We tested it is an interesting online tool worth trying it. Allows customization of themes without CSS & HTML knowledge. It’s a good start.

You can check online how the page looks by using this tool: http://browsershots.org.

Hope it helps! Happy designing!

The solution that worked and which is in the line of KISS (keep it stupid simple) principle is LULU.COM - Self Publishing.

With this company you simply register on their website and start publishing your works. You upload the documents, for instance a book, design the cover, describe it, etc, then you set the price and publish it.

What you can publish on Lulu.com:

• Books (in the form of: Paperback books, Hardcover books, Comic books, Dissertations, Cookbooks, Product Manuals, Sales proposals, Travel Guides, Presentations, Brochures, Yearbooks, Annual Reports, Textbooks, Training manuals, Course outlines, etc.);
• Photo Creations (in various types and formats like Photo Books, Wedding Books, Calendars, Portfolios, Posters, Artwork, etc)
• Digital Media (like: Images/Graphics, Music, Ringtones, Sounds/Midi Files, Movies/Videos, Fonts, CDs/DVDs, ebooks/Documents)

The website offers specific wizards for each type of publications and assists you step by step in uploading and preparing your creation for sale. You have choices like sell the book only in print or make it available for download also. You can describe it, set keywords, to optimize searches that will lead to your book. Once you are ready, the work appeares in Lulu.com Stores, available for browsing and buying.

That’s it. As simple as easy. Promote the book and adjust until you see sales starting and growing. Lulu takes care of everything from accepting credit cards on your behalf, printing the book or burning the CD on demand, shipping and handling. It’s a one stop self-publishing solution that, until now proved a good way of letting the authors do what they know best: authoring.

What did not work: we’re not based in the US and we wanted our book to be published under the “Published by Lulu” option, getting the ISBN from them. Looks like this is not possible, at least for us, so we got it by ourselves.

What you still have to do: you have to promote the book online so that the page on lulu.com gets visited. Spread the word online. There are numerous tutorials and tips on how to do that out there on the web. You can try googling for tutorials, of course but we will also try to gather some information in this direction in a future post for you.

Happy authoring!! Oh, and please drop us a note if this works or not for you. We want to know.

But when you host the wordpress blog on your own webserver this feature is not available unless you install a Digg plugin and integrate it in your posts.
Steps I took:

• I downloaded the diggIT plugin available from here.
• I unzipped and copied the diggthis.php file in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
• I edited the single.php and page.php files in my template directory (/wp-content/themes/my-template-name-folder/)
• …and pasted this code: <?php if(function_exists(digg_this)) { digg_this(”, ”, ”, ”); } ?> right above the line saying <?php the_content(); ?>
• Then I went to admin interface to Plugins and activated the diggIT plugin.

That’s all. Saved and uploaded the files back to the server and viewed the page.

It worked for me. Hope it helps you too. Happy digging!!

Comments are open for this category and everyone can post a suggestion or help request on a specific topic as comments to the current month’s posting. No registration needed to comment. As simple as easy!

GIVE IT A TRY ON THIS MONTH’s HELP REQUEST BOARD (January 16th 2008).

• How can we or the community around this blog help you ?
• What would you like to read ?
• What would you blog about in our pages ?

…these are our questions to you. What’s your answer ? Go on, comment!

Previous experience with Wordpress was resuming at making small changes to predefined templates and trying new plugins. In the quest of creating GetHelpFor.com blog I wanted to implement a template from scratch. Well, I did not designed it (see the footer credentials), I took it from the Open Source Webdesign website and attempted to adapt it to suit the Wordpress and this particular blog’s needs.

Now the recipe:

• a template from Open Source Webdesign (OSWD) website;
• for basic information I used the “So you want to create WordPress themes huh?” tutorial, found through googling;
• for some tweaking and cool feature usage I tried “WordPress Theme Hacks“
• first I modified the template from OSWD to make it look the way I wanted to;
• and then I used the tutorials listed above to make it work in Wordpress.

All in one, it felt great learning something new (for me) and I want to send a big THANK YOU to all the designers who generously open-sourced some great templates on OSWD and to the authors of the two tutorials. I am sure there are literally hundreds of Wordpress tutorials out there on the web. If you have them, let us know. These two did the initial trick for me.

Everybody blogs these days and there are zilions of useful blogs out there, even more useful than dedicated sites. GetHelpFor.com aims no more than being just another blog with special emphasize on being practical, solving things, sharing experience of doing this and that and enjoying it.

We will however try to categorize things and new categories will be created and even reorganized once we grow. No particular themes are to be approached, but more likely - if the authors or the contributors feel up to the challenge of maintaining a subject in a series of articles, then a category will be allocated.

These being said, let’s get back to doing our normal things and blog about them and have fun all the way. Enjoy your readings and once you are here, we “digitally” invite you to comment and help others.