So it’s been a couple of months since I’ve taken the time to write anything new in this little blog of mine. Laziness? Nope just far far too much has been going on to take anytime at all to sit back and think up the words I usually have no issue spewing forth (isn’t that a great mental image? no…guess it’s just me then). Between parenting, working and trying to stay sane in this crazy world (omg! The inaugration went off without a hitch! Congrats to our intelligent President Obama! Nice to have a leader who can talk again! Plus seeing not one but two (TWO!) competitive drum & bugle corps do the parade was awesome go Colts!)
Anyhow the last bit of 2008 had some very odd ups and downs. Let’s start with the upside though:
Launched the website for my newest endeavor: Slate Technologies woo. Looks great and was designed by the team over at Duel Designs who do such excellent work that they’re now part of the Slate Technologies team (which is very cool and will help us launch quite a few spectacular projects coming very very soon).
Started putting more effort into No Filter Fridays, which for those of you who are fans there is now a twitter account called succinctly enough nofilterfriday. Up next on that plate is a weekly podcast with video and some other coolness
On the downside at the end of 2008 was some family drama. Sucks that it had to happen but nice to finally know what type of people some of my relatives are.
Into 2009 we have even more great news!
I got to have a whole week with my awesome wife Zoe while the boys were off visiting Grandma. It was like a 2nd honeymoon of awesomeness!
Slate Technologies took just a short 3 months to outgrow Cubespace so we’re moving on down the road to a much bigger place which is good since our team has now grown from 2 of us all the way to 7 of us! Holy crap!?
We managed to set up a couple of strategic partnerships with a couple of different local startups
Aside from trying to launch multiple products, setup new sites, migrate friend’s websites to better hosting I also found my time even further in demand due to the obligations of being both a “charter member” of the Portland WordPress user group (I’m not entirely sure what a “charter member” does only that it sounds somewhat cool with just a dash of pretentious) as well as being one of the Legion of Tech‘s new board members.
In just the last week I’ve managed to juggle a whopping 5 different projects all while attempting to deal with an impacted abcessed wisdom tooth. Finally managed to get into a dentist today and got a prescription for antibiotics & Tylenol 3. Biggest upshot of the dentist appointment was getting to see just how badly impacted my wisdom tooth is. Ow!
I am setting aside some time to post more often (Friday’s between 2 and 3 I will get a post up no matter what) as well as get back to posting less about work and more about the family and I.
Anyhow there’s a nice tasty little update on what the hell I’ve been doing with my time and if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go enjoy some of the painfree time I’m getting to experience after a week of agony :D
In an amazingly awesome post made by Jane Wells (@janeforshort) over on the official WordPress.com blog she announced the release date (and time no less) of the amazingly awesome WordPress 2.7. She’s kind enough to deliver in textual form the great presentation she was uh..presenting at all of the wordcamp she’s been attending (ours was best though).
Anyhow I’m not going to rehash all of the great new features but I will point out my personal reasons for switching to 2.7 way back before beta 1 was even released (yeah I roll that dangerously on my site, but never customers though).
QuickPress – A new admin dashboard widget that lets you type up and save or even publish a quick blog post. This has helped get me from 2 drafts waiting for finishing up to 31 post ideas that I was able to quickly summarize the idea without leaving my dashboard
Add New Plugin – No longer do you need to have an ftp app or any other method to adding a new plugin. Simply type in the keywords or name of a plugin you want and it lets you install it right from your dashboard. This one is great since I had a plugin that was breaking my rss feed and was able to delete it and replace it with similar functionality while on Thanksgiving vacation on my iphone. Handy :D
Quick Edit – Easily add/remove tags without having to open the entire post. This is also quite a timesaver.
Anyhow those are my 3 favorite new functions in WordPress 2.7.
Go get switched over (and if you’re in Portland we’ll be having an Upgrade release party within the next week. Food, drink and all the help you need to upgrade (or even migrate) your site to the goodness that is WordPress 2.7.
WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full fledged CMS tools you can find, it’s greatest strength is the ease of adding new functions via a plugin. Once I hit a list of 30 plugins I’m going to try and release a plugin a day every day for a month. Every day an unreleased plugin that tweaks your site in a variety of different ways. Whether you want to be a better admin, better with social media, or to provide cooler functions for your readers there should be a plugin you’ll want.
My current idea list:
refresh comments admin dashboard
A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
feedburner widget for dashboard
Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
plugin compatibility checker
The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
mint stats dashboard widget
I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
social media welcome mat with follow me message.
If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding <twitter handle> to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
Referrer widget for dashboard
show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
WPMU plugin installer permissions
allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)
Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.
Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).
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.
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:
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).
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.
Well @ChrisStumph those "separates us from the animals" folk almost always ignore the evidence that proves we're worse than most animals. [chrisorourke]
RT @ChrisStumph: .@chrisorourke I mostly love the comments about "what separates us from the animals" as if that is always a quality and ... [chrisorourke]
My Wishlist
God Hates Us All
Opteka 10x 58mm HD² Professional Macro Lens for Canon EOS / EF
Social Media Goodness