I’ll be helping out with WordCamp NYC on November 14-15, 2009 this year. The venue is Baruch College, CUNY, and it’s shaping up to be a really nice WordCamp. Lots of Automatticians will be in attendance. The tracks, announcements, demos and Q&A all look really interesting. I live in NY but I’ve never been to NYC, so this should be good fun.

Follow wordcampnyc on Twitter to get the latest news. Tickets for WordCamp NYC are on sale now.

Also, we’re currently looking for volunteers, speakers, and sponsors. If WordPress helps you do your job, forms part of your business, or just plain makes you super happy every day, please consider becoming an individual ($250) or consultant ($500) sponsor. These tickets will get you full pass access and goodies, plus a little publicity and public thanks.

The WordPress 2.8 Release is cool, smooth, and simple as Michael says in the latest video announcement. I like that. My favorite new features are the theme search and install that pulls directly from the WordPress.org Theme Directory (amazing!) and the new syntax highlighting that let’s you “navigate your way behind the code behind the poetry.” I’m so looking forward to the improved media handling coming up in the next releases. test

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! 

I was ecstatic to see visits from syr.edu in yesterday’s site stats, so I decided to take the plunge and switch out the new design I’ve been working on for designsimply.com. The new look is quite photographer-trendy with black backgrounds for photos and white for text. Check out the updated photo gallery to see some of my recent stock photography work. I am quite proud to say, this site is now WordPress-powered, and layout was achieved with valid W3C standards-based XHTML and CSS protocols. You can still reach the old portfolio until I cross it over into the new blog format and photo-friendly style. Enjoy! And thanks for visiting!!