WordPress version 2.6 made it’s debut a month early just two days ago on WordPress.org. This latest version is called “Tyner” after a famous jazz pianist. The screen cast which details the release even has his snappy music as an accompaniment. Take a look!

Don’t feel like watching the video or reading the release post? Here’s what’s new in WordPress 2.6:

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web—easily grab any photo, video, quote, or bit of text from the page you’re currently viewing.
• Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging—download all of your basic WordPress scripts to speed up your blog while you’re working on it!
• Theme Previews: See a theme applied to your site before your audience does.

Contact us to have your blog upgrades to WordPress 2.6 today!

SO! There’s been quite a bit going on this side of the Hudson lately! I feel like I owe an explanation for the lack of activity. Maybe not, but here’s my life within the past few months anyways:

• Ahmadinjad came to Columbia University amidst great controversy. I had a few hearty political debates with around three cameras in my face at all times (as did every other student that day). Check out some interesting photos from the event.


• I got through my first semester of college! Woohoo! And no. Unless we’re Facebook friends, there are no “interesting photos” so see from that.


• I have reaffirmed my belief that New York City is the best city in the entire world and that every undergraduate who isn’t attending college here is seriously missing out.


• I interned for two months at College Humor as a web developer—owned by Connected Ventures. I subsequently learned that working for free is not cool.


• I became online editor at The Columbia Daily Spectator. Since the beginning of the semester I have launched an entirely new blog network—entitled SpecBlogs—completed many upgrades for the publishing company’s websites, and have many big plans in place! (Including some super awesome web applications never before seen by any other College Daily… no Harvard… not even your ”Crimson” will be putting out stuff as cool as us.


• I hatched up a brand new business plan… which involves fashion and websites; these are very obviously two things I truly enjoy. More on this possibly soon…


• I bought a black fedora and I wear it everywhere.


• … because I have finally started to take on new projects at Blog What? Design and will hopefully be blogging quite a bit more after the semester settles in.

And life couldn’t be happier Anyways, that’s it for now! 

Here’s the latest addition to the portfolio! Crunchy Mustard!

Crunchy Mustard is a personal blog of mine and Christian’s along with our friends Yurij and Ryan. This blog was launched a few months back and features a wide variety of absurd news stories and findings.

I decided on this excellent graphic from Simon Oxley because of its absurd nature and the way it fit into the theme. I put a fishbowl around it and voila: a strange blog logo (but a perfect fit!) was formed.

The aquas and greens fit together naturally; they’re reminiscent of a pond scene. The blog is run strictly off WordPress with your basic features in the sidebar. These include: an about blurb with some pretty funny author photos, the top commenters for the month (along with a link back to their blogs!), your basic blogroll, search spot, category display, and meta section with RSS and login “stuff.”

Our extra cool features include: a small sidebar chat room (it pops with each new message!), and a display of recent readers via mybloglog.  Not found in the sidebar are these great plugins: ajax comments for the permalink pages, and a special “dofollow” feature to allow our visitor’s sites to be crawled by Google!

View this latest portfolio item over at… our portfolio!

I had another excellent time working with my friend, Tyrone II at SEMTAN Media on the redesign for The Moderate Voice once again. The original concept was actually presented by one of the contributors to TMV (it’s quite a large blog!) and I took the idea and ran with it.

To really pick up on the new age of media, I chose vibrant blues to match bright blue sky. I used heavily contrasting colors to make things easy to read, and styled your basic “Arial” font to look like a totally different one! To really make the design “click” I used famfamfam’s AMAZING silk icons. (Check ‘em out!) I also created simple header 2 tags for the sidebar, so that Tyrone could throw in any sidebar headers he needed with out fussing around with lots of code.

The left sidebar displays the “meat” of the blog (dynamic page listing, login spot, author features, categories, blog roll) while the yellow (right) sidebar caters to the chunk of ads TMV has displayed. This really allows the reader to separate the two, and to migrate over to the ads only if they’re interested (while still pulling in some income for TMV!)

The code I set up allowed Tyrone to drop in quite a few different plugins as well. Take a look!

Here’s a post I put up on Crunchy Mustard a few days back and received some great feedback for. Hope you enjoy this cross-post!

There’s a new project over at Successful Blog, and I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s a group writing project and the question is: What’s Your Blogging Metaphor?

Blogging has always been a hard thing to explain to the generation before us. “Web 2.0” and “blogosphere” are things they just don’t know about. Rather than ignore this fact, I’ve come up with the perfect metaphor for blogging.

Blogging is like a county fair. You know… funnel cakes, completions, and all. Everyone gathers around - your family, your neighbors, kids, grand parents, friends. Each person brings something unique - money for amusements, pies to sell, or BBQ equipment to compete with.

All of these different attractions at a fair make up the diverse spectrum of topics in the blogosphere, or the entire “blog world.” Although food dominates at a county fair, Aunt Suzie’s pie represents a gadget review blog while Uncle Tom’s secret BBQ technique represents a fiery political blog.

Aunt Suzie proudly brings her pie to the table. She takes look at every other ladies’ pies (even though she knows hers is the best) and shares recipes, comments on the shape and style of each crust, and new ideas for next year. Think of this small congregation as a blog. Whether its a gadget or a pie, there’s constant review, commenting, and chat going on.

Now Uncle Tom… he’s a little more competitive. You see, he represents the fiery world of political blogs. Uncle Tom knows he’s got the best BBQ recipe, and he’ll fight to prove it. The men gather ‘round and openly critique each others’ rigs and styles. No holds barred: review, commentary, and discussion still occur. Although none of the men want to admit it, each of them are learning new techniques, styles, and ideas during this event.

Catch the underlying theme here?

In both of these examples, discussion and feedback are the defining point. This is exactly what a blog represents. The blogosphere represents a world of discussion and commentary… just like your local county fair competitions