As you may have (or not) noticed, it’s been just over two weeks since our last post. I’m going to tell it straight: we’re not sure what we’re doing here.

A couple of months ago, I bought the domain resourcepile.com because, quite simply, I found it by accident. I was browsing for another domain and when I discovered resourcepile.com wasn’t taken, I thought it good enough to grab for something. So we at Kerplunc decided to make this blog, it was a simple idea: just post cool resources we find. We never expected much to come of it. But it did. We posted our first collection, a collection of icons, and gained a rapid 60,000 uniques in a month. It was great. But there was one problem, it takes quite a long time to get these collections and articles written/collected, and more importantly, a lot of Kerplunc time.

Kerpluc is about services, not content.

I feel we should stick to it, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Resource Pile, but I doubt it’ll be much blogging, we have a few ideas on the table. Of course, we might stay a blog, I can’t say for certain, I just thought it unfair to leave this place blank.

Thanks.

It’s that time of year again: the one where we look back at the trends and ideas which have developed, the good, the bad, the ugly. We analyse and reason, develop plans for the future and strategies to propel ourselves forwards in a greater manner than previously.

Blogs have grown massively in popularity and influence in the last year, and with more high quality blogs appearing, the competition for top place is stiff. Aside from content, marketing and networking, the design of a blog is key aspect to it’s success: the various sections have to be well layed out, it has to be great for search engines, it has to be easy to navigate and find things, the best content should be highlighted, there should be a wide arrange of feed/subscription offers, there needs to be a good balance of advertising to content and, of course, it needs to look nice. Most importantly however, the content needs to be great; content is king. All in all, I would say that creating a good blog is pretty damn hard.

So, let’s take a look at what works and what doesn’t, what techniques the big blogs make use of and why the little blogs aren’t getting bigger. We’ll be looking at all the above aspects, plus checking out some figures to see what’s popular in blogs.

Design, Layout & Positioning

Featured Articles. There have been many changes to design throughout 2008, the most prominent of which has been the ‘featured article’ trend. As blogs have grown increasingly popular, especially due to great content, many blogs are bringing the best of what they have to say to all frontpage viewers, while smaller, less important articles (despite being newer) often sit below. This system allows new people too view the quality of the blog immediately, while regular readers can skip right to the content below. However, only a blog with less feature updates, it can be hard to keep up the pace, as content soon becomes stagnant on the front page, and can lead to a loss of readership.

The ‘featured article’ has lead to a range of new design ideas and methods. Lets take a look at some examples:

Unique design, bold design. The age of the gradient-full, rounded-corner obsessed web2.0 design trend is over. Blogs are beginning to develop designs suited to their content and their readers, each hoping to give itself a ‘personality’. Particularly notable is the popularity of grunge and hand made elements:

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Merry Christmas everyone, have a great day!

Alexius is a digital painter, a photographer, a creater and an inspirer. His works combine the themes of fantasy and real life using a range of traditional and digital techniques. Lets take a look at some of his work (click to enlarge):

The image speaks a thousand words and a thousand more. Everything about it: the idea, the image, the detail, the final piece, is perfect. I cannot find a single flaw within his work. I first found Alexius via his deviantArt page.

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Check out the beautiful iNove theme for WordPress, desgined by mg12.

Fists are often used as a symbol of power and/or aggression. The soviets made great use of them in forcing their people into communist, censored life. The western democracies used them in those “we need you” posters. A persons mood can easily be told through the way they are holding their hands, and fists are certainly not peaceful. Bring power to photoshop with thse amazing fist brushes!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: water color brushes are some of the most common. Probably because they are relatively easy to produce, at least, basic, sub-standard ones are. What we have here is a wonderful set of watercolor brushes, possibly the best set I have seen to date. Thanks Qbrushes! Please note: they are for PSDTuts PLUS members only, which is a small fee of $9/month.

I was debating whether to post this, but this insanely obvious rip is worth drawing attention to. Immediately noticeable is the design:

That long, triangular ended rectangle with two ‘points’. Pretty much an identical design element, directly ripped. The login ‘box’ top right is very similar in style too and the main content area is, but that’s OK. I can see MephoBox has simply been inspired by Pattern Taps design. Then I read the content.

You see, Pattern Tap is a collection of lovely design elements, cool footers, beautiful headers and creative sidebars. Users login, they take screenshots of various sections of websites, post them collect them and generally get inspired. The strange thing is, this is exactly what you do on MephoBox. The two ideas behind the sites are identical, and there’s no possible way this could have been a mistake, could it?

Unless this is just a big joke, MephoBox = Pattern Tap, and Pattern Tap came first. So MephoBox is a complete and utter 100% copy. Avoid it, use Pattern Tap.

From the creator of the excellent inspiration resource Yay! Monday, comes even more inspiration in the form of yay!everyday. It’s a more social site, with profiles and user content powering it. Be sure to check it out if you’re in need of an inspiration booster.

Here’s an awesome set of neat, rounded icons. What’s great about them is that they come in .ai format.

After a long period of waiting, WordPress 2.7 is here, and I couldn’t be more happy. After just 10 minutes, I’ve fallen back in love with WordPress, it’s completely rejuvinated the entire system. Anyway, lets take a look at some of the awesome features and changes which have arrived for us:

The Dashboard

The new dashboard is like a work of art. The “Right Now” section is perfect, highlighting all the info which was previously slapped in a single line of letters, words and other mumble jumble. The Quickpress feature I have yet to use, but I can see it being immensely useful in the future, especially for our individual resources. The rest of the content is pretty standard fare, but it’s all organized well and you can drag bits around.

The Write Page/Edit Template Page

It’s wider! Finally, a large area to edit content, content is, once again, king. It generally makes writing easier, and the right sidebar has all the info you really need to create a post. Below the writing area is the less-used stuff, custom fields, custom excerpt, trackbacks and so on.

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Pro Themes has released an awesome set of over 100 free circular icons. All are transparent png’s.