There is just something soft and delicate about the Custom Community WordPress theme from Theme Kraft. It’s wonderfully understated in its tones, yet it offers a robust feature set that is suitable for a wide range of blogs and other sites.

All three of the predefined color schemes continue this “softer” approach to the appearance, giving a clean and simple design that is automatically pleasing to the eye. The jQuery slideshow at the top of the content area helps to showcase you rowrk, while the magazine style layout beneath gives a professional and accessible appearance too.

Like so many other pro-level themes these days, Custom Community doesn’t require you to have any prior coding knowledge. This is because many of the changes for the theme can be done through the WordPress Theme Options panel, including the placement of sidebars and the colour for the background.

More information can be found on ThemeKraft.com. A live preview and the free download link, as usual, can be accessed through the Free Themes Directory on WordPress.org.

We’ve got a little bit of everything from around the blogosphere this week, so let’s get down to it.

Joseph Planta has been conducting interviews on the web for a number of years and now he is celebrating the seventh anniversary of his On The Line feature. He takes us through some of his more interesting interviews, including two that he had with the late Jack Layton. Other highlights include Dawna Friesen, Mike McCardell, Tony Parsons, and Robert Bateman.

Thursday Bram is starting to recognize an emerging trend. Rather than focusing on computer science or engineering, the English major could be the next geek success story. Technology advances so quickly that what you learn in school could be outdated tomorrow, but good writing will always be valued as good writing.

Darren Barefoot is a not a “productivity zealot,” but he would like to get more done in less time. So, he has put together a list of ten productivity tips from a slacker. These include making approval requests opt-out rather than opt-in, getting onto instant messengers, and breaking large tasks into smaller ones.

Gus Fosarolli has published a guest post from Laura, running through the TV shows returning this fall. This is just part one of the series, discussing such programs as Dr. Who, Amazing Race, How I Met Your Mother, House, and New Girl.

Steve Selengut offers some financial management advice, reminding you how you can make a volatile stock market into your best friend. The volatility is what so many investors fear, but it is exactly through this volatility that you can make some very impressive returns.

When it comes to most conventional trade shows, there’s an expectation that each company will have its own booth and that’s where people can go to get information about their products. That may be true, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to just that paradigm.

In the case of a trade show like Penny Arcade Expo or the Consumer Electronics Expo, it is very common to see cross-marketing between companies that work together. The computer industry is a great example of this. A case maker may use the RAM of one company, the processor of another, and the hard drive of yet another in a display unit. All three of those partners represent advertising opportunities.

Similarly when it comes to the video game industry, the console maker, an accessory maker, and the game developer might all be promoting all three of their products. That’s not a competing product, since all three work within the same ecosystem. That helps with brand recognition and brand presence, spreading as far across the trade show floor as possible.

And this isn’t restricted to consumer electronics and technology. Companies from all kinds of different industries can consider leveraging similar partnerships. Travel trade shows, for instance, might see cross-promotion with hotels and airlines. The possibilities are endless and the opportunity certainly shouldn’t be ignored.

Growing a popular blog is very much a double-edged sword. It’s great when you have lots of new readers leaving lots of new comments, but that also means that your site is more likely to attract all the comment spammers and spambots out there.

Akismet has been the go-to tool for this problem for quite some time, but it is not without its flaws. It “detects” many false positives: comments that are legitimate can oftentimes be flagged as spam and never seen by the blog owner. An alternative to Akismet is GASP and it claims to be more accurate in this regard.

Developed by Andy Bailey, the same guy who made the popular CommentLuv plugin, GASP stands for GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin. It works to combat spam from spambots by implementing a very simple feature. There is a checkbox that needs to be ticked before a comment can be posted. The text next to this reads, “Check box to confirm you are NOT a spammer.” Real comments get through and spambots do not.

Check out Basic Blog Tips for more information about GASP. The plugin can then be found as a free download through the usual WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

When you have a new product, whether it’s physical or digital, you want to make sure that you get the best distribution possible. At the same time, you want to make sure that the public actually knows about the product and wants to have it.

Taken together, this could mean two things. First, you want to give product samples to the buyers for various retail outlets and other types of stores. This will help to convince them that you have a quality product that will sell. Without having a product in hand, it may be more challenging for the buyers to make that kind of decision.

Second, you want to give product samples to the media, both online and offline. They can review the product, highlight the product in an article, or otherwise provide you with that “press” and “exposure” that you need. The public learns about the product, how it works, and what purpose it serves. From this, they can extrapolate why they would want to buy one.

Naturally, giving out product samples comes at a cost and you may only have so many samples to go around. Do you give priority to the buyers or to the media? In the end, like so many other things in business, it’s about finding the balance. Both groups need to be kept happy.

The world of Android smartphones has certainly come a very long way since the original HTC Dream G1 that was released so long ago. Today, one of the best Android phones on the market is the Samsung Galaxy S II, a device that builds on the huge success of the Galaxy S series that preceded it.

With this iteration, Samsung has preloaded Android 2.3 Gingerbread to go along with a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The real star here, aside from the sizable performance bumps under the hood, is the 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen display. Photos don’t really do it justice and it really needs to be seen in person to be appreciated. The color saturation is amazing.

Some of the other notable highlights on this Android smartphone include the 8MP camera on the back with 1080p/30fps video support, Gorilla Glass display, TouchWiz v4.0 UI, built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, stereo FM radio with RDS, and remarkable 8.5mm thin profile. The current version ships with HSDPA, but a 4G LTE version will be shipping soon.

More information about the Galaxy S 2 can be found on the Samsung website and through the comprehensive review on Mobile Magazine.