Every once in a while, a WordPress theme comes along that really blows me away. It doesn’t have to be particularly fancy. Maybe it’s just full featured. Maybe it has some amazing splashes of true genius. Whatever it is, there are some themes that definitely stand out from the pack. Infinity is one of those themes.

Designed to resemble the attractive look of the Vikiworks Studio blog, the Infinity theme is three columns of pure graphic design goodness. I tend to think it goes a little overboard with the “so memorable that you’ll have to change a lot to make your blog unique” head and foot portions, but the core of the theme is solid.

This is definitely a theme that will make your blog stand out–until too many people start using it.

Aside from the glaring problem that the theme is instantly recognizable as a free theme, there are a couple of other issues as well. Lack of widget support. Flickr integration but no Twitter integration. But, for the most part, these are minor flaws that have been corrected in a “spin off” theme called Mashup. It’s not finished yet, but should be soon.

In any event, if you can live with the problems, have the need to customize, and want a very attractive free theme at your fingertips, give Infinity a try.

Thanks to Smashing Magazine for bringing this amazing design to the limelight.

The core of this post is designed for WordPress users–but there are just a couple more steps needed for everyone else.

You’ve heard me mention it before–the pain and suffering that goes into working with Internet Explorer 6. It just doesn’t follow the rules.

While layout problems are a major pain, one of my pet peeves is the lack of transparent PNG support in IE6. That’s what we’re here to talk about today–how to fix these problems in just a few seconds without having to do any code editing yourself.

For months (years), there have been quite a few different solutions out there on how to fix these PNG problems. Most of them revolve around inserting some JavaScript into your site’s head and changing the names of all of your PNG files. Unfortunately, a lot of these workarounds have been limited, unable to deal with outside the box PNGs, such as those which have been tiled or used as backgrounds, or so on and so forth.

With all of these setbacks, one solution has seemed to work the best–the Unit PNG Fix. It’s small, simple, and does the job really well. Certainly better than most. I’m using it on some of my other sites, but not this one–yet.

The only real problem remaining is that you actually have to edit your site’s code to ascertain the benefits of the PNG fix.

But those days are gone.

Thanks to the work of Vincenzo Russo, we now have a plugin (aptly named the WP-UnitPNGfix) that can do exactly what the Unit PNG Fix is capable of doing, without having to edit any code. It’s only for WordPress, but that’s better than nothing.

So, if you’re having trouble making that step to edit your own code, try installing this plugin instead. You’ll thank yourself later.

Blogging about Apple products? The free Tigerpress WordPress theme from Smashing Magazine may be just what you’ve been looking for.

Taking a page from the design of Mac OS 10.4, Tigerpress resembles many of the key characteristics of Apple’s previous operating system. From the use of many true Apple icons (though scaled down in size) to the background and colors used in the theme, Tigerpress is as close of a representation to the true Tiger operating system as we’ve seen to date.

While there are a few other Apple related WordPress themes out there, the flow and overall high amount of polish on the Tigerpress theme really set it apart from the crowd. Using it truly gives you the experience that you are browsing through files and folders using the Finder.

However, I find a couple of things with this release to be very strange. Firstly, does anyone else find it odd that, nearly a year after the release of Leopard, the designers chose to build a Tiger styled WordPress theme? And secondly, are there really that many Mac bloggers out there who could directly benefit from using a theme like this?

Click this link to download it. Or view a preview image of the theme.

Upstart Blogger, a site dedicated to helping new bloggers succeed, recently added a brand new theme to their roster or strikingly minimalist designs. This time around, the new Moleskine theme comes across as a bit more mainstream, lacking most of the stark and cold design elements featured in their other designs like the famous Futurosity.

The idea behind the theme was to come up with a design that looked like a Moleskine notebook. You know, those famous black notebooks made famous by such literary geniuses as Hemingway. And the theme accomplishes this feat well. As a subtle gradient takes you from top to bottom, the typography is elegant and well placed–harkening back to the days when people actually wrote instead of typed.

But all is not without its problems. While the theme works flawlessly for most cases, there are issues with the Tag Cloud. Namely, sometimes the font can get a little too large–oozing out beyond its boundaries and infringing on other widgets’ space.

Nonetheless, the simplistic design of Moleskine more than makes up for this truly minor flaw. And, like everything else at Upstart Blogger, the theme is completely free.

Check out the demo. Or go ahead and give it a download.

Blog Oh! Blog has announced their newest theme–DailyPress. While it probably doesn’t have anything to do with my local newspaper of the same name, the DailyPress theme looks as though its trying to bridge the gap between those news/magazine themes that we’ve been seeing a lot of lately and the traditional blog.

And it does a pretty good job of it.

The layout is streamlined and utilitarian with a definite focus on the post of the day and the homepage includes built in links for sharing the latest post across all sorts of mediums. However, I doubt the usefulness of this feature since most people link directly to a blog post and not to the homepage.

As for the rest of the theme, its all pretty standard affair. Three 125px ad spots, some snazzy JavaScript tabbing effects here and there, and all of the standard WordPress sidebar widgets.

And it’s all completely free. So take it for a test run or go ahead and download it.

I awoke this morning to a pleasant surprise. The much touted WordPress app for the iPhone arrived today. And it’s free. I love free stuff. Don’t you?

While I’m still waiting for it to sync with my iPod Touch, here’s a rundown of the features according to Jeff Chandler.

• Support for WP.com blogs and self-installed blogs version 2.5.1 and higher
• Embedded Safari for true previews of posts
• Full tag and category support
• Photo support for both camera pictures as well as library photos
• Support for multiple blogs
• Ability to password protect a post, save as a draft, or mark the post for later review
• Auto-recovery. This will recover posts which have been interrupted by phone calls

Sounds pretty spiffy, and I’ll definitely enjoy trying it out. I’m pretty sure that personal bloggers will have more use for this than anybody else. There aren’t any more excuses left for not being able to keep up with posting–even when you’re nowhere near a Wi-Fi connection.

Now if only I could type as fast on the virtual keyboard as I can on a traditional laptop or desktop keyboard.

If you have iTunes installed, you can pick the app up here. And yes, that link will open iTunes for you.

Do you have any plans for using the WordPress blogging app? What about another blogging app, like TypePad? Any thoughts on the usefulness of these blogging apps for the iPhone?

[Via the WordPress for iPhone Blog]

WordPress is easily one of the best blogging engines around. It’s got thousands of plugins, nearly as many themes, and its easy enough for anyone to use. But, for some time now, there hasn’t been any place to find all of the newest themes in one centralized location. That’s all about to change with the creation of the Theme Directory at wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Taking a page from the highly successful Plugin Directory, the Theme Directory lets you search and browse through themes with ease. There’s even a “Preview” button to view a live demo of the theme in action. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is there a lot of content at this point? Nope. But I’m sure it will start to grow quicker than anyone can possibly imagine in due time.

According to the WordPress development blog, it’s as easy for developers to include a theme in the directory as it is for users to download one.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

It’s about time the world’s most popular blogging platform finally has a place where everyone can go to check out great themes. Though, it may soak up some of the traffic that theme authors were used to getting on their own websites.

[Via Weblog Tools Collection]