The things that we do for our families, right? Today is a weekend work day – and to give my wife some much-needed rest the girls came with me to the office. They have some yummy gummy snacks, their iPads, and their coloring sets which should get me to around lunch time. Strike that – most likely it’ll get me half-way there. These girls get bored as quickly as I do!

It’s been a relative “light” week as I look back on the past 7 days – although we’ve had a record amount of posts published this past week the other sources of news articles has been relatively small. And when I say “small” I don’t mean small-small as there’s always a lot going on. Just compared to the previous week I suppose. I’m rambling. In anycase, here are some great articles that you may have missed that we didn’t cover – and don’t forget to enter into our BlogDroid Giveaway!

You know, this is a bit awkward to admit, but apparently I haven’t been paying for Akismet. Like, ever. It’s not that I was trying to skip over my duty to our wonderful spam fighting plugin or that I even was attempting to cheat any system that was made available to me – I simply did not think of ever coming back to the system and being reminded that I should pay for the service if I’m using it for a product or commercial service. And there’s really no one that I can blame except for myself – because Akismet […]

Ling Wang is something different, that’s for sure, but I really appreciate his perspective in terms of online publishing. With his latest release of version 0.0.2 of Letterpress, which introduces Tags, ASCIIMathML support, and a few others, I’m beginning to see even with more clarity what his intent and implementation is all about. No, this isn’t another WordPress-powered implementation but rather something entirely different. Ling describes his experience with WordPress and how he came upon this solution: I’ve been using WordPress since July, 2009. It is almost good enough. I encountered several downtimes when MySQL hung. I don’t know a thing about […]

When we covered BlogDroid a little ways back we managed to not just cover another player in the growing managed WordPress hosting sector but also spend some time learning about their company and their motivation for starting their service. It was a frank and honest approach to bringing the concept into the market – they took their time finding a spot in a middle-market area and focusing on bringing their customers up to speed as fast as they could. The result? A fast, secure and reliable offering that oversees managed software upgrades, automated backups to cloud storage, one-click restores and user-created snapshots. All of […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hah66fJhxNY&feature=youtu.be Tom introduces one of the small things that we installed recently to simply up the level of fun that we have in the office. There’s always opportunity for adding a little bit more flavor, right?

Public-facing video uploader for WordPress.tv? Oh yes. Talk about a big win that will greatly reduce the friction between WordPress-related video (via WordCamps and WordPress events) and seeing them publicized on WordPress.tv! This will help not only the moderators and managers of WordPress.tv and their work of uploading the content but really put the power (and responsibility) back into the hands of the community. It also means that more videos will be vetted and shared with even greater speed. Jerry Bates (better known as JerrySarcastic) referenced this news via the events.make: This has been a busy week for moderators at WordPress.tv, […]

Jen Mylo shared a sneak peek of the new Learn site that’ll be the homebase for the handbooks that are being created, downloadable training material, and even educational events that’ll be hosted and available for users. Jen has been teasing this new site for quite some time and some of the contents so it’s great to see the momentum being built and things moving forward with great speed! There is already a pre-registration for the first Women’s Workshop (you should check that out), Props and much thanks go to Mel Choyce for the design layer, George Stephanis for CSS, and […]

Philip Arthur Moore shared yesterday the release of 3 new themes on WordPress.com that may have a more than a few users making some switches today. And why the heck not since Philip has dubbed any day that releases 3 themes as “Threeme Day” – make the best of it, shall we? The 3 new themes, Blocco, Crafty, and Hustle Express are all blogger and publisher themes, not like some the magazine themes we’ve seen release recently. Hustle will set you back $68 dollars while Blocco comes in at $75:

It seems to be a growing trend for creative individuals to undertake the work of re-imagining, redesigning, re-branding larger companies websites and properties either for a personal project, a portfolio piece, or even as an attempt to get hired. It’s not that this is a bad thing – I actually love seeing the creative alternatives to long-standing brands. Take for example a recent Kodak redesign or even the very famous Microsoft re-brand that eventually led to a job offer for the designer, Andrew Kim. Powerful stuff this is!