I have been working quite hard in the last few days to complete and put a new site online called Blogtastique. The aim of the site is to help beginner bloggers churn out a truly quality site in a day, and to help pro bloggers manage their blogs.

With the free Basic Package we’ll install your Wordpress blog for example, recommend themes based on your content, recommend some cool plugins and generally give you some good tips about this and that. the Pro Package means we’ll make some theme customization for you, install plugins, third party applications like embedded Twitter, widgets and so on and we’ll try our best to synchronize the look of your blog with what you write about.

The Managment Package is for those of you who don’t like doing the “paperwork” that your blog generates. We’ll pre-configure your categories or optimize them for you, going through each post, we’ll create a custom theme just for you, we can check each new post for errors, we’ll moderate your comments, manage users, and generally do any task you bestow upon us.

Please take a look at this new service, I’m very excited to get started with it, if you have any questions, suggestions or want to sign up, please write to the Blogtastique team, you can find contacts in the contacts section of the Blogtastique.

I’ve praised the new Wordpress admin theme in the past, but I’ve found a theme called Fluency that is so cool, I just have to show you. I first saw it at MUO when posting and it looks breathtaking. It has a darker approach, but I wouldn’t say the design has a dark feeling. In fact, I think it’s a lesson in design, since the only color type used is gray, and not even hundreds of shades, just about 5-6. It’s amazing that someone can create such a beautiful, simplistic, yet useful theme, out of just 5 shades of one color.

The biggest change you’ll see is that all menu options are now in a left side menu bar, which seems a bit more logical and drastically more contrasted, so you can find stuff more easily. Sub menus show up on the top, again in a tasteful, and very usable way. I know I’m ranting on and on about this too much, but this theme is so damn good.

I haven’t taken a very in-depth look, but it uses css a lot, so it should be customizable in the right hands. I may try and make it a bit more green to fit Hack Your Day later on, but right now I have it installed on my personal Ideas blog, which has a darker theme anyway. Since you just activate it as a plugin I really do recommend this, if you don’t like it, just deactivate and that’s it.

If you are a blogger and need to keep track of some of your post ideas, but don’t really like writing drafts, let me show you a great way to store some notes. If you follow this tutorial, all you will really need is to be comfortable with writing notes in a text editor. In addition, if you are familiar with CSS you can do anything you like to your list, but this is not needed.

We will be modifying your index.php file, the one governing your admin, not the website itself. This file can be found in the wp-admin folder, simply named index.php. Download it and make sure to make a backup copy. Open up the file with a text editor, I prefer Notepad++, and search for the following line:

<p><?php _e(’Use these links to get started:’); ?></p>

You may notice, that this is the first line of your admin dashboard, so let’s put a to-do list above this. Now there are two ways you can go about this. You can either put the list right here, or you can write it in another file, and tell the page to call that file. Writing it here is fine, but you don’t want to go through all this code whenever you want to edit the list right? So let’s place it in a different file, to make it easily editable. Above the line we just searched for, type the following.

?php include(”todo.php”); ?>

This will tell your browser to load the contents of the file “todo.php” right here. All we have to do is create a new file, name it “todo.php”, edit it in whatever way we want, and upload it to the same folder that “index.php” is found in. First of all, create a new simple text document and save it, naming it todo.php naturally. Now we need to write the list, in the following form.

<ul>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
<li>List item 3</li>
</ul>

Save the file and upload it, you should have a nice little list of things to do on your dashboard. It could be useful to jot down some long term things if you don’t feel comfortable editing this list all the time. If you think that rearranging and touching the list takes a long time try some of the advanced features of Notepad++, it can upload files directly to where you want it to, but more on this soon, in another article.

This article is part of the Wordpress customization series, with more to come, like skinning the admin interface, so be on the lookout for new parts. If you would like me to cover anything specific don’t be afraid to suggest.

Productivity and organization are powerful tools, but there aren’t really any readily made applications to help you with them. If you want to create a log of your activities, what do you do? Task managers only enable you to track your to-do’s, what if you decide to do something else, will you create a to do list after the fact? It’s feasible, but not too practical. You can use applications like OneNote and Evernote, but personally neither are ideal for me. OneNote is too freeform for me, I get carried away in the details, and it’s also not the best for creating a searchable database. With Evernote I just feel that my stuff is all over the place. Also, I would especially love to keep my database online, which neither application can accomplish. To get around this problem, I just came up with a logging system that enables you to log any even in any way you want.

This tool is known as Wordpress. Yep, I am using a blog to track what I do. It’s quite simple really, basically I just installed a blog on one of my domain names (you can use a free Wordpress.com account as well, or any other blog) and each entry I write is a log. I then access the blog via RSS to give me all the info on my blog in a neat, concise way.This form gives you numerous advantages, here are some I use myself, but with the right plugins you can do anything.

How I add notes

I just create a new post to add log entries and I give it a very simple structure. The title contains as much info as possible in one line, the better titles you write the more info at a glance you can derive from your RSS feed later. The second part is a short summary of the item. I add a horizontal rule in the html code after that “<hr>” and write the long description (or paste the email) after the rule. If you don’t have this much info you can just leave out the rule and the long description of course.

Alternatively, you can also use the “<!–more–>” quicktag to cut off your post after the short description. This has its advantages, you will only see the short description in the RSS feed, but on the downside, you will have to click to another page in order to see the details. I am going with the first method at the moment by the way. If you want some added visibility, bold the short description and it will show well in the feed.

That’s all there really is to it, apart from adding categories and tags explained below. It takes about 10 seconds to write a short entry and about 30 to write a long one. This means that this method will take up 30 minutes of my day at most, but the benefits of productivity and really good organization, along with great search capabilities make this well worth the time.

Tags & Categories

Tags and categories give you endless options in organizing your log. Initially I am starting out by only using categories. I am using two sets, one is for assigning real categories like “Email” or “New feature” and so on, and the other is for the state of the log entry. This can be “done” or “follow up” or “waiting”, etc.

A crafty plugin I found that helps here is the Fun with categories plugin. It enables you to filter posts according to two categories at once. This plays into our hands nicely, as I can narrow it down to all emails waiting for follow up. Productivity is on its way with this plugin, but it also helps if you try to think of your category structure before hand, not just make it up as you go along.

Comments

Commenting is a great way to collaborate on specific items with a team or with friends. Wordpress essentially has built into it the structure for all those task management sites with a payment option. Lots of plugins exist to enhance comments, but even in its original state it will be great.

You can also use it yourself, to indicate any changes. You can create an entry as a task, and if you completed it in a different way you can indicate that in the comments, instead of changing the original post. This has two benefits, one is that you will see the originals of everything, the other is that you will see the exact dates because the original post will retain the posting date, while the comment will get a new date.

Plugins

I don’t really want to go into this now, let’s leave that for another post, but needless to say that the productivity you can achieve with addins for Wordpress is awesome. You can put a calendar on your blog and integrate it with Google Calendar, you can put Widgets to keep track of yourself, in other words, you can create the ultimate personal information manager, organization and productivity system, just with a simple blog. Take a look at the Wodpress plugins page if you need anything, and make sure to comment if you have anything to say (and Digg if you liked it).