I just upgraded my Thesis Theme from the version 1.4.2 to version 1.5.  and can’t believe my eyes. 

I purchased the Thesis Theme a few months ago as I was starting this blog.  My decision to buy was based on all the positive reviews I read about the Thesis Theme and I felt that if I was going to be a serious blogger, I needed a serious theme. 

This certainly is not the first theme I have worked with.  I have extensive experience with a number of free themes that I  retooled to perform the way I needed them to, but this is the first purchased theme I have used.   Since my purchase of Thesis I have purchased a few other themes for other sites I am working on but none compares to the brilliance of this workhorse.

One of the best things about this theme is lifetime upgrades – FREE.  Now I have been around the internet for a while and I have upgraded different software packages before.  Some of them have new features but many times the upgrades are a bigger pain than they are an improvement.  

Well, I have to admit that is what I was thinking about this upgrade.  I bought the theme and as soon as I had purchased it and got everything the way I wanted it, the new version starts to be offered in Beta form.  I thought, “why bother, its not going to give me that many new features, if any”. 

In fact, I forgot there was an upgrade until I was looking at another blog that was talking about their recent conversion to Thesis .  As I was looking at the layout I noticed something that I didn’t think was possible, one of their columns was larger than the other column.  That was not possible in my version.  I investigated it to make sure and when I could not figure out how they did it, I asked.  The answer came in the form of a necessary upgrade.  They were using version 1.5.  Oh No.  What an idiot I am.  How could I have missed that one.  You mean you actually got some cool new features with the upgrade – and it’s free. 

I immediately upgraded.  Everything went very smooth.  The upgrade was easy to find, the instructions were to the “T” and the uploading and activation worked exactly as described.

You can see the results on my blog.  You see how the right column is larger than the left.  This is significant because it just widened the playing field of content and layout. 

All of this to say, the Thesis theme is a quality deal.  The ease of usage is amazing and with a little plugin called Thesis Open Hook the whole process of customizing your theme is too easy.   You can add affiliate links at will, change the layout of your theme instantly and really make it hum in very little time.  

I highly recommend the Thesis Theme, especially if you are serious about blogging.  It takes all of the coding hassle out of the picture and lets you work on your business and content, instead of working in the code. 

Let me know your thoughts.

Here is a tutorial for creating link cloaks with the htaccess file.  It is very easy to do with the right tools and not only takes care of the link cloaking but allows for a central location for your links.  This is important when it comes to changing any links throughout the site.  By centralizing the links in the htaccess file you only need to change or update links in one spot to make changes throughout your entire site. 

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This class will teach you how to take advantage of some websites and tools that are out there so that you can socially network your Twitter Accounts while you sleep. It is truly a very cool little. In this class we’ll teach you how to listen to words that you’re interested in that people are currently tweeting about. Then, once a word is heard, your twitter account will automatically follow the people who said such tweets. After that, if they follow you back, which is the norm, your twitter account will automatically reply with a direct message that you have composed ahead of time. During all of this cool automation, your twitter account will also be automatically sending out tweets to all of your followers on a regular basis. It does this by automatically sending them RSS URL feeds of related articles that you and your followers are interested in (based on what word tweets you are listening to) which it finds out on the web. There are also a couple of maintenance tools used in this class to automatically trim off the people you are following, but who are not following you back.

Please take your time and go thru the class step by step. Some of these instructions are a little tedious, but, if you’re patient, and experiment around a little, you’ll understand it very easily and soon be on your way to having thousands of tweople following you.

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