Regular readers will know that I’ve been using the Copyblogger theme for this blog for some years.

Up until recently it’s been perfect for this blog, simple and clean and not distracting.

However I’ve been gradually upgrading WordPress with the new releases under v.3 recently and, just yesterday, I realized, to my horror, that I couldn’t click on anything in the sidebar. It all seemed to be frozen into immobility.

Now the elements in the sidebar – sign-up form, archives, recent posts and so on – are just loaded into the sidebar widget, so there’s no reason why a simple theme like copyblogger would freeze just by upgrading WordPress. Yet it did.

As soon as I changed to the standard theme that comes with WordPress, called the Twenty-Eleven, everything in the sidebar was back to normal.

I checked on the Copyblogger site for updates and found that the theme hasn’t been updated since WP2.2. There is a new ‘version’ of the Copyblogger theme on a new framework, but it doesn’t look quite the same. Chris Pearson, the creator, has moved on to new themes and, of course, why shouldn’t he? If you provide something free there’s no obligation to keep updating it. Or is there?

You may have wondered why people like Chris create themes and plugins for WordPress and then give them away. The answer is, simply, that every theme and plugin that is installed provides a backlink for the website of the creator (that is if you leave the links back to the originating website intact, which you should do if only to say ‘thanks’). It’s a good way of popularising your site and raising it higher in the Search Engines rankings.

Anyway I’m now looking for a new theme to use on this blog. When I’ve found my ideal theme I’ll update and let you know what I’ve found and why I’m using it.

If you are looking to add a little more emphasis to your landing page or squeeze page then I suggest you try Slide Up FX, on sale today at www.monday-madness.com

I’ve found that static pop up boxes are all very well but more and more website visitors are just finding them an irritation and closing them before even reading the contents. Slide UP FX is rather different in that, as it’s name suggests, your info box slides up from the bottom of the screen.

You can see it in action here…

www.monday-madness.com/SlideFX/

but what this doesn’t show is the sophisticated engine behind Slide UP FX that provides a multitude of options to enable you to program the slide up box any way you wish.

For example you can set the delay of sliding from 1 to 20 seconds or anywhere in between. You can add a ‘Do Not Show Again’ button in addition to the Close button, if you want to avoid annoying visitors to, say, your blog, or remove the Close button entirely if you want the box to be visible at all times.

And there’s a full WISYWIG and HTML editor to compose your info/pop-up box as well as a Preview so you can see what it looks like before copying the Javascript code to your website. Of course you can insert your Autoresponder form in the box, just like a standard pop-up.

There’s no restriction on the number of sites you can use SlideUp FX on, you can even add it to a WordPress blog or anywhere you can insert a Javascript bit of code. Installation is a cinch too, so you can see why I’m recommending it, especially at this Monday Madness Bargain price!

www.monday-madness.com/SlideFX/

A few days ago I was fortunate enough to be a Beta tester of a Graphic Design application specifically aimed at creating website Header images. So what, you might say, there are a number of products like this.

Well two things stood out. One is that this application was from the creators of a favorite website builder software. The other is that this application, now it has launched, is FREE.

I found this very easy to use, thanks to some excellent templates, and within a few minutes I’d cooked up this header…

What do you think?

Now I’m a seasoned Photoshop user, so I’m not going to make this application the mainstay of my website graphic designs. But I will turn to it when I want to knock up a header quickly for, say, a minisite or blog.

If you think this would benefit your site designs just sign up for my newsletter, by entering your name and email in the boxes under my mugshot, and I’ll send you the application page where you can get this graphic design software free.

No catches. It just works.

Occasionally I’m emailed by someone who has downloaded one of my products complaining that the ‘zip file is corrupt’. Now this is always due to an incomplete download. I know that because I always check the zip files myself to make sure they’re intact and I have the same problem myself when downloading files that I have purchased!

So what’s happening with these incomplete downloads? I needed to find out because it causes buyers a little bit of annoyance and frustration that they can’t unzip their purchase straight away, as well as the fact that I’d rather spend my support time helping people in other ways!

The problem seems mainly centred around Internet Explorer. So my first suggestion is ‘try downloading a second time’ and, if that doesn’t work, ‘try using another browser’. One or the other always manages to perform the ‘cure’, but I still wanted to get to the root of the problem.

After some experimentation I found that clearing my Temporary Internet Files cache also appears to ‘solve’ the problem. If you don’t know what that is then you ought to know that browsers keep a cache of all the website pages you have recently visited in a temporary space on your hard drive. This is so that, when you revisit those pages, the page and all the items on it, like images, appear quickly on your screen. Rather than waiting for them to download all over again the browser just retrieves the bits it needs from the cache.

Sometimes this can catch you out because, for example, you might be emailed that a new offer has been placed on a website you’ve been to the day before, but when you return to that site you can’t see it! That’s because your browser has probably loaded the cached page rather than the updated one. If that is the case hit the F5 key, or click the Refresh button in your browser, and it will download the new page.

But back to our download problem. When you are downloading large files, and the files in this week’s Monday Madness offer are around 16 – 18Mb because of all the information I’ve packed in, then your browser cache can fill up before the file has completed downloading. If you watch carefully you’ll see this as the download bar starts off moving across slowly and then suddenly rushes to the end. If you look at the file size using Windows Explorer you’ll see that it is much smaller than we say it should be!

The solution, then, is to clear your browser cache before downloading any large files. I’ve listed below the method of doing this for the most popular browsers. Hopefully you won’t have any more problems downloading after you do this!

If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0…

Launch Internet Explorer.
Go to Tools > Internet Options.
The ‘Internet Options’ dialog box is displayed.
Click the ‘Delete Files’ button.
The ‘Delete Files’ dialog box is displayed.
Check the ‘Delete all offline content’ box.
Click the ‘OK’ button to confirm the deletion of your temporary Internet files.
Click the ‘OK’ button again to close the ‘Internet Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Internet Explorer 7.0…

Launch Internet Explorer.
Go to Tools > Internet Options.
The ‘Internet Options’ dialog box is displayed.
On the ‘General’ tab, click the ‘Delete…’ button under the heading ‘Browsing history’.
The ‘Delete Browsing History’ dialog box is displayed.
Click the ‘Delete files…’ button.
Click the ‘Yes’ button to confirm the deletion of your temporary Internet files.
Click the ‘Close’ button to close the ‘Delete Browsing History’ dialog box.
Click the ‘OK’ button to close the ‘Internet Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Firefox 1.x…

Launch Firefox.
Go to Tools > Options.
The ‘Options’ dialog box is displayed.
Click the ‘Privacy’ button.
From the areas listed, locate ‘Cache’. Click the ‘Clear’ button to the right of ‘Cache’ to delete your temporary Internet files.
Click the ‘OK’ button again to close the ‘Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Firefox 2.x…

Launch Firefox.
Go to Tools > Options.
The ‘Options’ dialog box is displayed.
Select the ‘Privacy’ option.
The ‘Privacy’ options are displayed.
Under the ‘Private Data’ heading, click the ‘Clear Now…’ button.
The ‘Clear Private Data’ dialog box is displayed.
Check option ‘Cache’ and ensure that the other checkboxes are not checked.
Click ‘Clear Private Data Now’ to delete your temporary Internet files.
Click ‘OK’ to close the ‘Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Netscape…

Go to Edit > Preferences.
The ‘Preferences’ dialog box is displayed.
Under the ‘Advanced’ category, click on the ‘Cache’ section.
Click the ‘Clear Disk Cache’ button, then click the ‘OK’ button to confirm the deletion of your temporary Internet files.
Close the ‘Preferences’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.