Some time last year, however, I started noticing that my desktop was getting cluttered with too many files and folders, and it was becoming hard to find what I needed fast. That is why I decided to create what I call the functional wallpaper. Here is a picture:

The idea is not mine. I believe I had seen something like this either on the web or on some friend’s computer long time ago. You basically create a background image with sections, and then you organize the icons and files inside these sections. For instance, I have one section for general stuff, one for my backups, one for programming stuff, and one for each of my main websites.

It is working like a charm, so it will probably be a while before I decide to change it. If you are having a hard time finding stuff on your desktop too, give it a shot.

The Mill is a simple, yet elegant, two-column WordPress theme.

Misty Morn is a grey-based WordPress 3.0 child theme for Purple Pastels with custom image and attachment templates, thickbox enabled image attachment pages, and additional page templates for pages without comments and pages without the sidebar.

My Valentine is a pink-based WordPress 3.0 child theme for Purple Pastels with custom image and attachment templates, thickbox enabled image attachment pages, and additional page templates for pages without comments and pages without the sidebar.

Steampunk is a steam punk inspired theme built under the Themeatic Theme Framework environment with clean and SEO friendly HTML/CSS code.

Sun City is a darker WordPress 3.0 theme that makes use of orange, green, blue and other primary colours to provide a visually rich display.

ZenLite Black Mandarin is a darker child theme for the single column ZenLite theme.

In the past I had seen tools and plugins to completely stop any and all scripts from running, but this was a drastic fix, because on some sites and situations you might want to run scripts.

Is there a better solution? Yes. It’s a Firefox add-on called NoScript.

The add-on will block all scripts by default, but you can customize it extensively to make sure you’ll be able to run the scripts you need or want. For example, you can pre-define a list of domains that should be allowed to run scripts, or you can allow and disallow sites and pages on the fly, while you navigate.

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.

If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.

Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.

New plugins

List Yo’ Files adds the ability to list files by file name for a given folder with hyperlinks to each file making it downloadable.

Readable Names forces commenters to write their names in the language that your blog uses.

WP-comment-master enhances your comments with AJAX posting and pagination.

WP-WikiBox allows you to get a Wikipedia article summary for a keyword in any language, inline with your posts and pages, with a simple shortcode.

Updated plugins

IE6 Upgrade Option displays a warning message, simply and politely informing the IE6 user that their browser is out of date, and provides links to download newer browsers.

Vimeo Quicktag enables the user to embed a customized Vimeo video into the blog content.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

The WordPress development team had a very successful meeting last Thursday, where they solidified their plans for WordPress 3.1.

The finalized goals for WordPress 3.1 are “to have a very short dev cycle, a decent amount of testing time, and a release in mid-December. Low on new features, heavy on ui and code cleanup, and avoidance of schema changes. Save the big ideas for 3.2 where we’ll have the liberty to implement those ideas in PHP5. No schema changes and no big new APIs.”

Besides bug fixes and code cleanup, users can look forward to a new wordpress.com inspired admin bar and theme browser, as well as post templates and styles, and a separate network dashboard.

The team plans to halt new feature submissions on October 15th, followed by a primary code freeze on November 1st, and a string freeze on December 1st. The beta period will begin November 15th until the estimated final release date of December 15th.

Keep in mind that this will be the last major release to support PHP and MySQL 4. If your hosting provider has not yet switched to PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, it’s time to start bugging them.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to seeing what will come of the development team’s focus on bug fixes and code cleanup with this release. What are you looking forward to in WordPress 3.1?

There.

You knew when you put in that pithy final line, just punchy enough to ensure a ton of comments and at least 200 retweets. You sat back, cracked your knuckles, sighed deeply and click “Publish”.

And sure enough, a few days later, you’re looking at 348 comments, 1235 retweets, a ridiculous response on StumbleUpon, and a personal e-mail from Daniel Scocco asking you how you did it.

You know without a shadow of a doubt: that was the best damn blog post you’ve ever written, bar none.

And that’s when it sinks in.

“Oh God. How am I going to top that one?”

Blog readers are an awesome audience, especially if they’re engaged in the conversation, willing to bat your ideas around and really bring some solid ideas of their own to the floor. But they’re a nervous and flighty sort too, sometimes.

Just like any online audience, their attention spans can waver. Their patience can wear thin. Let’s face it:

They can forget you.

So that’s why you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into cranking out reams of killer content from the day your blog launched! Isn’t that enough?

Well, no.

Killer content is absolutely vital. That’s what brings the readers to you and keeps them coming back. That’s what builds up the conversation and the social media cyclones that can dump insane amounts of qualified traffic on your site over and over again.

It’s what feeds the blogging machine!

But even with the most incredible content out there, the average blog reader can begin to tire of your content if you’re not careful to do one equally important thing.

This one thing can mean the difference between hitting your peak with that “best post ever” and continuing your meteoric rise to blogging stardom. And, sad to say, most bloggers never bother to do it.

Are you ready?

Ask your readers what they want next.

It’s really that simple! Ask your readers what they want to get next from you.

They’re at your blog because your awesome content brought them there. If they’ve subscribed, they’ve invested their most valuable commodity, their time, with YOU and your blog. If they comment, they’re sharing their thoughts and feelings with you on your home turf! If they’ve dugg, retweeted, stumbled or liked anything you’ve written, they’ve put themselves out there as an advocate for you and what you stand for.

So what’s the logical next step?

Find out why. Why do they like you THAT MUCH? Why do they keep coming back? What is it they would absolutely LOVE to see more of? What do they keep wishing you’ll write about that you haven’t yet?

Give them the chance to be heard, and then actually ACT on what they say, and you’ve made an advocate for life.

So, the next time you run into that delicious problem described above, and you’re sitting there wringing your hands wondering how you could ever top that last uber-post… just ask.

They’ll let you know.

About the Author: Justin P Lambert blogs daily about writing, speaking and being awesome at Words That Begin With You. Subscribe so you don’t miss any of the good stuff! Or, join him on Twitter @justinplambert.

Cherran asks:

As a person working online, after the initial revenue goals are achieved, I’m getting a feeling that I’m little bit straying away from the normal world. Even for a small business owner with half of our income, he would need to interact with people face to face everyday.

I’m getting a feeling that we may live in a safe cocoon, far away from the reality.

Have you ever felt this way? If so how do you deal with it? Joining some organizations, working from coffee shops these are some of things came to my mind.

When you work full time on the Internet you’ll definitely be having fewer face to face interactions, especially if compared with someone who works inside a large company. Certainly this is not a positive thing, as human beings are social by nature. But, it is not necessarily a bad thing either.

It can be a negative thing if you are a person who needs or likes to be interacting with other people all the time. There are people out there who simply would go nuts if they had to work all day alone inside a home office.

However, there are many people who don’t mind it, and in this case the lack of social interactions you get from working online is not a big problem. This is especially true if you consider the advantages that such a lifestyle has: the possibility to spend more time with your family, the flexibility regarding your schedule, the time you save because you don’t need to commute, the possibility to live and work from anywhere around the world and so on.

I belong to the second camp, which means that I don’t mind the lack of face to face interactions while I work. It is important to balance things out though. For instance, every week day I get out to practice at least one hour of physical activity, and during the weekends I also go out my friends.

The things you mentioned can also help. For example, there are many people who like to work from coffee shops. Some even rent a shared office space so that they get to interact with other people.

What do you guys think? Do you believe that working online isolates you from the world? Is this necessarily a bad thing?

BlogTimes is an old school Newspaper style WordPress Theme, based on a three column fluid layout, enabled with cufon fonts with beautiful typography for the headlines, options panel, and a custom front page slider.

Dark Tuts is a very clean WordPress theme that has been designed with blogs in mind. This theme has an HTML5 doctype, clean and valid code, 3 color schemes (blue, green, red), 3 different ways to add post thumbnails, the ability to change thumbnail sizes via the theme panel, 1 advertisement spot and tons more features.

Quick-Vid is a simple blogging theme with slick design elements.

Semanu is powered by the 960.gs css framework with multiple widgets and a 3 column layout.

Syailendra is an adsense (advertising) ready theme with multiple widget positions, threaded comments, theme options, drop-down menus, and custom menus.

WP Perfect is a two column SEO optimized WordPress 3.0 ready theme. The theme has a jQuery-based options page that lets you change basic settings easily.