Blog

I recently came across an article published by the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) with research indicating that it is actually healthy to slouch. I spend anywhere between 8 and 16 hours in front of the computer daily. For that reason, ergonomics are very important to me. But can slouching really be healthy?

While contemplating the next content management system to include on Themebot, I decided to take a look at the poll for favorite CMS. I was surprised to see that e107 was ranked 3rd with over 5% of the votes. I had done nothing to inform e107 users about Themebot and it is impressive that a significant number of visitors are choosing it as their favorite CMS.

A couple of months after Themebot.com went online, I was surprised to see that the site hadn't been indexed or received a pagerank from Google. I started a thread in the forums called Websites that have a higher pagerank than Themebot just for fun. After Google finally gave Themebot a pagerank, I moved the forum to Sites to See. For some reason, Google still hasn't indexed Themebot, not sure what is going on. Anyhow, I decided to give the Sites to See forum its own Blog.

A few weeks ago, upon recommendation by several visitors, I redesigned the header area for Themebot. But the lingering problems with the XHTML / CSS code and the table-based layout were still bothersome. I decided to do a little Spring cleaning and completely gut the template to make it a 100% CSS-based layout.

Themebot uses the Joomla content management system for the main site. Of course, the core output produced by Joomla and third-party components still uses tables, but at least the template itself is CSS-based. Apparently, developers will be able to easily override the core output in Joomla 1.5 and I'm looking forward to the stable release.

When looking for a template to use as a starting point I had specific requirements in mind:

Sure, it is great having a button up top that says "Over 2000 Free Themes to Preview & Download!" But that doesn't mean each and every one of the free web design templates on Themebot is worth downloading. In an effort to maintain a high level of quality among the themes in the gallery, a new system has been put in place.

If you have visited before, you will notice something new when you browse to an album for one of the open source software platforms hosted on Themebot. Each album now has a Recycle Bin. Also, it is now possible to comment on particular themes in the gallery.

This is a bit off-topic and I'll keep the intro short. However, over 82% of visitors to Themebot are running Windows, so there is some relevance. I'll briefly discuss purchasing considerations and Linux alternatives.

The prompt for this article came when I noticed that laptops with Windows Vista preloaded have just recently become available...

Well darn! This is going to make it harder to keep the "Websites that have a higher pagerank than Themebot" forum thread updated with interesting sites.

Several people have mentioned that the header area for Themebot could be improved. So, I went ahead and redesigned the header area. The colors used more closely match the rest of the site. And, a nice thing about this new design is that the header takes up less space leaving more of the content viewable. Please click the Read More... link below to view a screen shot of the old template.

A visitor recently suggested WordPress for the CMS poll. Shortly after making the suggestion, another email was received asking to ignore the first email because they had seen the separate category for blogs (you may have to scroll down a bit to see all the polls). This brings to light a question that has been in the back of my mind for a couple of months now: Is it necessary to have a separate category for Blog software?