We’re gearing up for an incredible WordCamp here in Atlanta and because I’m part of the organizing team I have to review nearly everything that goes into making this thing “work” – and it’s a lot of work, believe you me! But it’s an incredible amount of fun and I’m having a blast with Judi Knight, Carel Bekker, and Russell Fair as we build this thing together with a lot of community help. One of the things that has been interesting in the launch of WordCamp is the adherence to the GPL – which we all know has recently caused a […]

John Brown submitted an announcement about his first ever WordPress plugin and I thought it was neat enough to get some press here, especially since it is his first, which is a big deal – so congrats on that John! What is hhhhold? It’s simple: A placeholder for random content to stress test a design. Placeholder scripts aren’t new and neither is Brown’s execution here but I like how they are being created and presented from user-generated content. It’s simple to use too with the following size parameters:

We are constantly experimenting internally with our site and the technology that surrounds it so that we might be able to up the user experience and community engagement when possible. This might be major design overhauls (which we hope to do later this year), adding a responsive layout (yes, we have an explanation), or simple tweaks to the existing design to increase overall performance. Today we’re pleased to announce a small but significant user experience update to our overall brand by using a new URL shortener, wpdai.ly – we are using the free service bit.ly to help facilitate this simple […]

Whew. Another week, come and gone. It’s getting faster it seems, right? I mean, it’s already February! Where did the first month go and how are we almost half-way through the second? There have been a lot of great conversations and great content being shared all over the place and we couldn’t possibly have gotten to it all – so in our typical fashion, here’s our Weekend Roundup:

As we continue to build out our new office space we’re trying to find places where we can insert opportunities for creativity. Jared, our designer, came up with a full floor-to-ceiling chalkboard paint idea that we finished out recently. And this morning we spent a least a few minutes putting our own “marks” on the wall – and we’d love for you to doodle something creative when you stop by (perhaps at WordCamp Atlanta 2013?)! Check out some of our initial doodles:

It’s no secret that the WP Daily team here is also the company behind a premium theme and to be honest, thank goodness, as it’s the only way we’re financing this blog for the time being, which is “costing” me plenty of hours of work every single day. I love it though and the community that we’re developing as well as all the amazing contributing authors has been phenomenal has been more than enough to sustain our collective interests! But I still do spend ample amount of time working on our product, the business, and everything else that a startup requires […]

Medium is one of Ev Williams newest ventures – you know, that guy behind Blogger and Twitter, among other things, and it’s an online publishing system that’s already presenting some very innovative perspectives and implementations for both the end user/reader as well as the publisher. Why do something like this? Williams’ shares a few thoughts about the genesis: The ethos behind Medium is one of openness and democracy—like the Internet itself. Eventually we’ll be opening so anyone can post and create collections. But that’s not all… The beauty of the Internet is it allows anyone to put their thoughts out […]

The big news recently, if you haven’t heard, is that Google+ is a really big deal. I know that I even made fun of it when it first came out but you can’t make fun of it when it becomes the #2 most active social networking platform, just behind the obvious #1 Facebook. Yeah, that’s right. Unbelievable statistics and the proof is in the pudding: Google+, who despite being branded a failure or ghost town by large portions of the media, grew in terms of active usage by 27% to 343m users to become the number 2 social platform. Interestingly […]

P.J. Onori had to expect that his free WordPress Theme on Smashing Magazine was going to force a lot of pageviews, right? Of course! SmashingMag is a huge site with tons of followers and readers and has been known to tank much smaller sites when referenced. P.J. was ready. In fact, he had created his theme called Frank specifically for speed and performance under fire and he wisely chose the “demo” site as his own personal blog as a living example of the theme. Of course, he can’t really ever change his theme now that it’s locked up as the […]

Tackk is one of those web applications that when I first heard about it and tried it out I was nearly offended about how easy it was to start creating content. In fact, there was no buffer between me and my first engagement and the publication layer at all – you instantly get hit with a demo area and are asked to start playing around. But I realized that this was a brilliant way of getting new users to understand explicitly how the software works and how it can help them start building a simple page of interactive content. What the […]