Goodbye, old. Hello World! WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is here. It’s faster, more customizable, and prettier. The hardest part about upgrading to WordPress 2.7 for me was making the backups beforehand.

Michael Picks‘ introduction video begins, “this Winter, a tale of heartwarming usability, breathtaking beauty, and thrilling flexibility…”

A completely amazing amount of user testing and community involvement went into this release. Everyone that participated has done a truly superb job. This is a brilliant way of developing software.

What is WordCamp you ask? It’s a conference of sorts where bloggers of varying levels get together to talk about all things WordPress such as blogging, web design, code, publishing on the web… what it means and where it’s going. WordCamp Utah 2008 has a seriously amazing line-up of speakers including Matt Mullenweg, Richard Miller, Cameron Moll, Thom Allen, Ash Buckles and Alex King. If you are interested in blogging or are a local web designer, and you will be in Salt Lake City on September 27th, then you MUST not miss WordCamp! 

Looking for a way to SMSify your website? Look no further. DOTGO is a new service designed to let you access your site via text message. In the past, the high cost of shortcodes have made texting prohibitively expensive for smaller websites. Now they can SMS for free with DOTGO. Try it out by texting “cnn” to DOTCOM (368266). To customize the response for your site, you just need to create an index.crml and place it in your root directory. Check out the Hello world! example cmrl file and try it out. The CMRL documentation has more examples.  

Even though you can see some of my featured design work in my gallery and some of my earlier work from the U of U School of Business, the Junior League of Salt Lake City, and Myriad Genetics, Inc. on this older portfolio, I noticed there isn’t much print design work displayed on designsimply.com. So, I’m posting a few pieces of recent work here. Enjoy.

Here are some examples of a brochure, a registration form, and a banner ad that I designed:

Because of my interest in photography, I have always ended up serving as the official product and event photographer at most any job or event I undertake. Here are few product photography highlights from Myriad Genetics, Inc. in Salt Lake City, UT:

When it comes to stock photography, I am very proud of my iStockphoto.com/designsimply portfolio. Here are my most popular files on iStockphoto:

Another photography claim-to-fame, my duct tape picture was used on the NPR story page for “Best Tool Ever” by JJ Sutherland. I love this.

I will post more soon. Thanks for reading!

I just noticed that the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is showing actual numbers instead of the usual progress bar style indicators for the approx search volume columns. This is a nice (more transparent) move for Google. I like this change.

Steps for setting up GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter) on MediaWiki:

1. Download GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter).
2. Upload geshi.php and the geshi folder to your MediaWiki extensions folder.
3. Create GeSHiHighlight.php using this source code.
4. Copy the following line to your LocalSettings.php file.

   include("extensions/GeSHiHighlight.php");

5. Add code to a MediaWiki page using <pre> tags.

   <php><?php echo "Hello World!"; ?></php>
   

More information about GeSHI can be found at http://qbnz.com/highlighter/.

Edit: Oops. I had posted the last step with <pre> tags instead of <php>. I’ve fixed it now. Thanks override!

How to Be a Productive Procrastinator was the topic at hand on Talk of the Nation on June 12, 2008. Rationalizing our dawdling, Neal Conan lead a discussion about the latest on procrastination from Timothy Pychyl, blogger of Don’t Delay on Psychology Today and professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and John Perry, self-professed structured procrastinator, co-host of the Philosophy Talk podcast, and professor of philosophy at Stanford University. Two of my personal favorite procrastinators are Douglas Adams and Mark Twain.

Happiness is the product of the pursuit of your goals. Is procrastination a negative or positive force in your life?

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” -Mark Twain

PHP::Impact recently named sixteen PHP open source applications that have “changed the world” including two of my all-time favorite, much loved, and long used web phenomenons, WordPress and Gallery. Ten years running is a long time for the popular, pragmatic, database-wielding phpMyAdmin to have been in high demand—I had no idea phpMyAdmin had been around that long. I am also very impressed to see Magento eCommerce on the list since it just came out of beta this March. So far, Magento is getting rave reviews and a few complaints. It will be interesting to see how these projects continue to evolve and change take over the world.

SMX Advanced networking party at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.