I liked the look and functionality of this theme and it wasn’t too over-the-top news-ish, but still has some of the cool slider features and sidebar & footer widget areas. Normally the InReview theme would be used for product reviews and ratings – there’s a full rating system for editors to rate product features and for visitors to provide their own ratings. It’s a great theme and maybe I’ll find a use for it on another site… Be sure to check out Elegant Themes for a ton of other great themes w/ one low price to use any/all of them!

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the new theme! As I mentioned in my previous post, I have some new post ideas in the works and should be able to get some new content published in the very near future.

So, let me know what you think of the new look for drivelocity.com!

Anyhow, I’m working on implementing a new theme and will try to revive drivelocity from the dead. Since many things have changed over the past year, some of which involve old topics, I have some new post ideas ready to go once the new theme is ready.

The current theme, while whimsical and suitable for this site, is quite limited as far as customizing and using widgets. I’m pretty excited about that. Stay tuned…

Many thanks to my host, ASmallOrange for helping me out!

UPDATE:

It appears that it may actually have been a problem with a plugin, rather than the .htaccess file. At this time, all plugins are deactivated, so you may see some errors. I’ll keep an eye on it for a couple days before turning plugins back on to make sure that is, in fact, the case.

The only real issue I’ve come across is with the Tabbed Widgets Plugin. The one site I use it on currently only displays one of the four tabs that I have set to display. So, it looks like I may need to disable it until it’s upgraded to work correctly with WordPress 2.8. Others are experiencing similar problems – the author is aware of the problem and says that a new version is in the works.

I came across the Tabbed Widgets plugin, which allows you to add a widget to your sidebar and set that widget to have tabs or accordion style links that expand to show other widgets. For example, on the other blog, I had the Recent Posts and Tag Cloud widgets enabled on the sidebar, but also wanted Recent Comments and to reduce the space that they were taking up. Tabbed Widgets allowed me to put those three widgets into one, like you see at the top of the right sidebar on this site.

I have decided to remove their banner from drivelocity.com for two reasons:

First, it slowed down the load time of my site to unacceptable levels. Many times the page would just hang at that banner location and not continue loading the rest of the sidebar for almost a minute, or more! (I didn’t actually time it)

Second, I had nothing to show for it. Sure, I didn’t give it much time and it’s possible that I missed something in the Publishers section that would either help me generate revenue or attract more page views. But, I had neither. Their site claims a “guaranteed ad inventory from the very start.” I never saw any advertisers’ ads on drivelocity.com.

So that, coupled with the load time issues, made this a failed experiment and am unable to recommend PerformancingAds to anyone. It’s unfortunate. I had read some good things about them. That’s why I gave them a try. But there really is no point in slowing down my site and having nothing to show for it.

Please note that they do have an affiliate program, which I used to link to their site in a previous post about advertising options; however, I made a point not to link to them in this one.

If this helps anyone else out there, I’m glad. If anyone has had a different experience, please feel free to share in the comments!

It’s not a bad starting point, but moving beyond that with a newer site can be difficult. I am now interested in obtaining more quality backlinks, so if you have a similar page rank and would like to exchange blogroll links, please let me know.

Here’s a great graphic from Smashing Magazine to explain Page Rank:

This is going to take some getting used to… the Admin dashboard is completely different, as is the Admin navigation. Visitors shouldn’t notice anything different until, maybe, I get the nested comments working, if it’s not already. The navigation, which used to be entirely on the top, is not mostly on the left sidebar…

Again, please let me know if you come across any issues. Thanks!

So, here is the list, in no particular order, though I did place the newer ones at the top.

1. Akismet – This comment spam prevention plugin, as you probably know, comes pre-installed with WordPress. The hangup for me in activating it is that you need a WordPress API key to use it. To get that, all you need to do is create an account on WordPress.com. If you have an account, you can find it in your Profile. I activated it yesterday and it’s already started blocking spam comments
2. Top Commentators Widget – This is becoming one of my favorite plugins. Top Commentators adds a widget to your sidebar that lists the visitors who have commented the most in whatever duration you select. You can also check here for a list of sites, sorted by PR, who use this plugin. By commenting on these sites, you can wind up on their front page with a link back to your site.
3. CommentLuv – This plugin is showing up more frequently as it’s a good way to provide value to people commenting on your blog. When a visitor comments, CommentLuv can pick up the last post(s) on their blog and provide a secondary link directly to that post. I am grateful for visitors who take the time to comment and this is a way to show my appreciation.
4. DoFollow – WordPress has NoFollow set by default and this plugin remedies that by removing it and allowing search engines to follow links in comments left by visitors. You’ll also notice that I’ve added a “U Comment I Follow” image to the left sidebar to show visitors that there is added benefit to posting comments on drivelocity.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin creates that sitemap and will help the top search engines index your blog better. While it is called Google XML Sitemaps, the XML-sitemap format was adopted by Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.
6. Slashdigglicious – See the cute little icons below each blog entry? Those, if you’re not aware, are social bookmarking links to help promote the site. If you find something interesting, please click the icons and vote/add for that entry.
7. Viper’s Video Quicktags – This plugin easily lets me embed videos from YouTube, Google, etc. into my blog posts. Without this, I could only post links and that’s just not very fancy… To use it, you just click a button in the WYSIWYG editor and paste in the URL.
8. WP-ContactForm – I don’t like putting my email address out there for all the email address harvesting bots to come by and pick up, and it has built in security. Plus a contact form built into the site makes it easier for people to email you.
9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This is a pretty impressive plugin that can crawl your post titles, content and tags and provide a list of related topics (if any) below each post. It can help people find other posts that are not otherwise easily found.
10. wp-cache – I’ve just installed this plugin, but I don’t need it just yet. If a post ever ends up on slashdot or digg, it will help to keep the site up. I hope. If you’re using shared hosting, there may be issues with symbolic links.