We're looking for a WordPress designer to make a wicked theme for TalkAndroid.

Here's what we need:

1. A really standout, but clean design suitable for a content blog
2. Cool logo
3. Android themed.
4. I need this made as an actual "theme" for WordPress (eg all the files necessary in the themes folder), not just a static mockup
5. Gotta have room for top of fold 728x90, 300x250, 160x600, and other ad spots
6. It's got to look GREAT compared to other Android blogs.

If you have samples of past work just link me to it, or email me via my contact form, or tweet @howard_ha

I'm testing the OpenX hosted solution out right now on a site with some decent ad impression requirements, and so far I'm not convinced its a viable alternative to Google's Admanager (now known as Doubleclick for publishers).

We're only using one single position right now, a custom size, delivering about 135k impressions a day (all told the site has many positions that require an aggregate total of over a million ad impressions a day), and I'm noticing that delivery is not always smooth.  Sometimes I get broken ads, sometimes the space is empty.  This is not a user error, it is definitely an unreliable ad delivery situation.

What's worse, is that the stats system is constantly failing to load, with dreaded server errors.  In the past 3 days I've been trying to access stats with only 10% of my attempts working.  This from a company set to expand to Japan today?  Their support forums have users who are complaining about problems with no one responding.

Truly I want OpenX to succeed, the PhpAds platform it evolved from has been in use for over a decade on many sites, including some of my own.  However, right now the service has left alot to be desired in terms of reliability - I can't get stats to work on a measly 135k impressions a day, what happens if I need to deliver a million, or 2 million impressions a day?  Doubleclick for publishers is EASILY handling this volume right now with no problems for me.


Has anyone else got some positive things to say about the OpenX hosted solution?

Apparently Google is working on yet another social network to compete against Facebook.  Previous attempts with Orkut and Buzz failed to gain any significant traction and Facebook continues to make strategic decisions that entrench it more and more as a power to be reckoned with.  Some are as bold as to say that Search is "over" and social marketing and realtime search (a la Twitter) are the new paradigms moving forward.

I think one reason Google has failed to really break into this space so far has to do with both Facebook's critical mass and Google's lack of a coordinated push into the space (or maybe it was never a priority and they haven't even really tried yet :P).  Facebook is a powerful social platform based on relationships, and Google is a collection of many services, some which enable collaboration, but lack a compelling personal and  friendship element.

Google still has a very strong chance to turn it around and create a significant social network if it can come up with a coordinated strategy.   There are still a number of users who are unwilling or unable to use Facebook, and there are a number of users who are just hanging on the edge, willing to try something else.  If Google made the perfect alternative with just the right balance of social and networking features, it might turn out to surprise the naysayers.

Consider the following things Google can draw upon:

1. A massive network of Android devices whose owners are constantly in touch with friends and relatives, a platform growing by 1.4million devices a week
2. a huge number of Gmail users who already manage contacts, both personal and business
3. a collaborative document system
4. an absolutely mammoth user reach via Google search and Adsense, that happens to also give them huge profiling capabilities of a large proportion of web users.
5. A news platform in Google News that is still highly sought after
6. a HUGE network of publishers and sites that run Adsense and already rely on Google for traffic, every single such publisher already has a Google account.
7. Arguably the defacto destination for public video content on the web.

The basic picture I'm seeing is that Google's got a tremendously broad reach as far as users who already have Google accounts, and this may allow them to overcome the dreaded registration barrier to entry other networks are faced with.

How Google can drive adoption:

• How easily could Google convince websites to adopt their own variant of "Google Connect"?  As a web publisher myself, I'd support it if it was made properly.
• How easily can Google encourage "Google Like" buttons?  Depending on what they do, it can happen overnight (what if Google Like buttons influenced SERPs , for instance, even at some miniscule level balanced for gaming, who could risk not using them?)
• What would happen if the social networking capabilities that Google offers spanned across all their properties to some degree (and yet remains non-invasive)?

In fact, if done right, Google can have its users using its social network without them even really thinking of it as a social network.  Maybe they don't even need to make a social network, but instead keep integrating and coordinating deeper social features into their entire portfolio of services.  I'm not arguing that Google's social network is the next big thing to happen in social networking.  I'm saying Google has a lot they can draw upon to make it succeed where others may not.  Unfortunately, as I heard repeated by many recently at GrowConf 2010, success is sometimes a mix of doing all the right things and just plain having a large dose of dumb luck.

Sometime in 2008, around Wordpress 2.6 or so, the Wordpress team made an update to "fix" a bug with how "Read More" works in the RSS feeds.  Apparently the "Read More" feature was not intended to work in RSS feeds when you chose to show full posts in feeds (Settings > Reading > For each article in a feed, show > Full text).  Some users seemed to really like this "fix" but for TalkAndroid it was a nuissance because sites were using our RSS feed to reproduce our entire content on their own pages and the "Read More" tag was useful for splitting up our more original content.


After many hours of tooling around I found a reference to Customizing Read More and this handy post here which mentions enabling the "Read More" on pages aside from the main page of your blog.  Even those two pages were not enough.  I had to track down exactly where the RSS pages were and then hack them specifically to make it work.  Here's how to do it:

1. Look for the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php and wp-includes/feed-rss.php scripts in your Wordpress folder
2. Look for code that looks like "<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></content:encoded>" and replace it with: "<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('<strong>Read More...</strong>'); ?>]]></content:encoded>"
3. Add <?php $more = false; ?> right before the content encode portion of the RSS files.  This part is necessary because the the_post() function sets $more to 1 and this prevents the Read More from working.

The final code looks something like this:

Twitterfeed is a handy RSS to Twitter service that reads your blog's RSS feed and submits it to Twitter and Facebook.  We were using it on OverclockersClub to sync up our news with our Facebook fanpage and Twitter account, but I was less than thrilled with its performance.

If you have a Wordpress blog and use Twitterfeed Stop Now! Here's Why:

Reliability

Several times over the summer we had "feed" outtages where users complained that Twitter and/or the Facebook updates stopped.  Both times turned out to be Twitterfeed related.  The problem with Twitterfeed is that if you're not watching your feeds you won't know you had any problems until someone tells you.  Twitterfeed may have solved these outtages, but if it does strike again when will you know?  It only checks every 30 minutes at best for your feeds so you won't know for up to 30 minutes whether the updates will even happen.

Speed

Twitterfeed's highest speed setting is to check your feeds every 30 minutes.  If you're competing against other bloggers and sites,  30 minutes is a huge lag between when you write something and when your Twitter followers and Facebook fans get the news. 

Alternatives:

On TalkAndroid we never used Twitterfeed at all, instead we opted to go with a plugin called WP to Twitter for our tweets.  WP to Twitter sends the tweets the moment you publish a post, and also supports your Twitter API key if you've got one.  If it fails to tweet you'll also know right away because you get an error box in your Wordpress admin interface.  That solves both of the problems I have with Twitterfeed right there.

For our Facebook page we're using Steve Atty's excellent Wordbooker plugin.  It too posts instantly to your Facebook page or Facebook Wall.  It's a bit tricky to setup and might take some patience, but Steve is amazingly responsive on his support forum on Facebook.


If you run a Wordpress site and are using Twitterfeed, dlvr.it or another such service try the above two alternatives.  If you're running custom blog software I strongly suggest rolling your own API calls to Twitter and Facebook, which lets you brand yourself too by linking to your site instead of another service with each Tweet/FB post.


Addendum:

OverclockersClub is a custom CMS so we can't use these plugins.  We do use dlvr.it now, but ultimately a custom system to send the tweets and FB page shares via official APIs would be the "ideal" solution.

In Invision Power Board 2 you could hide text in their templates by preventing it from showing to logged in users.  The code looked like this:

<if="$this->ipsclass->member['id'] == 0">
Hello, guest
</if>

In IPB3 templates this didn't work at all.  Instead, to limit your code to show only to guests and not to registered users use the following:

<if test="$this->memberData['member_id'] == 0">
Hello, guest
</if>