by on May 18, 2007

Looking for a New Theme for WordPress?

I learned so much at SOBCon about personal branding. David Armano’s presentation really hit home with the question, “Are you unique?” I am, but my blog’s not. I consider myself as more than capable of designing what I want my blog to look like, but it really comes down to taking the time to do it after work or risking getting fired by doing it at work. That would suck, wouldn’t it?

I started looking around for more themes for ideas to see what it would take to come up with something “original,” as I often do when I’m getting geared up to create a logo for someone. It really gets the juices flowing. That was when I stumbled across Template Monster. This is perfect if you don’t have the tools or experience to build your own design, but still want to be unique.

FEATURED WEB TEMPLATE

VIEW MORE TEMPLATES


Think about it this way… How many people do you know who have paid for their design? I know a lot of bloggers, and my number is probably under 30. There are a lot of numbers floating around out there about how many blogs there are, but let’s say there are 3 million current self-hosted WordPress blogs, and they offer thousands of free themes from their site and other libraries of themes. It’s impossible to have a unique look if you use a theme that everyone else is looking at! I know, I have one right now. Sure, I changed dozens of things, but the skeleton is still there.

Be on the lookout for a new design soon, but go ahead and prime your pump, too. Maybe you need to pay to get a new theme, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ll be different, unique. Dare to be different. It will pay off.

Filed Under: Blogging, Design
by on May 16, 2007

American Idol Top 3 Results: Americans Can’t Vote Right to Save Their Lives

The collective voting population of American Idol watchers must be dumber than a box of rocks. That might seem harsh, but it is simple math, people.

If you want to make sure your top two favorite performers make it to the Finals, you have to place multiple votes, and place them evenly. Millions of people forgot to vote for the sure-thing Melinda Doolittle and only voted for their favorite second-place singer.

I am ashamed to call myself an Idol fan if this is how the voting goes. There is no way that the most consistent singer was not the favorite for next week’s Finals, so she should have received the most votes and left the rest of the population split between Blake Lewis and Jordin Sparks.

This is a travesty and I declare tomorrow a national day of mourning for the American common sense, which has obviously kicked the bucket.

Filed Under: American Idol
by on May 16, 2007

Updating Permalinks on Your Blog: A Guide

Something I have wanted to do for the longest time on Gitr’s WoW Blog is to change the permalink structure to reflect the post title name, but it’s way too late to do that with how many blogs and SEO links are directly linking posts using the default structure.

UPDATE: I just checked a link to my site from another blog using the old permalink, and it still works! It knows both addresses.

Here is a guide to updating your structure, because it was a total pain in the butt for me. I’m not a server genius, but I’m not stupid, either. I hope this is helpful for you, and I’ll try to be as plain as possible.

My first step was Googling for how to do it and kept getting all kinds of info about ch_mod and server permissions and writing to your .htaccess file. It was all very confusing. Everything I did kept causing an Internal Server Error. Please feel free to ask me how I did it, but I highly doubt I can solve anything outside the scope of my experience in this ordeal.

  1. Go to http://www.keyboardface.com/IIS-Permalinks/. Download the files he offers to help. I had no idea what server software I was running so I guessed I had IIS, whatever that is. I think this might work no matter what using my method, though.
  2. Go to your domain hosting site and see if there is a place in the control panel to edit your Error 404 page. I have GoDaddy, and it was easy. If your blog is in a subdirectory, make sure you put the file in the root file of your blog. My blog is in the root folder of its domain, but it is a domain settled in a folder on my host, so I had to /directory/errorpage.asp to get it to the right location in the control panel.
  3. Upload the htaccess.php and errorpage.asp to your blog/domain root folder.
  4. Change your Permalink setting in your WordPress Dashboard. Options/Permalinks/Custom. Enter the code: /%category%/%postname%/ for the best SEO configuration, or whatever else you want. Save the settings.
  5. Make sure you don’t have an .htaccess file in your blog or domain folder. This was the last straw for my problem. As soon as I renamed that file, everything worked like a charm.

Enjoy your new structure and reap its SEO benefits.

Filed Under: Blogging
by on May 16, 2007

Wacky Wednesday: Issue 1

Welcome to my first “feature” article on Perfectly Petersen. This will be a weekly post about something wacky, be it news, facts, or whatever strikes my fancy as being wacky. For something to be wacky to me, it’s pretty extreme, as I’m quite wacky myself.

This week’s feature was found in the news and reported by the AP.

A man from Lake Luzerne, NY is in desperate need for a generous helping of brains. Someone must have bumped God’s elbow when he was pouring in Damion Mosher’s brains with an eye-dropper. He’s obviously a few drops short of a teaspoon.

Bullet CasingsAt 18 years old, he clearly has entrepreneurial aspirations, but is seriously misguided in his thinking. He takes .223-caliber bullets and empties the contents to sell the brass casings. His method of emptying the rounds is flat-out stupid. He places a round in a vise and whacks the end off with a hammer.

The first 100 bullets went fine. The last one shot him in the abdomen. He’s in pain now, and a lot of it. He was treated and released, so that’s all good.

His casings came up to just a few pounds, and the local scrap business pays $1.70/lb for brass. Of all the things to do, why would you spend hours emptying bullets and making them worth $1.70/lb when they are probably worth $3.00/lb as bullets?

What other strange entrepreneurial ventures have you heard of lately?

Filed Under: Wacky Wednesday
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