Just a quick update: as promised, Chevez now has Menu Builder support. Dynamic Theming is still scheduled for Arliss and Chevez at a later date.

The Menu Builder brings a small bit of additional functionality to Chevez. As seen in the demo, the header features a “rotating panels” configuration driven off the post categories. A fully customizable menu changes the approach–as a result, Chevez can now populate these panels with category posts, tagged posts, or child pages. All driven off the choices made in the Menu Builder configuration screen.

Grab Chevez 1.06 directly from the theme page.

Released today, version 1.08 of Arliss adds the Menu Builder featured in Melora. The header menu and both footer menus can be fully customized through a javascript-enabled interface: add, remove, rename, and reorder with ease.

Still in the pipeline and coming soon: Chevez will get Menu Builder support, and both Arliss and Chevez will receive full Dynamic Theming. As always, updates are free.

Today marks the launch of our new Affiliate Program. It’s a fairly standard affair, as affiliate programs go — simply sign up, distribute links, and earn money. The entire process is easy to understand and takes only minutes to complete. We’re offering a lucrative 20% commission on all sales that come through your referrals. Why not give it a shot?

With the launch of Melora, we’re proud to introduce two compelling new features: the Dynamic Theme Engine and the Menu Builder.

Dynamic Theme Engine

This is a powerful new way to reshape a theme’s appearance. Custom colors can now be set for each and every piece of a theme’s design: images, text, backgrounds, etc. Specify a standard html hex color, and the engine goes to work — calculating shadows & highlights, and generating new versions of theme graphics. See it in action in the screencast…

So, today we ditched the Digg This button in favor of the Tweetmeme Twitter retweet button - a move that I’ve been wanting to make for a while now.

Of course it’s not a “new” service by any means, but simply put - it just makes more sense.

We’re not sure how much exposure Digg was even generating and after more thought, we’re not sure it’s the type of exposure we want, or more importantly need.

Here’s my point.

We’ll never be able to sell our product like you can sell our product.

Marketing is not about us (the distributor) telling you (the consumer) how sweet we are with regular press releases, witty product descriptions or social media alter-egos. Instead, marketing today is about you (the consumer) telling your friends how sweet we (the distributor) are - if that’s how you feel.

And this is where the implementation of Tweetmeme makes sense for us and the Digg This button doesn’t. Nothing is as impactful to a business as a customer telling their story - positive or negative and Twitter has become a platform for stories to be told easily. We want to embrace that. We want site traffic to be the effect of the Continue Reading …

If you’ve been using Synected, yet find yourself running into problems or errors, you may be interested in today’s release. The following bugs are addressed:

• Synected did not function at all if Wordpress was installed in a subdirectory (ie, the site url and blog url settings differed). This now works correctly.
• When shortening URLs with a querystring (eg, http://example.org/?p=132), Synected could incorrectly ignore the information after the ‘?’. This is resolved.
• A SQL error that would appear on the Edit Short URLs screen on some systems has been fixed.
• Paging of short URLs (once you create more than 10) was broken, but now works.
• The redirect used by Synected has been switched from 302 to 301, in order to be more search engine friendly.

A big thanks to everyone who’s written in reporting bugs and providing information. The plugin continues to improve. And now I’m afraid I must run. As Wonka would say, there is so much time and so little to do.

So it seems that Synected had issue with PHP4, in that if you were running PHP4, you’d get a fancy fatal error message on activation. This is now resolved in version 0.83. The problem was certain PHP5-only features that were in use, that PHP4 had no idea what to do with. Does this mean that functionality has been removed? Well, technically, yeah–but nothing you’ll miss. The code is less “correct” now, perhaps, especially from a class designer’s perspective. But as a Wordpress user, this changes the way Synected operates exactly none at all. And now PHP4 servers can run it too.

Hooray.

So Synected has been out for nearly a week now and feedback has been rolling in. I’ve taken some of the feature suggestions (and bug reports) and incorporated them into a new version. Here’s a quick rundown:

Support for short URLs with no prefix.

Originally, I didn’t think this was possible - but as it turns out, I simply hadn’t given it enough thought. This new mode allows you to use your domain directly, the same way the third-party services do. So instead of http://blurbia.com/u/j7, it can be just http://blurbia.com/j7. Now for the caveat: this is an experimental mode that could even be considered dangerous. Suppose you have a Wordpress page with a slug of “j7″? Suppose you have a short URL of “4378″ - would this go to your Synected link, or to the Wordpress archives for the year 4378? If you add plugins that modify permalinks into the mix, it gets even messier. For now, I’d say only use this mode if you’re feeling adventurous, or if you want to help with testing and development of Synected. And backup your .htaccess file first!

Support for short URLs without permalinks.

Now you can use Synected even if your web host doesn’t support permalinks. Continue Reading …

New plugin released today: Synected. It’s a drop-in solution for Wordpress users for making your own shortened URLs. Like tinyurl.com, but with your own domain name.

The name is essentially a simple mix of two words. I was sitting around thinking about what to call the thing, and remembered the word synecdoche, a lovely word introduced to me by Synecdoche, NY, a film that I adore. Merriam-Webster defines synecdoche as:

“a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole”

Well near enough, I thought, certainly in the ballpark of what a shortened URL is and/or does. But suppose we made it more unique? And that’s when I happened on the handy interaction between synecdoche and connected. There’s just enough overlap to not make it awkward, and in fact I find the result a bit easier to wrap the head around than synecdoche itself. Overly clever wordplay, perhaps, but it’s pronounceable and suits my purpose.

Done and done. This is what my brain gets up to when I’m not programming.

And so it ends, and so it begins. The completion, the culmination, the finish line of a race long run. This occasion of the opening of our digital doors. It’s our work paid off, the goal that was before us now reached, now realized. It’s the fruits of our labor, or so the saying goes. And so it ends.

Yet always, ineffably, as the older is slipping away the younger is on its way. Phoenixs–phoenixes? phoenixi?–rise from ashes, just as new metaphors are written to replace tired ones involving mythical birds. The end of the one thing is the start of the next, and so forth. There are only so many ways to restate this. And I’m… well, I’m derailing here.

Here we are. It’s 10:51 am. Blurbia is now open, and a whole host of new work now awaits. Themes to be designed, plugins to be written. Updates and help topics and the next great idea. And so it begins.

I think… yeah. I think I’m ready.