General Trick Blogger

Where do you go to read the news? Are you able to customize your news source and filter out the topics that interest you and the ones that don’t? More than likely you can’t filter anything, which is why Xygnalis a breath of fresh air. Many people start their day by reading the top news headlines, but often don’t care about many of the headlines. With Xygnal, you can customize the news based on topics that you’re interested in; no need to wade through all of the irrelevant topics or articles that you may have no interest in.

Xygnal is currently in an early beta stage and has just one website that works on any device or browser; there are no downloads or updates required.

This section shows you the top news headlines and the trending topics within those headlines. While you can’t view the whole story on the site, you will be able to see an excerpt and link to original source. Additionally, you can also see how long ago the story was posted (in minutes, hours, days) and you can click to see related articles.

Xygnal offers 3 options for each article: you can save it (to later view under Saved), share it (on Facebook, Twitter, Google+), and/or track topics within the article.

The tracking features gives you the option to track any topics or keywords within the article. So if you are reading an article about social media and it’s also talking about Facebook and Google, you can track Facebook and/or Google so that you can keep up with other articles that are related to those topics.

When you click on a topic to track, you can choose to track it for a day, week, month, or you can ban the topic (by clicking on the red crossed out icon show above).

When you go to the “Tracked” section, you’ll be able to see all of the topics trending in your tracked topics along with articles related to those topics. The tracking feature is a great way to filter out the topics that you’re most interested in.

This section is where all of your saved articles go. They will stay here until you remove them. As you begin to save articles, you’ll also be able to see the most popular topics within those saved articles.

The search feature does just as expected: it lets you search for any topic and then view articles based on those topics. Again, you’ll have the same options as above (view related articles, save, share, track topics).

There’s not much to offer in the settings just yet. You can edit the topics you’re tracking or banning, check your email address, and delete your account. That’s about it.

Remember, Xygnal is in early beta so there is still a lot features being added and changes being made.

I’m not very fond of the design, but I love the concept and can definitely see myself using Xygnalas my main news source on a daily basis. It’s nice that users can customize the news to their liking by tracking and banning topics. This way, you only see articles based on the topics that matter to you, instead of having to sift through it all just to find what you’re interested in.

WordPress continues to be one of the most popular blogging platforms, but you don’t want your blog to look like everyone else’s. To aid you in your search for the right theme, we’re kicking off a new series of posts here on Blogging Tips that will highlight some of the best WordPress templates on the ‘net.

The first in this series is Thesis Theme.

The default installation of Thesis Theme has a simple navigation bar along the top of the screen, a multimedia box in the sidebar, and a magazine-style layout below the fold for highlighting more posts. Interestingly, one of the most unique features of Thesis Theme is its flexibility.

Without having to dive into the raw code, you can adjust many of the design options through the WordPress control panel. Thesis Theme can be configured to have one, two, or three columns, and you can adjust their respective order and pixel width. The admin area also allows for the changing of colors, fonts, multimedia box content, navigation style, borders, and more.

While Thesis Theme allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your WordPress site, the design markup is actually separate from the HTML code. This way, the underlying code can be as clean as possible, which can be very beneficial from a search engine optimization standpoint.

Further to the SEO benefits found in Thesis Theme are the ability to add custom titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, CSS class, and more to individual posts. The WordPress dashboard has an area to enter your RSS feed and stats code information.

Some popular sites that use the Thesis Theme include the following:

As you can see from these examples, particularly with Copyblogger, Thesis Theme can be highly adjusted to suit your needs. You can check out the demo siteas well. For more information on how what Thesis can do, and how to use “Hooks”, check out this additional Thesis review.

Thesis Theme is available at DIYthemes. The personal option (one live website) is $87 and the developer’s option (unlimited websites that you own) is $164. Both options allow for footer attribution removal.

Once you download the app, there is a remastered version of the Svansl�s cursor set created by Max Rudberg which is retina-screen ready.

Mousecape is as non-instrusive as possible, never asking you for your password for anything. It works by using private APIs created by Apple to register system cursors so it has no performance hit at all.

Capes, or cursor sets, are applied for as long as display state doesn't change, meaning until you change resolution, monitors, sleep your computer, reboot or logout. However, inside of the application is a helper application that will detect when the cape is reset and will apply it again.

Mousecape is available for free, open source and with no obligations. Users can create and share their own capes that are animated and bring new flair to the operating system.

[crarko adds: For 10.8+, including Yosemite.]