Featured

WooThemes releases its first tumblog WordPress theme

Posted on Mar 1, 2010 in Featured, General, blogging | 0 comments

WooThemes, makers of fine premium WordPress themes, released its first tumblog theme: Cinch. Tumblogs are streamlined blogs, pioneered by Tumblr (my favorite blogging service), that emphasize unique styles depending on whether a post is a quote, video, photo, or straight text. As usual, it has a bunch of extra color styles, customizability, and other great design polish. But WooThemes also designed a custom blogging bookmarklet with extra features above and beyond what WordPress’ own bookmarklet offers. It’s a great looking theme, and WooThemes has more in the tumblog style on the way.

Buy a theme or sign up for a subscription through my WooThemes affiliate link and I’ll get a kickback.

Two new Garage Sale items: Jawbone Prime and Nintendo DS Lite

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Featured, General, shameless | 0 comments

I just added two new items to my Garage Sale: a Jawbone Prime and a Nintendo DS Lite with accessories. They’re both in great condition, I don’t think I’m asking much for them, and I ship via insured UPS to anywhere in the US. Let me know if you’re interested.

Stick with a plugin for submissions or allow “contributors” to register?

Posted on Jan 24, 2010 in Featured, Finer Things | 3 comments

I run a series of sites about the Finer Things in Tech. They contain short tips about handy features, clever UI polish, and other perks. I use WordPress MU (note: not WordPress.org) to power the sites, and I accept user-submitted posts via the TDO Mini Forms plugin. This way, anyone can visit a page at the site with a form, like this one, to submit a post. It’s convenient, and users don’t have to register with my WordPress install just to share something awesome. Unfortunately, TDO Mini Forms has some quirks, and since I switched from regular self-hosted WordPress to WordPress MU, it has even more.

I am now considering just allowing readers to register with my WordPress MU install as “Contributors” so they can draft their own posts in the WordPress UI. This way I figure they can add legitimate profiles, use much better blogging tools, and the WooTheme I use should “just work” in terms of displaying the proper author attribution.

But I have a few questions about going this route: As I understand it, “Contributor” is very low on the WordPress user permissions scale, but I could still allow them to upload media for their posts. Is there any danger to allowing people to register as Contributors? I use extremely complicated and secure passwords for my admin and author accounts (generated by 1Password, natch), so I’m not too worried about those.

I’m more wondering about things like how many users WordPress (and WordPress MU) can competently handle, and other management and performance issues. I don’t expect hundreds of signups, but you never know.

For Macworld: Sync iCal tasks to your iPhone with these apps

Posted on Jan 18, 2010 in Featured, Writings | 0 comments

The iPhone doesn’t have built-in support for syncing or even just managing tasks. I went on the hunt to change that: Sync iCal tasks to your iPhone with these apps | Macworld.

Finer Things in iPhone gets the new shiny

Posted on Nov 15, 2009 in Featured, Finer Things | 0 comments

FineriPhone This morning I finished applying the new site design to Finer Things in iPhone. I’m using the same theme as Finer/Mac, which is called Headlines from Woo Themes (affiliate link – click and buy a WordPress theme or membership and I get a pat on the back). I’ve settled on Headlines as the overall site layout for all sites in the Finer Things network, as it looks professional, stylish, and is quite flexible.

Finer/iPhone is now also mobile friendly, like Finer/Mac, thanks to the fantastic WPtouch plugin. It should render in a nice, stripped-down-but-surprisingly-functional mobile version on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and generic mobile devices.