First Impressions: Veritocracy

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com – Veritocracy learns to find the best perspectives, on the topics that interest you. To get started, just read and vote on the articles you see.
What is Veritocracy?
”The ultimate objective,” says CEO Lee Hoffman, “is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it.”

I was able to snag an invite to the closed Beta of Veritocracy through a write up on TechCrunch. The title of the article, Veritocracy = Digg + Techmeme, was interesting enough for me to try to sign up through my phone while walking into a restaurant to get some lunch. Unfortunately due to the AJAX sign up form(along with validation) that appears after you enter the invite code, it renders off screen on a iPhone 3G. With some guessing and hitting the “Done” button I was still able to sign up even though only half the sign up form was able to be seen. No worries, it’s in Beta…besides who registers for a Beta site from a phone…

Once you get your confirmation email and log into the site you are presented with your personal page, in which you see a brief overview of the Top 2 articles for numerous categories.

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com

What’s appealing is that once you begin to start reading articles and rating them, the system will adjust to your preferences and show you articles according to your ranking of articles. Not sure how long it would take for the algorithm to start sending articles tailored to your interests but it will probably take some dedication from the user. Think of the Digg Recommendation engine as a site of it’s own and you’ll have the quick idea of Veritocracy.

In order for the system to send you specific articles you need to rate a number of articles. Luckily if the articles are submitted via the feed feature and show the full story vs the excerpt you are able to view the articles in a lightbox like feature, which is truly convenient as it allows for quick reading and rating.

Veritocracy.com

Veritocracy.com

The appeal of publishers getting their stories to those readers who would be most interested in the topic is promising, but will take a lot of user contribution. The articles you see when you log in are not to be the most popular articles on the site but the most appealing based on your history of rating articles, submitting and commenting.

7AD26797C8A0A66E12273E38A6A33960

ScatterBrain WordPress Theme

The ScatterBrain WordPress Theme is available for download!

ScatterBrain WordPress Theme: Demo
ScatterBrain WordPress Theme: Download

Theme Features:
-Widget Ready Sidebar (with 3 specific areas)
-2 Column (Main/Sidebar)
-Main Page:
Featured Story
Recent Stories
Archive List
-Built In Plugins:
WP-PageNavi
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
-IE6 Friendly

ScatterBrain Wordpress Theme Ready For Release

ScatterBrain Theme - Wordpress

ScatterBrain Theme - Wordpress

Happy to announce that either late today or within the next few days I will be releasing the ScatterBrain Magazine Style Wordpress Theme. I am part of the Beta group over at ThemeForest.net so I may release it over there for purchase or maybe, just possibly I will give it away on here.

Theme Features Include:
-Widget Ready Sidebar (with 3 specific areas)
-2 Column (Main/Sidebar)
-Main Page:
Featured Story
Recent Stories
Archive List
-Built In Plugins:
WP125 Plugin – Ad Manager
WP-PageNavi
Breadcrumb NavXT
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
-IE6 Friendly

*EDIT:
I am going to pull the WP125 Plugin from the functions.php and just include it in a plugins folder. Adding it to the functions.php added great ad support off the bat but alot of people did not want to serve 125ads. I will leave the addition of 125ads as an option and there is still support for it’s placement in one of the 3 sidebar widgets.
As for the breadcrumbs…I put it in as a feature but due to no immediate use for it, it has been removed from the functions.php and will be included in the plugins folder if anyone wishes to install it.

I need to pull the theme from my testing server, create a sub-domain or just a folder and populate the new WP install with content so that everyone can get a better feel for the theme with images and content included. I will most likely kill those blue category, comment, continue reading buttons that appear after the feature post…not sure. Stay tuned!!

Working With the Infinity WordPress Theme

Infinity WordPress Theme

WordPress Theme Infinity

*NOTE* From the Theme Author: On Aug 18th – Infinity 1.0.1 WordPress Theme has been released, it is highly recommended that you upgrade at your convenience, especially if you’re need WP page template which was missing in previous version. Enjoy.

The Infinity WordPress theme was featured on Smashing Magazine last week and had a great setup for a portfolio style site as the theme uses thumbnails as visual representation for all your posts/pages.

The theme was designed by Zhang Yichi, the creative mind behind Vikiworks Studio from Shanghai, China especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

I decided to visit Zhang Yichi’s site and leave a comment of how great this layout was, didn’t read through the comments but noticed the last two comments on how to add a link to the navigation for a “About” page. I gave my input but after I posted, a reader named “inty” brought up an issue when trying to open any page created when using this theme.

@Gabe Diaz
This method does not work with this theme.
It displays a miniature of the page, not the page.
And you can not click on the thumbnail to see the page …

Let’s fix this…here’s what we’ll do for a workaround:
1. Create an About Page
2. Add a link to your About page to the top navigation
3. Fix the issue of viewing your newly created page
4. No more issue…we hope!!!

Hopefully you already know how to create a WordPress Page, if not go to Write/Pages and start typing away…in this case we are creating an About page so we will label the title “About” and our URL for our page will be http://yoursitename.com/about

Now go into your WordPress Design Tab, select Theme Editor and then make sure you highlight Header(header.php) so that it appears in your edit box.

Scroll down till you see the list below, this is your current menu as written by the theme author.

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<ul class="topnav">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/" title="Return to Frontpage">01. Home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vikiworks.com/" title="About">02. About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vikiworks.com/" title="Contact">03. Contact</a></li>
<li><a href="#main-wrapper" title="Contact">04. Skip to content</a></li>
<li class="rss"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/vikiworks" title="Subscribe RSS">RSS</a></li>
</ul>

Let’s have our menu link appear at the end of the current menu, so what I did was copy one of the previous lines and paste the code after “04. Skip to content” and made the appropriate changes. My new line has bloginfo(‘url’) in the a href because that small line of code will spit out your site url and since we follow it immediately with a /about the link will read http://yoursite.com/about

Wordpress Infinity Theme Navigation

Wordpress Infinity Theme Navigation

You are adding one line for every new page you wish to add to your main navigation, in this case it’s line #6:

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<ul class="topnav">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/" title="Return to Frontpage">01. Home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vikiworks.com/" title="About">02. About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vikiworks.com/" title="Contact">03. Contact</a></li>
<li><a href="#main-wrapper" title="Contact">04. Skip to content</a></li>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about" title="Contact">05. Sample Page</a></li>
<li class="rss"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/vikiworks" title="Subscribe RSS">RSS</a></li>
</ul>

You should see the following:

Wordpress Infinity Theme Navigation

Now we come across the error of when clicking on your newly created menu link, you get a preview thumbnail similar to what it seen on the main page. The reason for this is because there is no page.php file included in this theme and therefore WordPress automatically will use index.php to layout the page. Wordpress uses a specific hierarchy when looking for how to display a page as well as when styling your home page, categories, archive etc. visit the WordPress Template Hierarchy for the complete rundown.

Back to our problem, when you click on your new menu link that is suppose to send you to your About page you will see:

Infinity Theme Navigation

Infinity Theme Navigation

Easy fix…open your single.php file, copy all the code…create a new file, paste all the code from single.php but save this file as page.php and of course upload your new page.php to your wp-content/themes/theme directory.

Wordpress Infinity Theme Single Page

Wordpress Infinity Theme Single Page

Lastly since this is a static page and if you want to remove the meta(comment/date/category) as well as the comment section go into your page.php and remove:

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<div class="postMeta">
<span class="comments"><a href="#comments"><?php comments_number('No comments', '1 comment', '% comments' );?></a></span>
<span class="date"> // <?php the_time('M jS, Y') ?> // <?php the_category(', ') ?></span>
</div>

and

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<?php comments_template(); ?>

If you read the WordPress Template Hierarchy you will notice that WordPress will automatically use page.php before getting to index.php for your page template. Remember though that page.php will be the template used for all the pages you create, if you want custom templates for different pages you can override page.php and index.php by creating a page-name.php file in this case labeled about.php but you must provide the following in your very first lines of your custom page template:

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<?php
/*
Template Name: About
*/
?>

To use a custom page template you just select the name given to your custom page-name.php from a drop down when writing or modifying your page.

Hope this helps!!

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Contact

Questions, inquiries or just feel like getting in touch, feel free to do so: