LunarPages Hosts WordPress Theme Contest

LunarTics WordPress Theme Contest

The other day, I was notified of a WordPress Theme contest that is taking place over at the LunarPages blog. All it takes to win the contest is to come up with the coolest, most unique WordPress theme. Then, upload the theme to LunarPages to give yourself a chance to win. Here are what the prizes look like:

First Prize is $1,000 cash and 5 years free hosting on our Basic Plan

Second Prize is 3 years free hosting + $300 cash

Third Prize is 1 year free hosting + $100 cash

The best part is that it’s easy to enter – simply give us some contact info (like your name and email so we can tell you when you’ve won) and upload your WordPress Themes directly to our site, where they’ll be posted for the community to vote on.

Each week starting December 10th, we’ll highlight our top 5 favorites and give our community the chance to vote via a poll on the blog for a favorite theme of the week.

The winner of the weekly poll is guaranteed a position in the final 12. There will be 6 weekly polls.

Lunarpages staff will choose an additional 6 themes for inclusion in the final 12. Contest entries close on January 22nd and the final 12 will be announced on January 23rd, so everybody has a chance to win! A new poll with the final 12 (6 from weekly polls and 6 of Lunarpages choice) will be posted on January 23rd and voting will run for 2 weeks, closing on February 13th.

Winners will be announced on Feb 24th, 2008. The winners will be highlighted on their blog as well as their newsletter. For more information and to enter the contest, click here.

PHPBB3 Goes Gold – Released

PHPBB Logo

After 5 long and sometimes painful years, the day has finally arrived where PHPBB 3 has reached gold status. PHPBB3 can now be downloaded from here and will be the official supported version of PHPBB. PHPBB 3 also known as “Olypmus” contains over 200,000 new and altered lines of code. When you take into consideration the recent security audit that the PHPBB 3 code undertook, PHPBB3 looks to be one of of the most secure open source projects to date.

phpBB has changed considerably since work on its second major release began. People have come and gone but this day would not have been reached without the hard work and dedication of all our group members, past and present. The phpBB community, all of you, also deserve a large pat on the back for continuing to support this project. Whether it be through writing mods, creating new themes, spreading the word or simply using phpBB to build new communities, our thanks to you too.

So again we say with great pride and many thanks to all those who’ve helped us reach this point – enjoy phpBB3.

Thank you.

For discussions about this announcement, please refer to: Discuss: phpBB3 Gold Released

So for those of you waiting and waiting for this moment to arrive, your Christmas present has arrived :). By the way, I still think Vbulletin is better but you can’t beat the price of PHPBB. (FREE)

The Web 2.0 Bubble Video Pops

The popular web 2.0 bubble video created by the folks at RichterScales.com has been taken off line due to a DMCA take down notice. Based on what I’ve read, the video featured a number of photographs that the video producers did not have the permission of publishing. One of those photographs featured in the video was of Valleywag’s Owen Thomas.

Owen Thomas

This photo of Owen Thomas was taken by a person known as Fetching on Flickr.com. Judging by the content within Fetching’s post and the associated comments, I think it’s a safe bet that in some form or fashion, Fetching has helped to file the DMCA take down notice. It’s not known for sure just who filed the claim, but if RichterScales used a series of photographs without permission, I have to agree with the stance that Fetching has taken.

Richterscales has said that they will be redoing the video to highlight the source of every image used.

We don’t know who filed the takedown or why they did so without first talking to us, but we would like to talk about what it would take for you to cancel your request.

It probably was impolite not to offer full credit in the video in the first place. But those who called us thieves and jokingly threatened us with physical violence were also being impolite. Let’s keep this civil, folks.

I’m not sure if the Web 2.0 bubble video will ever return. But if it does, I don’t think it will be the same.

Flickr Launches Stats For Pro Members

Flickr has introduced a new feature for PRO members. The new feature highlights various stats for your online photos. If you’re a pro member you can activate your stats now. The first round of stats will take at least 24 hours to process.

The stats show you how people arrive to your photos. There are stats available for people surfing on Flickr itself – where the referrer is flickr.com – and stats about people coming from other websites. Flickr will now be able to tell you the sorts of things people search for on search engines where your photos turn up, and tell you how many views your photos have in a week, or for all time.

Flickr Stats

The stats will display as far back as 28 days prior to the day of activation. As for the more technical details of the stats themselves, Flickr states:

We update stats once a day
Your own views of your own photos are not counted
We track views and referrers when a page on flickr.com is loaded. We are unable to count views of your photos on external sites (like your blog).
The “Search Engines” group of referrers counts traffic from most of the major search engines online, including Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, Ask.com, and live.com
When reading search engine results, we are able to show what people searched for to find your content.
We don’t display links to individual Flickr members as referrers

For more information in regards to this new feature, check out the official Flickr Stats FAQ.

I Need Your Feedback

Its that time again where I have to ask you, the readers, what is it you would like me to write about on this blog? So far, it looks like the majority of you enjoy posts that highlight new icon packs. Even the posts that deal with vector based graphics or logos appear to be a hit. I’ve also noticed that you folks seem to enjoy WordPress related material as well.

What would you like me to write about? Do you want more WordPress news? How about more WordPress plugin or theme reviews? Do you think I should not change anything and keep writing about the stuff I already cover? Should I continue to review web 2.0 sites and services, or should I review other things such as actual software? Do you enjoy the short articles, or the in depth longer ones? If I started a WordPress based podcast, would you tune in and listen? Do you enjoy the interviews I have posted and would like to continue to see me publish interviews?

These are just some of the questions that are on the top of my mind right now. I know this is a blog about stuff, but I’d really like to know what you 150 or so RSS subscribers and regular visitors would like to see more of on this blog. As the year comes to a close, I’d like to start off the new year with at least a little more of a focus on what I should be blogging about. Of course, I’ll still blog about personal experiences, the jokes, comics, and what have you, but I’m interested in what sort of content you’re interested in.

Your feedback is incredibly valuable to me.

Modern Life Design Trends Of 2007

Thanks to Mark Rizzn and his Google Reader for sending me this story. Modern Life has posted their 2007 design trends and cliches. Based on this article, it looks as though we are finally moving on from the pastel colored Web 2.0. According to Modern Life, this years list is:

Cute Cartoons And Mascots
Swirls, Drips and Flourishes
Broken Borders
Oversize RSS Icons
High-Texture Designs
Rich Colors With Dark Grey Background

I thought the clean look of Web 2.o based websites which really took hold during 2006 were nice. But, I have to say that the new earthy, rich colored websites on dark backgrounds seems to suit my eyes much better. Considering this blogs design is boxy, does that make me pre year 2000?

Which design trend of 2007 have you enjoyed the most?

QuickInsert Adds New Features

QuickInsert Logo

QuickInsert, the service that allows you to sell your content that I reviewed here ( Protect Or Sell Your Content Via QuickInsert ) has gone through a major upgrade. Here are the changes outlined by QuickInsert:

QuickInsertControlPanel

You can now host a separate login form from your content anywhere on your pages.
Emailing functionality – email all or some of your users on your Edit Users page of the control panel.
Enhanced interface for the registration form – everything appears more fluid and more practical for users registering on your site

All in all, functionality across the entire control panel is easier than before. If you’re interested in managing and then selling your content, QuickInsert provides a good platform to start with.

CliqIn Adds Features To Widget

As you may have noticed the other day, I temporarily disabled the CliqIn widget. This was in response to the widget misbehaving. For whatever reason, it was stretching out the entire page and doing all sorts of goofy things. Now that the widget is back to normal, not only is it behaving but I’ve noticed a new feature was added. The reason why I’m happy to post about this is because this is the feature I requested.

If you look at the bottom of the widget, you should now see a button that says JOIN THIS CLIQ. Now you no longer need to navigate to a specific Cliq on their website in order to join. Of course, you still need to have an account on the CliqIn website in order to actually join the Cliq. Also, because I’ve elected to make mine private, you will need to request an invitation to join.

Other than that, I have no idea what has changed since they never sent out an email detailing the changes that occurred. I do know one thing though, I now have an annoying title within the widget that says POSTS YOU MIGHT LIKE. I figured out how to get rid of that before, but now I have no idea. It looks annoying and messes up the widget. I’ve already looked within the embed code for the widget and the title attribute is not there. Anyone else have any ideas?

Impressive Free Icon Sets By DryIcons

It’s not too often when you come across free sets of icons that have that professional look too them. DryIcons has at least 5 Free available icon packs that simply look gorgeous. One of my favorite packs by DryIcons, is the Ruby Multimedia set.

This set features 13 high quality icons depicting media equipment such as a web cam, headphones, mouse, digital camera, ect.

Then, there is the WYSIWYG Sapphire icon set. These icons would be perfect for anyone developing their own WYSIWYG text editor. 47 icons are featured in this set.

Next up is the WYSIWYG Classic set. This set is the same as the one above, except it doesn’t have that blue Sapphire touch.

Blue Velvet is a high quality icon set that you would use on your own website. This set contains 86 icons and features buttons that can be used as a means of communicating a specific purpose.

Aesthetica is the big one. This set features 160 icons and contains everything from media player buttons, to all sorts of operating system icons.

Happy Birthday SMS

HappyBirthday SMS

15 years ago, the first ever recorded cell phone based text message was sent, to an employee at Vodafone. The message was “Happy Christmas“. 15 years ago in the first week of December, Airwide engineer Neil Papworth sent the test message to Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis.

Fast forward to today, and everyone and their mother, no pun intended is text messaging. The BBC reports that SMS messages in Britain are being sent at a rate of one billion per week. Compare that with the U.S. where 10 billion text messages are sent every month and thats only on the Verizon network.

How many of those text message do you think involve Twitter?

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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