Far from being full of the traditional cherubic leprechauns and shamrocks and “kiss me, I’m Irish” slogans, we wanted to approach this St. Patrick’s Day theme in a way that was representative of how the holiday is most commonly celebrated: using it as an excuse to drink Guinness.

For that reason, we took a rugged and dirty approach to designing a St. Patrick’s Day theme, one more akin to a smoky pub than Lucky Charms…something that’s just a bit more gritty and human and real.  We like it a lot, and we hope you do, too.  Now go celebrate St. Patrick’s Day appropriately and remember to drink responsibly!

download A bit of Luck 3.2 kB
downloaded 13 times

This wallpaper comes in all the usual sizes, with and without calendar, as well as an iPhone version.

Widescreen
1920×1200
1440×900

Standard
1600×1200
1280×960

iPhone
320×480

download Afternoon Dream 3.2 MB
downloaded 13 times

Contact us if you have interest in a custom Blogger template or just want a customized header image like in the screenshot.  And if you like the blog template, let us know in the comments — we love hearing from you!

Download Love is all you need 3.3 kB
downloaded 62 times

This wallpaper comes in all the usual sizes, with and without calendar.  We also included a Twitter background.

Widescreen
1920×1200
1440×900
1280×800

Standard
1600×1200
1024×768

iPhone
320×480

Twitter
1920×1200

Download Clockwork Decay 13.1 MB
downloaded 23

Adventure Tykes was one of the biggest projects we’ve worked on in a while and crossed over into many different applications.  We started out with a Magento online store.  We supplemented that with a community powered by phpBB with a Coppermine photo gallery bridge, and a Resources section with articles and a blog powered by WordPress.  The goal was to provide a seamless look and make the experience as easy for the user as possible.

The site and community was built to provide a resource and store for outdoor enthusiasts who don’t want to become shut-ins just because they had a kid.  It was a lot of fun to work on and they were a great pair to work with.  It was particularly interesting for us to work on this project because, being parents who like to camp and hike, we were also part of the target audience for the site.

Erin composed a welcoming design that used the earthy color palette from their logo suitable for a website for kids’ stuff and outdoor-types.  I became a code monkey for a couple of months, immersing myself in the various platforms and making sure the transition from one to the next was as natural as possible.  We are confident that when it launches officially, Adventure Tykes will not only be a great place to find outdoor equipment for you and your little ones, but also an engaging and active community and resource for ideas to go on adventures with them, too.

Designed by Erin
www.adventuretykes.com

Hot Mess is available in widescreen, standard, and iPhone formats in the following sizes:

Widescreen
1920×1200
1440×900

Standard
1600×1200
1280×960
1024×768

iPhone
320×480

We also included a version for your Twitter account!

Download Hot Mess 2.2 MB
downloaded 30 times

If you haven’t upgraded your WordPress blog to 2.9 (actually 2.9.1 as of the time of this writing), you should.  With the 2.9 update, the people at WP have implemented a feature that I’ve been pining for for some time.  The only problem is it’s not where you’d think it might be.

If you do regularly keep up on your WP updates whenever you get an alert that there’s a new version, you probably saw the option to upgrade your plugins when you upgraded to 2.9.1.  But I know a lot of people (myself included) often let updates slide, and while I did run out and upgrade to 2.9, I hunted for the upgrade-all-the-plugins-at-once button and didn’t find it.  If you’re like me, this post is for you, and here’s what you do.

First off, upgrade if you haven’t already.  WordPress has made it easy to do an automatic upgrade since the 2.7 release, so all you need to do (in most cases) is click a button and WordPress does the work for you.  But what if you are at 2.9+ and you have a little red icon next to your plugins menu on the sidebar, and you want to take care of all of those at once?  It’s not in the Plugins page — which is where I assumed it would be — despite the fact that you can filter your plugins by those needing to be updated.  Instead, you’ll need to head to the Upgrade page in the Tools menu, a place that normally you wouldn’t go for anything other than upgrading WordPress.

Once you’re on the Upgrade screen, everything should make sense.  If you need to upgrade your WordPress version, you’ll have an option to do that, and if you need to upgrade any of your plugins, they will be listed underneath with checkboxes next to each one, and an option to select all. After you click on the Upgrade Plugins button, it’ll go through each one, and tell you at every point what’s going on.

…and that’s it.  WordPress will tell you when it’s done, and the whole process should be pretty quick.

Fixing problems

What it’s doing is temporarily dropping your site into maintenance mode while it does the work.  This takes down your site for a few minutes and displays a message that says “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” (it looks like this).  It should really only take a few minutes and as soon as it’s done it will come back up.  However, if there’s a problem on your server and the script stops, it means your site is locked in maintenance mode, and even you can’t get in.

Luckily, this is relatively easy to fix.  When WordPress goes into maintenance mode, it creates a temporary file in your site’s “root” folder (the folder on the server that your WordPress installation is located that contains the wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes folders) called .maintenance.  All you need to do if your site gets stuck in maintenance mode is to delete the .maintenance file.  This may require connecting via FTP or going to your webhost and accessing a File Browser-like GUI that displays a list of files in your installation.  Once you’re looking at the files in your WordPress install, it should be easy to spot the .maintenance file and delete it.  Once that’s done, you’re back in business (although you may want to try upgrading that plugin individually from the Manage Plugins page, or manually by uploading a newer version to your server).

Saves time

Being someone who maintains multiple WordPress sites and has to periodically upgrade all of them when there’s an update available, this feature is invaluable to me.  It’s so much faster and easier to go to one screen on each site I need to update, and upgrade both the version of WordPress and all the plugins more or less at the same time, and then move on to the next site.  Even if you only have one blog, this takes a lot of the hassle out of having to do periodic plugin updates.  It’s something that a lot of us have been asking for since Automattic added in the automatic upgrade feature, and I’m glad they finally added it in.

Questions?  Comments?  We’d love to hear from you!  Let us know if this post helped you out!

If you’re using the dual monitor version, the left contains the January calendar.  There isn’t a dual monitor option without a calendar, sorry.  All other sizes have a calendar and no calendar option, including the iPhone version.  Dark Clouds comes in the following sizes:

Standard
1600×1200
1280×960
1024×768

Widescreen
1920×1200
1440×900

iPhone
320×480

download Dark Clouds 1.2 MB
downloaded 54 times

As we teased last week, here’s the full archive of all 50 light textures that we’ve posted in two parts (you can check out previews of part one here, and part two here).  But, because you waited patiently and were such good little boys and girls, we bundled a special surprise into your stocking: you can also download a bonus snow texture pack featured below.  You can see one of these textures in action in our popular holiday Blogger template, Advent.  Snow is often challenging to find good textures of because it’s not something you can point-and-shoot.  Without manual adjustment, photographs of snow will come out gray, because cameras look for light and dark and take the average when they are making their light readings.  So we’re pretty pleased with how these pics came out and hope you like them as well.

All our textures are released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike license. Click the license badge below for more information about usage.

Arcane Palette textures by Arcane Palette Creative Design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.arcanepalette.com.

To download this pack, click the link underneath the previews below.

Have a great holiday!  And check back soon, we’ve got more texture packs lined up!

download AP-light (full archive) 51 MB
AP-light downloaded 15 times

download APnature-snow 8.1 MB
APnature-snow downloaded 34 times

All our textures are released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike license. Click the license badge below for more information about usage.

Arcane Palette textures by Arcane Palette Creative Design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.arcanepalette.com.

To download this pack, click the link underneath the previews below.

download AP-light2 24.7 MB
downloaded 36 times

Tell us what you think!