writing short, clear, dry, humorless sentences in your email and journal. True or False?

3. You do a lot of writing as a technical writer.

Although your day is punctuated by a meeting here and there, you spend the majority of your day in writing mode — writing how to use a particular product, or editing what you’ve written. After a full day at work, your fingerpads are often sore from so much typing! True or False?

4. You need a job in technical communication to get a job in technical communication.

Breaking into the field of technical communication is a Catch 22: You need a job in technical communication to get a job in technical communication. Sometimes a degree, certificate, or internship in technical writing can make up for a lack of job experience, but generally breaking into technical communication requires job experience in the same field, making it nearly impossible to get in. True or False?

5. Technical writers are second-class citizens in IT departments.

As a technical writer, you’re generally treated poorly in IT departments — ignored in meetings, put in your place when you speak up, avoided by subject matter experts, excluded from decision-making processes, and sometimes given demeaning secretarial tasks. True or False?

6. Technical writers feel as if they’ve sold out.

You once aspired to write a novel or go into publishing, but due to financial obstacles, you had to embrace technical writing to meet your monthly bills. You often feel as if you’re expending your talents in the wrong direction. You’ve given up on your literary publishing dreams and have resorted to manual-writing as almost your exclusive writing activity. As a writer who once turned heads with your creative prose, you now feel as if you’ve sold out. True or False?

7. You can easily support a family with other writing careers outside of technical writing.

You could pursue a variety of careers in writing to support your family in a comfortable way. Whether working as an editor in a publishing house, a journalist at a newspaper, a staff writer for a magazine, a proofreader for a journal, a writing teacher at a university or high school, you can make enough to be the sole breadwinner of your family. True or False?

8. You have to know a lot of tools to break into technical communication.

To be a competitive applicant for a technical communication job, you need to know a plethora of tools — RoboHelp, Flare, Framemaker, AuthorIt, InDesign, Visio, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Camtasia, Captivate, Word, and a handful of others. You also often have to be familiar with various technologies — HTML, XML, DITA, Javascript, CSS, RSS, Java, and C++. The tool/technical knowledge for entry can be formidable. True or False?

9. Technical writers are introverted, isolated, boring geeks.

As a technical writer, you have a generally introverted personality. You keep to yourself most of the day, don’t enjoy large social gatherings, and spend half your day practically mute. You work in your cube or designated area, typing away solemnly at your computer while others interact around you. You tend to have a lot of arcane, geeky knowledge about things no one else cares about. True or False?

10. Because IT technologies change so frequently, you have to spend large amounts of your spare time just keeping up with what’s new.

Your workday ends at 5 p.m., but since the field of IT is moving so quickly, with new sites, applications, and technologies emerging almost daily, you have to spend a good chunk of your spare time at home just keeping up. At times you can feel as if you’re drowning in new knowledge, barely keeping your head above water. You have little time for anything else. True or False?

Note: This article was originally published in the Sept 2008 (Fall) issue of the TechCraft newsletter.

Richard works for the More Good Foundation, whose mission is to help LDS church members share their beliefs online. The More Good Foundation has migrated 40+ websites from Dreamweaver to WordPress, and now manages 150 WordPress sites. In addition to his work with the More Good Foundation, Richard is also the author of the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin.

Richard says a CMS (content management system) provides separation of code and content, and allows non-technical users to publish and update the content. The More Good Foundation chose WordPress rather than Drupal or Joomla because WordPress is easy to use, extensible, and has an excellent community.

When using WordPress as a CMS, one of the biggest questions you face is whether to use pages or posts for your content. Pages provide parent/child hierarchies, but don’t provide RSS or offline publishing. Posts appear in chronological order (which you can tweak), but don’t provide hierarchical arrangement. You can, however, organize the post categories into hierarchies.

Richard showed some examples of WordPress CMS sites:

• bookofmormonresearch.org
• blacklds.org
• mountainmeadowsmassacre.org
• Mormonsbelieve.org
• Mormonbloggers.com
• Askgramps.org
• andyroddick.com
• autoshows.ford.com
• particletree.com
• allthingsD.com
• ethosmarketing.co.uk
• mouseonhome.com

There’s no set way to use WordPress as a CMS. You can use all posts, all pages, or a mix of the two. Here’s another list of sites using WordPress as a CMS.

]]> http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/09/27/using-wordpress-as-a-cms-wordcamp-utah/feed/ http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/09/27/seo-tips-for-your-blog-wordcamp-utah/ http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/09/27/seo-tips-for-your-blog-wordcamp-utah/#comments Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:40:09 +0000 Tom http://www.idratherbewriting.com/?p=2034 Ash Buckles presented on “SEO tips for Your Blog” at Wordcamp Utah. Here are my notes from Ash’s presentation.

Strategy and Purpose

Ash says, You need a strategy with search engine optimization (SEO); otherwise you’re just pinging content all over the place. Everyone has an agenda, a strategy, or a reason – or should. If you don’t have a reason, you should shut your blog down and walk away.

(He later took some criticism for this comment.)

Links

• Include internal links to your content so search engines can better find your posts.
• User permalinks in your titles.
• Include a XML sitemap on your blog.
• Include a call to action in posts (e.g., remind users to take the next step, such as to buy your book).

Content

• You don’t need a ton of content on your posts (300 to 700 words is fine), but avoid posts shorter than that. You can’t create a call to action based on a single paragraph. If you run out of words, cover the journalistic Who-What-When-Why-Where.
• Ensure keyword density in your posts. Use keywords in your title and content. (He didn’t mention much about placement, but I’d say definitely include keywords in the title and first paragraph.)
• Focus your posts on how to solve a problem.
• Hone your copywriting skills. You need to lead a reader down a path gracefully.

Search Engine Marketing

• Create link bait with your content (make it enticing for others to link back to you).
• Keep linkbacks varied. Google is suspicious about linkbacks that all have the same anchor text.
• The more linkbacks you have, the greater SEO.
• Add comments on other blogs.
• Partner with other bloggers, such as by going to events such as Wordcamp.
• Write guest posts (this can introduce you to a new audience).
• Add your URL to blog directories.
• Send your latest post links across Twitter. (Ash uses Twitter to follow links more than Google Reader.)

Recommended Plugins

• Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Comment Luv, Contextual Related Posts, DoFollow, Easy Inline SWF, Easy Tube, FeedBurner, FeedSmith, flickrRSS, Google Analytics, Google XML Sitemaps, Keyword Luv, Make Clickable, Rewtweet, SEO Post Link, ShareThis, Subscribe to Comments, Twitter Tools, What Would Seth Godin Do, WordPress Mobile Edition, WP Auto Tagger, SEO slugs

Tips

• Avoid static links that are spread across every page of your site, such as a blogroll. Google looks at these types of links suspiciously. Put your blogroll on just one page. (This is the first time I’ve heard this advice.)
• Avoid duplicate content. The content duplicated between your category archives and your single posts is undesirable. Ash recommends using excerpts or titles on your category page instead.
• Avoid thinking instead of doing. Don’t sit around contemplating hypotheticals all day.

Ash asked people to submit questions via Twitter. Interesting social phenomenon — he received tons of questions, but people felt free to heckle him playfully with tweets.

Preparing Your Podcast

• Capture extensive metadata in the ID3 tags of your audio file. This helps increase the visibility.
• Give your podcast files a human readable name (not something like nar0081008.mp3).
• Host your own podcast files. This allows you to reap the benefits of the search engine karma that comes to your site. Bandwidth usually isn’t an issue.
• Listen to your own podcast before publishing it.

Blogging Your Podcast

• Use WordPress to publish your podcasts — it makes it incredibly easy.
• Write attention grabbing titles.
• Add a link in the text area of your audio or video file (so users can download it).
• Add a description of the podcast to let users know what it’s about.
• Announce your new podcasts on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

Essential Blog Theme Elements

• Choose an uncluttered, simple theme.
• Make it easy to subscribe. Put the RSS buttons in a prominent location above the fold.
• Choose a theme that allows you to organize your podcasts into their own area.

RSS and SEO

• Create an RSS feed just for your podcasts.
• Give readers the ability to play the audio or video.
• Make sure you publish your podcast on iTunes (and link to your iTunes page from your blog).
• Document highlights and time indicators in your podcast.
• Use a transcription service to produce the texts of your audio and video.
• Make sure your title is highly descriptive and SEO-rich.
• Gather stats from Google Analytics, Woopra, web server stats, Podtrac.

Recommended Plugins

• One Pixel Out Audio Player
• PodPress
• All In One SEO Pack
• WordPress.com Stats
• Woopra
• Google Analytics
• FeedBurner for WordPress
• WP Super Cache

My Notes

Nice presentation, Thom. I’d add one thing, though. Because the iPod has total market domination for MP3 devices, getting into iTunes is essential. iTunes requires certain specification tags to be included in your podcast feed. I use Feedburner’s podcasting options to automatically insert these iTunes tags.

The PodPress plugin also inserts the iTunes specifications, but since PodPress sometimes breaks with new releases of WordPress, I don’t recommend PodPress. I wasn’t always an iPod user, but since switching from the iRiver to the iPod Nano last month, I’m a total convert. iPods are the way to go.

During some preliminary technical issues …

Jane says, “I can feel the nerdiness vibes increase ….” And then checks her blog and sees that she just won another bloggy award.

Someone twitters that he doesn’t know a single person at Wordcamp. Guy next to me searches Twitter and finds his tweet. I follow him. Then Jane points out that the guy who sent the tweet is sitting right next to me. Same table. Holy smokes.

Technical issues solved, Matt gets into his presentation.

WordPress Stats

Matt mentioned some stats about WordPress:

• 2.8 million downloads of WordPress in 2007; 11 million downloads in 2008
• 11 new releases of WordPress.org this year
• Bloggers write the equivalent of “an English Wikipedia and a half” per month on WordPress.com blogs alone
• 230 million unique people viewed posts on WordPress.com blogs
• WordCamps have increased — 14 so far this year, 4 happening today, 10 upcoming. In places all over the world: China, South Africa, Philippines.
• 5 billion spam comments caught by Akismet in the last year

There’s a new type of spam sneaking through: (1) spam that is praising/flattering; (2) spam that copies your other comments, but changes the URL; (3) spam that comes from third-world spam sweat shops. Akismet’s challenge is to identify spam even when bloggers approve the comments.

New WordPress Developments Accomplished This Year

• The iPhone WordPress App. 100,000 installs of the iPhone app so far. Very popular in San Francisco, not so much in China.
• WordPress Theme Directory. The central repository filters out shady themes that have hidden sponsor links and other backdoor practices.
• WordPress Zeitgeist. More blogs than they thought: 5.6 million WordPress.com blogs, even more with WordPress.org and WordPress multi-user blogs.
  
• PHP 5. High adoption of PHP 5; WordPress may make it a standard.
  
• Intelligent tails/Better plugin stats. WordPress developers will look at the popularity of plugins and track usage to plan for future inclusions in the core.
  

Top 10 WordPress Plugins

1. Akismet
2. All-in-one-seo pack
3. Google-sitemap generator
4. Next-gen gallery
5. Stats plugins
6. Wp-db-backup
7. Caching plugins
8. WP Automatic Upgrade
9. WP-polls
10. 10. cforms (contact forms)

The average blog has 4.96 activate plugins. Plugins allow users to create a unique, customized blog. Other blogging platforms have more features than WordPress, but they can’t complete with the 3,000+ plugins that WordPress provides through its community.

Planned Features for WordPress 2.7

• Dashboard Redesign. The new design is based on usability eye-tracking tests. Expandable/collapsible navigation on the left.
• Drag and Drop arrangements. You can drag around the various components on the Write page. Ability to hide and show the components you want.
• Sticky posts. Ability to keep a post pinned to the top of your home page.
• Single Insert Media button. The upload media button automatically figures out what type of media you’re uploading.
• Quick Inline Editing. Ability to edit posts without fully refreshing the page. Ajax technology.
• Comments API. Update and moderate comments from your mobile device (rather than just write and edit posts).
• Dashboard comment replies. Reply to comments directly from the Dashboard.
• Threaded comments. Ability to thread comment conversations automatically, or allow users to thread their comments (insert replies below the relevant comment rather than at the end). Threading helps the conversation make sense.
• Keyboard Shortcuts. Similar to the abundance of shortcuts in Google Reader.
• Automatic plugin install in browser. Ability to install new plugins directly from within your blog, rather than FTPing them. They’ll attempt to do this with themes too. This is WordPress’ attempt to seamlessly integrate the strength of its community.

WordPress 2.7 will be available in November.

What’s After WordPress 2.7?

• Automatic upgrades. You’ll have the ability to update directly from within your blog.
• Web host updating. When a new release is available, WordPress wants to ensure all web hosts have the latest version.
• Security. The list of federal agencies using WordPress is extensive (includes Homeland Security, FBI, NSA, military divisions, Treasury, etc.). WordPress wants to ensure the platform is secure (even with all the vulnerability from plugins).
• Media. WordPress will do more with videos, slideshows, photos, and other media.
• WordPress as Hub. WordPress wants to incorporate all the activity you do online. For example, when you post to Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr, it should show it on your blog (or be included in your blog’s database).
• BackPress. Integrate the frameworks of other platforms more seamlessly into WordPress to allow sharing or transferring of information (BBpress, BuddyPress, etc.).
  
• Fashion + Tattoos. More WordPress apparel.
  
• Year of Themes. More and better themes (similar to Prologue), as well as themes with integrated plugins. Matt says, “Themes are where the action is.”
  
• Screencasts. WordPress hired a help author (I believe), who is creating 40-50 screencasts. They plan to integrate the screencasts throughout the WordPress interface.
  
• WordPress TV. Broadcasts of the Wordcamp sessions that take place throughout the world.
  

See Matt’s blog at http://ma.tt

Take a look at this Microsoft Word 2007 help topic on inserting headers and footers. Although inserting headers and footers is the main task, the topic really has 11 related tasks:

• Insert the same header or footer on each page
• Make the first page header or footer different from the rest of the pages
• Use no header or footer on the first page
• Make the header or footer different for odd and even pages
• Make the header or footer different in each section or chapter
• Change the contents of a header or footer
• Insert a page number
• Insert the file name of the document
• Insert the document title, author’s name, or other document property
• Insert the current date
• Remove the header or footer

The author could have created 11 separate topics. Do you agree with Microsoft’s decision to group all of these subtasks into the same topic? Or would you rather explore each subtask as a separate topic in a table of contents?

Although the practice of single sourcing encourages chunking of tasks, if you won’t be reusing the subtasks or related tasks independently, there’s little reason to separate them out into discrete topics. Forcing all of these subtasks into separate topics would severely bloat the table of contents (TOC), rendering it not only less usable, but also more intimidating. Your application’s apparent complexity would magnify.

Separating each subtask into its own topic often forces users to click in a non-linear pattern from topic to topic as they search for the right task. This nonlinear clicking can give users a headache. It’s part of the reason why reading online is more strenuous than reading a book. Books provide more of a hierarchical layout and logical progression of ideas. In contrast, the web is a scattered maize.

Consolidating subtasks into one topic also improves the user’s ability to find topics. With fewer topics in the TOC, the user can actually browse the TOC and find the right topic. But even if the user reverts to keyword searches, the longer topics will have greater keyword density and more likely rise to the top in search results.

I sent a question across Twitter the other day asking whether anyone had done research into this issue, and Brenda Huettner pointed me to a Web Usability Guidelines reference book. Chapter 8 echoes Brenda’s response that “it depends.” The authors say that older people are slower at scrolling, but comprehension may be better because the user remains on the same page. Here’s an excerpt:

Guideline: Use longer, scrolling pages when users are reading for comprehension.

Comments: Make the trade-off between paging and scrolling by taking into consideration that retrieving new linked pages introduces a delay that can interrupt users’ thought processes. Scrolling allows readers to advance in the text without losing the context of the message as may occur when they are required to follow links.

However, with pages that have fast loading times, there is no reliable difference between scrolling and paging when people are reading for comprehension. For example, one study showed that paging participants construct better mental representations of the text as a whole, and are better at remembering the main ideas and later locating relevant information on a page. In one study, paging was preferred by inexperienced users.

Sources: Byrne, et al., 1999; Campbell and Maglio, 1999; Piolat, Roussey and Thunin, 1998; Schwarz, Beldie and Pastoor, 1983; Spool, et al., 1997; Spyridakis, 2000.

In other words, each time a page loads, you interrupt the user’s thought process. By remaining on the same page, the user can better grasp the concept as a whole.

Thanks for the resource, Brenda! In the studies, the content consisted of web pages rather than help material. Some of the examples for scrolling depict long, sophisticated pages — quite a bit more hairy than the Word example above. Still, I agree with the general findings and think they apply to help authoring.

My colleague Ben Minson, however, raises an important objection to long topics. He says,

In reality, people don’t want long topics. They want to think that procedures are short and simple. Long topics intimidate people and make them reluctant to consult the documentation in the future. (”Long Topics: A Help Author’s Crime Against Humanity“)

I agree that no one wants to be confronted with a massive topic when all they need is information to complete simple task. However, adding a quick topic menu at the top, similar to the following image, seems to solve that problem, doesn’t it? The user can jump immediately to the relevant topic, rather than meticulously scrolling down and checking each heading.

Overall, in my experience, it’s easy for a help’s TOC to grow successively larger as you think of more and more scenarios, possible tasks, and concepts to explain. But if you reach the end of the project and see that your initial 50 topics have grown to 250, I think something’s wrong. Most applications aren’t that complicated. When users expand the TOC and find a seemingly infinite number of topics, it’s the equivalent of the disheartening “thud” from a long printed manual.

Three guys who go by the names Professor So and So, Jojobean and YeaWhatever spend part of each day running elaborate cons on Internet scammers. They consider themselves enforcers of justice, even after they send a man 1400 miles from home, to the least safe place they can bait him: the border of Darfur. The three self-made enforcers tell Ira their story. For more on what they did, along with photos, maps and phone recordings, go here. (29 and 1/2 minutes)

In short, Ira Glass tells the story of how some “baiters” returned a con on one of the Nigerian email con men. It’s hilarious at first, and then becomes somewhat dark and unethical.

While you’re downloading podcasts, be sure to include Alistair Christie’s podcast on Virtual Machines — very useful if you’re writing installation documents.

Download MP3 (right-click and select Save Target As to download)
Duration: 60 min.

In this podcast, Liz Fraley, founder of Single Sourcing Solutions, talks to the Intermountain STC chapter about “Repurposing Content for Multichannel Publishing.” See this flyer for a more detailed description of the presentation.

Liz Fraley is the founder of Single Sourcing Solutions. You can read her full bio here. To contact Liz, send her an email at liz.fraley@single-sourcing.com.

One of the responders, Robert Poulk, put it best when he compared manuals to encyclopedias:

You’re asking a variant of the question “Do you read the Encyclopedia?” The answer is, of course, yes, but only the parts that matter.

I think if you go over the other answers you’ll see that’s really what everyone is saying — “Yes, but only the parts that apply to whatever I don’t understand at the moment.”

A good user’s manual useful it not only contains good information about everything a user may come across as the product is used but also, and more important, a means to locate the information easily, meaning randomly.

IMHO people need to stop being embarassed about not reading the whole thing. Nobody does, and nobody should.There’s no need to read the whole encyclopedia in order to learn where the Ganges River is.

In other words, users turn to the help to look for a specific question, just as someone consults an encyclopedia for a specific question. No one reads the entire encyclopedia/manual, nor is anyone expected to. Well-written encyclopedias allow users to find information through indexes, tables of contents, alphabetical organization, and search fields.

Reading these responses, it made me wonder I should adjust the approach to my help’s home page. Usually, my help’s home page provides an introductory overview of the application. Most of the time, users are already familiar with the application, so this introduction is really just filler material.

What should really be on the help’s home page? The top ten most common questions users have about the application. The first page users see should try to anticipate answers to the obstacles they encounter. A search box should also be readily visible.

In a previous post (“How Much Should You Document?”), I explored the question of whether we document too much, whether the resounding thud of a thick manual is a turnoff to readers. Reading this LinkedIn thread reinforces the idea that users need all the advanced nitty gritty detail that help provides. In simplifying the help, we may leave out the answer to the complicated question the user is trying to answer. A comprehensive online help file, or a three-inch thick manual, is all right if the user can navigate it via indexes, tables of contents, keyword searches, or other means to quickly find the answer he or she is looking for.

For example, my post on “Technical Writing Careers — Answering 13 Questions About Technical Writing Jobs” targeted searches for “technical writing careers.”

My post on “How I Create Video Tutorials” targeted searches for “create video tutorials.”

I don’t always search-engine-optimize my posts, but when I do, the post has a lot more hits. Ideally, I should search-engine-optimize all my posts.

I think we underestimate the importance of search engine optimization. I’d even say that SEO is one of the most important techniques for writing blog posts. For example, today I received an email from someone who wrote,

I found your website while searching “podcast” and “Technical Writing”.

I was invisible to this reader until he found me in the search engines. Sure you have your regular readers who occasionally look at your RSS feed and visit your site. But 75% of the time, your visitors come from people searching for specific keywords using search engines. If you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, many more people will find you. Your readership will steadily increase. Neglect SEO and your posts only live until they pass from your blog’s home page.

Right now, I have 1436 subscribers — about 100 more subscribers than attendees at the last STC annual conference. Of course I’ve been blogging for two and a half years, and I have close to 500 posts. But I know applying the right keywords to my posts in a search-engine-optimized way has helped me attract as many readers as I have.

One plugin that helps is the WordPress All in One SEO pack plugin. It allows me to create a search-engine-optimized title for Google, and a different title for my readers.

In addition to that SEO plugin, I try to add the keywords as the first words in my title, as the first words in my first paragraph, and then mention the keywords about 6 times throughout the first 3 paragraphs. That’s it.

Of course figuring out what the right keywords are (using a tool like Wordtracker) is another task, which I usually skip. It takes too long. I usually just ask myself how I would search for the topic and use that phrase.

I had a small question about your blog’s template. I really liked the template as soon as I saw it and went ahead and downloaded it. Could you let me know how you added the navigation tabs on the top? I am not much of a programmer but I can work with php and css to an extent. I’d be highly obliged if you could help me set up the same

And I hope you that you keep posting GREAT content - I love it!

All the best,
Sapphire

Dear Sapphire,

Thanks for the compliments on my theme hack. The original theme is the Limau-Orange theme by Blog oh Blog. I wanted a top navigation bar so I used one from the Contempt theme. It took a few hours of wrangling to make it fit. You can download my hybrid here: Limau-Orange Theme with Contempt’s Toolbar. Make sure you change the logo.

One a side note, I’ve been fairly happy with this theme. Minimalistic themes don’t become eyesores as fast as others.