Gravatar in Gmail
Jon experiments with Gravatar in Gmail. I would love to see more of this. We also need a better way to get Gravatars into your Apple address book / iPhone for people that don’t have a set picture.
Vietnam School
Visiting Room to Read school with Tim Ferriss and two other donors about 3 hours outside of Saigon / Ho Chi Min City. More about the school here. They teach ages 2-5. Also: birthday dinner for John.
Saigon
Traveling to Saigon, small night market, and BBQ dinner.
Authentication in WordPress 2.8
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.
PollDaddy API & Twitter
PollDaddy has a new API. Also check out their easy tool for polling your Twitter followers.
Hoi An
Full Moon Festival in Hoi An, Vietnam. Also Tim and I got the cheapest haircut ever, about $0.80 a piece, and I got a shave for another dollar or so. (You don’t want to cheap a guy holding a razor to your neck.)
Hue
Touring the various temples and tombs of Tu Duc and Khai Dinh around Hue, Vietnam.
Pottery and Water
End of boating, pottery studio, and fishing in Hanoi.
Ha Long Bay
Driving to and on a cruise ship around Ha Long Bay, Vietnam.
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?
Around Hanoi
Visiting the “Hanoi Hilton” prison, Ho Chi Min’s house, an art museum, a pedal-bike tour, some awesome break-dancers, and random place dinner.
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.
Arriving in Hanoi
Arriving in Hanoi, Vietnam and some brief sojourns around the city.
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. 🙂
WordCamp Denver
WordCamp Denver at the Art Museum, which was a fantastic venue.
Magazine Theme
Check out “Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme. Even better: it’s GPL.
Denver Dinner
Pre-WordCamp dinner in Denver, where it was very cold.
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.