I have two new WordPress themes I’m going to be releasing for free in the very near future. They both just need some tightening up (mostly in the markup department). I’ll probably be releasing one of them as an exclusive to subscribers of my newsletter and the other through regular channels and on WordPressings.

City White

City White is a widget ready, fixed-width WordPress theme with a right sidebar and a very simple, image less layout. It’s the first theme I’ve released without any images at all, as a matter of fact.

Since this theme is so minimalistic and white it’s going to be very simple for anyone to expand upon it and make it their own. I actually thought about using it as a base for a series of sports related themes but I’m putting that idea on the backburner for now.

Blue Gloss

Although it’s very simple like City White, Blue Gloss does have a bit more of a style to it. It’s also a fixed width, widget ready WordPress theme with a right sidebar.

Right now I’m leaning towards making Blue Gloss the newsletter exclusive theme. Future issues of the newsletter will have a special download code to give verified subscribers access to this and any other exclusive themes I release.

Alex King is responsible for a lot of great WordPress plugins but one of my favorites is his simple 404 Notifier.

404 Notifier is an admin-side plugin that logs any 404 errors your visitors encounter while visiting your blog.

The neat part of 404 Notifier is that you can subscribe to a special RSS feed that will automatically notify you of any new 404 errors.

This week’s WordPress plugin is great for those of you looking to integrate free photography into your blog posts.

With PhotoDropper you can browse Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr based on keywords and attach them to your blog posts.

This sounds really good but there’s a catch. PhotoDropper automatically includes a credit link to the photographer (which is fine) but it also includes a link back to the PhotoDropper site with the anchor text “photo” next to the credit link.

So if you think that’s a bit shady you might want to look elsewhere for photos for your blog. I always recommend stock.xchng.

I’ve decided to launch a newsletter to compliment my posts here. Jack’s Newsletter will offer web development tips, WordPress news and thoughts on freelancing that won’t appear on this blog. I’ll be running all of my future contests to members of the newsletter as well.

Speaking Of Contests…

As an incentive to subscribe and to help promote the launch, I’m going to be giving away a Single-Use License for the popular Premium News Theme for WordPress to one of the newsletter’s verified subscribers. It’s free to subscribe so you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up.

Subscribe Now

In fact, I’ve made it really easy by including the sign up form right here:

I’ll be picking the winner of the free premium WordPress theme at midnight on March 7th, 2008. Feel free to tell everyone you know about the contest and have them subscribe to Jack’s Newsletter for their chance to win.

This week’s plugin is called Redirection. This plugin simplifies the process of building 301 Redirects by creating an easy to use interface within WordPress for updating your blog’s .htaccess file. This is great for affiliate marketers who want to hide their affiliate links.

Another nice feature of Redirection is its 404 monitoring. It will track the 404 errors your blog generates so that you can then create redirects for them. That’s pretty slick.

If you’re interested, head on over to the Redirection page for a list of even more features and help installing and running the plugin (including a video tutorial).

Credit for this week’s WordPress Plugin of the Week goes directly to Viking Blogger. He wrote a post about it recently that I just read this morning.