Well, I switched to the new Frugal Premium blog theme; did you notice? Yeah, I know, it looks a lot like my old theme. But, I’ve always loved the look of my original theme and, to be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that it wanted to morph into a Picasso painting every time there was a WordPress upgrade, I never would’ve changed.

One of the great things about WordPress is that there are so many free themes out there. If you look hard enough, you’ll find a theme that is exactly what you’re looking for. Having said that, if you’re serious about blogging—especially if your goal is to become a  professional blogger—it is imperative you either hire a reliable programmer, or at least choose a theme with a dedicated support system.

Since the income generated at Dead Rooster does not yet justify adding a full-time programmer to my staff, I went with purchasing a theme with a stellar support system.

Obviously, the support system wasn’t the only reason I chose Frugal Premium; I really liked the ease in which you can change nearly every aspect of the theme without writing a single line of code.  I’m referring to sophisticated features such as Static Home Pages, Multiple Sidebar Configurations, Featured Article Sections and countless other items. You can even get into the minute details of the theme—still, without coding—such as the navigation bar attributes:

And that’s just the NavBar! There are similar control panels for nearly every other aspect of this theme.

But uploading my new theme didn’t go flawlessly; I ran into a few glitches related to my previous tinkering with the old theme. For instance, I created a stand-alone blogroll page framework so I could have a separate “links” page and not have to list every link in the sidebar of  every page. Well, when I switched over, my new theme didn’t include this framework, so all of my blogroll links disappeared!

…and, I forgot what I did to create that page in the first place!

I tried some plugins that were supposed to do the same thing, but they didn’t work for me. This jogged my memory and I remembered having the same problem with my previous theme causing me to create a special php file to get what I wanted.  If there’s any intrest, maybe I’ll write a blog post on how to do that in the future.

Anyhow, I wrote another php file for the new theme and my blogroll page is back to operational.

Another major glitch involved the avatars in the comment section (which I could never get to work with my old theme). Well, they started working too good, I was seeing multiple avatars for each comment. This was due to having multiple avatar plugins activated. Haha! Easily fixed.

Try leaving a comment on my blog and see if an avatar shows up. It’s supposed to load avatars from various places such as MyBlogLog. If you don’t see an avatar for you,  head over to  Gravatar.com and upload one (you don’t even have to have a blog) then come back and see if it loads.

If anyone wants to try Frugal, there is a free version available, but a lot of the really cool stuff is disabled.

Photo credit: Kainet

When Dead Rooster was born, I literally spent a week finding the perfect theme. I knew what I wanted and it was only a matter of time before I found it. Finally, I found Daleri Selection by Andreas Viklund and it was EXACTLY what I was looking for.

I love this theme!

The problem, though, was that Andreas decided to stop supporting it (even though he personally uses it for his own blog), so after MANY WordPress upgrades, the theme became incompatible with more and more plugins and widgets.

Since there was no other theme on the market that would replace the look and feel to my satisfaction, I began tweaking the code of the original to work with the current WordPress upgrades. THIS IS A GIGANTIC MISTAKE!

I want to alert everyone out there that by tweaking your theme’s code to “work” with current WordPress upgrades, you could be setting yourself up for serious problems in the future. Namely, when you finally do switch themes (and, you eventually will), your new theme will not carry over the tweaks you made to make things work and your blog could blow up when you switch.

I’m no CSS programmer, so I didn’t really have the skills to go with a custom.css file. At least THEN I would’ve had all my tweaks in one place so I could deal with each one when switching over. As it was, my tweaks are spread throughout my original theme’s various .php files (I’m such an IDIOT!).

I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I switch, but I’m assuming there will be quite a few problems. I know FOR SURE of one problem: my images will ALL be misaligned when I switch. I’ve had to tweak the image code WordPress creates when you add an image. I’ve had to do it on nearly every post; so, I know I’ll have to deal with that. Luckily, it will only be time consuming and some posts may look funny for a while, but, at least it’s not something I don’t know how to fix.

And, then there’s the comment section. I’ve had to really tweak the shit out of that to get it to work with threaded comments—I still never got it to work with gravatars. Yup, I think I’m most nervous about my comments. We’ll see.

Anyhow, I’m really excited about the new theme. It’s a commercial theme which I intend to write about in a future post because you won’t believe all the cool things you can do with it. It’s amazing!

At first, I adjusted the settings to look almost IDENTICAL to my old Daleri Selection theme, but then I thought: why not improve the look a little bit? Make it cleaner?

So, in the next few days, expect to see a mildly different look for Dead Rooster (or, maybe by the time you read this, it has already happened!).

This being the final post with the old theme, lets document the original look of Dead Rooster:

Goodbye old theme, I’ll miss you!

Wish me luck, everyone.

Here goes…

I make so much money online that I often just sit around the Dead Rooster Mansion puffing on Tiparillos which I carelessly light-up with actual Mexican currency totaling as much as 100 Pesos!

I know what you’re thinking:

Hey, William, you may be way more interesting than that Dos equis guy, but if you’re such a trillionaire, how come you light-up cheap 79-cent Tiparillos and not some form of $2,000 Havana Gold Wealthdrainer cigars rolled by Cuban zombies and containing tobacco extracted from the guano of rare, prehistoric, tobacco-eating Himalayan Squeak Bats which went extinct during the forming of the iridium layer?

Well, I…

…and, further, why do you light them with cheap 100-Peso notes worth less than eight American dollars each when you could be using a much more trillionaireistic currency such as a United States hundred-dollar bill?

Maybe if you stopped thinking so loudly, I could explain!

See, if you were a major trillionaire like me, you’d know that the first two commandments of The Trillionare’s Handbook clearly state:

1. Don’t Smoke Bat Poop!
2. Why torch a hundred when Mexican money is so much more colorful?

But, none of that is important now. What is important, is that you learn how to make your own vast sums of enormous cash on the internet.

How to Make Vast Sums of Enormous Cash on the Internet

The first thing you will need to do is start a blog. There is simply no way to lose money with a blog. You’d literally have to be walking around with a brain the size of an electron while smoking crack all day in order to fail.

Look at me. The money comes non-stop in refrigerated transport helicopters 24-hours a day! Even a lazy upstart like John Chow, who’s blog is not nearly as popular as Dead Rooster, admits to making a decent $40,000 a month. I couldn’t live on it, but, good for him.

So, don’t just sit there! Quit your job immediately and…

Step 1: Go get a cheap (but interesting) domain name

Step 2: Go get cheap (but reliable) web hosting

See what I did there? I used something called “affiliate links” in order to make even more money. It’s the kind of super secret money extraction technique a loose-cannon blogger such as myself could reveal at any moment here at Dead Rooster dot com (better subscribe to my FREE UPDATES right now!)

The next thing you’ll need to do is load a blogging platform such as WordPress onto your server (I’m sorry to report WordPress is free, so no affiliate link. ). Normally, loading WordPress is extremely complicated requiring a degree from NASA including a complete understanding of hyperspace; however, if you were smart enough to go through my affiliate link and sign up at Hostgator (which, by the way, is what Dead Rooster runs on), you’ll find a one-button installation in the control panel so easy a moderately-trained squirrel could do it.

Now For The Hard Part

Once you get set up, you’ll have to write something.

This can be either difficult or easy depending on what you’re trying to achieve. If you just want to make money and don’t really care whether it’s interesting to readers or not, you can research keywords to see what people are searching for in your particular genre or niche and write about that. Or, you can do what I do and write about things like the time your pants fell down at the beach or when you flung a flaming dummy onto a speeding ice cream truck.

Note: if you decide to research keywords, do yourself a favor and order Keyword Elite through this affiliate link. It will not only save you hours of research time (it’s simply the best available tool for this), but if enough people buy it, I won’t feel guilty spending $269,000 on that Aston Martin DBS I’ve been looking at:

OK folks, I think I’ve given enough information to get you started. Before you know it, you’ll be buying helicopters.

One last thing:

To any mean lawyers out there ready to sue me because I advised my readers to quit their jobs or because I suggested actual money could be made from blogging:

1: I hereby declare this blog post a joke; it is not meant to be taken seriously by anyone, especially lawyers.
2: Do lawyers always use goofy words like, “hereby,” even in everyday situations such as when ordering pizza?
3: I hereby order a pizza.
4: Do you have an affiliate program?

I’ve considered adding video to Dead Rooster for quite a while now, but since I’m constantly chased by hordes of desperate Supermodels wanting to “make me their man,” I can’t afford to be slowed by a clunky camcorder style video camera. I need something I can run with.

Even though the Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera isn’t available until September 15th, I’m convinced it’s the perfect pocket video camera for bloggers. Here’s why:

After months of research and repeatedly watching the Asian Hula-hoop Girls Video shot with the Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera in a dimly lit Taipei Hooters, I’m sure it’s the right choice.

Other pocket video cameras, such as the Flip MinoHD; Flip UltraHD and the Sony Webbie MHS-PM1 all suffer from the same non-blogger-friendly deficiencies: 1. They suck in low-light situations. 2. There is no built-in image stabilization resulting in “shaky” video playback when shot in hand-held situations, and 3. There is no external microphone jack.

The Kodak Zi8 solves these problems. It’s the first affordable (under $180) pocket video camera to offer built-in image stabilization; it uses a fixed low-light compatible lens and features an external microphone jack.

Aside from the fact that it records amazing high definition video up to 1080p at 30 fps with 16:9 aspect ratio, it also boasts an expandable SD/SDHC card slot for up to 32 GB of additional memory; removable rechargeable batteries; a cordless, swing-out USB arm for uploading and a vibrant 2.5–inch viewfinder.

What I don’t like about this camera is that you’ll need a pretty powerful processor (Kodak recommends 2.8gz!) to process and edit that super high-def 1080p video; however, for me, the good news is that I’m NEVER going to use it. I’m only interested in blog videos and settings higher than standard 720p is way overkill as far as I’m concerned.

Other considerations before you buy a Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera is the extra expense for an SD/SDHC memory card. I’ve heard the on-board memory is just enough to run the camera’s software, so buying extra memory is mandatory. Also, a good external stereo microphone, if you chose to use one, is not going to be cheap.

Still, I’m absolutely convinced the Kodak Zi8 will be my first digital video camera. I love the preliminary video footage I’ve seen; it’s small enough to take with me everywhere; and it gets over an hour of 720p video on a single 4GB SDHC memory card (which are cheaper than dirt right now).

The Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera comes in three colors: Raspberry, Aqua and Black and is available for pre-order right now at Amazon for $179.95.