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
• A launch page has been setup for the WordPress Dreamteam site.

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.

My current idea list:

1. 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.
2. feedburner widget for dashboard
   Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Referrer widget for dashboard
   show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
7. 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).

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.

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!

Do you owe someone a drink? Find out with Foamee, a new site to help track owed coffee or beer with twittery goodness thanks to SimpleBits. You owe me a beer I owe you a beer, doesn’t matter so long as we both get beer :D

PC DeCrapifier

Buying a new computer? Here’s an easy tool to remove all the bloatware that manufacturers subject you to when you buy a prebuilt system. No more heavily branded useless software eating up your brand new spiffy hard drive. You paid for 750gb so you should get to use it how you want to.

300 Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog

As one of the leading open source blogging platforms, WordPress has inspired hundreds (if not thousands) of plugins and tools here’s a collection of some of the best

Idea Sandbox :: Prioritizer

Prioritizer is the way to prioritize three or more items! Get yourself in order.

all streets | ben fry

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey a low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land.

Cadence Management Podcast.

Excellent podcasts on project management skills and training. Definitely a must listen for anyone managing people, projects or anything in between from Portland’s own Cadence Management.

Tags: cadence, project management, podcast, business, pmi

Open Parenthesis » WordPress to Facebook and Back Again

Wow, a wordpress plugin that crossposts to facebook (and crossposts comments as well it appears!!!)

Tags: crosspost, wordpress, plugin, wordpress plugin, facebook, comments

ManyBooks.net – Free eBooks for your PDA, iPod, or eBook Reader

Thousands of free ebooks, pre-formatted for reading on your computer, PDA, Blackberry, iPod, iLiad, Sony Reader, Librie, Zaurus, Newton, eBookman, or Rocketbook – eReader, PDF, Plucker, iSilo, Doc, RTF, Mobipocket, Newton Paperback, and zTXT ebooks ready to go!

Tags: books, ebooks, free books, iphone, ipod, kindle

Monotone WordPress Theme

Brilliant wordpress theme that is quite similar in concept to the way Dave Shea of mezzoblue.com has his site setup. This theme is perfect for photoblogging since the site will always color complement the photo.

Tags: theme, wordpress, photoblog, photo, clean

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.

1. Akismet - Comment spam filtering for the masses. Comes with every single WordPress install because it’s by the same wonderful folks at Automattic who brought us WordPress. Currently it’s been responsible for over 23,000 comment spam caught on my blog. I’m in total agreement with Aaron that activating this is the absolute first step in deploying WordPress. Here’s what Akismet.com says about their plugin:

“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again“.

Those last 7 words say a lot about their confidence in their product. Are they true? Absolutely.
2. Sociable – A quick easy way to add social media buttons to your posts (or everywhere, easily changed from the settings page, not only that but it does so easily, and beautifully (see it in action at the end of this post and feel free to submit if you like).

I can’t imagine an easier to configure rock solid way to have the social media links I want all in one place.

3. Wp-Super Cache – This little plugin will help protect your blog from the Slashdot/Digg effect of huge amounts of links swamping your server. Here’s the description WordPress superstar Donncha O Caoimh (the author of this plugin) gave it:

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.”

So far I haven’t been slammed here but if it happens I can rest easy knowing that the guy who’s done most of the work on WPMU (the multi-user version of WordPress) built a plugin to protect a blog’s uptime, which is a pretty important thing for those folks for whom blogging is their life & work.

4. WP-DBManager – This is a pretty important one. I’m often forgetful about backing up my WordPress database before tinkering with it and so with one simple plugin I get nightly backups to my Gmail account, scheduled optimization maintenance as well as the ability to repair it when ever I run into an early version plugin that may break something.

5. WordPress.com Stats – This is one that should be installed with every copy of WordPress. Quick clean easy to read stats that are supported from the WordPress.com website. Rather than rewrite what the plugin site has to say I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.”

I love it and seeing that gorgeous little flash graph show the number of hits (right in the dashboard) at a glance is as easy as it gets.

6. Fluency Admin - I’m going to cheat and add this one these two to the list (it was a tossup between this one these two and Akismet since technically Akismet is already installed). Much like the author of Fluency says on his blog:

“Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn’t work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.”

I loved the Tiger Admin theme and was going to write my own until I discovered Fluency. They made a massive amount of changes to the admin area in WordPress 2.5 and not all of them seem well thought out or right. In short I hate some of what they’ve done (but that’s a whole other post). This wonderous little plugin changes and reskins the whole backend to make it; clean, simple and flow just like it should.

7. Wphone – I love my iPhone and the ability to surf the net anywhere on it is great. Posting to my blog via my iPhone though had always been a chore. Along came WPhone allows you to use a custom admin interface while interacting with your WordPress install via your phone. It contains two versions of the mobile admin interface, a full iPhone version and a “lite” version suitable for almost every cellphone with a built-in browser. I just noticed that local plugin author Viperbond007 (who modified rewrote and made usable my own humble CDC Clean Archives plugin into the awesome jQuery based plugin I’m now running here.

Alrighty, that’s my list of must have/can’t live without plugins. I’ll be updating with links to the other folks I invited to share their Top 5 lists with as they post them. Feel free to let me know the ones I don’t know about or somehow overlooked (I’m currently using 13 plugins total and always looking for amazing time-saving, information delivery improving plugins).

From the official WordPress blog:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Pretty big list, but how easy the upgrade? Easy as ever. I did a quick backup at lunch (while sitting in the Roxy no less) including a database backup then deleted the site. Next I opened up Transmit (thanks to Verso for introducing that tasty little app to me). and uploaded the shiny new WordPress 2.5 and then ran the upgrader. It finished in record time (about 5 seconds less than the last upgrade script I did) which was my first nice reaction. Logging in and seeing the new dashboard was fantastic. Nice neatly divided boxes compartmentalizing each different section. Seeing the stats graph integrated into the dashboard is a masterful idea. The only real wish I had is that they were rearrangeable using AJAX and some css (might be a nice plugin if I can find the time before someone else beats me to it. Speaking of plugins I did finally have to stop using Tiger admin plugin I’ve been using for a couple years. I will definitely miss having the navigation bar on the side instead of the top. Also a nice new feature to play with is the fullscreen editing mode. No other distractions on the page. Just a big huge word fillable area.

So after testing all the rest of my plugins I didn’t see any other problems. I did notice that Gravatar’s had an upgrade notice on the plugins page. I clicked the upgrade now link and after quickly typing in my server info it upgraded perfectly. Ironically I just noticed that I no longer need that plugin since the functionality has been written into the core code. Excellent!

Next up is an attempt at using the new media manager and gallery tool (now added to the neatly upgraded TinyMCE toolbar in the write window). I’m using some old artwork as well as an unused rough draft of the redesign of this site since it was handy.

Pretty easy to add. Select the files you want, click upload and then using some nice ajaxy goodness you can edit the description of each photo and alter the title.

All in all this is an amazing upgrade and quite a nice bit of work both under the hood and on the front. It’s nice that so much from the old “shuttle” concept has finally made it into the code. Looking forward to continuing to experiment with the theme design as well as figuring out what other surprises I might find as I explore the tasty goodness of wordpress’ php.