I’ve had a surprising number of questions about the “free unlimited-user copy of WordPress” prize for the color scheme contest. To clarify, that was a joke. WordPress is Free. 🙂
Knight Rider
K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider on eBay. I used to watch this show every single day. Hat tip: Colin.
Contest Update
One day left in the contest, there have been some really great entries so far. There are going to be multiple winners of the smaller prizes and one grand prize winner, and you can win multiple times, so keep the entries coming.
MediaWiki
MediaWiki looks pretty amazing, and I think it will be replacing phpWiki for my personal use and for WordPress. There is a lot that can be learned from their extensive history and documentation of the development of the Mediawiki project. This is open source at its best.
On 1.3
I’m running the latest nightly build of WordPress 1.3 now. Living on the edge! Seems to be working well, and it’s a good stress-test of the system.
Rolling Along
Feed-O-Maticburner
Using Ping-o-Matic with FeedBurner, 3 methods, all easy. Lots of synergy there, both services abstracting details of a fragmented market.
RSS Search
I just realized that because the WordPress support forums has RSS for everything and Bloglines is indexing it Bloglines must have all 60 or 70 thousand posts from the support forums in its database. I wish there was some way we could tie into that search directly.
Two Steps to Salvation
This has got to be the worst error message with the worst instructions ever. I want to see the video (Barack Obama) but I’m afraid about what will happen to my computer if I fire up IE.
Meet the Press
Met with the charming Cathy Matusow from the Houston Press earlier today and we chatted for a while about blogs and blogging and blogbloginess. We’re going to meet again this Saturday to talk some more, and maybe even set her up a blog. Yesterday I talked with Farhad from Salon.com for a good while, but that chat was a lot more technical, things like comment spam, emergent communities, and business-oriented topics. Farhad asked some very challenging questions that I had lots of thoughts on but my replies were scattered, so I’m not sure if I communicated what I wanted to say.
Best site forward
Ethan asks Is Mozilla putting the best site forward? The further reading is interesting and candid as well. BTW, Firefox 1.0 is coming in September.
Zeldzilla
Mozilla 1.7 / 1.7.1 home page shows a picture of Zeldman.com in its screenshot.
Bloglines Citations
Bloglines is the new Technorati. Relevant results, easy to read, and FAST. Hat tip: Dan Hersam via Outer Court. (BTW, it’s interesting to see where Doug’s sliding doors example shows up.)
Color Theory
Colors Found in Nature
Boxes and Arrows: Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design. A fantastic article that may give you some inspiration in the contest. All the colors schemes I like that I’ve done have been directly inspired and lifted from photographs I like.
On Market Share
Nick says Feed Demon defaults to checking once every three hours, so depending on how you look at stats it may appear 1/3 of readers that poll every hour, skewing its market share numbers. Something similar may effect WordPress’ numbers with installations and blogs. If the average MT user has two or three blogs per installation (like their survey indicated) then the actual number of installations would be half or a third of what the blog survey numbers indicate, putting it much closer to WP’s numbers. Of course I know of no good way to track this, so it’s just a random musing.
Color Schemes Contest
I’m very interested in seeing some alternative color schemes for the WordPress admin, so I thought I’d sponsor a mini-contest here. You don’t have to be a WordPress user or even have it installed to participate. The colors don’t have to match the logo or anything like that, I’m just interested in seeing easy-on-the-eyes color schemes people would enjoy looking at. For people who aren’t running a nightly build or not running WP at all I’ve put up two screenshots that you can use to get an idea of where the colors will go. You don’t have to be a designer to play, just play around with the colors in those images until you find some that you like and then post the results. Winners (I’ll probably pick a couple) will get prominent mention on this site and wordpress.org, a free unlimited-user copy of WordPress, and a small monetary prize via Paypal. So fame and fortune, what more could you ask for?
So to recap the important bits:
- What?
- Playing with interesting color variations for the WordPress admin sections.
- Materials?
- Screenshot one, screenshot two, and a HTML dummy page.
- How do I enter?
- Leave a comment with some way to represent your color scheme, whether it is a screenshot, CSS code, linked post, hex values, whatever you’re comfortable with. You can enter as many times as you want and win multiple times. If you don’t have time to enter, link to this entry and let other people know about it.
- Any guidelines?
- Be creative! Don’t modify the layout, just the colors.
- Deadline?
- Friday night, my time. This is a low-impact project, all you need is a color picker and about ten minutes. Submit your entry as soon as possible so no uses your colors before you do. Enter as many times as you want.
- Prizes?
- Fame, fortune, and that warm fuzzy feeling you get from contributing to open source and having your work in front of thousands of people.
When all is said and done I’ll roll this into a plugin or something so people can enjoy it. You don’t have to be a designer to enter, just put together something you like.
Update: There are a few clarifications and tips in the comments, so you might want to look over those. The big news, however, is that Aaron Epstein has donated a copy of his excellent Color Schemer Studio product to be awarded to the top winner. Downloading a 15-day trial would be a great way to put together a great entry and get a taste of what you might win.
This hasn’t been forgotten, I’m just can’t write the plugin for the winners until 1.3 is finished. Thanks for your patience.
Seriodesign
I missed the redesign when it happened but I came across Seriocomic’s site today and it looks gorgeous. Great attention to detail in many parts of the design.
Missing Inch
My 12″ Powerbook is just under 11″ wide. I demand a refund.
Throwing Tables
Throwing Tables Out the Window, Doug on redoing Microsoft.com live in front of an audience. He should take that show on the road.