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My next offering into the world of Wordpress themes, Paintbrush 1.0, is a theme with an exceptional color scheme.

There’s something I’ve always liked about blue and green together. And to be able to mix that with with art and painting, makes it that much better. It has great appeal!

Features include:

• Two Column
• Widget Ready
• CSS Valid

Preview or Download.

Recently, while taking part in the Instigator Blog’s Ultimate Guide to Productivity, I introduced a new way to organize your desktop to make your most often used files and folders more accessible. I started thinking about the fact that not every one who uses a computer knows how to make that background image, so perhaps offering a few of them for download would be a good idea. Then, AgentSully left a comment with that same thought, which prompted me to go ahead with the idea. Not only that, but I’ve also come up with a way to use this method of organization and still enjoy a desktop picture! The only thing is, each picture has to be customized. So now I have several variations available for download on my new desktops page. If these do well, I will offer more in the future.

Enjoy!

To create my first theme that I felt was “public release” worthy, I slaved over the details. The design is the opposite of what I’m using here on my site - It’s very conservative and “earthy”. No bright colors or rounded corners will be found here.

Coffee Break is a fixed-width layout. It’s also CSS valid, and widget ready. One of the things I really like is how the theme handles images. As most of you know, I’m a fan of the Cutline theme - more for it’s robust mark-up than for the default design. As Cutline has classes assigned to images, I’ve included that same idea in Coffee Break to make positioning an image in your post much easier. Special thanks to Small Potato at WPDesigner.com for his great tutorial which answered several questions I had.

I hope you guys like it.

Preview or Download.

I mentioned in a post not long ago, that I had registered in a contest to win my very own copy of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. I’m happy to report that I was chosen as the winner!

Here’s a video of the official drawing:

Thanks to Jonathan-C. Phillips of SmartWealthyRich.com for having the contest……and for drawing my name!

I’m a little late getting in on the Productivity Tips submission at the Instigator Blog, but better late than never.

When I was thinking of ways to be more productive, I didn’t want to dwell on the typical “meditate and visualize” advice. I wanted to come up with and share something unique. Not only that, but I wanted to be as specific as possible. So, I decided to focus on computer work, since I love doing anything on the computer.

The Desktop

First of all, most people completely waste their desktop. There are neat little widgets and gadgets that you can put on it, and those can be helpful in some ways I suppose. I used to have the “Konfabulator Widgets” on my desktop before they were “Yahoo Widgets”. Anyway, when I’m sitting at the computer, the only time I minimize my windows and actually see the desktop is when I’m looking for something…….whether it be an application icon or a file. No matter how nice the photo I’m using, I really don’t look at it that much. This is the typical Windows XP desktop:

Why waste all that space on some picture you never really look at, and keep all your files in your Documents folder? Why not make everything more accessible? OK, maybe not everything, but the files and apps that you use most often. I’ve come up with a solution for this that makes everything much easier and quicker to get to. To my knowledge, this idea is original…….

How do you separate everything out like that? Well, I just created an image, using my favorite photo editor, for my desktop and separated it in six color-coded sections. Then I labeled each section with text. The image should be the same size as the screen resolution you use on your desktop. My screen resolution is set at 1280 x 1024, so that’s the size of my desktop image. Once the image is made and is set as your desktop background, just drag the icons and files on your desktop to the section you want them in.

So what are your best productivity tips? This is a meme that may actually give some great advice. Ben has already had well over 100 submissions on this project, so there are some great tips. Check it out at the Instigator Blog.

I’ve noticed over the past couple of years, I’ve bought several computer related books. Several of them I’ve used quite a bit, while others were not used very much at all. One of the newest ones I have is called CSS Mastery. I bought this book after it was recommended by ClarkeW. Books like these are not really the type of book you just sit down and read, or at least, not for me. I use this type of book more for reference than anything. In my opinion, this is probably the best book I’ve seen on CSS.

Back about a year ago, I picked up a book called PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites. This one is a very useful book I think, yet I admittedly haven’t spent the time going through it that I should have. I still would like to as time permits. This is a subject that I would like to become a little more skilled in dealing with. Tons of web applications and CMS platforms are built around MySQL databases, Wordpress and a whole variety of others.

When I started using Wordpress, like most people, I learned a lot about the platform by using it and by reading about it’s capabilities on the Wordpress website. Then, this book called Wordpress 2 came out, and I felt the need to pick it up. What this book is not, is information on the more complex subjects surrounding Wordpress, as I had hoped. Instead, it’s a guide for beginners. You would think I had picked up on that by the “Visual Quickstart Guide” part of the title…….go figure. Anyway, I’m sure it’s great for someone completely unfamiliar with Wordpress or blogging in general, but for someone who already knows the basics, well, this probably won’t be very useful as it hasn’t been for me.

Before I became familiar with the whole “blog” and CMS phenomenon, I bought a book called Creating Web Sites Bible. At the time, my phocus was on building an e-commerce site, and I was looking for the most inexpensive way to run an online store. I didn’t want to purchase an “e-commerce package” from a web host because of the expense. I bought this book and hoped it would give me a little more info than it did. I’ve used the book as a reference point quite a few times since then, so it’s great for that. What I really don’t like about a book like this is, there’s way too much filler material in my opinion. I don’t need this book to lead me through all the reasons I might want a website, etc. I already had a good idea of that when I shelled out approximately $30 for this book.

So out of the few books I listed here, I probably get the most use out of the CSS Mastery book. The others, well not that much. I plan to get more use out of the PHP and MySQL book. It’s not the books fault I haven’t spent the time to learn it. I have several others I didn’t list here that haven’t been very useful at all. So is it worth it to buy these books? Most computer books are expensive. It’s cheaper if you buy online, but you don’t have the benefit of flipping through them first to see if they are what you’re looking for. Out of the ones I’ve bought, I’ve come to the conclusion that most have been a waste of money.