cdcstudios.com | portfolio v7.1

So since I had planned on having a release date party on November 10th for Wordpress 2.7 but couldn’t due to a delay in the official release I decided to migrate this little piece of the internet I call home to 2.7 beta 2 on November 10th. I’d been playing with the 2.7 beta on my dev server but hadn’t wanted to risk my site on unfinished code.

Let me be the first (or more likely the 166th) to say, Wordpress 2.7 is the new hotness. The new dashboard, the speed, the automatic upgrade being native (yay one less plugin) and being able to add plugins without using ftp is so amazingly handy. The idea that I can add new features to my blog from my iphone now is really useful.

I’ll get to work on a more indepth review later, for now I’m still exploring and checking all of the plugins I’ve written to make sure they don’t have issues with the 2.7 nightly builds.
If you’re interested in making the switch I’d recommend you get the db-manager plugin first to automate your db backups.

In other news, in honor of the switch to 2.7 I also managed to switch from my aging contact form plugin to cforms II which you can see in action over at my contact page.

Here it is. The presentation I’m giving right now (yes this very second people are watching me advance slides on a projector telling them how to have the best wordpress blog plugin experience). These 13 plugins help optimize the back end administration, empower users and just plain make your blog better. Space at WordcampPDX was limited so for those of you not in Portland or unable to attend here’s my presentation in it’s entirety. Well the slides anyway. I’ll get an audio enabled version as well as some demo video up as soon as I can.

For those of you checking this out for the links I promised during the presentation, let me know if you found any other great plugins I may have missed or if you have any questions about how to configure these plugins and I’ll see if I can help :D

After the slides are the links to all of the plugins.

The top 13 plugins featured in my presentation

• Disqus
• Twitter Tools
• WP-OpenID
• Clean Archives Reloaded
• WP 2.5 Gallery Lightbox
• WP Super Cache
• WP-Contact Form
• Mint: A Fresh Look at your Site
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
• iPhone Webclip Manager
• WP-DB Manager
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade
• Sociable

There you have. Keep checking back for my ongoing series of posts on the best new plugins and ways to better your blog as well as other hints, tips and tricks to help make your blog stand out.

*UPDATE*

Here’s the much requested “honorable mention” plugins list:

• WP Calais Autotagger
• WP Calais Archive Tagger
• Fluency Admin Dashboard theme (will be deprecated with the release of Wordpress 2.7)
• iWphone (theme for iphones)
• Treasurelicious (widget)

Thanks to Dale Chumbley for recording this. While I shudder a bit at some of the bad jokes I made to ease my own palpable tension it’s nice to see that it came out ok.

Before I get to the video I want to thank everyone of the presenters, the attendees and Aaron Hockley for giving me one of the greatest experiences with the Portland Tech community. Reading the responses on twitter to my presentation as well as the experts panel really made my day. Additionally getting to finally meet Viper007Bond who’s written some great plugins (some of which should be core, but more on that at a later date) & Marshall Kirkpatrick as well as a few other people was awesome.

Without further ado here’s the video (I’d recommend headphones for this).

Direct Link to the video

Also keep checking the WordcampPDX site for information on the next wordcamp here as well as a possible November 10th upgrade party to version 2.7!

The boys in a rare moment of semiquietness.

Well it’s been a strange few weeks since I last posted anything other than my weekly links (sorry about the lack of links last week (and this odd habit of alliteration as well)). Anyways, since I last wrote anything I’ve: gotten to spend more time with my family which is a great thing. Been laid off from my job as a network engineer (I’d name the company but they don’t need the search engine bump and I only advertise products I truly believe in. On top of that my father went back in to have a tumor removed (same spot as 5 years ago).

In the short term I’ve decided to return to my roots a bit and focus more on building my portfolio up a bit more and taking a few classes to bone up on my all around skillset as a network engineer and also as a web developer.

What’s coming up in my personal future:

• The soon to be unveiled new project
• The soon to be fully launched “Portland Dreams” site
• A resurgence in my participation in the Portland Tech Community (add my absence as another failing of my former employer. How can you possibly be a vibrant tech organization when 95% of the rest of the tech community has never heard of you?)
• More baby pictures than you can possibly shake a stick at. (why in the hell would you be shaking a stick at pictures of my babies? They’re awesome and cute. Plus the littlest one’s drool is a proven cure for dryness)
• Massive note taking and rehearsal to give a decent couple of panels at Wordcamp next month. This will be my return to the world of public speaking (for those unaware, it’s been about 12 years since I’ve done anything remotely resembling public speaking). If anyone wants to give me a pair of New Balance sneakers to go with my black turtleneck and jeans that’d be great :D

On the work related side (and as part of a return to my graphic/designer roots):

• The soon to relaunch site for the Percussion line I’m in.
• Wordcamp Portland limited theme
• Launching a photography site for a former coworker from the K. Falls newspaper
• Completion and launch of 3 plugins on the Wordpress.org site.

While not on either list I’ll also be endeavoring to write at least 2-3 posts a week from now on as well as increasing the number of Howto articles as well.

In the last bit of news I also recently switched to Disqus for my commenting needs. For those not in the know this means I have a few new features for my little spot on the web.

Features of the new Disqus Wordpress plugin:

• Comments are indexable by search engines (SEO-friendly)
• Export and import of comments
• Automatic synchronization between Disqus.com and your WordPress comments
• Uses the new Disqus API
• Moderate/administer your blog right from the WordPress admin

Very cool stuff and they even have integrated Seesmic support for video commenting which is just awesomely cool.

Well that’s it for now, I’ve got work to be done and eventually my In-law’s swimming pool to hop into. See you all on the flip side.

Lastly:

• RIP Bernie Mac & Isaac Hayes.
• Major congrats to the Phantom Regiment for winning their 2nd DCI title. This version of Spartacus was amazing and I enjoyed getting to see it twice this summer. Way to go! Hope you guys come west again next year!

Late Saturday night I decided it was high time to finally make a webclip icon for cdcstudios. It was a total piece of cake and shortly thereafter I made another one, this time for the folks over at Silicon Florist. For those not in the know, a webclip icon is the iPhone or iPod Touch desktop bookmark icon. They’re really easy to make and quite useful as displayed in the pic above.

With this plugin you can make a custom icon for your wordpress site or your wordpress multiuser site (yep this plugin will allow each individual WPMU blog to have full support for custom webclips). Head to the plugin page to get it or if you have any questions about it.

Many people know and love Outlook as the end all be all of email & calendaring. I’m not one of them. I split my time between Outlook at work (stupid exchange server) and Thunderbird and Mail.app at home. If you’re tired of Outlook then let’s switch (painlessly) to Thunderbird and allow me to tell you how to get started with this free (as in beer) alternative combination that kicks Outlook’s ass.

First off the main reasons to change:

• It’s FREE (again as in beer).
• No license, No need to take up 500+ MB of storage.
• Just like it’s older brother Firefox it has regular updates and patches to keep it stable and secure.
• Multiplatform. (I run it on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)
• On top of that Thunderbird offers the ability for themes and addons to make your email and scheduling woes faded memories.

Ok let’s get started with Thunderbird by installing it:

Download Thunderbird & Lightning: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/]

Download the installer file from the page above, and double-click the file. Make sure you’ve closed all of the other apps you’re running (general advice but you can feel free to ignore it).

Read the agreement (or just choose accept and click next).

It should look similar to the above (unless you chose a different place to install to). Click next.

Click finish and you’re done installing (and you’re also starting Thunderbird for the first time).

Let’s configurate!

When you open Thunderbird for the first time, you need to create a new account, I will try to show you this step by step.

First click on “Create a new account”.

Select “Email account” and press next.

Fill in your name and email address, press next.

Now you are asked to fill in the incoming server, for me it’s “mail.gmail.com”, you may be asked for outgoing server aswell, usually this is the same server, press next.

You may have noticed I chose IMAP for server type. That’s a whole other post to figure out which is best for you. In a nutshell IMAP = syncs your mailbox so if you read email on a laptop and at work you only need to mark it read once and all other devices will reflect that.

Now you are asked to fill in your user name for your email provider, for example “jsmith”, press next.

Now you are asked what you would like to call this account, (I chose the email address for this example but you can choose anything you’d like), press next.

You will get a summary, check your information, and if everything is OK press finish.

Mark your email address and press “Get mail”.

You’ll be asked for the password to your email account, carefully type it in and check the box that says “save password” if you only want to have to enter it once. That way you won’t get asked again.

There you have it, you’re now using Thunderbird. Fun isn’t it?

Some of you more observant folks may have noticed that there is a calendar on the right side of Thunderbird screen above. That’s coming later this week in part two where I show you how to leverage the power of Thunderbird’s extensibility by installing Lightning and more.