I don’t get to hear Chinese a lot though the 2008’s Olympics will be held in China. I thought that it would be the right time to hear some sweet Chinese words. I was strolling in the YouTube’s vicinity when I spotted this :

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Many of us, bloggers, surely must have had such encounter : getting on a blog which looks superb, and instantly we would try looking for the footer or somewhere else, through the blog for any hints of what theme that blog is using. Sometimes to use it ourselves afterwards, or just maybe out of curiousity. It might be discouraging though when we aren’t to find anything that might aid us in recognising the theme. In this article, I shall tell you how, a simple method of knowing what theme a particular blog is using when you’ve got no clue on the blog telling you what it might be.

The reasoning behind is simple. As any Wordpress blog pulls the stylesheet from the theme’s folder the blog is actually suiting, we’ll just have to find the name of that folder. Because most of the time, theme’s designer name the theme’s folder, the one containing all the theme’s files including the stylesheet, style.css, the actual name of the theme itself. It would be obvious, or 99.9% sure that the theme’s folder is the theme’s name.

To get this done, that is to find the name of that folder, here I’ll be doing it with Mozilla Firefox and that’s all we would need. Just get on any site. Let’s take for e.g, mine for instance, http://blogosquare.com. There are no instances on my blog where I’ve told what theme I’m using. So after loading blogosquare.com in Mozilla Firefox, just do a right-click somewhere and do View Source, then hit CTRL+F to find the first instance where style.css is called which will give you something in this line :

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://blogosquare.com/wp-content/themes/Cutline2.0/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

And that’s it. So look for the above line when doing View Source for any blog and you’ll see from where the style.css is being called, ultimately the name of the theme. Here, it’s Cutline2.0. Just Google it and you’ll hit the theme’s download site. Simply.

Now, if you’ve spotted a site using a theme but can’t figure it out on the blog, using the above method, you can. Or else, just drop the site’s owner a mail asking him the question if he’s willing to reveal you the theme he’s using on his site. Your feedbacks on this, whether you find it an interesting method or not, are all welcomed through the comments.

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There was that video from Common Craft which urged me to getting twitter‘ed’. It could prove efficient to pack all my bunch of net stumbles : just like some sort of SMSing+micro micro blogging - I think just micro blogging would be Tumblr.

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Hold your breath, Nintendo fans, here’s a breaking news for you ; the Legend of Zelda movie is soon to be released. Check out its trailer below :

Happy April Fool : I know it’s a bit late but better late than never. As you perhaps guessed it, it was the an IGN’s joke.

DON’T UPDATE NOW!

Even if you’re constantly reminded to do so from your WP admin panel :

And if you happen to be someone visiting the WP download page everyday, you’ll probably see this :

The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5) is available

but no no, it’s not really stable. As with every major update, it ’should’ show glitches so wait for sub-releases like 2.5.1 or further to update. Give everybody time to update their plugins and for the WP developers to see subsequent holes and bugs that may do nasty things to your blog :p you’ve been warned or I prefer advised : Don’t update to 2.5 now, don’t cripple your blog!

And yeah, that’s not an April Fool Joke. I wish that was really one : WP 2.5 release being an April Fool Joke LOL.

Surely you must know the Transformers, the hit movie and lately the popular Vista Transformation pack. Nirmal from Life Rocks 2.0 published an excellent list of all the popular Transformation pack around for Windows XP, moving your normal PC to a real cutting edge and dazzling new machine(new look and behaviour).

It’s a PC user’s dream : to be on a mac. Actually what motivates this craving desire for the mac, imho, is the look : both the hardware(the mac) and the accompanying OSX look great. It’s stylish, fresh and sleek.

But if you’re on a PC, no need to despair or hack it down to make it look like a mac. I’ll concentrate here with aquafying the OS. First you should know that if you’re on a PC and using either Windows or Linux, stay with it. No need to use things like the tweaked Intel Mac OS/hackintosh, that will put the real OSX on your PC. Even if you happen to get this working, it would take you long to get a fully functional PC with the Intel Mac OS installed; it would take you time to hunt down the drivers for your hardware and then there aren’t much software that would like to be run on such a configuration.

What you should be doing, instead, to fulfill that envy of yours to see your PC look like a mac is to mod/tweak only the required parts of the OS that I’ll describe here. Windows/Linux’s interfaces are rather good so no need to add superfluous things like a dock when the taskbar is here to grab all your opened applications. Furthermore don’t you find the explorer good enough to manage the access to your files? It’s not fully functional so just follow on where we’ll try to remedy to this situation.

Before going any further, I’ll concentrate more on the XP/Vista mod further on. For Linux’s users, check out the corresponding tutorial, Mac4Lin here and change accordingly. That guide will show you how to mod an Ubuntu Linux distro installed on a PC but as I’ve already said, there are many things that I think needn’t be touched : like tinkering with the taskbar.(On Ubuntu, this gets really messy, since you’ll have to get Compiz fusion working in order to install the AWN dock).

So let’s get that sleek mac look down on our Windows installed PC. In fact, it’s just some simple things to be changed/added : nothing complicated and most importantly nothing that will change the behaviour of Windows - which is our main objective here.

I told you it would be simple, so here’re those steps :

• Download the wallpapers ; your desktop should shine like an apple : download OSX wallpapers here, Tiger OSX wallpapers here, Panther OSX wallpapers here and check out some stunning modded wallpapers(mac osx/iphones/ipods derivatives too) here. Extract them and apply your new OSX wallpaper on your PC.
• Download the MacOSX fonts here and apply them following this guide.
• Download Leopard X theme that comes with 3 visual styles : iTunes, Tiger and Leopard look. Extract the package’s content to /windows/resources/themes. Then you should be having a folder called X and the Leopard X theme file. Click on the Leopard X theme file to apply the new theme or to select the different visual styles.

Tiger theme :

Leopard theme :

Itunes theme :

• Skin Firefox and Thunderbird

MacOSX skin for Firefox :
MacOSX skin for Thunderbird :

• Replace Windows default sidebar folder view with Findexer, a small application that once installed will provide you with a sidebar panel similar to that found on Finder for mac osx. No lengthy configuration required. It’s ready to use once installed.

That should be it. Leave the rest because XP/Linux is good enough to sit on your PC although many mac fans advocate the contrary : Windows/Linux is good. No need to buy an EXPENSIVE(read me carefully) mac to get just that sleek look. If you want to try out OSX, then better buy it because that will cost your more tinkering with your PC to get OSX on it. And I’m firm sure that you haven’t learnt enough of the marvels your PC can do to get rid of it now for a mac. So rejoice PC users, stop dreaming of that utopian mac osx look on your pc, you’ve just got it now. Wake up, neo.. Oh I mean PC user. Cheers

P.S : While many boast the simplicity that you can get by using FlyAKiteOSX or WinOSX2 to get that macosx look on your PC, I wouldn’t advise you to use such software for the simple reason that they change many of Windows’ core items that could easily make your system sluggish and cause irreversible damage too.

If you have upgraded recently to Wordpress 2.3, you’ll notice the following error message appearing either under your sidebars or at the bottom of your blog :


WordPress database error: [Table 'edrop.wp_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_categories


This is caused for the simple reason that some codes have been deprecated in the new Wordpress 2.3 which causes the above error. It’s really easy to fix this problem, just proceed as follows:

• Using your favourite FTP program(FileZilla is a good one), navigate to wp-content/themes/myjournal hypereal theme folder and open the footer.php using your favourite text editor.
• At the top part, find the following code and delete it:
  $numcats = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->categories");
if (0 < $numcats) $numcats = number_format($numcats);

  Then somewhere at the bottom of the same file, footer.php, find this part :

  extending over <?php echo $numcats; ?> categories and delete it altogether.

That should do it. Hope this helps fixing things quickly.

After the many requests of correcting the banner which was shifting to the right of the screen when the theme was displayed on monitors with high resolution(1280×1024,etc), I decided to update myJournal Hypereal. I also waited for Wordpress 2.3 to get released so that I can correct any bugs or errors showing up with myJournal Hypereal. All this to tell that you can now grab the new version : WideJournal.

or check out the live preview on Wordpress 2.3

Some of the noticing features of WideJournal:

1. The rotating banner is displayed at the center of the screen
2. The search form is found at the top left together with some navigational and translation icons to get you anywhere quicker and allow your visitors to read you in their favourite languages.
3. + all the existing features of myJournal Hypereal

I hope you’ll enjoy using WideJournal as I enjoyed developing it. Do leave any requests or queries about the theme at the forum.

Please do tell how do you find it and whether everything is working perfectly.

Related reading

• myJournal meets Sandbox providing you the best theme ever
• Download the Cloudy smilies
• Download the best black minimalist theme for your Wordpress blog : ColourFull Wall
• How-to turn visitors into returning visitors
• Best of Wordpress theme galore

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