First of all, Happy New Year to all the readers! (a little late but better late than never – I’ve been busy) Thanks for standing with us for the first half of 2009. Since the last part of 2009 Appchain has taken a few steps into the future and has evolved in terms of quality of the content it provides. There was a small period of time where theme reviews where made for free and premium themes. That experiment was partly a success but a huge time killer with too little success to continue. It died and something better took it’s place. Something much better…
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Finally, It’s here, Our latest free wordpress theme named Slidette. It comes in 3 colors (green default, blue and black) , with a slideshow and a featured first page 4 posts from a category, two columns and dynamic widgets for the sidebar on the right and in the footer. +Continue Reading
I am proud to announce that the give a beer widget on AppChain brought us 1000 beers today! Seems this plugins is usefull and that people really like AppChain.
Thanks everybody for sending your virtual Beers!!!
Better means faster, simpler, more effective…
The previous theme was not exactly 100% wordpress and performance OK.
- Threaded comments where not very well written in terms of design (when more than 3-5 comments existed)
- The visual elements, slideshows and all the pictures that needed loading took a lot of pageload (on each new page refresh)
- Theme took a lot of space and needed a lot of scrolling down
- certain parts of posts where inefficient to appchain (like more about author section at the end of each post)
- Certain parts of the theme (sidebar , header) where not editable in terms of simple design, value changing
Anyway, this is a free theme from wordpress.org that makes things more simple and more visual, more beautifull at the same time. I’ve installed and enabled wp super cache (had only wp cache before and i think it was disabled for some reason for about 1 month) and everything seems to be working much more faster right now. (at least x3 times faster).
So welcome to a more faster and simple’r AppChain
Yes, you read right! “Why?” you ask? … well, actually because after 4 months and 6 days, 10 plugins and 3 themes (1 of witch accepted on wordpress.org), it’s not been going as good as i’d hoped it would go. I can’t say we have great free plugins to offer but in the process i realized some important things that hit me like a cold shower in the morning.
It takes time
Everything that’s open source, if you are not google and just announced google wave (and still did not send the long awaited invites BTW), is very hard to promote. Especially if you are just testing the market. And if you (like me) take a look at the statistics of all the major plugins from the wordpress.org plugin directory to see that they did not start yesterday, last week or 4 months ago, but in 2008 or 2007 and if you look at them evolving you can see they all started small. Now… i am very grateful for the amount of downloads received on the Live Countdown Timer plugin, Advanced Twitter and Youtube Widget… and a few others, but it’s not enough, and at this point i don’t have the time to invest in something that might not take off, no matter how good it is. (i have one big idea but, I am 1 guy, so unless you want me to start now and finish in 4 years, i have a better strategy. Can’t tell you what it is, but I can say it involves taking a leave of absence (only temporary hopefully, but definitely long) from appchain.com. The plugins need to evolve in time, they need to get popular and i need to do what i know i must do…
One thing though…
When wordpress reaches 2.9, i will try to break some time and fix any incompatibilities/problems/bugs in the plugins and themes. I will still be around, I will still check stuff, statistics and from time to time answer comments… just 1-5% of the time i’ve been dedicating so far (so you can imagine how low). So you guys can still keep bugging me if it’s really important.
Yes, it really is necessary!
Because it’s a evolutionary step , because i realized this particular job takes time (i’m talking about developing free plugins for wordpress) and because i have no great ideas that really need work. Let’s face it, in 4 months, 10 plugins and 3 themes is kind of OK for 1 guy.. no? (i’ve actually worked on other projects in this time too.. It’s actually been a loong hard road on all the work for appchain (not long and hard enough it seems) so, YES, what i am about to do now is really necessary.
But Enough About Me..
Don’t hesitate to write or call, invite me to wordcamps or other conferences, send me pictures or love letters… You guys made these 4 months happen so i propose something… If you developers out there want to continue the work on any of the plugins or themes from appchain.com, you are welcomed to do this. I will give you your names and the websites in description and make postes about you. This has actually happened with 2 users (they upgraded plugins for me). I will be available for any upgrade! you just give me the source. I will test and make it go on wordpress.org
Untill next time… I salute you,
Ciprian
It’s a little something I won while on WordCamp in Bucharest and decided to make it the default theme on appchain after i chose it from their theme gallery. The creators are wpzoom.com and they’ve done a really nice job at it. Of course, I’ve made some modifications (top pictures in header and logo), and probably still will make some stuff while appchain is evolving. For the next months, this will be the default theme… who knows, maybe a full year (but once we grow bigger, a new theme that organizes everything is inevitable).
Leave comments with impressions and feedback….
Ok.. so I got sick and tired of having bad quality content and code on AppChain.com
That was not my original ideea!Not only that something much better can be done….But I already started doing it.
AppChain is based on Wordpress now and i will be developing plugins and stuff to integrate everything i want in it.
So this is it! a clean slick! So far it’s a downloaded template… that i might just modify… we shall see. This time i promiss you, we shall make stuff work!
wish me luck!
