Will Norris on the new authentication system in WordPress 2.8.
Category Archives: WordPress
I Heart Blogging design contest
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.
Awesome Comment Plugins
Introducing IntenseDebate Plugins: add the features you want. Now ID has a plugin architecture (just like WordPress) that allows you to enhance the functionality of comments. First ones out the gate are polls, Youtube, Seesmic, and of course smileys. Want to supercharge your comments?
New Spring Design
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.
Open Source Usability
Open Source Usability — Joomla! Vs. WordPress. We’re on Slashdot again, with of course the predictable comments somehow ending up in an argument about Vim and Emacs. 🙂
Magazine Theme
Check out “Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme. Even better: it’s GPL.
Ryanair Diss
In a relatively bizarre case an employee of Ryanair left disparaging remarks about WordPress on someone’s blog. Someone with the airline should apologize.
ReadWriteWeb France
ReadWriteWeb France Catches Up with Matt Mullenweg. The French version of RWW uses WordPress and is doing really well.
Embedding WP.com Video
Implementing WordPress.com Video on a WordPress.org site. It’s easy, but I agree it would be nice if the video media embed popup made this more seamless.
SxSW Pool Team
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.
My WordPress Tattoo – Baker’s Hours
Ed Morita writes about his new permanent WordPress tattoo. I knew once the temporary ones starting taking off it’d just be a matter of time. 🙂 Lorelle has a good writeup here, and so does Mashable. As for people asking — there are no plans to change the logo ever! I think the W is pretty timeless.
Paris Day 2
Drinks with core WordPress France folks at Centre Georges Pompidou.
Erlang, PHP, WP
Persistent PHP processes in Erlang/OTP. “It’s so easy, in fact, that I now use it to debug WordPress functions from within Erlang.”
Rockstar
There’s a new WordPress book available: Rockstar WordPress Designer.
4,000 Plugins
WordPress.org plugin directory just reached its 4,000th plugin! I declare January 28th our official “Thank a Plugin Developer” day. To celebrate take a look at the plugins you use and love, visit the author’s site, find their contact form, and drop them a note. (Or Paypal!)
USA Today Article
WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers’ best friend – USATODAY.com. We got some nice press in USA Today in an article by Jefferson Graham, pick up a dead tree copy today if you can to check out the article.
Must-See WPTV
Dilemma No More
The Blogging Software Dilemma. On this day, 6 years ago, WordPress was conceived in the comments section of this blog. Hat tip: Mike Little!
Dubai Timelapse
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.