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I designed this template in Photoshop, coded and edited it in Dreamweaver and Notepad++. Although this theme is visual attractive (which in many cases means “heavy”) it does not take a lot of resources like some other similar wordpress themes. Most of the visual attractive themes tend to be heavy for your host and slow loading for the user. Most of those themes load a lot of add-ons in their header.php, plus they have a very complex functions.php. I designed Director to be as “lite” as possible, yet visual attractive.

Many more features will be added in the next versions of Director. Some extra features like custom CSS, Analytics, Adsense and more. Custom CSS will let you modify the stylesheet and save the customization, so you don’t lose the changes when you update. Twitter, Facebook and Custom RSS can be added from the theme’s options. Enter the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance -> Director Options. You can also send suggestions here. This WordPress theme will be offered in Spanish (my native language) in the next few versions. Want to translate Director Theme to another language? You can contact me as well and I will add your credit (name and site) to the changelog!

Here are some stats of WpThemesPlanet first year:

20,000 downloads of Patagonia and 10,000 of Tandil

100 articles

800 approved comments

12,000 spam comments blocked by Akismet!

300 user Emails received.

450 Support emails sent.

3 Free WordPress Themes and 50 Theme Updates released.

Many theme customizations for clients of Patagonia and Tandil.

I want to thank everyone for using my themes and supporting the project. The first year is hard. Most internet projects collapse during this period. If you manage to survive the first year, you are good to go. During this period, I spent time adding content and supporting users, as well as updating and improving both themes. During the second year I want to take the whole project to the next level. Many good things will follow! Stay tuned!

Finally I want to quote a phrase from Thomas Alva Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Never give up!

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You can either install or update Patagonia and Tandil theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually. Otherwise, make you sure to save your customization before upgrading.

Happy WordPressing everyone!

If you have many sites and you want to track the whole server, the best option is to use a single web server script. These are easy to install and run. You can contact your hosting support and they will install it in a few minutes. Some hosting companies have a 1 click install of these tools. Others come with stats installed by default.

Many different free and paid web stats tools are available. I will show two of the best known free web stats tools. I tried both on my own sites and I will show you how they work, along with their pros and cons below.

Webalizer:

Webalizer is a free open source script written in C. It has a very simple interface with a straight to the point approach. Some people like using Webalizer because it’s a nice tool for viewing web stats quickly. You can choose to have the stats either protected by username and password or open to the public. Remember the best part of using your own server based script like webalizer or awstats, is that you don’t have to insert any code on your pages. If you have a lot of pages, webalizer will track the activity in all of them automatically. No codes needed like with google analytics. This is a huge advantage and you also have full control over your stats.

Visitor tracking and stats information are GOLD nowadays. With Webalizer, you’ll be able to see your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly traffic stats. Also referrers, spiders and KB’s used. Sometimes you see a lot of traffic coming in and you don’t know who’s sending you that traffic. Webalizer will tell you. It will recognize most traffic sources. You can sort the traffic by Hourly Statistics, URLs, Entry URLs, Exit URLs, Agents, Systems and Countries. Here is just a sample screenshot, as you can see the graphic environment is pretty basic, but in terms of information it is a great script. It’s a “lite” script, which means that it can be used in very small servers and still process big amounts of traffic. You can get Webalizer here.

AWStats:

AWStats is a free open source script written in Perl. Some webmasters prefer AWStats due to its fancy report format. Although the type of information AWStats displays is similar to the type of information Webalizer displays, for some statistics the reporting values might vary between Webalizer and AWStats due to the different way they process logs. To choose the one that’s right for you, review both types of reports. One report may be clearer or easier to understand for a specific web metric. You may also have an aesthetic preference. The key is to find something that works for you and meets your needs and comfort level. Here is a sample screenshot of AWStats:

You can download AWStats here. There is a more detailed graphic analysis of both scripts on their sites. You can take a look at the demo account to get a better idea.

Many other web stats tools are available, and although we covered only two of the most popular ones, don’t be afraid to experiment with others until you find the one that meets your requirements. You could also look for a paid tool if you or your client can afford it. These two tools we covered are the standard scripts in shared hosting environments.

Make sure to subscribe to the RSS and follow me on Twitter.

Good luck everyone!

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Changelog includes the following additions among other small improvements: Facebook Support was added. You can add your facebook profile and activate it from the admin panel. It will show up with Twitter and RSS. Another improvement is that options panel URLs were “sanitized” to avoid undesirable characters to display. This is to comply with the latest wordpress version security demands.

If you are upgrading Patagonia and your theme was manually customized, remember to save those changes before upgrading. WordPress will probably release a feature to make theme upgrades easier in a coming future, specially for users who customize themes. You can also update Patagonia theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually.

Have a great weekend everyone!

By late 2001, Google was well on their way to claiming a dominant position in the search market, and everyone was looking for links. Because of the “link building arms race” that Google started back then, link building has changed a lot since 2001. Link building has become a discipline unto itself, and one short chapter isn’t enough. Bing has also been using a similar concept since 2009.

The first step in understanding link building is getting a sense of how the search engines see things. As explained in a previous article, all of the search engines use link analysis to help them determine page rankings and choose relevant pages.

There are only a few areas where the search engines are actively working to fight what they call “webspam” and link analysis is by far the most active subject in that area. As a result, it’s very important for you to understand their position, and what they’re looking for, if you want to create an intelligent link building strategy for your site and stay alive.

There are a number of ways to look at any given link that you find on the web. From your perspective as the webmaster trying to get ranked, it might seem that the only important questions are: What page does this link point to? What words are used in the text? How much “link juice” am I going to get from this link? Is there any risk of being penalized?

In order to understand the answers, you need to understand the questions, and that means starting with the search engines’ perspective. So, make sure to check and analyze the sites you exchange links with.

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WordPress is no longer known as “just a blogging platform”. The job of theme designers is to style WordPress for everyone and to make Internet sites look great and easy to browse. Amazing Free and Premium WordPress themes will be released in 2010. Version 1.6.6 of Patagonia includes excerpts in the category and tags pages which shows a resume of each post and a link to the full article.

If you are upgrading Patagonia and your theme was manually customized, remember to save those changes before upgrading. WordPress will probably release a feature to make theme upgrades easier in a coming future, specially for users who customize themes. Another great news is that I have partenerd with one of my colleagues to start offering free blog hosting to my theme users, but I will release this via Twitter and RSS first, so make sure to subscribe to the RSS and Twitter. Wish you a great start of 2010! Happy blogging!

The coolest new additions to this version are:

1.The first addition is amazing. It’s a global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete one of your posts or comments you can bring them back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete…

2.Another great addition is the Built-in image editor that allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

3.Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more to come in the following releases).

4.Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress.

WordPress 2.9 provides the smoothest ride yet because of a number of great improvements under the hood and more subtle improvements you’ll really begin to appreciate once you’ve been around the block a few times.

Patagonia Theme and Tandil Theme are both fully compatible with this version. Subscribe to our RSS to be part of our free WordPress hosting with no ads and follow us on Twitter for more blogging articles.

Enjoy!