I’d like to introduce all of you to a site that my brother Norman Hicks has been developing over the last 5+yrs. He’s got a page rank of 6, comes up #14 on a google search for: book clubs. (how broad of a search is book club anyway!)

Point is, he’s achieved a lot. Here is one comparison for you, have you ever heard of Seth Godin, well he’s also a page rank 6. I will openly admit I didn’t see the significance of page rank until the last year or two, but I can say with out a doubt most of us will never pass a pr4.

I’m mentioning Reader’s Circle because he is in need of admin overhaul. He could use a little more lead in his press… If you are an avid “Reader” or a lover of the printed word take some time and get to know what Reader’s Circle is all about.

Here is the crazy thing, everything that Norman has accomplished has been done without using today’s standard of “Social Networking”. He’s offering a service and a resource that you just can’t find anywhere else.

So, if you’re a Reader this is for you! Go and see for yourself!

This is a call out to all those people out there that are Designing Blog Themes. I need your help and Bloggers want your Designs.

I woke up yesterday morning and thought this would be a cool idea. Normally I wouldn’t bother anyone with stuff like this, but I used groups/wp-themes/ for the url so I figured I should probably tell some people who also like to design WP Themes a lot.

I’ve been picking up so much work lately that I feel like I’m cutting corners on Design, and this is my attempt to farm out Design work based on the clients interests… fingers crossed!

Go to flickr.com/groups/wp-themes/ and read the rules and everything. Join the group and upload some stuff. Hopefully at some point in time we can make this into a great tool for design collaboration and designers meeting designers.

About WP Theme Designs

This is a place for Design. Join the Group, Post your Design, Link back to yourself! This Group is not directly connect to WordPress, were just folks that like to design Themes.

Designers:
Just because you can’t write a web page doesn’t mean you can’t design one. Let see what you got!

Looky Loos
If you see something you like, contact the designer and/or an admin and we’ll see what we can do to get it built.

Our Intent
This group was started with the intent to give Bloggers a place to come check out designs before they’ve been cut into a theme. With that in mind designers can post a Theme and make it available with out having to go through the hassle of creating a full product before they get paid.

As a designer I’m constantly coming up with random ideas that never make it past the psd. I figured there must be other people out there with designs just waiting to be seen. My hope is that Bloggers can come here and find a Design they like with out having to go through the potential weeks of mind-numbing design process, or at least find a designer with the same concepts in mind.

There is no Catch
One of our Goals is to help facilitate the Designer/Client ice breaking by letting Bloggers find Designer through their work rather than hours of google searches and sifting through the repository.

Our over all Goal is to cut out the nuts and bolts of the code and keep the Designs flowing. Keep the Creative People Creative, and Keep the Coding People Coding.

Please, Please, Please!!!
Be Kind, Be Courteous & Be Constructive …or don’t be anything at all.

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Let me know if this turns on any lightbulbs for ya, there is a lot of potential in something like this. All we need is the right catalyst to get it started.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been walking on a very thin sheet of ice. WordPress 2.7 came out and life was wonderful, plugins were getting updated almost daily and things seemed to be just fine. Then out of no where I found a twisted up wrench on the ground, and wouldn’t you know it all the gears to the blogs were sitting right next to it.

Sabotage!!! Some hates me,,, No actually somewhere in the midst of all the updates one of the plugins came back just a little more beefed up than I expected.

Gigpress is pretty awesome plugin with some great options and great widgets. It’s fairly easy to manipulate and the php is easy to understand if you want to mess with the guts. But!!! Gigpress does a lot of work so it comes with a lot of queries, usually not a problem, but the latest version mixed with the Bluehost server didn’t cut it.

Here me out though, Gigpress isn’t all bad. Due to some unfortunate events I moved one of my projects to Dreamhost in hopes of finding some other solutions to my problem. (I’ve been looking for a good reason to check out Dreamhost for a long time, I guess I got my wish.) I did quite a few test and found that regardless of 20+ queries that Gigpress asks for Dreamhost served it up 54 queries in 0.462 seconds, not bad. Bluehost was serving 54 queries in 2.542 seconds… Ouch!!!

So what did I do? I found a different plugin. Might I recommend Gigs Calendar. I stayed away from it for a long time because it’s admin is said to only work with Firefox and Safari. So be sure to read the Other Notes on the plugin from the WP Plugin Directory.

Take my advise, don’t over look your query load just because you’re not seeing a problem… it will come back to bite you…

Try these functions in the footer of your theme, if there not already there.
echo get_num_queries();
timer_stop(1);

I’ve been using these for ever, but I’ve never appreciated them more than I do now