I’m already a huge fan of Mad Men, the TV show based in the early 60′s and focusing on the advertising industry of New York City so this collection of ads that just don’t work anymore, while totally sexist and completely wrong, still made me chuckle a bit.

The copy reads: Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn’t have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. That noble styling sure soothes the savage heart! If you’d like your own doll-to-doll carpeting, hunt up a pair of these he-man Mr. Leggs slacks. Such as our new automatic wash wear blend of 65% “Dacron®” and 35% rayon–incomparably wrinkle-resistant. About $12.95 at plush-carpeted stores.

It says- “this young man is 11 months old- and he isn’t our youngest customer by any means.  For 7-Up is so pure, so wholesome, you can even give it to babies and feel good about it.

-By the way, Mom, when it comes to toddlers- if they like to be coaxed to drink their milk, try this: Add 7-Up to the milk in equal parts, pouring the 7-Up gently into the milk.  It’s a wholesome combination- and it works!

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During the lifespan and evolution of Randomn3ss many changes have been made and this now is the third re-skinning of the site and I’m very pleased.  After using premium themes to re-launch my own site and more recently a friend / client’s site it seemed to make sense that Randomn3ss would receive one too.

I chose to go with Sparta, a minimalistic theme that is clean and easy to navigate.  All the same content from the previous theme is here but the main column is slightly wider allowing for larger photos and videos and the sidebar is cleaned up and organized a bit more.  Additionally, a usable footer is in place, however it’s currently a mess, more on that in a minute.  The top navigation features a drop-down menu on the About page to keep things clean, so all the content is there, but none is hidden by complex menu’s, the content is what is featured.  You’ll also notice on the home page the moving images of the Featured category to showcase specific articles.  Along the right sidebar are the 10 most popular articles and the five most recent tweets from me.  Missing from the old site are the list of authors, something I can’t get to work but is high on my list to figure out fast and all the categories, which leads me to the cluster that is the current footer.

Having a usable footer for me has always been important and Sparta features a nice, clean one that displays all categories as Topics.  Great, except for one major problem.  When I launched Randomn3ss in 2007 there was no such thing as Tags, so I created Categories, a lot of them, more than 80!  My goal is to go through and edit them down to five or so and utilize the tag feature in WordPress better, I just don’t know how realistic that is going to be with nearly 900 articles to hand-edit.  By doing so though, I’d be able to incorporate a tag-cloud into the sidebar.

Other subtle changes include a new plug-in for social bookmarking, sharing, printing and emailing articles, one that looks a little nicer I think then the previous one. Also, on the home page you’ll notice that the articles are truncated, this is to keep the clean look and increase load times for everyone when image heavy posts happen.

The install of Sparta went really well and I got most of the work done in about two hours, however the documentation was lacking just a bit.  Luckily, it’s not an overly complicated theme and most of it is just common sense.  I haven’t had the need to modify too much of anything by hand which is always a plus and am happy with the cleaner, more grown-up feel of the site.  For me, the $22 spent is well worth it.  Like Sparta? Download it here.

Because I know things have changed and you might not be used to them yet, something might be missing or broken, please leave any comment (positive or negative), feedback or feature requests in the comments section.

Update: Marty suggested a plug-in and helped do a little customization so the footer is a little bit more manageable for now, until I have time to go in and clean out the categories and get them under control.  Thanks Marty!

Update: Got the authors names linked back in the right sidebar to all the articles they have previously written!

Update: After a problem on the home page with the slider function working, I emailed the coder of the theme, Cristian.  He promptly got back to me with an updated file but it still didn’t work.  He didn’t give up and continued to help via email.  While trying to troubleshoot this problem, Scott volunteered to give it a look.  He helped me pinpoint one potential problem with a few erogenous erroneous characters in a PHP file and then through some other small issues.  Needless to say, it works and I’m happy again!Similar articles that might also interest you:

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When you hover over any of the main images on the home screen the title and lead info to the blog post are displayed as is left and right navigation arrows to jump to the next image.  Each of the images on the Home base are linked to Posts and not every post needs to appear on the Home page.

Because Jeff had more then two years worth of content, as did I when I upgraded, I knew I’d have to do some shuffling around to make it all work, but it turned out to be far easier then I thought.

On the home page you’ll see a large 950 pixel wide photo and thumbnails across the bottom, all which you choose as you post and can even control the duration spent on each thumbnail as it transitions to the next frame.  The transitions and resizing are all handled server side by jQuery and work flawlessly.  For Jeff, this was a great way to present both recent and his best work right on the front of the site.

The header of the site is clean and straightforward, the logo can be uploaded through the admin panel of WordPress and the main color of the site can even be changed there.  A thick underlining bar indicates what page you’re currently on, in this case the Home screen.  What was different about this theme compared to his previous was how pages and categories are setup.  The arrows to the right of Portfolio and Blog indicate a drop down box by hovering them, but due to the limited vertical space, I opted to stuff some of Jeff’s pages into child pages of the parent page, Portfolio, as shown in the screenshot below.

The ability to use drop downs and then further drop downs allowed Jeff to retain all the pages he had created within his previous theme but have them more organized and in a neater, easier to digest package. For his site, I created the Parent category of Portfolio and then stuffed everything under it.  All pages are as creative as you need them to be, but require setup on each and every one.

The Blog section in Phototastic is very similar, it relies on one main category, in this case named Blog, and then child categories under it.  When you hover over the Blog word on the theme the categories are displayed and thumbnails from the most recent photos in posts associated with those categories are displayed, this I thought was pretty amazing and a very slick addition to the theme.  From a user perspective, you can either click any of the specific categories or the word Blog itself to display all recent posts, this is where more of the Phototastic magic happens.

The default view is to show the 45 most recent posts, yes, 45!  All in auto-magically created thumbnails, again done server side.  As a photography, I truly appreciate the ability to show off a vast array of my photos without the clutter of words, but as a viewer, this is like utopia.  The vast array of colors and snippets of photos is wonderfully enticing and makes me want to dive in, but that’s not all Phototastic brings to the table.  In the top right corner you’ll see Switch View, clicking the middle icon switches to list view and shows the 10 most recent articles in a slightly different light.

Again, the thumbnails are all generated server side and it gives the viewer a different way of viewing the same content.

Individual blog postings feature the highlighted photo large at the top, the same one rendered for the front page and thumbnails, then whatever content displayed below it.  The screenshot below is only small sample, to view the entire post click here.

The contact page uses a fairly standard Contact Form 7 Plugin to handle the form new customers fill out.

Overall, Jeff is very pleased with his new site and visitors to it, new and old clients couldn’t be happier.  Installing it was really straight forward and the directions are very well documented.  There was a slight bump for me, as I needed to upgrade the hosting plan Jeff had to run PHP5 instead of the older and slightly out dated PHP4, which wasn’t in the documentation.  Because I was converting an existing site into this new theme, a little more work needed to be done too.  If you are purchasing this theme to start from a fresh site I’d strongly suggest having at least 15-20 posts ready to go before your public launch date.

Because Jeff already had a steady flow of site visitors and the theme upgrade was going to take me at least an hour to do (turned out being longer due to the PHP speed bump, not Phototastic’s fault), I installed the Maintenance Mode plugin and customized it to allow visitors to still get to the About and Contact pages of Jeff’s site and an outbound link to his Facebook Fan page.

One thing to be aware of with Phototastic, image optimization for the web is crucial because your web server will be rendering all the thumbnails for the various ways of viewing the site.  If you don’t optimize them in Photoshop or similar editing program, you could really bog down your server and slow the speed your site loads for customers.  Additionally, while the thumbnails are loading you may occasionally see the following screen.

The little icon in the middle is animated and I don’t think this distracts at all from the site and I’ve only managed to see it a few times even on slower connections.

The logo should be saved as a transparent PNG file, this isn’t mentioned in the instructions but I’d assume for most all applications this would be the best way to display it because of the gradients.  The footer is customizable via the admin panel for left and right side and accepts plain text and HTML.  The only thing I feel the site lacks is a proper integration of social media icons / placement and RSS button.  Because so many people use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, RSS feeds and other things, having this integration should be standard.  I manually placed a Facebook icon in the footer as Jeff wanted his visitors to be able to fan and follow him there in addition to the site.  We’re still undecided about adding Twitter and RSS icons at this time.

Overall the theme installation went really smoothly, when I did need to contact support about the problem that ended up being a server side PHP error they responded promptly and explained immediately how and what needed to be done to resolve the situation.  Phototastic is coded brilliantly with plenty of options to keep everyone happy.  It’s professional, easy to navigate and displays photographs wonderfully, any photographer should be proud to use this as their theme.  Future plans include filling the right sidebar with marketing material, both on blog posts and pages, as they are separated within this theme, a really nice touch.

Phototastic WordPress theme can be purchased from ThemeSnack.com for $49, a small price to pay for the full versatility of this amazing theme.Similar articles that might also interest you:

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Having such great results with the premium theme from Theme Forrest, I searched around and found what looked to be the perfect theme, fitting all the needs I had without me even knowing what I needed when I started.  Before this review goes further, I’m going to be as specific as I can with regards to the theme itself, this is not intended to be how-to install WordPress or Themes.  You can hire me to install WordPress and the theme of your choice / customize it though.

Why a premium theme? Like I mentioned, I had great results with my previous client’s site.  Most of these results were because of a well documented install directions, PSD files of the entire site and solid code.  There are thousands of free themes out there, but for the $15-35 for a premium theme from Theme Forrest, the value seems overwhelmingly worth it for me.  They are half or a quarter of what other premium sites charge for themes and some of the best looking one’s I’ve found.  The other reason for me choosing a premium theme is that I know it will limit the chances of seeing another person using the same one as me.  As it stands now, only 50 people have downloaded the theme I chose, who knows if they all got installed yet.  Compared with the average downloads of free themes, I like my odds more of having a somewhat unique theme.

Gallerific.  The theme I chose is called Gallerific and was created by Justin Scheetz, who through a little research also happens to live less than 20 miles from me.  Even though it’s the internet, I like to support local artists.  It instantly appealed to me because of the large images used for the home page navigation, it comes with two different color schemes and utilizes some creative and unique image handling techniques.  It also has a drop down menu system for the header navigation for a super simple and clean look and feel.  I’ve always felt that photography portfolios should be focused on making the images look good, not be so overly complicated that it takes away from the photographs featured.  This meets my needs.  Here’s what my site currently looks like.

Gallerific was a simple install, following the instructions included.  There were however some speed bumps along the way that I needed to iron out, which I’ll cover later in the article.  Because I already had content, most of the initial tweaks were minor ones to properly display the home page.  If you are installing this for the first time, plan on having at least seven unique blog postings ready or this won’t work for you.

Breaking down the home page and all the features.

The header navigation is powered by a combination of both Pages and Categories.  In my case, the Home button takes you obviously to home and is hard coded into the theme.  Blog and Galleries are actually categories for posts, Archives and Contact are Pages.  During setup of Gallerific, you specify which comes first (left to right), pages or categories.

For my site, every post is labeled with the Blog category, this gets everything to show up nicely in one spot and because I sometimes need to post non-photographic updates, like site updates or to promote an art show.  The Gallery category is the Parent and utilizes ten Child categories, all neatly displayed in the roll-over drop down menu system. While the theme comes widget ready, I didn’t like the idea of storing my archives in the sidebar and wanted a specifc page for them.  I created the Archive page and installed the Clean Archives Reloaded plugin that I feel serves as a better overall archive and site map than one in the sidebar.  Lastly is a rather standard Contact page with another plugin for the form used.

Included with Gallerific is a PSD file to customize your logo, I made a minor color tweak to my existing one and uploaded it.  The directions do not specify the file format and I’m thinking it needs to be a PNG, as the JPG I used is slightly off in color.  Search is well integrated and, well searches.  The default install of Gallerific includes a section in the admin panel to easily put your name, address and phone number below the search box.  Because I’m not a studio photographer, I don’t really have a need for those fields and have a specific Contact page for such information.  I edited the theme file header to include some social networking links and an RSS icon.  The only design flaw I found for this theme was the lack of an integrated RSS button, something I hope makes it into the next version release of the theme.  For the time being, I’ve installed the overly trendy Web 2.0 style buttons, these happen to closely resemble iPhone icons.  They will more than likely change when I find something that fits in a bit better with the overall theme.

Moving down is the Featured section of the home page.  Photos in this section appear when posts are in the Featured Category and the photo must be set to a specific width to work properly.  The screen shot above shows what happens when you roll the mouse over it.  Note that it shows the post name, categories it’s filed under, number of comments and the first few words associated with the post.  Clicking the post title or View Details will take you to the specific post.  The arrow to the right will take you to the next Featured posting. This is way cool and a great way to spotlight specific files and a very creative use of WordPress.

Directly below the featured header box are square boxes numbered, in my site’s case, 1 through 3.  When you hover over them a small thumbnail will appear of the other featured posts that can be displayed in the header if clicked.  From the overall size, I’d guess two dozen or so images could be utilized as Featured and gives the viewer another way to access and see images used.

The main body features cropped images from the last six blog postings made and text, customizable from the back end of WordPress.  I really like the fact that every blog post means fresh content on the front page utilizing these lower six boxes, always giving visitors something new and fresh to look at, while the featured box at the top can remain a little more static.  The text to the right is where I’m displaying what would normally be on an About page, which I usually hate on portfolio websites.

The six images also hide one more secret, they are not just links to the blog posts associated with them.  Hover over and you will be given two options.  The first is View Details which will take you to the blog post, the second is View Larger Image.  When the second option is clicks, the uncropped photo opens up and gives the viewer a better idea of what could be seen in the rest of the article.   Once again, giving the visitor to the site more to do while remaining super clean with design.

The footer is clean and utilizes the same header navigation, sans the drop down menu system.  Copyright info is displayed to the right, I’ve chose to leave the credits in the footer and added in text for my RSS feed, which again was lacking, and a little icon for stats tracking.  One design element I find missing here is an Up or Back to Top button, often usefull so the user doesn’t have to manually scroll.

Looking at more details.

One setting that is kind of unique for Gallerific is how Categories are displayed.  Each Category can be displayed as a blog or as a gallery.  For the Blog category, I’ve chose to display it as a blog, same is true if you click on the word Gallery.  This shows one highlighted image that I specify for each post (same as used on the front of the site or for the featured section) and about 40 words followed by a Continue Reading that takes the reader to the rest of the individual post.  This keeps the page neat and clean, which is why I like it.  For each of the child Categories under Gallery, I’ve set them to gallery view, as seen below.

This displays 10 posts that are in the People category in the same fashion as the front page, looking like a nice gallery with the options to roll over images and view one larger or be taken directly to the post.  Text indicating older entries takes the reader to the second page and so on. You’ll note the two images / articles featuring cars in the screen shot above and may wonder why they are showing up in the People gallery.  Because I’ve associated each of those posts with more than one category, including People, they show up under different galleries.  Because you can only specify one image for the display square, it’s hard to be exactly perfect.  Each of those posts also feature photos of people, clicking the View Details button reveals that in the full post.

As I’ve said, the install went really smoothly and once I wrapped my head around how the categories section worked, I’m more than thrilled to use this as the theme to power my site.  Making images Featured on the front page and creating the thumbnails for the gallery view is very straight forward and well documented.  I do have plans to utilize Parent / Child categories more for an upcoming wallpaper section of the site which I hope to launch in a few months, as well as a page to sell prints from.  The only main problem I had with the theme during install and configuration was that I had existing posts, more than 150 to be exact.  Each post was in a category but didn’t utilize the parent / child sections because, well I had no need to.  Gallerific almost requires that and relies heavily on categories to function to its fullest potential.  Because I wanted every post I’ve published to show up under Blog and needed to move every post in an existing category under the parent category of Gallery, some time was going to need to be invested.  WordPress does not feature a bulk or mass edit categories option, and I spent two full days searching google with different search strings, asking on Twitter and Facebook for a plugin that would simply let me bulk edit categories with no luck.  The plugins I found weren’t supported by the newest version of WP and I was left high and dry.  A week after giving up I tried a new search query and found exactly what I needed and compliant with the newest version of WP, Manageable.  This plugin should be included with the theme as it’s almost essential to anyone looking to use Gallerific on a site with existing content.

I’ve quietly launched this, now 4th version of MikePanic.com over the last two weeks while tweaking and making minor customizations to it, and adjusting all the categories to fit my needs.  Today marks the unofficial relaunch, in this review, and the best my site’s looked since buying the domain name 9+ years ago.  I can’t thank the coder / developer Justin enough for making such an amazing, low cost theme.  Justin currently has six super high quality, amazing themes available for WordPress here, some as low as $15.00.Similar articles that might also interest you:

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I mean, this says it all and then some, and has pretty colors too! Intrigued, I typed into my browser the rather unique domain name listed in the top right corner, theportfolio.ofmichaelanderson.com.  A quirky blog from a designer who clearly likes his job and enjoys amusing others with his design work.  I’m hooked.  If I needed a designer, he’d be one I’d look for.  Only one major design flaw in the whole site, there’s no obvious way to contact Michael Anderson without looking at the full resolution image here and then typing his Yahoo! email address into your mail client.Similar articles that might also interest you:

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It’s stupidly simply to create one, simply enter your Twitter user name into the little box and click Make the Mug. In roughly twenty seconds the browser refreshes and dumps you onto the Zazzle web-page, a company that will create on-off products for you.  You’ll now be shown a live preview of how your new mug will look.  CrowdedInk randomly lays out your friends profile pics and you can’t change the, I don’t see this as a bad thing though.  The image used here is a screenshot of what a mug would look if I got one made, but for fun I did a second one to see how @kevinrose would turn out.  With roughly 83,000 people following Kevin Rose, I was kind of testing the script to see if it would break.  Sadly, it only uses the same number of images and clearly repeated a lot of them.  With 83,000 friends, I wouldn’t expect them all to fit on a mug but I would at the very least expect them to not duplicate.

Pretty cool little script, even cooler that I found out about it because of Scott posting it on Twitter.  Social networking at it’s finest.Similar articles that might also interest you:

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Click here to view the embedded video.

The table is built by none other than Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, the same people that made bristlebots more than 2 years ago.  For just under $2,000 you can get one of your very own from Because We Can.

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is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

Now, I don’t sign up for every Web 2.0 social networking / bookmarking site out there, and I haven’t signed up for this one yet, but I have subscribed to their RSS feed and been somewhat hooked on it all weekend.  It’s photos, graphic designs, marketing material, basically anything that is found that someone thinks is worth sharing, all in one blog.  Because of FFFFOUND I found some really cool photo blogs along with some inspiration for design concepts.

They are currently on an invite only basis, which I’m sure is fueling the fire and making people even more curious as to what the back-end offers users, but I’ll just continue to lurk for now.  If you are into cool imagery, FFFFOUND might be for you, just wait till you get out of work to view it since occasionally there is a fine art nude photograph on the front of the site.Similar articles that might also interest you:

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without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It’s designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging

Great news for parents who have to fight opening up toys for kids, and then try to locate all the zip ties and other small objects used to bind toys into pretty packaging, great for the environment since there is simply less packaging and great for the kids because now they can play with their toys that much faster.

Check out the FAQ on Frustration Free Packaging to get all the answers you may have and then browse the products currently available.Similar articles that might also interest you:

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