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Google is making incremental improvements to the Android platform to ease the burden of fragmentation on developers and original equipment manufacturers. While still allowing manufacturers to create custom skins, Google is doing its best to standardize the rest of the of the Android development environment with version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Themes are a big part of standardizing the Android experience. Android has instituted a requirement in ICS that that the "Holo" family of themes be implemented into devices unmodified. This will mean that widgets, apps buttons and menu screens will be much easier for developers to integrate.

When it comes to launching blogs and Websites, small businesses often go with Wordpress, and for great reasons: it's customizable, widely-used and - best of all - free. In addition to the core product, there are tons of free plugins and themes available that make building out the ultimate site a cinch.

Sure, we all love free stuff. But just because there are hundreds of free options within reach doesn't mean you shouldn't be willing to spend a few dollars.

I have this terrible (or awesome, I suppose) tendency to create new blogs. In fact, just today I bought a new domain (another terribly awesome tendency) and will soon begin the process of setting up "just another WordPress blog."

That means searching for a new WordPress theme. And those who've done this before know how difficult it can be to find a good theme in what is arguably the underbelly of the SEO beast: the search string "WordPress themes."

As if finding a good WordPress theme isn't challenging enough, Siobhan Ambrose points out the dangers and security issues when you're searching for - or rather, installing, "free WordPress themes."

Finding a good theme for a jailbroken iPhone has always been a challenge. Themes are either posted online in designers' and developers' forums, outside the reach of the "mainstream" jailbreaking audience, or they're arranged haphazardly in Cydia, the jailbreak app store. Neither is an ideal solution for users interested in customizing their device.

Now, things are about to change. A new jailbreak app store called "Theme It" is preparing to launch, billing itself as "the Theme Store you've been waiting for." When it launches in January (tentatively), it will be available as both a standalone mobile app like Cydia as well as a mobile-friendly website.

Firefox Personas, the designer skins that let web surfers dress up their browser, are now being rebranded "Personas Plus" and are being moved over to Mozilla's add-on gallery to join the other plugins. With the move, Mozilla has also announced that development work on this popular personalization program is continuing with the addition of new features that will transform Personas from static background images to dynamically updating themes that could even include ambient information.

Just about a year after Google launched the first version of Chrome, the company released the first stable version of Chrome 3.0 today. According to Google, this release comes after 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes. As a result, Chrome 3 isn't just more stable than previous versions but also considerably faster. According to Google, Chrome's JavaScript performance has improved 150% since the release of the first beta and by more than 25% since the last stable release. The new stable version will also feature Chrome's new Safari-like New Tab page, an improved Omnibox and better HTML5 capabilities, as well as support for Chrome themes.