Wordpress Theme Paperback Writer Theme – How I Made a Wordpress Theme From Scratch

I just started a personal site at http://jeffbarr.com to showcase my pulp fiction type writing (science fiction fantasy horror et al), and also some of my personal projects. I needed a theme, so I decided to do a little experiment and learn how to make a Wordpress theme from scratch. It’s called Paperback Writer Theme - if you like the theme, you can download it and use it freely. I will rite a short how-to on the way I chose to make a Wordpress theme from scratch, as it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. This is from my personal site, JeffBarr.com:

… I couldn’t find anything much to suit me at the Wordpress Theme Repository, so I decided to learn to make a WP theme, as despite several years of hacking themes and general WP tomfoolery, I had never sat down and tried to make a theme. The result: Paperback Writer Theme – my first and most likely last foray into making a Wordpress theme. Please note that if you want to use it, you will want to add a good deal of functionality – right now it is very bare boned.

What is Chrome OS – AKA the Google OS for Web Computing

What is Chrome OS? If you use the Google Chrome browser, you know that its targeted for those users (I myself am one) who do work, make notes, write blogs and do programming all on the web – in the cloud in other words, rather than on old style applications that reside on you computers hard drive. The newly announced Google Chrome Operating System promises to be the OS for working in the cloud – it is primarily aimed at netbooks, which depend on cloud computing for most if not all of their appeal.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Will you use Google Chrome? The answer for me is heck yeah! I think this is the technology that will finally remove us from being chained to our PCs – now computing will be netbook-to-smart-phone-back-to-netbook, and repeat as needed.
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Wolfram Alpha Is Genius

Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine/comparison engine/scientific calculator/etc etc, is pure brilliance. I am loving the
simplicty – just plug in the data, and wolfram alpha will spit out stuff you didn’t even knwo you wanted – but it turns out you did. Isn’t that one of the definitions of a killer app?
For example:
Everyone’s favorite news topic, the H1N1 Virus, or Swine Flu

However, as brilliant as it is, it is alpha, so something like this:

Drake Equation from Google: 113k results
Drake Equation from Wolfram Alpha produces no results: Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.

That’s a query I would expect wolfram alpha to beat google at in the future, but even now should have something, even though Wolfram Alpha doesn’t cover user-generated data. Still, WA is going to be huge in the computing community – the real question is, where is the API, and what kind of apps can be made with this amazing tool to benefit the rest of the web?