Wordpress hosting $5 per month

If you want a Wordpress blog this is the place to get it.

You don’t need a domain name to get a WordyBlog. You can just sign up for a blog with the address of yourname.wordyblog.com. But if you want to use a domain name you can.

We’ve taken care to make sure that starting a blog with WordyBlog is as simple as possible. When you sign up you’ll get the latest installation of Wordpress together with a comprehensive pre-installed collection of themes, plugins and widgets so you can get started on blogging straight away. If you don’t understand anything about HTML or CSS or PHP that’s no problem. Everything is set up for you so you can just choose your theme, decide what you want in your sidebar and away you go. Some themes have customisation built in so you can customise from a simple admin panel without having to touch any of the code.

But if you want to play about with the code, or roll your own, you can. You could always start off simple and get more complicated as you get to know your way around - if that’s what you want to do.

There are some excellent free blogging services based on Wordpress, of course, such as Wordpress.com and Blogsome but inevitably they have some restrictions on use - you can’t edit your template, for instance. And Wordpress.com don’t allow you to use JavaScript so you can’t even put Statcounter or Sitemeter on your page. Or if you want to install a Comcast music player - you’re stuck.

With WordyBlog you get the simplicity of a Wordpress.com blog with the flexibility of a hosted account.

How do I get one?
Just enter the blog name that you’d like:

Gemini-Plus started out in life as a project to update the original Gemini theme by Root and Jennifer Ledbetter to use widgets. Then an options page was added to easily switch between colour schemes. And then some more options were added. And then some more…

The theme now has 11 different styles, which can be selected from an options page. Header image, background, font colours and various other things can also be configured from the options page. You can almost design your own theme without having to edit any Wordpress files.

See the Gemini-Plus demo site for a demo and screenshots.

Download Instructions:

• Download the zip file (link at bottom of page), extract it and upload it into the /wp-content/themes directory of your WordPress blog.
• Go to the Presentation page in the WordPress control panel and activate the theme.
• Click on Sidebar Widgets in the menu and flavour to taste.
• Click on Gemini-Plus in the menu to get to the Options page - you can select different looks for the theme here or configure your own settings and then click ‘Store Options’. You can see a preview of what the theme will look like in the Preview window at the bottom of the Options page.

To set your own header graphic.

• First, you need to have a suitable graphic, such as a photo cropped and resized to suit. A width of 780px probably works best, but it can be wider or narrower than that if you wish. If it’s wider you will probably need to increase the overall width of the theme - the very last option on the options page othwerwise not all the graphic will display.
• Next you need to upload your graphic somewhere where it will be accessible on the internet. If you have a Flickr account or similar you can upload it there - you will need to know the exact URL of the graphic file.

Or upload it to your Wordpress blog like this:

• Go to the ‘Write’ page of the Wordpress Dashboard.
• Just beneath the Save and Continue Editing button click Upload, click Browse, select the image file and click Upload.
• Click on the image preview, click ‘Using thumbnail’ so that it says ‘Using Original’ and click ‘Send to Editor’
• The image will appear in the post window - right click on it and select ‘Copy Image Location’
• You can then exit the ‘Write Post’ page - there is no need to publish or save the post.
• Go to Presentation/Gemini-Plus and paste the URL you just copied into the ‘URL of header’ field in the options page.

Bugs
This theme has a number of options which are quite complicated to program and there may very well be some bugs that need ironing out. Please report bugs to info at wordyblog dot com.

New features
If there are any new features you think would be good for the theme, such as additional options please feel free to suggest them. It’s quite likely that time will need to be spent ironing out bugs before any new features are added, though.

Header photos
The header photos supplied with the theme are all copyright Roger Harrison of WordyBlog. You are free to use them in the theme provided the copyright notice in the footer remains intact.

Download
Download Gemini-Plus (1.42Mb).