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.

Small Potato from WPDesigner is giving away 20,000 WPDesigner themes club accounts (free membership for a year) and has reserved 100 accounts for WPTG readers, which I’ll be giving away throughout the next few weeks. To start off, I’ll be giving away 40 accounts and all you need to to is leave a comment under this post telling me why you’d like to become a member of WPDesigner themes club. I’ll send the codes to the email addresses used when leaving the comments.

The free coupons expire at the end of 2008.

My blog decided to be different and it stopped displaying posts in reverse chronological order. I’ll try to fix it later tonight.

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Well, since I had no idea what the problem was, I had to do some research. Through Google, I quickly found out that other users were having the same problem and that it had to do with a certain version of MySQL. So, my guess was that my blog’s host had recently upgraded the MySQL to that version, which means that there was nothing much I could do. A few support tickets mentioned that the solution to this problem was to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, but I already had the latest version.

As a temporary solution, I used a workaround for the past few days. Setting one of my posts as an announcement, using the WP-Sticky plugin, changed the order of the posts back to reverse chronological. Then, today, I decided to check if the blog was still displaying posts in the wrong order without the workaround and to my surprise, it wasn’t! (: