I have been working for some months now to develop an e-commerce module for Admin76,  the CMS which is currently exclusive to 76 Creative. The e-commerce module, called Cart76, utilises many of the nice features of Admin76 such as drag n drop functionality, advanced image gallery management, etc. It is now in it's final stages of development, so if you are interested in running your self-managed site on the Admin76 platform, or if you require a self-managed online store please contact 76 Creative for more info.

After releasing my WordPress theme Simplistix into the wild a few weeks ago I have been very happy, and somewhat surprised by it's popularity. It has received hundreds of downloads from my site and over 700 downloads from wordpress.org in the last 12 days. I knew that there was a niche for simple, text based blog themes as I had seen a few sites such as www.plaintxt.org that are entirely devoted to these type of themes. But, with all the sophisticated and complex wordpress themes on offer, Simplistix feels like quite a humble little theme — perhaps that's part of it's charm.

Anyway, seeing the download stats made me feel curious about who was using the theme. I had already seen it being used on a couple of blogs because, as with most wordpress projects, I had received some suggestions, ideas, support requests and constructive criticisms from members of the wordpress community. I did a bit of further research on google and instantly found loads more bloggers using my theme. The main thing that struck me was the diversity of subject matter that these blogs covered – science, computer programming, economics, movies, music, art, fashion and many more. It was also nice to see instances where people had modified the theme, adding in their own site headers, sidebar widgets, google advertising, etc.

I felt so inspired by seeing all these sites using Simplistix as their theme that I decided to write this post featuring some of my favourites. So here they are:

TOP PICKS

www.flyhypersonic.com – The seatbelt sign is illuminated
www.thewherewithal.org – Blogging about credit, debt, money, economy, theory
nicolasulloa.com/blog – Music, Animation, Graphic Arts and Illustration
www.ianthewebsite.com – If you could be any blog, what blog would you be?
2chicksblogging.com – Blogging for Change Training since 2008
feedingme.com
blog.nakedsteve.com – Oh hey is that a monome?

THE BEST OF THE REST

phoward.com/blog
ponasniekas.nespalvotas.lt
www.bigtechcenter.info
www.bletherskite.com
blog.xieer.com
www.bestmusiccenter.info
www.businesstechnologytimes.com/wordpress
likeitreallymatters.com
hasibul.info/blog

I am planning an update to the theme in the near future where I will add an options menu which will allow you to control colours, fonts etc.

This article is an extension / improvement upon another article I published on my site previously: {{post id="simple-javascript-for-image-mouseovers" text="Simple Javascript for Image Mouseovers"}}. As I am always looking for improved methods, I was discussing the pitfalls of the javascript method with a friend (and occasional comment writer / contributor to my site) who pointed me in the direction of CSS and image sprites. This lead me to research the topic further, and I found two articles in particular which were incredibly useful:

Read on…

I've installed the TinyMCEComments plugin on my site, so now you can preview what your comment will look like as you type it. Nice!