There's Something About Harry

Brett Bumeter is presenting today at WordCamp Birmingham teaching people how to design their first theme in minutes.

Note: Cross posted from Softduit Media.

Permalink

I’ll make more more materials available later today, but here is my initial slide presentation for WordCamp Birmingham.  This is just the opening remarks for the actual mentored demonstration.  Hoping to add video of the meat and potatoes of this presentation after its done.

The main goal of this presentation is to help everyone give this a try, and if possible design their own theme, while I guide the audience through the process.

If you want to follow along during the presentation, I recommend downloading the free trial software from Artisteer or Cnet

1. Go to Artisteer & follow the instructions to download the free trial via Cnet (Mac users navigate to the News tab, scroll down and download the Mac OSx version of Artisteer)

*If you are using a Mac with Snow Leopard 10.6, there is a early beta (download trial beta) that is workable for most users so far, that early release by Apple has the team at Artisteer working over time like so many other companies I suspect.

2.  Install the free trial software (works on PCs or Macs) & generate your theme.

For more information on the Theme Design Contest . . . see ->

Enter the WordPress ‘License to Design’ Theme Contest 2.0

Note: Cross posted from Softduit Media.

Permalink

Note: Cross posted from Softduit Media.

Permalink

Between now and the end of BlogWorld in mid October, we are going to run a WordPress Theme design contest for new designers or people that want to learn how to design a WordPress theme for the first time.…

Note: Cross posted from Softduit Media.

Permalink

I turned on a twitter digest functionality on the site a few days back. This is kind of my personal site, and I wanted to capture some of the conversations (if you can call them that) that take place on twitter. I’m not sure if this will be something the readers of my blog enjoy reading one way or another, but it seemed like something worth documenting, because the twitter stream flows by pretty quickly and is not easily read in context hours, days or months after the fact.

I would prefer to find a way to take this little segment of posts and stow them away nicely on my blog somewhere else, (like I did finally with my Utterli photos) but I haven’t found the right place for that yet.

As I keep stopping by my own site, I keep thinking its about time for a new theme.  I haven’t quite figured out where I’m going to go with such a thing, but I am looking at several direction changes, and this blog will probably change as well.

Years ago this started as a whim, as a test site even, a place to go to break writers block.

I’m not really using it for any of those reasons lately, and frankly its not as funny as it used to be.  That’s partly because I’ve split off my humor writing efforts across several other sites so that I could ‘focus on a niche’ or something crazy like that.

But lately, I’m starting to think that all that ‘pursue your niche’ advice that I loosely followed might have been bogus, or at least not the right fit for me.  It led me to cover a lot of niches because I’m frankly a fairly multi-faceted person (as are many people).  But at the same time if I write just in a niche here and just in a niche there, etc, I’m basically splitting myself apart a bit.

That might be good for a casual visitor to my site that comes in from Gia knows where and can’t get their bearings but, you know what that’s part of what comes with my friendship.  If you know where I’m coming from everytime you talk with me, then I’m obviously not putting a lot of effort into things like I should be, which probably means I’m boring you and me.  That’s not really what happens with me most of the time, so I shouldn’t try and squeeze my sites into a mold that doesn’t fit me.

All that said, one of the reasons why I split myself up on multiple sites ages ago, was due to limitations in the blogging technology.  But these days, its a lot easier for me to be as complex as I wanna be, and still keep the site organized enough for people to navigate to the areas they like without getting lost (or offended by my weird sense of humor, politics, causes, etc).

hmmmm. more to follow, probably in actions more than words

Just a quick collection of some other pictures from the drive in last night (clearing out my camera before the event)

I’m heading to Atlanta a little later today.  I’ve got an appointment to show our house tomorrow to a potential renter.  Our house in Atlanta has been vacant for 2 years now.  We have shied away from renting, trying to wait out the housing market.  But after 2 years I think its time to rent.

The neighborhood is a good one and in one of the best school clusters in the state, but there have been a lot of short sales in our neighborhood which have really pummeled home values.  Ours has actually not fallen as fast and far as most, but it has fallen enough for it to be too problematic to sell at this point.

So now I take a road trip!  More updates to follow from the road . . .

• Work on migrating Mike McAllen’s site to a new host(today if possible), then finish the reboot of the new site(by Monday other project factors permitting)
• Establish a theme Gallery including them preview functionality on Softduit
• Finish the Toad Creations Website (this week)
• Get a Quick Fast sprint of a swim in this afternoon
• Get cleaned up and out of dock/swimming clothes & make myself presentable
• Head to the Charlotte Interwebs Meetup this evening
• Get the small stack of recent bills paid
• Test Out 2 new twitter advertising services for future article
• Get AVG installed on My Wife’s computer while she’s out of town & not using it
• Get 3 new products listed & established on Softduit
• Prepare the groovie new blog marketing campaign that will launch in about 40 – 50 days in time for IzeaFest
• Run my last IzeaFest Contest!

Note: Cross posted from Maven Mapper’s Information.

Permalink

I’ve been covering Dragon Naturally Speaking from Nuance for a long time but have not seen the prices this low before.

Right now you can buy Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 for $29.99!  For your average user, that’s all you need!  If you want to have the extra ability to utilize an MP3 voice recorder (I use a Sony) you can get the Preferred version for as low as $117.99 and the ‘wireless’ version for $155 (that’s bluetooth wireless, I personally use an after market 2.6ghz wireless logitech headset that will work with any version).

You could buy the basic version for $30 and an $90 logitech clearchat wireless headset for a total price of $120 or just jump to Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 bluetooth wireless at $155.

No matter what these are great prices.  Typically the lowest prices you will se are about $80 for Basic, $150 for preferred and $250 for bluetooth wireless.  The best part about this is that at $30 for Basic, this is a great price for a first time user to get in and see just how great this software is these days.

Note: Cross posted from Maven Mapper’s Information.

Permalink

Note: Cross posted from TOP 10 TECH.

Permalink

The Social Media Douche Bag Cabal that runs the world recently convened meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, LA, and NYC to confirm amongst themselves that they were all in agreement that the company pitch to be issued by Social Media Douche Bags around the world would be that Sponsored Tweets Suck.…

Note: Cross posted from TOP 10 TECH.

Permalink