Develop Wordpress themes locally on your Mac

MAMP - Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, and PHPWhen it comes to designing and developing your own custom Wordpress theme it can be a little tricky. You have to learn how the Wordpress theme files work, while trying to make your vision of your site come to fruition. But instead of installing Wordpress on your live site and then rushing to get your design completed, try installing Wordpress locally.

By installing Wordpress locally on your computer you are able to spend as much time as you want designing, developing and tweaking your theme without the worry of breaking your live site or having visitors see a half completed design.

And the best part is that installing Wordpress locally is actually very easy to do on a Mac running OS X 10.4.x or later, and you don’t need any programming skills.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now you can brighten up your Gmail with themes

Gmail Theme Tea HouseI use Gmail for my personal email, and I have it open every day. I’ve found it to be the best web based email around, the spam filtering is great and it has a nice, easy to use interface and functionality.

A few days ago when I logged into my Gmail like I do every morning I saw a little notice at the top announcing that there are now Gmail themes that I can use. Cool! So of course I tried them all, there are a number that are just different colour combinations of the standard Gmail layout. There are also a few more fun and funky ones.

Read the rest of this entry »