Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

I Heart Blogging design contest

WordPress, ,

You may know of Infectious as those guys who make the cool vinyl decals for cars. Now they have laptop and iPhone skins, too, and WordPress has partnered with Infectious for the launch with the “I <3 Blogging” contest.

The winners will be chosen by Derek Powazek, Matt Thomas, Team Infectious, and yours truly, and the prizes are sweet. If you nab the grand prize, your design will be printed on laptop and iPhone skins that will be sold in the Infectious store. You’ll also get a cut of the profit from their sales, $400 cash, some WordPress schwag, and $400 to spend on merchandise in the Infectious store.

The contest ends March 31, so hop on Photoshop or Illustrator and use your design chops to show us why you love blogging. The theme is completely open to interpretation, so feel free to get creative. You can submit your creations and vote on others here. You might also want to check out the official WordPress logos and graphics because friends don’t let friends use the incorrect WP logo. 😉

As a final bonus, I’ll be putting the winning design on my next laptop, so it’ll get exposure all over the world. (Last year I spoke in over 35 cities across 6 continents.) Enter your design here.

New Spring Design

Essays, Gallery, Meta, WordPress

Time to break out of your RSS readers: there’s a new design on Ma.tt! Recommended only for the high-bandwidth and the open-minded. There was nothing wrong with my old theme, I just get an itch for something new every now and then and wanted a totally different direction — especially now that every site has copped the worn paper look / colorful flourish. Also it’s refreshing to be able to have a design where the only person in the world it needs to please is me. Here’s a before and after:

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For fans of the old design, I’m going to abstract it into a regular WordPress theme — gallery features and all — that will be available to the entire world, including WordPress.com. It’s amazing to me how many great designs are thrown away, never to be used again, when as a WP theme they could live forever.

I wanted to thank Julien Morel, the creative mind behind this iteration, and Brian Colinger, who turned the vision into HTML, CSS, and PHP.

If I could I would redesign the site every season: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. It just always takes longer than I planned (this was supposed to launch in Winter). The cobbler’s sons go shoeless.

What do you think?

SxSW Pool Team

WordPress, , ,

There’s going to be a pool (billiards) competition at SxSW this year in Austin benefiting charity and I’m thinking about putting together a WordPress team for it. Are you a world-class pool player, WordPress user, and going to be in Austin the night of Sunday March 15th? Leave a comment saying why you should carry the WordPress banner and I’ll pick the two best to represent the WordPress community at the event.

Dubai Timelapse

Essays, Video, WordPress

A month or so ago I got a tilt-shift lens (Nikon PC-E Micro Nikkor 45mm f/2.8D ED) and one of the first things I wanted to try was interval shooting to make a stop-motion like tilt-shifted video like these awesome ones from Australia photographer Keith Loutit. Haven’t quite figured out how to make them look that cool yet but here’s one of the first efforts, taken from the Burj Al Arab looking down at its car entrance at night. Watch how the lights come in and out of focus, and how fast the cars are at the intersection. The video is available in full HD if your computer can handle it just toggle it in the top-right and go full-screen.

Big thanks to Michael Pick of WordPress.tv fame for doing all the video magic here.

Tune in to WordPress.tv

Automattic, Essays, WordCamp, WordPress

Today we’ve switched on WordPress.tv, a new space to geek out and learn about all things WordPress.

WordPress.tv is home to tutorials for both WordPress self-installs and WordPress.com to help you get blogging fast and hassle-free.

We’ve also aggregated and organized all that awesome WordCamp footage from around the web, on WordCampTV. There you’ll find videos and slideshows of presentations made by Automattic employees and other WordPress gurus, plus interviews I’ve done with the media and fellow bloggers.

Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog.

As always, community comes first. You have a say in shaping the future of WordPress.tv. Just drop us a line and let us know what you’d like to see added next.