I hate sifting through hundreds of sites to find just one decent wordpress theme. So I have collected a the list of beautiful, optimizeable! Just for these themes I made up a word :). Click the image for the download.
I also recommend not futzing with the images on the site unless you know graphics well, or try to talk to someone you know who is very good at graphics. I’ve gone to many websites where I know the theme it was originally beautiful and someone then took a hacksaw too it adding fonts that do not match, or just look childish. So even the smallest things make a big impact. I immediately left because I feel if they think that is a good representation of their content then their content must be as childish or poor. When in doubt go plain! I’d rather goto a website with a layout that is dull then one that is offensively ugly :\

For those who like to keep daily tabs on their status, linkbacks, whois and alexa rank there is a nifty little plugin created by the FireFox people. It’s created for FireFox and Mozilla for now, but I’m sure they will create something for IE for our non FireFox users.
It looks like this:

For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.

After installing it and feeling bad about my dismal page rank, it really motivated me to do something about it even more so. If you’re like me with 0 as your page rank because you’re the new kid on the black it is also a great motivational tool!

DOWNLOAD IT HERE!

Now for the IE Users there is an Alexa tool bar not as discrete as this nor does it include the page rank. Alexa Toolbar

I’ve decided to write a litte expose on the company that hosts my website (E-Starr) because it really is that good.

Their smallest shared package offers 200mb space and 8,000mb bandwidth for $5 per month (or $60/yr) and you can get a free domain with any yearly hosting purchase. If you’re looking for something with multiple accounts, their reseller packages start as low as $15 per month ($180/yr) with 1500mb space and 30,000mb bandwidth. That free domain thing goes for resellers, too.

The best thing about E-Starr is that you’re guaranteed there will be no oversold servers, like those places that give you 20GB space for $5-10 a month. That could barely make a server bill. The 24 hour service is great and you don’t have multiple people answering your tickets asking the same questions the previous techs did. You get one person who sticks with you until your issue is resolved. The phone support actually connects you to a human being as well, without having to know some secret EXT number to get to them. My favorite part about E-Starr is the personal service they provide to not just me, but all clients; and knowing that I will be treat just as well as the larger clients.

For my readers here who are ChaCha users or guides, You will notice there is a lot of downtime. From whats being said they are doing work on the servers. I personally thing someone pressed a wrong button. :) This is the first time I’ve experienced problems since I joined on the 2/13/07 and I’ve made over 70 dollars with them in my spare time. The downtime is now costing me money! I love to do my searches and I keep a weekly goal of how much I am going to make and now I cannot do that, as it takes me 7 minutes to return 1 result.
The forum members have not been helpful in the least about when this will be resolved and I am not happy. This is my first complaint about chacha as of yet. I had 2 people I was sponsoring as guides and both are completely turned off. This is very upsetting to me.