TentBlogger

Ouch.

The above graph really does show it all (click for larger view).

I have often shared here that one of your greatest assets as an entrepreneur and starter is to experiment – never stop experimenting and evolving as an individual for your own personal growth as well as your business.

Of course, this goes for your blog as well and I continue to experiment wildly on a number of stealth blog projects (as I like to call them) – even with things as drastic as changing the core WordPress Theme that is being used.

Well, I set out to do just that with one of my blog projects and like most of my experiments I set a time-limit which is most typically a full 30 days to see if the change is working as intended.

Well, I sometimes have to break that rule when the results are so obvious that it’s painful to watch as the graph above clearly shows. What I did was I switched WordPress Themes and instantly saw a drop of traffic – it was so dramatic that I wrestled with abandoning the experiment altogether within the first 48 hours, something I rarely do.

Typically switching a WordPress Theme won’t see much movement at all in terms of traffic, both up or down – but this time it was incredible shift in the wrong direction.

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Today is a #GangnamStyle type of day. Do you agree?

— John Saddington (@saddington) September 7, 2012

WordPress just released the newest self-hosted version with v3.4.2 and it is sweet! There are a number of security improvements among other neat styling updates but there are two updated features that you should definitely know about!

The first is the fact that you now have native Twitter embeds built right in. It couldn’t get any easier at this point!

All you have to do is copy and paste in the direct link to the tweet and voila, it shows right in your content layer! The above tweet is simply this:

Pretty cool, right? For those that leverage Twitter a lot for not only their own social platform and brand development but also source interesting tweets and articles this new update is a killer one.

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Blog Post formats in Standard 3.

One of the best changes that have come out in recent times with WordPress is the introduction of Post Formats. Even though it was introduced over a year ago it’s only become more adopted for developers en masse this year as more and more demand for them has increased.

What are post formats? Very simply it’s a way of stylizing the presentation of a blog post in a unique way. You can easily do this by just clicking one of the radio buttons in the right column in your blog post drafting area, as you can see in the above screenshot.

What’s nice is that these are pre-formatted or pre-designed styles so you don’t have to do any design work yourself! You can, of course, edit or create your own designs or even customize the existing ones in any WordPress Theme.

In Standard 3 we’ve taken our blog post formats seriously and provided some incredibly stylish and attractive ways or presenting your content very quickly and effectively. You have 6 options to choose from:

1. Standard format
2. Status
3. Image
4. Link
5. Quote
6. Video

Each design and presentation/layout was crafted by hand by Jared, our UI/UX specialist – he even hand-crafted our icons from scratch! There’s really no better way to showcase how easy it is to use Post Formats than in real-time, so I’ve made a short video to show you how it’s done.

Check it out:

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One of the biggest jumps in terms of my experience with Standard 3 is the fact that it’s blazing fast, not just on the front-end but also in the back admin as well.

Sure, a number of performance-related issues with blogs and WordPress Themes has to do with the way you configure and manage your hosting and server environment but I had already optimized a number of things to be incredibly fast.

But the one thing that hasn’t changed in a long time was the code quality in the previous versions of Standard Theme. Although the foundational code was and has always been competitively better than most other WordPress Themes the newest version of Standard is unlike anything that I’ve ever experienced (or built).

For starters I work with one of the best WordPress developers on planet earth. After having worked with WordPress since 2004 I have never met someone like Tom – he’s at the very top of the spectrum and he’s just a few years in. Unbelievable.

Second, we have the incredible privilege and honor of being partners with the company behind WordPress itself, Automattic, and they have meticulously helped audit the code base to meet their exacting needs. If there was one team that you wanted walking through your code it would be them, hands down!

Last but certainly not least we have an incredible team behind Standard, including Michael who has Q/A’d every single line that Tom writes, Jared who adds the spit-and-shine to make it beautiful and pretty inside and out (and who always considers speed and performance in light of his design), and Chris who is militant when it comes to stripping out the BS of our product and leaving only the things that create incredible value for our customers.

Shoot, what do those guys need me for anyways?!

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Whoot!

Are you seeing something a little bit different with the design here today? Oh yeah!

I’m so pumped to be working in the completely new Standard Theme, version 3! We worked through the migration in real-time last night over at The Work Spot and we had about 45 people show up, 20 people IRL and about 25 people online via our online broadcast!

What fun! We had door prizes, candy, and the ever-popular Chex Mix for snacks. Tom and Jared were on hand as well to share their thoughts about online publishing, design, and software development. Much thanks to Ray Ann who is the best host and coworking founder in Atlanta! She seriously rocks.

And if you’d like notes from Tom about what was covered as well as a few pictures and even the assets used, check it out!

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You may have heard already but I want to make sure this community is made completely aware of the fact that Standard Theme is now available on WordPress.com!

Many of you have engaged with me over the past few months asking me if this was going to happen and it’s been really difficult to respond in a way that didn’t let the cat out of the bag and yet at the same time share the possibility that that reality was very possible.

Well, my startup made the announcement yesterday afternoon – you can read more about the story of the release there (which has been an incredible journey, to be sure).

There are tons of incredible improvements to our WordPress.com release – all of which will eventually make it into the self-hosted solution in v3.0, so don’t worry about missing out if you’ve been a long-time fan and customer using Standard Theme on your self-hosted blog!

The short of it is the fact that we essentially built the entire theme from scratch – nearly all of it is brand-spanking new codebase, now optimized for WordPress.com and their significantly high standards for theme development. I can tell you with confidence and integrity that although our first few iterations were amazing, design and development-wise, this version takes the cake in a big way.

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I’m happy to announce the release my third free (GPL) TentBlogger-branded WordPress Theme to the general public.

Naturally, just like the first theme and the second one, this one’s focused on the same goal: Content, content, content!

But this one is cleverly named to help a new blog get a good “jump start” to their blogging efforts since it does focus purely on the content and not so much the design – can you say black and white?!

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