If you’re reading this via RSS or email delivery pop on over to the website and check out the redesign. Actually, it’s a bit more than a redesign as I also changed hosting providers and a ton of other things.
As you may note, I went with a professionally designed theme (i.e. it cost money) called Thesis. I know that there are a ton of free themes out there and I could have certainly coded my own should I had the time and inclination but for $164 (for the multiple blog option – only $87 for the single blog version) I got a well thought out and very easy to administrate theme. From a time vs. cost perspective, it was an easy choice as even the free themes often require a lot of customization and if you want two columns instead of three then you’re in the code mucking around anyway. And then if WordPress releases an update that breaks the theme you can’t just download the newest version of the theme and install it because you have to go back in and put all of your hacks into the new theme.
Thesis operates on a completely different philosophy. You can configure the hell out of it via the control panel. You can change it from a 2 to 3 column layout with a click of a button. You can change column widths, add widgets, and make all sorts of changes all without touching a line of code.
Better yet, when you do touch code you don’t touch the theme code. All of your customizations go into special files which Thesis reads and then gives priority to over its own instructions. For instance, you can tell it that before the first item in the second column to insert a snippet of code. Your customization is then completely isolated to your own custom code files which allows you to do an upgrade to Thesis without overwriting all of your changes.
The API for Thesis is very easy to learn and very intuitive. You can combine the Thesis hooks with WordPress hooks to do some very cool stuff.
So far, I’ve been very happy with the new Thesis theme. If you’re interested in finding out about Thesis you can check out the website here.
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| Site | Rackback | Sign Up Bonus | US |
| Absolute Poker | 30% | 150% up to $500 |  |
| Ultimate Bet | 30% | 111% up to $1100 | |
| Cake Poker | 33% | 110% up to $600 | |
| PKR Poker | 30% | 100% up to $800 | |
| Paradise Poker | 30% | 200% up to €1,000 | |
| Players Only | 33% | 100% up to $650 | |
| Fortune Poker | 30% | 200% up to €1,000 | |
| Betfair | 30% | $1500 | |
| Aced | 30% | 100% up to $500 | |
| Poker Heaven | 30% | 200% up to €1000 | |
| Poker Nordica | 30% | 100% up to $200 | |
| Carbon Poker | 30% | 150% up to $1000 | |
| Red Star Poker | 33% | 110% up to $600 | |
| True Poker | 27% | 100% up to $200 | |
| Action Poker | 35% | 100% up to $2500 | |
| Cellsino Poker | 40% | 500% up to $500 | |
| Minted Poker | 40% | 100% up to $400 | |
| Power Poker | 33% | 110% up to $600 | |
| Interpoker | 30% | 200% up to €1000 | |
| Doyles Room | 33% | 110% up to $600 | |
| Gutshot Poker | 33% | 110% up to $600 | |
| Full Tilt Poker | 27% | 100% up to $600 | |
| Fat Bet Poker | 40% | 1000% up to €500 | |
| NoiQ Poker | 30% | 100% up to €5000 |
| Site | Rake Race | Rake Chase | Freeroll |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doyle's Room | $35,000 | ||
| Cereus Poker Network* | $7,500 | $10,000 | $10,000** |
| Cake Poker | $60,000 | ||
| Party Poker*** | $50,000 | ||
| Red Star | $23,000 | ||
| Eurobet*** | $21,000 | ||
| Players Only | $16,400 | ||
| Tower Gaming*** | $15,000 | ||
| Full Tilt Poker | $10,000 | ||
| Carbon Poker | $12,000 | ||
| Betfair Poker | $12,000 | ||
| Boss Media Network**** | $5,000 | ||
| Cellsino Poker | $5,000 | ||
| Power Poker | $5,000 | ||
| Poker Nordica | $5,000 | ||
| NoIQ | €1,500 |
* Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet (UB) ** May not be available to all players *** Poker Heaven, Fortune Poker, InterPoker, Paradise Poker
Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice theme. Your “Bill’s Poker Blog” link in the footer is busto.
Also, you should “noindex” your archive pages — I can see that you have the all-in-one-seo-pack (http://www.billrini.com/wp-content/plugins/ — you should drop an index.php in there so I can’t see that), so it’s just one click to do that.
Thanks Nat. Yeah, the broken link was a byproduct of doing html coding in the vi editor :-)
Actually I have All in One in the plugins directory but don’t use it with Thesis and Thesis seems to have overlooked that functionality. There is another plugin that only does nofollow/noindex on your archive, category, and tag pages so I’ve installed that until Thesis gets around to supporting that within the theme.
I’m just glad you finally have the posted date back on your posts. :) Looks good so far. Please post MORE posts now please!
Thanks Paboo. I plan on it.
Looks 10x better than the old orange look.
Thanks Mark!