Category: Reviews

10 free minimalist WordPress themes

In my previous post I wrote about some premium minimalistic themes and had promised that I will make a post about free minimalist wordpress themes next. So here it is, I am making good on my promise.

All of these themes are available as free and open source themes. Some of them surpass several paid themes in terms of looks and typography but I have generally found that they are also a bit minimalist on functionality as compared to the premium themes.

Tonal

Tonal
Tonal from Automattic sports a minimal design with large featured images. It can display images and videos at full width. The menu and widgets are hidden from sight in a pull-down panel. The background adaptation feature on this theme is unique. Select any solid background color and the theme will automatically modify your typography and other elements to preserve readability with the new background color.

Demo & Download

Papaver

papaver1
Papaver is a minimalist theme that puts the focus on your words. With column layout this theme makes your content look like a beautiful book. This theme offers one, two or three column layouts. Unfortunately this also needs the most code editing to make it really work well.

Demo & Download

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Minimalist WordPress themes – Premium version!

Recently I was required to search Minimalist WordPress Themes for a friend of mine. She did not mind it being a paid theme. Here are the ones which I shortlisted for her. These are all premium themes. If you want free themes you will have to wait for the next post where I will post the free themes which were shortlisted.

Purity: Responsive, Clean, Minimal & Bold WP Theme – $55

Purity: Responsive, Clean, Minimal & Bold WP Theme

Purity is a Clean, Minimal and Responsive WordPress Theme with a ‘BOLD’ feel that can be easily used as a personal portfolio or a business website. With an Extensive Documentation and a Demo Content it’s a matter of minutes to set your page up. Theme is fully compatible with the latest WordPress 3.9!

Demo & Download

Maktab – Business theme – $55

Maktab – Clean, Minimal and business theme

Maktab WordPress Theme is a fully responsive HTML5 theme that is ideal for Business, Corporate and Portfolio. Maktab Comes With a lot of features Custom page builder, custom posts, Bootstrap, Retina Icons, Contact Form, Woo Commerce integration, Unlimited Sidebar, and much more to help you create you next project.

Demo & Download

Good Space – $40

Good Space - Responsive Minimal WP Theme

Good Space Good Space is a WordPress theme especially for creative agency. It’s very clean, minimal with modern design. This theme is also has a responsive ability. Moreover, it comes with tons of features. Including our page items that can be managed very easily via our awesome tool, ‘Page Builder’. Admin panel in this theme is a real feature rich. You can also create unlimited sidebar, choosing over 450 fonts or if you want to use your own, we provide a cufon uploader. You can also translate each elements to your language via this admin panel.

Demo & Download

Minimal WordPress Portfolio – $35

Minimal WordPress Portfolio
This is a clean, minimal, timeless design for a wide variety of users. Designed to help you get your site up and running quickly by taking advantage of built in WordPress functionality and avoiding dozens of useless, complex option screens. Leverage the popular JetPack plugin for a custom Carousel, Galleries, Gravatar Hovercards, Contact Forms, Widget Visibility, Custom Add-on CSS, Extra Widgets, Infinite Scroll and more!

Demo & Download

Mokka – Minimal & Elegant WordPress Blog – $45

Mokka - Minimal & Elegant WordPress Blog
Mokka is a responsive, minimalist, flexible and modern WordPress Blog. From a clean white color scheme (with a accent color of choice) & multiple page layouts which all remain sophisticated and simple. Everything definitely brings a certain elegance.

Demo & Download

Casia – Minimal WordPress Theme – $35

Casia - Minimal Clean WordPress Theme
Casia is a clean and responsive one-page creative portfolio that is perfect to promote your work in a very professional and pleasant way. Casia was built in HTML5 and CSS3, with parallax image effects to make it even more appealing and dynamic. It is fully responsive; it looks stunning on all types of screens and devices (desktop, notebook, tablet and mobile). Casia comes in three versions:

Demo & Download

UniSphere Minim – $40

UniSphere Minim Corporate and Portfolio

UniSphere Minim is a WordPress theme designed with corporate businesses in mind. It has a custom CMS integrated into the WordPress administration area that allows you to build a fully functional professional website in minutes. The theme is also well suited for online portfolios and blogs.

Demo & Download

Rayleigh – $45

Rayleigh - A Responsive Minimal Architect Theme

Rayleigh is a minimalistic theme with clean and elegant design, made for architects, designers, and all-around creatives to showcase their work.
Demo & Download

Raiden – $40

Raiden - A Minimal WordPress Theme with Style

Raiden is an elegant personal blogging WordPress theme with refined typography and aesthetics. Offering support for all 10 WordPress Post Formats, this theme is ideal for your personal Blog. Raiden also has an optional View Mode Switcher that optimizes the reading experience according to the lighting conditions. Have a look at the demo!

Demo & Download

eBird widget plugin for WordPress

eBird Widget plugin solves the problem of showing data from eBird on to a website which runs wordpress. First I should elaborate what eBird is – https://ebird.org is a website which has a real-time, online checklist program. It does so by providing Global tools for birders which help in recording birds sightings, keep track of your bird lists, explore dynamic maps and graphs, share your sightings and join the eBird community and some more. The problem is that the sharing part is not too well evolved.

Just released the version 1 eBird widget for wordpress and wrote a post about it on the SANIsoft blog. The plugin uses wp_cron to fetch the data from eBird site in the background, thus the page load times are not affected. Read the complete blog post

Some Premium WooCommerce themes that I like

WooCommerce is a WordPress eCommerce toolkit that helps you setup a WordPress e-com shop. While the plugin itself if free the add-ons to it are priced at various levels. There are several free extensions  for WooCommerce but when it comes to woocommerce themes I just did not like any. After some searching I found a few premium themes which I have recently referred to a client.

The Builder – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes

The Builder is a Premium WordPress theme that comes with massive and flexible features. Focused on bringing easiest system for user to build and modify their own site, both on content and layout/design! Create an eCommerce, business or personal site with your own style!

Demo & Download

KALLYAS – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes
Kallyas is an ultra-premium, highly-responsive WordPress Theme built for today websites. It’s super flexible, clean design (and code), without no modesty, one of the … without no modesty, one of the most complete theme ever created.

Demo & Download

Mearishop – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes

MeariShop is a clean and flexible WordPress theme that utilises the powerful Woo Commerce plugins to create a versatile WordPress-powered shop, with unlimited layout options and unlimited skins. MeariShopis powered by the advanced Hana Panel, which provides tons of options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme – it is well suited for both beginners with no coding knowledge and developers.

Demo & Download

Xing – $55

WooCommerce Premium Theme

Xing is a clean and modern WordPress theme designed for corporate websites and e-commerce ventures. The theme can be used for small to large business setups, online shopping stores, personal portfolio, or as an editorial blog. Supported with custom templates, widgets, short codes, and customization options; the theme can be a suitable choice for your business/ecommerce projects.

Demo & Download

Shoppica – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes

Shoppica WP is a guarantee for a professional online presence. The clean and modern look allows you to use the theme for every kind of online shop. In combination with the powerful option to change the color of all elements, you will be given the possibility to make an unique e-commerce website that stands out of the crowd!

Demo & Download

Reset/Restart a frozen Kindle

A quick note to myself, while I still recover from my first Kindle Krash

  • Slide and hold the power switch for at least 15 seconds, this is way past when the green light on the power switch  goes off indicating that the Kindle has been turned off
  • Release the switch
  • Slide the power switch again – nothing will happen immediately
  • Wait for 30 to 40 seconds – it reboots

And while you are waiting for your Kindle to reboot take a look at some of the keyboard shortcuts

500px is not Flickr

500px - your main photostream page
500px - your main photo-stream page

Suddenly everyone and their cousin is talking about a Flickr alternative that is attracting users in large numbers – 500px, oh! well, 45k may be large for some 😉 I have been putting my digital photographs online since past 10+ years and have moved from uploading them to my own personal site, to flickr and then joining the 500px bandwagon recently.

My first reaction to 500px was indeed WOW! this is so much better. After using the app for a while the WOWness wore down a bit, some what like the second year of a marriage, I began to notice the shortcomings. Not wanting to get too frustrated I decided to blog the good and the bad and keep using the site.  May be I will come back to review this post a year later.

500px is not Flickr – the Good

  • The user experience on first flush is indeed very nice. The large square thumbnails with semi-transparent caption overlays are definitely how a photo website should be.
  • The tabbed interface for Photos, Activities, Friends etc is clutter free and intuitive.
  • The main photo display page gives a good 900px wide display which is much needed to appreciate a photo.
  • Below the main photo display is a filmstrip display of recommended photos – great for discovering photos
  • The concept of Blog and Wall integrated into a photo sharing  site is indeed useful and nice.
  • The editorial picks ensure that there is a human curating the choicest of the photos for you.
  • You have an easy to remember URL for your portfolio with your user name  eg: mine is https://500px.com/tariquesani
  • The portfolios can be themed and are separate from your photostream. Portfolio also has sections for Biography and Contact – Add to that the fact you can point your own domain to your portfolio and you get a ready made website solution for photographers who are web challenged.

500px is not Flickr – the bad

  • No public API!!! I could not find any mention of any API, no API means no upload app for any device, no possibility to create mashups or easy way to integrate your pics in other places. Yes the sharing to Facebook, Twitter etc is there but can I make a plugin for my favorite CMS? No! I may be wrong here, so if someone knows where the API is let me know.
  • No Geo-location integration – yes that map with red dot thingie.
  • No way to view extended EXIF info – these two points are very important for me.
  • No HTML in description, URLs in descriptions do not become hyperlinks automatically.
  • No way easy to see pictures in various sizes – I did discover a tedious work around though. If the photo url is https://500px.com/photo/799387 then you can view the various size images at https://photos.500px.com/799387/1, https://photos.500px.com/799387/2, https://photos.500px.com/799387/3, https://photos.500px.com/799387/4 and https://photos.500px.com/799387/5 –  Update: No longer works but is available thru an API call.
  • No concept of permissions – everything is public by default.
  • No way to declare licenses for your pictures – I like to explicitly indicate that my pictures are under a creative commons license.
  • There are categories but no concept of groups. Special interest groups are needed to popularize your pictures to your intended audience and creating communities.

I guess I should leave the good and the bad equally balanced at eight points each.  In summary a lot of effort has gone into the UX and UI part of the app now what we need to see is more features. Also I do wonder how things will scale up with increasing user traffic. Given the fact that they have received a funding I do hope to see accelerated rate of development. Plus at least at this point the developers appear to be communicating with their users.

P.S. That there are better photos at 500px as compared to Flickr will soon become moot as more and more users join in.

Update: An API was launched Mid Aug 2011 and you can get the details at https://developers.500px.com/

750words.com – Stream your consciousness

750words.com - stats for the day
750words.com - stats for the day

For past couple of months I have been undergoing a writing crisis of sorts. Reviving this journal was a part of the plan to over come the writers block. The plan did work for a while and then I slipped up again. I don’t really know if the thing I call a ‘block’ is real or just part laziness and part twitter effect, but I would like to put the blame squarely on twitter because I do manage to write about 3000 words during the week in tweets. However I still struggle to come up with a decent blog post about anything. As I tweeted Twitter killed the blogging star! but thanks to twitter I came across 750words.com! Continue reading 750words.com – Stream your consciousness

The boy who harnessed the wind – A Review

The boy who harnessed the wind

A thought that struck my mind as I was finishing this book was – How would the story of Wright brothers and their One day at Kitty Hawk be if they lived in an era with internet?

I read the Wright brothers story when I was in school and at that time all I was interested in was the journey of scientific discovery. The human part or the adversities faced by the brothers were totally lost on me. Now thirty years later I had in my hand a book which I felt was similar in spirit and I found myself lingering more around the parts where the life in the African village has been described – that is where the true story lies indeed.

The book tells the story of  William Kamkwamba, a poor but clever boy in Malawi Africa . The story is very recent and all the incidents depicted happened in last 9 years, in fact I remember reading the blog post which made William famous.

The book can be divided in three parts . The first part paints the background of the canvas in which the story is set. Talking about Malawi, a small poor country where most people live as subsistence farmers, a race of people who have not changed for scores of years, about their lack of basic health care, superstition, a brutal incompetent government,  lack of free public education, dangers of from animals and famine! In the year 2001 the maize crops failed leading to a devastating famine. The simple but vivid narrative of the hardships faced by the people during the famine is gut wrenching. The famine sets the scene for the second part of the story.

This second part is the story of William’s technological triumph. William is forced to drop out of the school because, after the famine, his parents cannot afford to send him to school. Deeply disappointed at this set back he does not give up. Always fascinated by mechanical things Willaim is particularly enamored by the dynamo of the bicycle, with very little theoretical knowledge and zero guidance he finds out that by putting the wires from the dynamo into the AC socket of a radio and turning the wheels you can get the radio to play. In the local library he finds a book called “Using Energy” which has pictures of windmills. The story continues on about how he constructs a windmill out of junk parts, a bicycle frame and flattened PVC pipe which can finally turn a dynamo and power a couple of light bulbs in his poor home. Charge mobile phones for people (in turn earn him some money) Interwoven in this in second part is a heroic story about human perseverance and brotherhood. William did not give up despite being ridiculed and not having proper tools just drove him to innovate. A heated wire served as a soldering iron, money from a friend served to buy a few parts – too many to enumerate here….

The third part is about the reward of being discovered by the world and of course the power of internet. Mike McKay wrote a blog entry about the Malawian Windmill which ultimately led to William being  invited to speak about it in TED Global. It is amazing to read how a boy who had never stepped out of his village, never seen a laptop let alone internet traveled across the globe, thanks to generous sponsorships and the goodness of human kind.

After I finished the book, I started drawing parallels to the situations in the book closer home – specifically Melghat- barely 350km from Nagpur, 90% of the children are suffering from some grade of malnutrition. I had visited Malura there were Mobile phones but no electricity to charge them. They had a school but no examination center.

On a broader scale there is no dearth of small innovators in India, in fact the Discovery Channel ran a complete series on them but what really became of them? Have they been relegated to just youtube videos? May be I am being a bit pessimistic here. India is huge and things consequently are slower to change but things do change….

My top 10 iPad gripes

  1. It is heavy and does not lend itself well to being held in a single hand due to the smooth metal back – I remedied this by ordering a silicon rubber sleeve.
  2. Safari for iPad does not offer search within a page. This can also be remedied by following the instructions here
  3. Screen should have been widescreen a 16:10 ratio is pretty much it these days. The widescreen option in the setting sucks!
  4. The look of apps like the address book, calendar and iBook is cheesy and not customizable
  5. Takes longer than expected to charge but on the flip side has a long battery life
  6. The built in Photo frame application is so basic that it will not even allow to set time between photos. Tapping will pause the slideshow but that is it!
  7. No printer support even in iPhone OS4 Will have to wait for iPhone OS4 for printer support (my accountant needs printed receipts of all purchases)
  8. Missing apps – Clock, Calculator, Weather, Stocks, I know that substitutes are available for free or very cheap but still….

OK! that is a list of just 8 and that said I absolutely love using my iPad. I use it most for reading, browsing Flickr and at times for viewing video using Air Video. Apple in past has heard its consumers so hopefully most of my gripes will not be there in next versions of the apps. The one which I am really doubtful about is getting a widescreen iPad but hey! one can always wish…..

I have listed my gripes – what are yours gripes about the iPad?

Sony Walkman W202 Review

Sony Walkman W202
Sony Walkman W202

The reason I had stopped listening to music while at work was

  • My work area is in an open place
  • I hate the tangle of wires associated with most MP3 player headsets

Continue Reading the review