Smashing Magazine has released a free RSS feed icon set, which was designed by Dirceu Veiga from FastIcon.

The set contains 8 icons that can be used for private and commercial projects for free. According to the license agreement, the designer asks for an operable link to http://www.fasticon.com, with the link text: “Icons by: FastIcon.com”.

The Icons are available for both Mac and Windows. The PNG files can be downloaded as well, which come in various resolutions (16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px).

Thank you, Dirceu, for designing such a fresh icon set and making it available to everyone for free. The download links can be found on either Smashing Magazine or FastIcon.

Rainbow Feather v3 by h4×3d.com

Rainbow Feather is a fluid one-column wordpress theme. As the name suggests the colours in this theme are rainbow-ish. From blue, baby blue, to yellow, orange, white, blue gradient and pink, barbie pink to evil pink. Cool features include: Fancy web2.0 like headings (wet graphics), custom badges “read on” and “continue reading”, matching color scheme/palette, Login area that shows logged in users (well it shows you and gives you options).

Live Preview | Theme URL

Transmission by Theme Lab

Transmission is a widget-ready two-column WordPress theme that comes with 8 different styles to choose from, including an all-in-one version that lets the readers select their preferred style. The theme is compatible with the flickRSS plugin, which displays Flickr photos on the homepage.

With the use of custom fields, an image can be easily added to the latest post and this theme also has an options page where the number of posts that are displayed in the homepage can be controlled.

Live Preview | Theme URL

Small Potato has just recently announced that WPDesigner has been sold and that the new owner is Pawel Ciszewski. There has been no introductions yet, but Small Potato left us with a few news: The $5 Themes Club will be continued (I still have coupons left!) and he will stick around and blog on WPDesigner from time to time.

If you want to know more about the sale or want to ask him a few questions, don’t forget that tonight at 9PM EST, Small Potato will be interviewed for a full hour on WordPress Weekly.

If you read other blogs about WordPress, you probably read about most of these, but might as well list them, right?

• Small Potato announced that he’s selling WPDesigner because of lack of time and multiple personal reasons.
• Dean J Robinson released Fluency, a plugin for WordPress 2.5+ that changes the look of the WordPress admin interface.
• Probama, a WordPress theme for Barack Obama supporters, has been released by Category 4.
• Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme, which was developed by Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks, has been released.
• Adii has announced that three new themes that are part of a new series called Live Wire will be released soon. He has also announced that he won’t be working on the Kineda Look-Alike Premium News WordPress Theme anymore and has released the theme unfinished.
• Market is a WordPress theme that has been released last month by Astereo and Blog Perfume is giving away 2 standard licenses for this theme. Details on how to participate can be found in the post.
• Alpha Blog Designs is running a competition for a free custom blog design.
• WordPress 2.5 still hasn’t been released yet, but a Release Candidate 1 has been released.
• Small Potato from WPDesigner has agreed to be interviewed for a full hour on WordPress Weekly this Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 9 pm EST.

WPTG Rank #1: WPDesigner

WPTG Rank #2: Weblog Tools Collection

WPTG Rank #3: Photo Matt

Best Google Pagerank: Photo Matt

Best Alexa Rank: Weblog Tools Collection

Best Technorati Rank: Photo Matt and Ryan Boren

New Blogs added to the Top 40:

• JaypeeOnline
• WPMU Tutorials

A few blogs have been removed because they weren’t “Blogs About WordPress” or because they just listed WordPress themes and/or plugins in their posts or because of inactivity. (Theme Arena)

Do you know a blog that should be listed in the Top 40? If you do, please send an email to wpthemesgallery [at] gmail [dot] com, so that I can add it to the list.

Do You Digg the Top 40?

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FreeShipping.org is the largest all free shipping resource on the internet. It has free shipping coupons to hundreds of online retailers.

So, why am I featuring this site here? Well, if you visited the site, you probably couldn’t tell, but FreeShipping.org is powered by WordPress!

It’s definitely interesting seeing WordPress being used as a CMS, but I wanted to know more about the choices made by the designer. So, I asked Luke Knowles, the owner and designer of FreeShipping.org, a few questions and he replied with the following:

I used Wordpress as my CMS because it allowed me to do everything I needed to do. Since I was very familiar with WordPress having used it on a few other websites I was able to get the website up quickly. From having the idea to launching site was 7 days. With the right plugins and Custom Fields you can do some pretty amazing things with WordPress.

Since FreeShipping.org is an affiliate shopping website, the most important thing about the design was that the site convert at a high rate. A website that looks good, but makes very little money would not be good. I studied some of the highest converting shopping sites like, ebags.com and shoebuy.com, to see what they were doing. I stumbled onto a few things that I think have made the site convert higher than it would have otherwise.

I put what I thought were the most interesting sentences from his answers in bold.