If you’re a Thesis user and you’ve been looking for a premium skin that’s a bit special, allow me introduce you to Osmotic.

Built on Thesis as a clean blog skin, Osmotic has a bunch of added features and loads of prettiness.

And it’s only available to 25 people. That’s right. I’ve always felt that designing a premium skin, then selling 500 copies kind of makes it, un-premium.

So I’ve capped the number of people who can buy a single user license for Osmotic to just 25. Nice!

Of course this means you’re going to have to pay a little bit extra for all this Osmotic goodness. I’ve fixed the price at $99, but to sweeten the deal and stop you all whining about my attempts to plunder your childrens’ inheritances, I’m also throwing in installation of the skin on your Thesis theme. Even nicer!

Anyway, enough banter. Head over to the Osmotic sales page (HINT: you should click the ‘Buy Now’ button while you’re there) to see what features are in store, or take a look at the Osmotic demo I’ve got running on a test server. Then, tell everyone about it because if I don’t manage to sell 25 copies of the skin I WON’T BE MAKING ANY MORE – and my children will need to take to the streets to forage for food & water!

Happy shopping!

I’ve had a couple of people (ok, one person) ask me what tools I use to deliver up PSD to Thesis sites and seen as I can’t be bothered to write a tutorial today, I’ll tell you.

1. Hardware. I use a MacBook Pro 15″ laptop for everything except IE testing. For that I use my wife’s PC (I have no idea what spec it is. It’s a PC, therefore I don’t care).
2. Graphics. Primarily I use Photoshop CS3 and Illustrator CS3. I’m yet to find an argument for upgrading to CS4. Besides, have you seen what it costs?!
3. Code editor. Up until early last year I was a big Dreamweaver fan. But it’s too damn bloated nowadays. So I switched to Coda. Seriously, buy a Mac just to get Coda. It’s that good.
4. FTP. Coda’s built-in FTP client, Transmit, works very nicely but I also run Filezilla, simply because it allows me to transfer stuff while I’m working on other stuff.
5. Browsers. You can’t beat Firefox for web development. Along with the Web developer toolbar and Firebug this is my most important tool of all. However, there are a few people in the world who don’t use Firefox (freaks!), so I test in Safari, Chrome and Opera (and IE6, 7 & 8 on the aforementioned PC).
6. Test server. I have a MAMP installation for testing sites, but I find more and more that I’m developing live on either my own test domains or client domains. It means one less transfer once the project is done, and allows for instant feedback on any work I do. My hosting provider is a UK based company called Xilo and they are absolutely brilliant.
7. Timekeeping & Invoicing. Until recently I didn’t worry about timekeeping, but I found I was losing money on some jobs, so I installed a nice little Mac desktop app called On The Job. It allows me to keep time on projects, break down tasks and raise invoices. Other than Coda, this is the coolest piece of software I own and a true lifesaver.
8. Backups. Most Apple users make use of Time Machine for backups, but I never seem to remember to plug my external drive in. So I opted for a Dropbox account instead. Much simpler.

First up, Happy New Year everyone! I had a New Year’s Resolution list post planned, but seen as I’ve broken most of them already there doesn’t seem to be much point in publishing it.

Instead, take a look at Osmotic, my first Thesis skin for public release.

Osmotic is a clean, minimalist theme skin, based on the 960.gs grid system with the following features:

• Single column or 2-column/3 column hybrid layout
• Thesis drop down menus
• WordPress search box in the navigation bar
• Recent Posts widget with thumbnails and post excerpt
• 3 column widgetized footer

Other than the fixed width structure of the theme, all default Thesis Options and Thesis Design Options can still be used, giving you a fair amount of flexibility to tweak colors, fonts, links and widget placement.

I’ve still got a couple of bugs to iron out, which knowing my current schedule will take at least another week. So expect this skin to be available towards the end of the month.

If you think you may be interested in using Osmotic on your Thesis blog, please let me know and I’ll put you on the ‘list of people to harass‘ as soon as it gets released.

If you’ve got any suggestions/comments/questions/insults, please leave them below. Thanks.

Merry Christmas!

A big thank you to everyone who visited, everyone who took the time to comment or follow me on Twitter, and the biggest thank you of all to everyone who hired me in 2009.

Have a great break. Don’t eat and drink too much and I’ll see you on the Interwebs in 2010.

Dave

Not exactly WordPress related, but sometimes it pays to stop and reflect on how lucky you are.

Today’s life lesson from the Interwebs is: The more objectives you have for your blog the less likely it is to achieve any of them.

Since this is a blog post and not a Twitter stream, allow me to elaborate.

Internet Marketers, or the yellow-highlighter brigade as Sonia Simone calls them, figured out years ago that on a direct sales website you must only present 2 options to visitors; buy now, or leave.

What this means is (a) all direct sales websites are horrible but effective, and (b) Internet marketers are way cleverer than 99.99% of the blog owning population.

Example

You build a new WordPress blog, Internet Marketer style, with just 2 options: Send us an enquiry, or leave our site. This means there’s a 50/50 chance you’re going to generate a sales lead from each visitor (all things being equal).

Now, rebuild the same blog, but throw in a newsletter subscription form, a link to 5 other sites you like, 500 gazillion affiliate links to products nobody wants and for good measure, your Twitter stream in your sidebar.

All of a sudden your visitor has 4 additional options (that’s a total of 6 in case you weren’t counting). According to my calculator you will now realistically only generate one sales lead from every 10 visitors.

Be Frugal with your online objectives

If we lived in a perfect world Angelina Jolie would be my future ex-wife and your business would only need 1 objective. But sadly for Angelina, we don’t live in a perfect world, and most bloggers need at least 2 objectives/income streams to survive.

I blame WordPress. Back in the old days (3 years ago) if you wanted a blogroll added to your sidebar, you damn well added the code yourself. Nowadays, you simply add a widget and you’re done. it’s just too easy to clutter things up.

My advice

Go ahead and add 2-3 objectives to your blog if they’re ABSOLUTELY necessary, not just because they make your sidebar look pretty.