BlogmyQuery – BMQ

We’re happy to announce that from today you can now buy individual themes at WPBundle for only $50. Any individual theme sales include free support, updates and child theme variations, plus access to our ever growing Icon set. We’ve also reduced the price of the full Bundle to only $200.

What’s New

- Individual Theme Sales. $50/each.
- Dropped full Bundle price to $200.
- Plans for Mini-Bundles
- New Payment system and Digital Delivery via Quixly
- New Support Forums
- Design tweaks to the main site.

Why we’ve done this

From the start of the project we’ve had a lot of people requesting individual theme sales. We’ve never been against the idea, but there was a few reasons why we didn’t feel right doing this, one of which was our name! It felt strange moving away from bundles, because of that, but we understand the demand and need for cheaper options.

Our partnership with WooThemes is no longer in effect. We’re still using their framework, plus we’re still really good friends with the WooThemes guys, but WooThemes quite rightly didn’t not want to be part of the new direction as they have to focus their attention on their own products and they felt that the new direction was a little too close to what they already do. It was all very mature and organic, but it does now mean we can take WPBundle in a new direction.

Mini-Bundles Coming Soon

We decided that we’d like to stick with the Bundle aspect, and look at offering Mini-Bundles. Customers can pick and choose their own items and put together their own Bundle at a cheaper price.

This feature isn’t possible yet as we’re waiting on a new system that will allow this sort of thing, but for now we’ve decided to just open up the bundle and offer individual theme sales.

The Benefits of the New System

There’s many benefits to the new direction. Especially for existing Bundle buyers. We’ll now be adding brand new themes to the Bundle, not just variations. We’re constantly increasing the value of the bundle, adding new items and giving them to existing buyers at no extra cost.

Information for Existing Customers

All you need to do is set up your new password.

If you do this we will you a username and password to the email address you used to sign up with us originally. Once you have done this you can then login to the new Support Forums. This is completely separate from your WooThemes account and will not effect it in any way. This is a new system and the two accounts are completely independent.

10% off for the next three days

For the next 3 days you can use the coupon code: WPBUNDLE2011 to get 10% off any purchase.

We recently finished work on a relatively small personal project of ours. ComedyExtra is an incredibly easy way of exploring all the best Stand-up comedy videos, clips and DVD’s from around the web. New videos added daily.

Building ComedyExtra.com

We tried to streamline the site so that the videos are the main focus, we want there to be very few distractions to the user – and ultimately create an environment where you can go through clip after clip at your own leisure.

We worked in plenty of ways to browse, navigate and explore new and old videos and tried to make the experience a little fun and different in it’s approach.

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Features and Points of Interest

Compact Controls and Options

We tried to compact a lot of the information. Short titles, short descriptions, a very simple video counter with the ability to skip to a random video, or skip between the previous and next video. Nothing is forced, it’s all made with the intention to be useful and encourage you to share at your own leisure.

Simple Video Grid

We thought through many options when it came to deciding how best to display all of the videos. We settled on a very useful grid view, split into rows. Each row is a different category and you can scroll through each category using the arrows.

Exposure for Comedians

The whole goal of the site is to expose people to fantastic comedians, new and old. Obviously these comedians have DVD’s and such on sale, so where possible we try and make it as easy as possible for you to buy the DVD and support the comedian you are watching. Video descriptions also link through to comedians’ websites.

Updated Daily

We’ll be posted new videos daily, you can follow @ComedyExtra on Twitter or Subscribe to the RSS feed to give yourself a daily dose of comedy. We’re also going to be editing together compilations of the best videos of the week.

Hand Picked Quality

There’s already a lot of videos on the site, but all of them are hand-picked. There’s nothing automated or random about the video choices. We’re happy to take ideas and suggestions for more videos and comedians, or if you’re a comedian yourself feel free to send your clips to us.

Quick Search

When using the search bar, as soon as you submit your search term, the first video result loads right away, and all other matches are displayed in the grid below. We thought this would help speed up the process of finding the video you want and cut down on the number of clicks it takes to do so.

For my little Sister

For those of you interested, this whole thing is something I made for my little sister to run. We simply made it for her, and I’ll be helping her to run it. Any help with sharing videos etc to help her along would be greatly appreciated.

It’s been strange introducing her to WordPress, and seeing her use something that’s so far from her world, but she really seems to understand it and finds it really easy to use. Not bad for a complete novice.

I clearly do far too much for my little sis.

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We’re back with a brand new set of soft and subtle grunge brushes. You can use these super soft and subtle brushes to build up your own textures in your designs with incredible ease, it’s also really easy to manipulate them in your own way to build up unique patterns and textures.

Example of Brushes

Obviously you can use these however you want, but our best advice is to build up layers of texture in a subtle way. Play around with the various brushes – and build up the realistic textures by varying colours, opacity and placement. What you should aim for is something that looks natural and organic.

Share These Brushes

If you find this set useful we’d like you to pass them on to other who you think might appreciate it. You can do this easily using the share links below the post, or share the short URL below, as well as using the full URL in the address bar.

The URL to share is: http://bit.ly/gpJog6

Important, you must link to this article when sharing the set, you must not upload these files to your own server when sharing.

Download full set for Free

Download Free Brushes | .zip Format |  9.3 mb

Optional. Pay if you want.

Buy the set $5 Donation | .zip Format |  9.3 mb

The price is completely optional, it’s more of a donation than anything. Buying the set gives you nothing extra, (apart from my respect) it’s simply a way of you showing your appreciation. Feel free to just take them for free if you wish.

A Big Thank you to our Contributors

As many of you know, I did this set a little differently. For the first time ever we looked for outside help for gathering the original textures used in the set. I asked people to take pictures of interesting surfaces and send them to me, the following awesome people played a big part in making this such an awesome set:

Design Shard – http://www.designshard.com
Caleb Kimbrough – http://lostandtaken.com
WeGraphics – http://www.wegraphics.net
Succodesign- http://www.succodesign.it
DS Squared.com- http://www.dssquared.com
ESWAT – http://www.eswat.ca

There was many more, but the above ones are the people I know I used for sure. If you think I’m missing you let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

We’re going to try something a little different for our next brush set. We want you to get involved & send us your textures. We’ve thought of a very simple and quick way for you to send them to us & we’ll give you full credit if we use them.

How to Send us your textures

Upload your Photos using wetransfer.net and put brushes@wefunction.com as the recipient. I’ll then look though the submissions and start putting together Part 3 of our Subtle Brush Sets.

What we need

We’re looking for original textures, photographed by you. The kind of things we are after include: Natural Paper, Cardboard, Wood, Concrete, Fabric or any sort of organic surface with an interesting pattern or combination of textures within.

I think the main thing I’d like you to send me is Natural Paper textures. I’ve found these to be quite popular textures, and the ones that I have trouble finding and photographing.

Size & Quality of Images

You don’t need to worry about size or quality, I tend to optimize them for the web, and I’ll tweak the crap out of them to make them look subtle, so don’t stress about levels or contrast. Anything you can send will do, I’ll make sure they work. Anything from iPhone snaps to high-quality photos will be considered.

Why are we doing this?

Our brush sets have been downloaded thousands of times by designers all over the world, all I’m asking is for you to return the favour and help us put together a really interesting set of brushes. Also because @TrentWalton is a swine! It’s pretty much his fault I’ve kicked this into life.

IconJar is a simple concept. An icon store with a never-ending set of icons. You make one small payment you get the icons already made sent to you, plus we’ll send you all of the new icons we design to you as they are made.

Details of the IconJar Icon Set

As it currently stands there is 139 icons to kick you off with. We’re planning on releasing a huge amount more. The set is very much a pixel based icon set, so it’s made with small sizes & tiny details in mind. The current IconJar Icon set comes at 32px in size, with .png and .psd files, we’re looking to re-draw many of these in 16px icons too. These will be available in future updates free of charge.

Anybody who has already purchased WPBundle will already have access to this Icon set and the free updates as it was included as a free bonus. The only difference now is that we’ve gave it a shiny new home and “branded” it.

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For one Week Only: $23

The standard price for the ever-growing set of icons is $45. But for the first week only we’ll be selling it for only $23, so now’s your chance to buy the Icon set with free updates at a huge discount.

You can view the full set here which shows you everything that is included in the set. If you want to follow updates you can check out the IconJar Twitter account, this is where we’ll post details of releases & screenshots of upcoming releases.