| Download: | ringtones/MacStartup.m4r |
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| Version: | 1.0 |
| Updated: | November 19, 2008 |
| Size: | 0 bytes |
This is from an inside joke here at the Microsoft Web Developer Summit, but if you’d like to have the Mac bootup sound as a ringtone on your iPhone, here ya go!
I recently received a copy of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers
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Do you use WordPress? Do you have an iPhone? Or do you just like beta testing cool apps? You could help beta-test the upcoming WordPress for iPhone 1.2 release.
The catch is, you can’t test unreleased apps on an actual iPhone. Instead, you have to download the (free) SDK, and run the code in the iPhone simulator. A lot of work to go through, to be sure, but if you’ve got time on your hands, and like playing with the latest toys, there ya go.
For this week’s WordPress Wednesday installment, let’s look at a few changes I’ve made here on this site in the past few weeks. As mentioned previously, there were several areas that I knew I wanted to go ahead and improve in the short term, as interim measures until I put a whole new theme in place. One of my primary goals here is gain and retain readers. I want to make the site “sticky” by providing several ways for visitors to keep up with my updates, and to spread my links to other potential readers.
Of course, the first part of gaining readership is to provide quality content. I hope that people already think I’m doing that. Beyond that, I need to highlight the various ways that readers can subscribe to my updates, and ways for them to spread the word. Let’s take a look at my first-cut efforts.
This is the article that I had originally intended to post last week, before I suffered a self-induced glitch which caused me to lose my work-in-progress. Thanks to my friend Geof Morris who prompted me to double-check my database for saved revisions. As it turns out, there was indeed a revision stored there which did not show up in the list of revisions given in the editor. That copy contained a fair amount of the original post — enough to give me a good head-start on recreating it.
This week, we’re going to take a quick look at some WordPress themes that have caught my eye recently. In particular, these are themes that don’t just look pretty, they have some muscle under the hood that a web developer like me can sink his teeth into. I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ll try to point out what it is about each theme that might make it attractive to a developer using WordPress as a site platform.
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This is not the original WordPress Wednesday post that I had intended to make, picking up from last week about changes to my site. It’s not even the backup subject that I started to write about, regarding cool WordPress themes for developers. This is a cautionary tale about saving your work.
See, I had originally planned to pick up from my previous post, and write about progress in working on this site. Except that last week went kaboom, and the first couple of days of this week weren’t all roses and bon-bons, either. So, I had started writing a post about some of the niftier WordPress themes that I’ve seen lately. And I had made pretty good progress on it, too.
Until my fingers accidentally brushed the keyboard in a fatal manner. I somehow managed to hit CMD-A (which does “select all”, followed by a few other random keys. So my post content was selected, then replaced by the other keys I had hit. And in an instant, before I really realized it happened, the WordPress auto-save function kicked in. When I tried to Undo the edit, it was to no avail, it only undid the last couple of keystrokes.
I had made the fatal error of not explicitly saving my post content along the way, so I had no post revisions to fall back on. Only the last auto-save, which contained the less than inspirational content of “kvx”. I didn’t think that “kvx” would be of much interest to my readers, and I don’t have time to recreate my original post right now. So instead, you get this hard-lesson-learned advice to always save your work-in-progress, even when there’s an auto-save function in your app.
As soon as time allows, I will re-write my post about WordPress themes for developers. Until then, please learn from my failure, and click “Save” frequently!
This is the first installment of “WordPress Wednesday”, which I mentioned in my previous post about making changes to my site. This first one is going to be a little long, and I’ve been editing the draft off-and-on for over a week. Future articles will probably be shorter, in general, and focus on a particular subject. But let’s start out by looking at the current state of this website. We’ll examine what is good, what I think needs changing, and I’ll point out some recent changes I’ve already made, and why.
In later installments, I will begin making changes to the site, and we can examine how and why those changes were made. I hope that by following along, you will be able to learn a little something that might help you see ways to improve your own site. Below, I’ll lay out some of the topics that I will be touching on. If there is something in particular you’d like me to address, let me know, and maybe I can add it to the list.
I’ve been saying for years that I want to redesign this site, but I still haven’t made many substantive changes. One of my favorite sayings is, “The cobbler’s children oft go without shoes.” It certainly applies to this site, as I spend a lot of time doing web development, studying programming, CSS techniques, SEO, user interfaces, and many other related disciplines that make up this craft. But my own site rarely changes, and I certainly haven’t applied all of the things I’ve learned. I think it’s time for that to change.
Starting Real Soon Now, you will start seeing some improvements around here. For one thing, I’m going to start posting more frequently. My current plan is to post at least once per week, with a new series called “WordPress Wednesday”. Every Wednesday, I will be posting something WordPress-related. It might be something short, like a pointer to some other article worth looking at, it might be a long article of my own, it might be an update to one of my plugins, and it may often be notes about changes I’m making to this site. I’m also thinking that I might occasionally have “Fun Friday” and “Media Monday” posts. I had originally considered “Music Monday”, but “media” is more general, and lets me cover movies, television, books, etc. I probably won’t do those every week, but expect to see them from time to time.
Also, as I just mentioned, I’m going to start making site design changes. I will probably continue to work on a completely new theme in the background, for launch in the indefinite future. But in the meantime, I will make improvements to the current theme. I want to give more prominence to features like feed and email subscriptions, my WordPress plugins and other projects, and “lifestream” features like my delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, and Twitter messages. I will also make more subtle design changes, like tweaks to fonts, text size, colors, etc., as well.
While I will probably continue to post the occasional personal item, but I will focus mostly on more technical, web development topics. I think that these changes will make this site more useful to you, my readers. Of course, I’m open to suggestions, so if you have an idea that you think would improve this site, or a topic that you would like me to write about, contact me, and I’ll put it in my idea box!
Dougal, Mitch, and Donna
As mentioned previously, I gave a presentation last weekend at WordCamp Birmingham 2008 on “The Future of WordPress”. My section on “The Past of WordPress” ran a little longer than I had planned, but a lot of people told me that they liked that overview, so I guess it was alright. I was pretty nervous at the beginning, but a couple of minutes after I got started, I settled in a bit, and I felt like I avoided looking and sounding like a total doofus.
I was thankful to have gotten the very first presenter time slot. Once I was done with my bit, I was able to sit, relax, and listen to the other presenters. Donna Fontenot was up after me, with some good tips on SEO. I saw lots of people getting “aha” expressions and scribbling down notes during that one. I particularly enjoyed Dave Griner‘s humorous presentation, even with its “Why I chose TypePad” joke 😉 (seriously though, he doesn’t currently use WordPress, and that’s okay).
After the first round of presentations, we enjoyed a thoroughly meatatarian lunch from Full Moon BBQ, graciously provided by Microsoft. Pork BBQ sammiches FTW! The lunch break was a great opportunity to actually talk to people. I did the best I could to look for names that I recognized from Twitter and say ‘hi’ to folks I recognized. But I know there were lots of people I never really got to talk to.
After lunch, we had Jeremy Flint, Mitch Canter, and Andre Natta speaking on using WordPress as a CMS. There were lots of good tips and plugin suggestions, and plenty of questions from the audience. Next up was Dana Franks with Effective Blogging in Mass Market Media, which actually covered lots of social networking, not just blogging. Last, but not least, was Whitney Sides with Blogging for Health. Whitney shared her story of being diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, her doctor introducing her to “cancer blogs”, and her own decision to begin a blog to chronicle her ups and downs. And she ended with the awesome news that she was in remission! Yay!
There was a second day of the WordCamp, which I was unfortunately unable to attend. But I had a great time on Saturday, and I’m looking forward to next year’s event, which has already confirmed Matt Mullenweg as the keynote speaker. Now that I’ve done one presentation, I feel like I’ve caught the bug, and I’m already trying to think of other ideas I could turn into presentations. In the meantime, and until it’s outdated by the release of WordPress 2.7 later this year, you can find my “Future of WordPress” presentation below.
If you have been thinking about attending WordCamp Birmingham 2008, but haven’t committed yet, now is the time. There are only a couple of hours left to sign up. Registration is only $25, and that includes lunch and a tee shirt — talk about a bargain! Register now!