Lets hope that 2010 is a good year for everybody wherever they are.

I hope everybody finds a little peace and happiness

TABLOID is a very simple 2 column template intended to look a bit like a red top newspaper.

Shades of Grey (Take 2) is 3 column template based on the theme that you see here on Webgazette.co.uk.

Back to work…

I’m going to work through these over the next few weeks and release them here on my Free Website Templates page.

More news later.

Shades4TAMB is a light, two column theme with a sidebar on the right and a horizontal menu for pages.

The theme is based on the Grigio Template and very similar to the current theme you can see in use here on Webgazette.co.uk.

More information, demo and download can be found here.

The Webgazette theme is now available. More details on the Webgazette Theme page. Get it while it’s hot

I’d heard that things had moved along to the stage where WordPress themes had become very complicated and more about programming than design, but I’m glad to say, that while some things have changed, they haven’t changed that much.

Once of the most obvious changes is the use of phpDocumentor tags in the default and classic themes. I’m not sure why WordPress have started to use these tags in the themes. I haven’t been able to find any official explanation about why they are being used. Maybe it’s just good practice and part of a wider WordPress code documentation project?

These tags aren’t that significant as far a creating themes are concerned. It has to be borne in mind that these are just comments at the beginning of the file which can be used by phpDocumentor for creating documentation for php projects.

I found these quite useful and have adopted them myself and used more tags to record more details about the theme such as author, version and what needs doing etc. Most WordPress files already have comments at the beginning and indeed throughout the file anyway.

Otherwise things don’t seem to have changed that much and it’s business as usual.

I’ve decided to call it “Webgazette” as it was originally used here on Webgazette.co.uk. It’s a good looking theme and I’m sure that many people will want to download it. I’m not making any promises as to when it is likely to be released, as it needs a bit of tidying up and refinement, but hopefully it’ll not take too long to get knocked into shape. It’s also been a while since I worked with WordPress themes so the coding may have changed a bit and I’m going to need to catch up a bit. I’ll post more news at a later date when I’ve made some progress.

This was brought back to mind when I recently saw that “Now That’s What I Call Music! 73” had been released. Priced at £11.70 in my local supermarket but a monstrous £36.00 on one download service I saw. Hard to believe anybody would pay that, and certainly not me!

Anyway getting back to the story… Since I stopped downloading music, I’ve missed being able to listen to new music by streaming it. You know, it’s a good way of previewing music to see if the CD’s worth buying – so many CDs these days, it seems, are 1 or 2 good songs and the remainder crap! So off I went in search of a good music streaming service.

My first approach was to try a search: best music streaming service. From there I Checked out this post: “The World’s Top 10 Free Music Streaming Services”. Here I found a good list to think about, and some not-so obvious, including:

• Pandora
• Last.fm
• Seeqpod
• Spotify
• Myspace
• Rhapsody
• Imeem
• Deezer
• Skreemr
• Lala

I’m not going to go into much detail here as Crenk have done a good job of doing that and I suggest you check out their post for more details, here. In summary, these range from paid for music download and streaming services through social networks to search engines finding Mp3 on the web (are these legal?) and quiet a few have geographical limitations.

For me Spotify seemed to fit the bill. Just sign up for an account, download the software, log in and you’re away streaming a wide range of tunes, all be it peppered with the odd, un-skippable,  advert now and again. Not too intrusive though and no worse that commercial radio here in the UK but with the advantage I can pick and choose what I listen to. Of course, you can get a day pass for £0.99 or subscribe for £9.99 a month for an ad free experience. I didn’t subscribe. Call me scrooge if you like but £9.99 a month seemed to much for skipping an advert every 30 minutes or so, and you don’t get a great deal more value for your money as far as I can see. Greater quality streaming perhaps but not a lot of point on my laptop speakers.

So that was the situation until yesterday, when I heard about a new level of Napster membership called Unlimited. For £5 a month you can stream all you like and as many times as you like without ads and get 5 Mp3 downloads a month included and are free to buy more if I want. So I signed up straight away. For me this  seems the best way. I can stream music from any internet connected computer and get a few Mp3s for my Mp3 player every month. I can buy more if I want and of course I can still go an buy that cheap CD from my local supermarket if I want.

I’m also starting to think that I’m not interested in what I used to be so much any more. So where’s the conversation at?