Category: Work

It’s been a really long time I have been with WordPress 🙂 I installed wordpress first on a separate sub-domain and liked the power and flexibility of WP. Later I moved the installation directly to https://masnun.com . During this period, I have switched from one theme to another. What I have looked for is simplicity and lots of customization. Obviously none of the themes could satisfy me. I have used some really great themes and appreciated their beauty in this post but all these were overkill for me. I am a simple guy and want everything to be as simple and plain as myself.

I have always wanted to do something with WordPress API by adding Google Analytics to WordPress but couldn’t really concentrate out of laziness. After my first WP plugin became a hit one, I decided to dig deeper into the WP API and then Hasin Vai asked me to study on WP Theme Development. I was looking for this. He sent me the book “WordPress 2.8 Theme Design” by Tessa Blakeley Silver. The book was good theoretically but like always, I didn’t like the idea of reading all those texts. I just skimmed through. But it gave me basics and the confidence to do something with WP Theme Development.

Today afternoon, I started building my first WordPress theme and here it is 🙂 I have built it, maSnun.com gets a new look of it’s own! 🙂 This is of course a hacked version of the famous “default” theme — Kubrick 🙂

The theme I have written has no images – plain HTML and CSS. I have willingly removed the sidebar and ability to add widgets. Instead, I have some plans to put in some static contents to fill up that space. This is just a rough version. I am not very good at CSS and styling. I am basically a developer. So my design was simply rubbish! But the positive side is I have learnt the curves of WP theme development, at least the php portion.

The efforts contributed a lot to my HTML and CSS knowledge as well. It was really a cool experience working it out!

I just love WordPress! 😀

Download: http://masnun.googlecode.com/files/masnun.com-2009-the-wp-theme.zip

Well, this came up as a pleasant surprise to me when I logged into my GetAFreeLancer.com account to deactivate the email notification. I have earned $34.2 in August 2009 from affiliate activity. I was puzzled first and then checked out the whole thing. One of the people whom I referred to GAF, created two projects there and I got the commission.

I am quite active on scriptlance and was getting bored with GAF for their very frequent email notification. Finally, I decided to turn off the notifications and deactivate my account. But now that GAF is earning me money from referrals, I am quite happy with them.

The referral links are being spread over the microblogsphere by my twitter bot that collects direct links to available projects on GAF and tweets them. I set up the bot out of experimental purpose but now it looks like it’s gonna be a good money maker as well.

Being inspired by this little surprise , I made some upgrades to the bot. The bot now adds hash sign (#) before important key words to make it search friendly. I also activated a identi.ca and a friendfeed clone of the same bot.

I am thinking of selling this entire bot script at $30. Anyone interested? Bargaining allowed for sure ;-).