Thesis Theme Tutorials and Internet Scoundrels

There are some great tutorial posts floating around the Thesis Community. There are also some dirty rotten scoundrels.In the first part of this post I will touch on a great site for tutorials. Then I will cover catching those internet scoundrels.

Thesis Hacker is a site with some great tutorials.

The screenshot below is from The Vault – a list of all the tutorials on the site.

Let The Hacking Begin

If you read my article Confessions of a Self-Taught WordPress Hacker then you will understand why I ‘need’ to learn things myself. Take for instance Thesis Hacker’s site. I have always been curious how to make a dark centre column so I thought I would give it a crack and see how it is done using my favourite tools and techniques.

Discovering what images and CSS are used

I found out how to do the black center column using Firebug, partial screenshot below.

The site uses both an image and the color black where the image doesn’t fill the content column.

• If you want to see what the image is, right click on the image and select “View Image” or “View Background Image”. You can try it on the image above. It will take you to the page where the image is and you can see what it looks like, how big it is, etc.

You can also see if it has been “pinched” and is using somebody elses bandwidth. If the url does not match the site’s root folders, it might be pinched. Keep in mind however that the site may be affiliated with, and have permission to use the image of, the other site. For example, we sometimes share images between Timberwolf HQ and Thesis Theme HQ.

Internet Scoundrels and How to Catch Them Out

A little while back, I discovered an incoming link to my site (listed in my cpanel), so I went to investigate. This is recommended to see who and why people are linking to your site.

Other sites link to your site for 3 main reasons:

• giving you a good wrap and linking to you
• flaming you and you need to know so you can address the issue. The flaming may or may not be justified. The only way to keep tabs on this is to check your incoming links
• using your server bandwidth by linking to your images instead of copying it from the original source, and saving it to their own server ( if it is okay for them to use the image).

In my case they had ripped off my content as well as using my links and server bandwidth. How RUDE!

This usually happens when unscrupulous thieves (like there’s another kind!) blindly copy and paste your article  onto their own site without changing much or anything, including the links.

HINT:

• Have at least one link to another article or place on your site, so if the article is copied, you at least get a link back to your site.
• Some recommend linking back to the original article so people find out it was stolen.

To check my suspicons I right-clicked on the image and selected view image and low and behold, the url was my own! Long story short, I sent a curt email to them and they apologised and rewrote the article, using alternate images.i

WordPress Hacking Case Study

My article Thesis Theme Tutorial: Image Line Up was written after I visited Thesis Hacker – another Thesis Theme website.

I liked the way the site has bookmark images lined up at the bottom of posts. I like to dabble with Photoshop (also self-taught ) and started thinking of ways I could use this idea – if only I understood the code behind it.

• As an aside I designed all of the headers for our sites, including Thesis Theme HQ.

You can cheat and get code from sites, even some plugins give you the code automagically, but where is the fun in that? What if you want to do something different – because you can!

Read my tutorial about creating an image line-up in Thesis.

Related Posts

1. The Definitive List of Thesis Theme Tutorials
2. 20 Awesome Thesis Theme Tutorials from 18 Different Thesis Sites
3. Thesis Theme Tutorial: Image Line Up
4. 5 Sneaky Ways and Means To Hack A WordPress Site
5. 15 Top Tutorials to Create a Na’vi Avatar Face in Photoshop