Transparentia is a new 2 column, widget friendly wordpress theme by Kaushal Sheth. It is a light and simple theme which is similar to the default Kubrick theme that is usally installed in Wordpress by default.

J David Macor said recently on his blog, ‘you can’t design a bad website with the color blue’. OK, that might not be all true, but it is food for thought when designing a blog theme.

I like this theme, the fonts used are smaller than usual but they are easily readable. It is nicely coded and if you are used to tweaking a themes code, you will like this theme. It does look similar to the default Wordpress theme, Kubrick, however the sidebar and overall look and feel of Transparentia takes it a step beyond Kubrick, I believe. It’s also widget-ready, which is great.

Online Demo: here

To Download this theme visit: here

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I came across a strange error today. It only seemed to occur since I’d transfered a blog to a new webhost recently. I did my usual database backup and the transfer went well until I tried to modify some files from within the Wordpress admin area itself. I kept getting a Error 406 Not Acceptable when I tried to edit or change anything at all! This was very strange, I had never seen this error before. This had to be a web server issue I figured.

And sure enough after a bit of searching on the internet a solution was found on the UrbanGiraffe website. The Mysterious Error 406 article on the Urban Giraffe website clearly illustrates the problem. It occurs because of the Apache module called mod_security. This module acts like an Apache firewall, blocking a lot of the usual routes that people use to hack websites and displays a 406 Error for anything unusual. So that’s it! It appears that my new web server’s mod_security, when configured aggressively, can cause problems in CMS’s like Mambo, WordPress and other web scripts.

The solution is simple. The lines of code shown on the left can be added to your .htaccess file to disable mod_security.

Obviously you will lose any benefits that mod_security module had, but this works great for a quick fix to the 406 Error problem on your blog.

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WPThemes.info has just updated one of their popular themes. The theme is called ShadedGrey and is now completely xhtml/css valid. This theme has proven to be a popular one on the WPTheme website since its first release in March 2006. Since then, a lot more features have been added to the ShadedGrey theme, all without requiring any extra plugins to be installed!

Some of the new features of this latest version of ShadedGrey include;

• Valid XHTML/CSS
• Improved overall Look and Feel
• Archives Page Template included
• Contact Page Template included
• Displays list of Recent Comments on the home page
• Displays list of Recent Posts on all pages other than the home page
• Automatic Page Navigation

Although this theme is not widget-ready at the moment the basic install of this theme looks great. The code is cleanly written, so it should be relatively easy to configure this theme to your own liking if you need to adapt it. ShadedGrey can be downloaded here. Have fun!

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Dagon Design has created a great Wordpress Plugin that generates a nice looking real sitemap for your website. The sitemap is very easy to implement and the final result is well worth the small amount of time it takes to add this to your website.

To see this plugin in action on this website, visit my Sitemap page.

This plugin is not another XML sitemap plugin, it is a real sitemap generator which is highly customizable. This plugin has an options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its advanced features include:

• support for multi-level categories and pages,
• category, page exclusion,
• multiple-page generation with navigation,
• permalink support,
• choose what to display,
• what order to list items in,
• show comment counts and/or post dates,
• and many other options.

What is really great about this plugin is that it is good for your website visitors as they can quickly find what they are searching for by accessing the sitemap for your site. It also benefits the search engines that visit and trawl your site for content. This Sitemap Generator plugin give the SE spiders plenty to index and crawl when they decide to dig deeper into your site.

The plugin can be downloaded here; Sitemap Generator Plugin v2.6

Installation is as simple as uploading the plugin and then activating it. In order to use this plugin you need to add a single line of code to your template or page. I found that creating a blank page, calling it Sitemap and then adding the line of code using the HTML button is all that is required to have the sitemap up and running fast.

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