For one, you cannot customise a theme in WP.com unless you go for the premium theme or custom-designed theme ($30 a year fee) route where you are given access to change the fonts or the CSS stylesheet of your selected theme.

For those who prefer to stick to “free themes”, there are a number of excellent themes that you can choose from.

I select themes which meet my requirements like –

(a) The theme’s layout is appropriate for the type of content I want to create for my blog. This means that if I want my blog to be a photoblog, then I use a theme for photoblogging. For newsy content, I use a theme that has the look and feel of a news or news-magazine site.

(b) The theme’s overall appearance (color, typography, background) is suitable to the readership I intend to reach.

(c) The theme is updated to leverage on WordPress new features including social media functionalities.

The fourth criterion I also apply in choosing a theme is that the theme’s coding should be SEO-compliant. Since I use only “free” themes for my WP.com blog, I apply this requirement to themes for my self-hosted sites.

From the range of free themes available at WordPress.com-hosted blogs, the themes I like most ~ at least for Working and WordPress-ing ~ are the following (theme descriptions as per designer’s blurb):

Rusty Grunge

A somewhat dirty, grungy theme with two widget areas and several customization options, including Custom Background, Header Image, Post Formats, and more.”

Remarks: This is the theme this site is using as I write this post.

Twenty Eleven

The 2011 theme for WordPress is sophisticated, lightweight, and adaptable. Make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background — then go further with available theme options for light or dark color scheme, custom link colors, and three layout choices. Twenty Eleven comes equipped with a Showcase page template that transforms your front page into a showcase to show off your best content, widget support galore (sidebar, three footer areas, and a Showcase page widget area), and a custom “Ephemera” widget to display your Aside, Link, Quote, or Status posts. Included are styles for print and for the admin editor, support for featured images (as custom header images on posts and pages and as large images on featured “sticky” posts), and special styles for six different post formats.

Remarks: This is WordPress’s current default theme.

Selecta

With a featured posts slider on the front page, a wide, one-column template on image and video posts, and archives displayed in gallery format, Selecta is well-suited for blogs which focus primarily on showcasing videos or images. It comes with six color schemes, support for video, image, aside, gallery, quote, chat, and audio post formats, custom header, custom background, and four widget areas — one in the left sidebar and three in the footer.

Remarks: I should try this next time.

monochrome

This theme supports widget, theme-options, and translation is ready. Also including page-navigation and multi level dropdown menu.

Remarks: I should try this next time.

Bold Life

A bold, colorful theme that lends itself well to personal blogs and daily journals.

Remarks: I will try this next time.

Greyzed

A dark and grungy theme with drop-down menus and a widgetized footer.

Remarks: A very impressive theme. I installed it last month for this site, but used it only for 3 days because it was displaying a bottom-page ad over which I do not have any control. Not really sure why ads were showing up.

Bueno

A stylish and fun theme with a custom header, custom background, and multiple alternate color schemes. Supports featured images for index and archive pages and in the Bueno featured posts widget.

Remarks: I am using this in one of my self-hosted sites, www.pinoykomiks.com for demo.

Skeptical

A theme featuring a custom header, custom background, and five widget areas – one in the sidebar, four in the footer. The footer also shows a maximum of three featured (sticky) posts. It comes with four different color schemes. It supports several post formats including aside, gallery, image, quote, link, chat, video, and audio.

Remarks: I am using this in one of my self-hosted sites, www.justanotherbloodywebsite.com

Mystique

Packed with six layout options, six color schemes, a spot for you to link to four popular social network profiles, and support for aside, image, and quote post formats, Mystique can meet the needs of many types of blogs. Further customize the design by adding a custom header and background.

Remarks: I am using this in one of my self-hosted sites, www.crazyprices.ws

Prologue

A group blog theme for short update messages, inspired by Twitter.

Remarks: I am using this in one of my self-hosted sites, www.cooltext.org

Which theme are you using? What features does your theme have that you are happy about? Please share.

(The image on this post uses a Newspaper layout which already has functions to select (and exclude) categories to show on the front page. The theme used by The Filipino Australian no longer requires category excluders as discussed on this post.)

Some of these plugins also have the functionality of excluding or hiding posts not only from your frontpage but also in archives and search pages. Some even allow you to exclude selected posts under certain tags, and even from your feeds.

Enter “categories exclude” or similar terms when you perform a search of these plugins in your “Install Plugins” window and you will be presented with a list of these plugins.

We have tested some of the plugins available in WordPress.org and below are four of the plugins which we like best as they are very functional and robust, and they produce the results we wanted. Note that, strictly speaking, plugins 3 and 4 are not “category excluder”, but I included them here as I found them also quite interesting.

1. Simply Exclude by Paul Menard

The plugin provides an interface to selectively exclude/include categories, tags, authors and pages from the 4 actions used by WordPress in your blog’s front page, archives, feeds, and search page. It can also be used to hide posts under certain tags.

2. Ultimate Category Excluder by Planet Mike

Ultimate Category Excluder excludes/hides posts under certain categories from your front page, archives, and feeds. Like Simply Exclude, it comes with an admin panel where you can toggle off/on categories to be excluded.

3. Category Selection Widget by Zack Design

Strictly, not a category excluder plugin but this plugin is excellent, especially for websites with multiple categories and sub-categories selection on their front page or on the sidebar. It gives additional functionality to your blog’s native WordPress “search engine” by giving you the ability to provide your users with multiple dropdowns. Very useful for blogs with lots of posts and sub-categories like websites of real estate agents where selection of posts can be based on subcategories like price range, location, number of bedrooms, etc.

4. Collapsing Categories by Robert Felty

Collapsing Categories creates an expandable list of categories and subcategories. It can also expand to show posts.

You can see a demo of this plugin on our sidebar TOPICS / POSTS.

In case you’re wondering: I am not promoting the plugins based on affiliate program-related considerations. I just wanted to share with you the results of my tests. The links above are affiliate links-free which you can easily find out by simply hovering your mouse on the links to see if they contain affiliate ids.

It has been more than a year since I made my last post on this site. At the request of some dear friends, I thought I give the control panel of my site at WordPress.com another look to see if I can continue with my experiments.

I am quite pleased to find a number of niceties and functionalities.

1. On new themes: I counted five pages of 30 theme thumbnails per page. I am not sure if there are 150 themes in there as some of thumbnails keep repeating, but anyway, I found some beautiful themes and some, premium themes too (meaning, you need to pay to use the theme).

For a change, I decided to use Greyzed, a dark and grungy theme with drop-down menus and a widgetized footer.

2. In the editing page, there is now a “Writing Helper” which allows you to use an existing post as a template and Request Feedback for getting feedback on your draft before publishing. (It’s good that the Share A Draft plugin for self-hosted blogs had been ported to WordPress.com.)

3. Also under Appearance panel, there is “iPad” which when activated displays “a beautiful app-like experience to visitors browsing with an iPad.

4. Under Appearance, there is also this “Extras” which you can switch on or off by simply clicking on “Update Extras” for your selected option. If activated, your blog will be displayed with a mobile theme when viewed with a mobile browser.

Obviously, this is an alternate to “iPad” for viewers who do not use an iPad like me.

5. Under Settings, there is “Webhooks” which I passed over as I am not into “hooks” yet. (Perhaps, later.)

6. Under Widgets, I found a number of new apps. Depending on which theme you use, you can put these widgets to enhance the appearance and functionality of your blog. From memory, these are the new widgets: Facebook Like box, Flickr (or has this been there since last year?), Twitter (I am sure this was not there before because I even posted “How to twitter your WP.com post”), Vodpod videos, del.icio.us, and Authors for multi-author site, obviously.

These are my impressions. It would be great if you can share your impressions or your experience with these new apps and functionalities.

For more WP.com tutorials, select any of the articles listed on the right panel or click here.

We are resending the same image as in earlier post, this time with different settings.

Most likely, the theme is not using “image” as a custom field but another name like “post image.” Anyway, we will just adjust Postie’s setting to include the image code in the content.

I am sending this mini-post from my BB phone and sending a picture which I snapped using the same device.

Before sending this post with image attachment, I made two changes in Postie’s settings.

1. Changed setting to allow image to post before the content. Since I am currently using a Thesis theme, I also expect that the image will display before the headline or title of this post.

2. Changed the setting to not to post the image with the other content. This means that the image code will not show in the post content but will be “attached” to the image.

In addition, I also changed the default setting of my theme to show a resized thumbnail to 150px by 150px and to display on right side of the resulting teaser with no text-wrapping. (Note that the thumbnail may appear only with the teaser and not when the post is fully displayed.)

Let’s see what happens. Here goes….

According to MySql resources, you can convert your default server charset from ‘latin1′ to ‘utf8′ by modifying the server’s initialization file. This is fine if you have the time and technical skills, and of course access to your server’s root files.

The easiest workaround I found out, and without touching your server’s root files at that, on how get rid of those “funny characters” is to edit one of the lines in your wp-config.php file.

To do this, open the wp-config.php in a text editor after downloading the file via FTP to your local drive, or opening the wp-config.php using the file manager of your server’s control panel.

Once opened, look for that line (about line number 30) commented out with /** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */

Next to that line is: define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

Simply change ‘utf8′ to ‘latin1′ and save the file, and then upload the file to your server if you edited the file in your local drive. Otherwise, just close the editing window of your Control Panel’s file manager.

That’s it.

Did you find this useful? Please leave me a message.

I found the WP plugin very handy, in fact a necessity, considering that most of the time, I am on the road.

I tried using that to my self-hosted WP installs, but to no avail. The problems I had encountered were just too many to list down.

So I’ve been updating my blogs from my desktop that is when I have the time. Last month I tried again.

After upgrading my WP installs to version three dot oh and my server’s PHP build to version five plus, I installed “Postie.”

I’m still tweaking it, but I believe I have found the perfect solution (so far) to my blogs updating needs.

With “postie”, I can now update some of my blogs sending emails via a smart phone. I have even ventured to experiment sending updates to a “photoblog” site which for awhile had been done in updating accounts with social networking sites.

Visit my experimental photo site and see how “postie” works – http://inphotos.info/streetgallery

*** Let me know if you need help with your “postie.” I may be able to share with you a trick or two.

By the way, this update is sent via an email. )

Romy

Results:

1. The image was successfully uploaded, but the image is displayed on the right panel // If you don’t see the photo on the right panel, please click here. //This site is using the Thesis theme which allows images to be displayed on the right panel (if the Multimedia functionality is switched on). The placement of the uploaded may be different if using a different theme.

2. The message headers of the forwarded message was scrubbed and does not display in the post.