It is exciting and also dismaying when that email arrives from the hosting provider with a warning that your website has been disabled due to "Severe Resource Abuse." On one hand, it signifies that you have built a popular website with a lot of people coming to visit, which is what every webmaster wants. On the other hand, it means that it may be time to upgrade to a more expensive hosting option. Not only does this require spending more money, it also entails transferring the site to the new server, dealing with configuration headaches, downtime for visitors and then a lot of testing to make sure everything is working properly again.
I completely understand why theme designers have sponsors for their themes. It is a lot of hard work to create a good web design template, especially if you have the added complexity of a content management system to account for. There needs to be some incentive for providing a free product. Not many people have all of their needs taken care of and are good-hearted enough to spend their free time making software that is available for anyone to use at no cost.
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...