Technical Speech

My usual practice for saving login details of websites is to save these details in a text file.  But it is a little bit risky that my computer is not only used by me.  So in this situation i decided to program a ‘Text File Encryptor ‘ in my favorite programming language  C.  Hence i made a simple program which acts as both encryptor and decryptor (that is if we encrypt an encrypted file it will be decrypted to its orginal file) using a password.

The Source code of the program is given below.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <conio.h>
void main()
{
   FILE *tfp, *fp;
   char *file, *tafile, *pas, c, rc;
   int i, paslen, ast, asp, asr;

   file = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char));
   printf("\t||SUHAIB'S FILE ENCRYPTOR||\t\n\n");
   printf ("Enter the file name :");
   gets(file);

   fp = fopen(file,"rb");
   if (fp == NULL)
   {
      printf("File not found.");
   }
   else
   {
      tafile = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char));
      pas = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char));

      printf ("Enter the target file name :");
      gets(tafile);
      tfp = fopen(tafile, "wb");
      printf("Enter the password :");
      gets(pas);
      paslen = strlen(pas);

      for(i = 0; (c = fgetc(fp)) != EOF; i++)
      {
         if (i >= paslen)
            i = 0;
         ast = (int)c;
         asp = (int)pas[i];
         asr = ast ^ asp;
         rc = (char)asr;
         fputc(rc,tfp);
      }
      fclose(tfp);

      printf ("\nFile encrypted/decrypted sucessfully...");
   }
   fclose(fp);
   getch();
}

Reference : XOR-Encryption

If you use a WordPress theme which is available for download,  you can share it with others. I am sure that it will be helpful to you, me and others viewing this post.

How to post?

• You can share your details through the comments in this post.
• You should post
  1. Theme name (name of the theme that you use).
  2. Your Website link where the specified theme is using.
  3. A small description (about purpose)  of your website.

Selecting a theme for our WordPress blog is probably as much as difficult as developing a new theme. Yes, this is my opinion that I learned from my experience. Because when I decided to make this website one of the problem that I faced is that which WordPress theme to use. Probably you will also face similar problem if you make a WordPress blog (for your personal use).  I said this because that much free WordPress themes in different categories and variety are available for download in WordPress Free Themes Directory so that we will be confused to select which is best for our website.

To get rid of this problem I decided to make my own theme that is my first WordPress theme Technical Speech. For that also I had to look at other themes for learning how they designed and organized. Even after making my own theme, I am not satisfied with that too.

Then after a long analysis and observation I selected some themes and took one out of that for my website. I am not sure that this theme is for how much time. I said all these because we should take some time in selecting a theme for our blog as it is one of the important factor of making a WordPress blog. For my convenience I have collected some most downloaded and highly rated themes and plugins (about 40 +) from WordPress Extend. I am sharing that collection with you people so that it will be useful to you also.

Download this collection of WordPress Themes and Plugins :

http://rapidshare.com/files/271905458/wordpress_themes_plugins.rar

size : 31.8 mb

After the release of my first WordPress Theme – Technical Speech,  I got many mails and comments through this website regarding suggestions and bugs in my theme, which helped me a lot to release the next version of my theme.

As i told the first version of this theme was made just for fun, but for this version i have put some extra care in the development as a result of the responses from the users.

Theme Details

Theme Name: Technical Speech
Theme URI: http://technicalspeech.co.cc/wordpress/technical-speech-updated.html
Description: A magazine like layout, developers and writers friendly theme. Compatible with Wordpress 2.7 and greater. Theme options, 3 dynamic sidebars, dropdown menus with jQuery. Updated : Multiple headers, a third widget added, ‘About Me’ box fully customizable, totally revised look… If any bugs found mail me at khaninhisway@gmail.com.
Version: 1.1
Author: Suhaib Khan
Author URI: http://technicalspeech.co.cc/
Tags: white, light, fixed-width, three-columns, theme-options, right-sidebar, custom-header
Released under the GPL.

Changes in this version

A lot of changes has been made to this version of Technical Speech WordPress theme.

• A new arranged and clean look.
  • Valid CSS and XHTML code.
  • CSS easily customizable.
• Enhanced Date display at top of every page.
  • Fully customizable by ‘Technical Speech Theme Options’ at WordPress admin page.
  • Can be disabled or enabled.
  • Display format can be easily changed.
• ‘About me’ box in the front page changed.
  • Fully customizable by ‘Technical Speech Theme Options’ at WordPress admin page.
  • Can be disabled or enabled.
  • Avatar in it can be disabled or enabled.
• A third widget has been added with built in ‘Featured Post’ Section.
  • Fully customizable by ‘Technical Speech Theme Options’ at WordPress admin page.
• Supports three Header styles.
  • Two Header images, located at ‘technicalspeech\images\head_image.jpg’ and ‘technicalspeech\images\head_image_large.jpg’
  • Large header is of width 920px and can be of any height.
  • Small header is of width 580px and height 60px.
  • You can switch between headers (text, large image, small image) via ‘Technical Speech Theme Options’ at WordPress admin page.

Download

Download from WordPress Free Themes Directory – Click here.

Preview

Click Here to view online preview of this theme.

Screenshots

With Text as Header

With small image ( 580px X 60px ) as header so search on top.

With large image ( 920px width ) as header so search on sidebar.

As I found WordPress as a simple and easy to use blogging platform (not only blogging, it can be used as a CMS with necessary plugins ) as I mentioned in my previous post, I began to work on WordPress. You all know that one of the main as well as nice feature is that it can be easily customized with themes. You can find a collection of awesome WordPress themes at WordPress Free Themes Directory which are free to download. On seeing these awesome themes I also wanted to make a WordPress theme. With the help of WordPress Codex and some tutorials on the web I also tried to make a theme. The result of that is my first WordPress theme which is named as Technical Speech, the name of my website (blog).

Technical Speech – WordPress Theme (version – 1.0)

Technical Speech Screenshot

A magazine like layout mainly aimed at developers. Theme is compatible with WordPress 2.7 and greater.

Main features of Technical Speech theme are :

• Three column layout.
• Two dynamics sidebars with widget support.
• Theme mainly uses navigation based on ‘Categories’ with slide down menu (sub categories) made with jQuery.
• Pages are displayed on the top navigation bar with drop down menus (sub pages) made with jQuery.
• Front page displays an ‘About Me’ box which displays the content of a specified page (page link can be set at ‘Technical Speech Settings’ in your admin page) and the image displayed in the about me box is located at ‘
  \images\ about_img.jpg’ (replace this image with your own).
• Front page displays only three ‘Recent Articles’ and three ‘Popular Articles’ and the ‘About Me’ box.
• Thanks for easy-popular-posts WordPress plugin by Christopherross for displaying popular posts in the front page and jQuery plugin hoverIntent used in the top navigation (pages).
• Theme options available in the admin page.
• Double display layout for posts and front page posts (Column and Row display, can be set at in the theme options).
• Threaded display of comments.
• More features will be implemented in the coming versions of this theme …

Theme can be downloaded from here.

I expect your suggestions about my theme and bugs found on my theme through the comments in this post.

As I found HTML is an easy language to learn, I started learning HTML as the first step to learn programming. It was much easy to understand the basic concepts of HTML and I learned it very quickly. We all know that now a days HTML is incomplete without CSS. After learning the concepts of CSS I found web designing as very much interesting. I started making web pages just for fun and that helped me to learn more and more about web designing. At that time I heard about PHP. PHP is a programming language used in web programming, for making interactive as well as dynamic web pages. PHP is an open source, popular scripting language designed for web development. When I started learning PHP, on the first day itself I became addicted to PHP and I found it really interesting. At that time I came across CMS (Content Management System) and blogs. When thought about making a website of my own to share my views and to discuss about my favorite topics, I choose Wordpress as a platform. WordPress is software that helps in making your own blog.

The reasons for choosing WordPress are :

• The first and main reason is that it is free.
• It is easy to install and use.
• It can be extended using plugins. It can also be used as a CMS.
• It can be easily customized with themes. There I can make use of my knowledge in HTML and CSS or web designing.
• WordPress uses PHP and so for me as I learned a little about PHP, it will be easier for customizing WordPress. Don’t misunderstand that for using WordPress we have to learn PHP. WordPress is easy to use so that we don’t need any knowledge on web designing, HTML or PHP for using WordPress.
• Website or blog using WordPress as it’s platform is highly interactive.
• It is very popular.
• More about working with WordPress…

The next and important thing was to find a place to host my website which meet the WordPress minimum requirements. There are thousands of such hosts, you can find some of the popular web hosts here or you can find top web hosts (reviews) at webhostinggeeks.com. But these are all paid hosting and that was a problem for me that I am not in a condition to host my website in a paid hosting service. So I have to find a free hosting service to host my website. That was an easy job but on the other hand it’s a tough job. Like paid hosting there are also thousands of web hosts that offer free web hosting with minimum requirements for WordPress (mainly PHP and MySQL). We all know that in most cases free is entirely different from paid so we can’t get features like paid hosting in a free hosting. So we have to find a reliable free web hosting service that offers stable and fair service with all our requirements. One of the popular and best place to host your wordpres blog is WordPress.COM, offers 3GB of file storage. But its free service is limited and it puts some restrictions on our blog. So we have to find a free web hosting service that puts no restrictions on our blog (self hosting with WordPress).

Some of the best web hosts that offer free hosting are:

• x10Hosting
  • 500 MB disk space.
  • 10000 MB Monthly Transfer.
  • cPanel, FTP Access, Webmail.
  • HTML, PHP, ASP.Net, CGI, Perl, MySQL.
  • Addon, Sub and Parked Domains.
  • Ad free (no Ads).
• HostCell.net
  • 300 – 1000 MB disk space.
  • 5000 – 10000 MB bandwidth.
  • cPanel 11, FTP Accounts, Webmail, SSI.
  • PHP 5, MySQL, CGI, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python.
  • Addon, Sub and Parked Domains.
  • Ad free (no Ads).
• ByetHost
  • 5500 MB disk space.
  • 200 GB monthly transfer.
  • VistaPanel and Automatic Script Installer.
  • FTP Account, Webmail.
  • MySQL databases & PHP Support.
  • Addon domain, Parked Domains, Sub-Domains.
  • No ads.
• AWARDSPACE
  • 200 MB disk space.
  • 5 GB monthly transfer.
  • PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI.
  • FTP Account, Webmail.
  • Domains Hosted – 2, Subdomains – 5.
• Freehostia
  • 250 MB disk space.
  • 6 GB monthly transfer.
  • 1-click 40+ Scripts Installer, Webmail, FTP Account, SSI.
  • PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python.
  • Addon domain, Parked Domains, Sub-Domains.
  • No Top/Bottom banner ads.
• Find more about free web hosts and free web hosts reviews at Free Web Hosting.

Note one thing that this list is not arranged. Help me to extend this list by posting comments about some best free web hosts that you tried.

Before ending this article I want to tell you one thing that a free hosting is always a free hosting. If you are not making your website for fun or personal purpose better you try a paid hosting service to host your website, now a days a lot of best web hosting services are available at a reliable and cheap cost.