Looking to start an online magazine and don’t know where to begin? The great thing is that WordPress can serve as a fantastic (and free) content management system that comes loaded with lots of features you may otherwise only find in paid back-end software packages. There are free templates to suit just about every need too.

One such case is the Channel theme. This WordPress template is laid out to mimic the look and feel of online magazines, professional news outlets, and other similar publications. There is a jQuery slider at the top for featured articles, pre-configured ad placements, and footer widgets.

It’s also very noteworthy that the sidebar already comes with widgets for RSS subscription, email subscriptions, Flickr thumbnail images, recent comments, and more. Along the top of the page, it is easy to configure different sections based on the categories of your articles. If you have a sports news site, for instance, you can have tabs for NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, MLS, and so on, making it easy for readers to find exactly what they want.

Check out the live demo for a better sense of what to expect from the Channel theme, then go to Theme Junkie to find the free download link.

What did the blogosphere have to offer us this week? Let’s find out!

Free Money Finance offers an interesting case study about a couple who, on paper, appear to be financially sound. After all, they’re earning a million dollars a year, but they’re having trouble making ends meet. The trouble is that they can’t control their spending and they don’t even know where their money is going.

Meg Fowler recognizes the importance of putting in an honest day’s work. She recognizes the importance of accomplishment and being all that you can be. At the same time, she also recognizes that sanity is more valuable than strict hustle. At the end of the day, you only have one brain.

Zac Johnson is already a relatively well known Internet marketer, but he always has something new to learn and explore at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. In a recent blog post, Zac highlights both the good things and the areas needing improvement with this relatively young blog conference.

Tiff Chow is a video game enthusiast, but she doesn’t restrict herself solely to the mainstream games being released through mainstream consoles. That’s partly why she had so much fun at the IndieCade conference, an event that attracts all kinds of independent developers and publishers. Thanks to services like WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade, these smaller developers have a place to flourish.

Gus Fosarolli is going on a trip and he has secured his Buenos Aires condo for the duration of his stay. It’s not the fanciest of bachelor suites, but it is well-furnished, well-kept, and well-designed. The best part is that it’s only going to cost him $560 for a two-week stay. Compare that to how much he would have had to pay for a hotel room… and the latter wouldn’t have a kitchen either!

By now, you’ve probably heard about the kerfuffle surrounding the new logo for the Gap. The clothing store chain felt that it needed to refresh its brand with a new logo, one that felt more contemporary and modern. However, the new logo was met with a lot of negative press and a general negative reaction from the public at large.

Upon receiving this feedback, the Gap decided to pull back the new logo and revert back to the old one. This is not only a negative experience from a public relations standpoint, as it mars the company image in the eyes of the consumer, but it was likely also a very expensive one. The Gap likely hired an advertising or branding agency of some kind to design the new logo. Much time, effort, and money was likely invested in the rebranding effort.

Now, all that time, effort, and money has effectively gone to waste, because the new logo is not going to be used. This is a very important lesson that all companies should learn. There is nothing inherently wrong with attempting a rebranding for your company if you feel that the image has become stagnant and is no longer relevant with your target demographic. However, you need to be very careful about such efforts.

It makes you wonder if the Gap even made use of a focus group to gauge their reaction to the new logo, because it solicited a very strong response from the general public. If no focus group was used or if the testing procedure was flawed, then the Gap has no one to blame but themselves.

Perhaps you’ve started a new blog and you’ve imported a number of posts that are ready to be published. Perhaps you have an existing blog and you recently purchased a number of blog posts that are saved in draft form. Whatever the case, it can be time-consuming to timestamp all of these posts for publishing in a manual fashion.

Alleviating this concern is the Drafts Scheduler WordPress plugin by Jeff Rose. This plugin will automatically take all the posts in your WordPress blog that are currently sitting in draft status and it will schedule all of them for publishing at a future date.

Going through the options for this plugin, you can choose to publish your draft posts sequentially, defining the exact interval that you would like to use to separate each blog post. Alternatively, there is an option that allows for publishing the posts in a random order, but still based on the intervals you prefer. The third option is a full random publishing time for the posts, but you can still define the start date, the maximum number of posts per day, and the daily time frame.

It should be noted that there is no “undo” function in this build of the plugin and all draft posts will be time-stamped (“scheduled”) when you activate its use. The download link is available at the usual WordPress plugin directory.

There is certainly something to be said about capitalizing on your business opportunities. When there is a chance to make a lot of money, it makes perfect sense that you would think about how you would go about approaching that chance. At the same time, you also have to think about the long-term viability of your company.

That’s why you’d ideally want want a company that is profitable in all seasons. Let’s take the example of a landscaping company that mostly makes its money in the spring and summer. This company would go about mowing lawns, sowing seed, planting flowerbeds, and so forth. That’s fine and it can be quite profitable if done well, but what is this company supposed to do during the winter months?

Not too many people will need their lawns to be mowed in the dead of winter. Not too many people need new flowerbeds to be planted when the ground is covered in a couple feet of snow. However, the skills and expertise that this company brings to the table can still apply to a winter-focused set of services. They can offer to shovel walkways and driveways. They can offer to maintain greenhouses and indoor plants. In the fall, they can rake leaves and offer autumn-themed landscaping options.

Just because the main part of your business is largely focused on a certain time of the year does not mean that you should necessarily forget about the rest of the year. If your company caters to the Christmas crowd, it can also serve the Easter crowd, the Fourth of July crowd, and the Thanksgiving crowd. It’s about being versatile and adaptable.

Webcam. Surround sound speakers. External hard drive. We have a lot of gadgets populating our desks these days and it’s easy to run out of available USB ports on your computer. Let’s not forget about the need for USB ports to charge our smartphones, iPods, and other portable devices too.

If you have far too many knick-knacks for the number of ports your notebook PC or desktop computer has, then you may want to divert your attention to the 24-Port USB Monster Hub. The name pretty much says it all: this is a USB hub that puts no fewer than twenty-four USB ports at your disposal.

If you want to go even crazier, it is possible to daisy chain more than one of these hubs to gain access to up to 127 powered USB ports. Even on its lonesome, this product provides automatic over-current protection for each port, hot-swapping connections, and the ability to charge USB devices without the need for a computer. That’s because the hub can be powered by a USB cable or with the provided wall adapter.

The 24-Port USB Monster Hub is available through ThinkGeek for $49.99. That’s a little pricey for “just” a USB hub, but you are getting two dozen ports to power your digital lifestyle.