I was playing around with WordPress trying to create a theme where the blog posts would not use a lot of screen space. I wanted to keep the content and background (wallpaper) image centered on the screen no matter what size the browser window was.

This is fairly simple to do, after you take a few things into consideration.

If you plan to use a fixed width layout for the page's content, you will want your background image to act as a frame for the content, and will most likely keep the overall width of the image small.

If you plan to use a fluid layout, (one that expands to 100% of the screen size), and plan to design for higher resolutions, (e.g.- 800x600, 1024x768 or higher), you can create an image that is 1600 pixels wide (or wider) and the same CSS will ignore the extra width that isn't used.   Be sure to keep the key elements of the design centered in the middle 800 to 1000 pixels.

Here's a screen shot of the "virtual iphone" I wanted to create. It was done as a WordPress theme to create a micro-blog.

The CSS to center a background image is very simple:

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A short time after you start your WordPress blog, you'll more than likely find an email in your inbox or a notice on the WordPress Admin dashboard telling you someone has commented on one of your posts.

Most new bloggers will be happy, thinking someone has read their blog and cared enough to comment. Unfortunately, roughly 86% of all blog comments are spam¹.

A few steps you can take to cut down on (or eliminate) WordPress comment spam:

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Somewhere between a full blown community portal and blogging is a small niche -- multi-user blogging.

The idea is that you run a site and allow each member to have their own blog, and it's all connected under one content management system.

If this sounds interesting, and you're looking for software to do it, you might want to check out WordPress MU, (the MU stands for Multi User).

If you're looking to have more features and want everything controlled under a single unified login / user management model, take a look at "BuddyPress", (still in BETA, but looks promising).

BuddyPress is an extension for WordPress MU that adds most of the common social media functionality -- "friending", media galleries, user-to-user messaging, chat, forums, user activity streams and more.

If the software is anything like WordPress in reagrds to being easy to install, easy to configure, and attracts even some of the legions of plug-in, widget and theme developers that make WordPress better than most other blogging software, then BuddyPress is sure to be a hit.

Maybe the best thing since WordPress itself is the Lighter Menus plugin which instantly converts the default Admin menu interface of WordPress into one-click drop-down menus.

For instance, instead of having to click Design, then click Themes, then click Theme Editor to make a small change to the appearance of your WordPress blog, simply hover over the Design tab, move down to Theme Editor and click --- once! In addition to the ease of use, the plug-in conserves space at the top of the screen making it less likely you'll need to scroll down to perform some operations.

To get the plug-in go to the WordPress site, click Extend, then click Plugins and search for "lighter menus".

The plugin is available in a number of languages and with over 20,000 downloads, and an (almost) 5 star rating, I believe it's a stable WP plug-in that you can depend on to save you time and make blogging faster and easier.

The Lighter Menus plugin is written by corpodibacco, you can find out more about it and other plugins from the author on the www.italyisfalling.com blog, (along with writings, poetry and other blogged stuff)...

KickApps - "white label" social medial software.

The hosted KickApps platform allows developers to create online communities from scratch or integrate social media functionality into existing CMS based sites.

Kickapps is marketed with two pricing models; FREE, and a CPM, (cost per thousand), pageview based pricing structure. Under the free pricing model, Kickapps displays advertising on the communities web pages, but provides a navigation column skyscraper ad space where the community's developer can run Google Adsense or other advertising.

Kickapps prvodes software to easily setup a Web 2.0 community with video, photo, and audio media file sharing.

Community members can interact with the community in a variety of ways including uploading of video and photo media from mobile devices. Each member gets a personal profile pages, (with it's own unique URL), which ties together their media uploads, blogs, forum messages and other aspects of their involvement in the community.

Kickapps is used on many national and international sites to either provide social networking functionality, or is used to create the entire site. Some of the sites include the Guinness' Book of World Records, the Rachel Ray Show, the San Francisco 49-ers Fan Site and National Public Radio (NPR) "Get My Vote" site. The following screen shots are actual KickApps websites, (click links below each one to visit the site).

KickApps powers the Rachek Ray Incredible People social networking site features.

www.rachaelrayshow.com

KickApps powers the Sand Francisco 49ers Faithful Fan Site

www.49ersfaithful.net

KickApps powers National Public Radio (NPR) GetMyVote Political site.

www.npr.org/getmyvote

Setting up a KickApps community was straightforward, fast and took under 5 minutes. You simply create an account, name your community, pick a theme, and go! The online setup tool gives you a temporary URL and a link to the site administration tools as soon as you're done. In less than 2 minutes you receive an email from KickApps with the permanent URL for the site, ("www.kickapps.com/example" if you named your community "example"). The email contains tips and links to help you get your site going.

In addition to the default URL, Kickapps allows you to use your own domain name and will do DNS masking so the site appears as your own. White label refers to the fact that you can re-brand the software as you like and do not have to have advertise that the site is a KickApps community.

I launched the "Affiliate Center", (which is what they call the site's back end management area). and with very little effort quickly customized the default template I had chosen.

I'd recommend KickApps for any organization looking for a hosted solution, although if you are running a commercial website and plan to monetize it with advertising revenue, you may want to look around a bit more as KickApps takes the prime advertising spots on your the site for their own PPC ads. I have not contacted them (yet) regarding the CPM paid pricing model. This story will be updated as ned information is available.

NOTE: Be sure to checkout our Social Media Software Roundup page for details and to compare KickApps to other Web 2.0 application suites.