Peter Jobst

“Under The Influence” is a unique and highly customizable new theme. This theme sports two main content columns and loads of options, providing a unique design for all your visitors to enjoy.

Aside from a unique design, this theme has lots of great options. Too many to count! For starters, there are multiple header designs, color pickers for main and accent colors, and adjustable column sizes for the expert blogger.

With just a few clicks you can get an alternate header design with the colors of your choice.

The theme doesn’t stop with the goods either. The footer keeps things stylish with flourishes and a cool multi-column layout!

“Under The Influence” is available for WordPress.com users under Appearance -> Themes. It is also available for WordPress.org users from the Theme Directory. (What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?)

It’s the start of a beautiful weekend. Whether it’s raining or shining outside, if you’re reading this you can probably count yourself among the most fortunate folks on the planet.

Perhaps you’re feeling particularly adventurous. You should check out the new “Surprise Me” feature.

To activate, go to your Personal Settings page, check the appropriate box, and save.

I’m not going to tell you exactly what it does. If you’re open to new things and serendipitity in your blogging life try leaving it on as you go about your normal blogging activities of posting, commenting, checking your stats, and such, and see what pops up.

Enjoy the weekend, let me know what you think, and on Monday I’ll be able to reveal more.

Update 1: This was the result of a collaboration with the artist Evan Roth at the Rhizome Seven on Seven event, where we just presented it. As I said, there will be more on Monday in the New York Times.

Inuit Types is one of the sharpest looking themes around and I’m excited to let you know that today it’s now available on WordPress.com. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer—including the alternate dark color scheme.

The image above highlights the optional featured posts (available from Appearance->Theme Settings) that take advantage of the new Post Thumbnail module available from your Edit Post page when using the Inuit Types theme.

Inuit Types features a clean drop-down menu with lots of room for multiple pages.

And now, a look at the front page intro widget area—a great place to add an extended introduction to your blog.

There’s a lot of really cool details in Inuit Types—things like full-width image attachment pages or the custom default avatar image for comments—but the thing I think you’ll be most excited about are the layout options and alternate color schemes available from Appearance->Theme Settings.

Here I’ve set up my Inuit Types demo blog with the included dark color scheme and full width featured posts. I’ve also chosen to display the sidebar on the left side of my content. Check it out.

Pretty cool, huh? And—besides looking great—the dark color scheme is one of the most readable I’ve ever seen; I love it. I’m pretty excited about Inuit Types. I hope you will be too.

Inuit Types is available in your WordPress.com dashboard and, for WordPress.org users, in the WordPress.org themes directory.

I’m super-excited to announce to you today that WordPress.com now has an official Theme Team. In a nutshell, we’re a bunch of people who really care about WordPress Themes and want to see them get better and better—on WordPress.com and for every WordPress.org user. And yes, that means we’re getting more themes, more often.

You’ll be hearing more from us individually in the coming weeks but I thought, to get started, it’d be a good idea to share a few of the Theme Team goals we’ve been discussing. Just some rough thoughts really. But I’m hoping that by sharing them here you can get a better idea of what we’re up to—and get as excited as we are about it all.

1. Every WordPress.com user should feel like there’s a theme that fits them perfectly, that is exactly how they want to present themselves to the world, that they’re excited to show to their friends.
2. We want everyone to feel a sense of momentum and ever-increasing possibilities, and to do so we will present as many perfect-fit WordPress themes to as many WordPress.com users as we can.
3. We will ensure all of our public work represents the best in coding practices, web standards, and technical excellence.
4. We will craft all of our themes to have a consistent user experience and meet our users expectations and hopes.
5. We will teach WordPress developers to become the best theme developers in the world. If you’re a WordPress theme developer—commercial or 100% free—we want to help you be the best.
6. We will ensure all our improvements make it back to the open source community.

I love the idea of meeting the “expectations and hopes” of everyone here by delivering to you the best in WordPress themes. Pretty, painless, perfect-fit ones that just plain work.

Keep watch here for more announcements—and more new themes!

We have added the really cool plugin developed by mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) called HookPress. HookPress lets you add webhooks to WordPress, providing an easy way to develop push notifications when various events happen on your blog (like publishing a post for instance).

You can now find this under the Settings Module in the dashboard.

As part of the process of integrating HookPress into WordPress.com we trimmed back some of the features (to ensure it didn’t impact performance or security) while improving other aspects of the plugin, like the management interface. To guide you through the rigs and roles of setting up and developing with this new tool check out the Webhooks support page.

There are currently three actions that you can enable a hook for: comment_post, publish_post, and publish_page. We’ll be adding support for more hooks in the future.

So what does all this mean? Well, for starters this is one of those features targeted at developers. Let’s look at a hypothetical example; say I want to get a text message every time a new comment is submitted to my site. First you need to setup a URL that will accept an HTTP POST request with the comment data and then does all of the heavy lifting of taking that data and shipping it off to your phone in the form of a text message. Then you add a new hook via the Webhooks section of the admin area for the ‘comment_post’ action, selecting which fields you want and the URL that you setup earlier. That’s all there is to it, WordPress.com will automatically send an HTTP POST with the fields you selected to the URL you configured for each comment that is submitted. A contrived example to be sure, but it gives you an idea of what the process looks like.

Another big thank you to mitcho for all his brilliant work on this super cool plugin and look forward to seeing what people do with this!

A few years ago, when we began to offer domain mapping—serving a WordPress.com blog on your domain, like example.com—we omitted DNS control because we didn’t count on many people needing it. Soon we tired of saying “no” to users wanting email on their blog domains so we added limited support for Google-hosted email. Recently we tired of saying “no” to users wanting DNS control so today we deployed a DNS editor for custom domains.

This free enhancement is available to everyone who uses domain mapping on WordPress.com. The ability to add some common DNS records (MX, TXT, CNAME, A) opens the door for services hosted elsewhere to work under the same domain as your blog. Integrating other hosted services with your domain, such as email (you@example.com) or other kinds of web content (wiki.example.com), can make your dot-com a more powerful branding tool. We hope it makes WordPress.com a better choice for bloggers all over the internet.

Media is a big part of my life. Showing friends a slideshow of a weekend excursion is a common occurrence. When blogging these photos, displaying them in a long gallery doesn’t always make sense.There wasn’t any other option to show off the images uploaded to your WordPress.com blog until now.

Today, we’re rolling out 100% JavaScript powered slideshows. But, why did I bother to mention that they’re JavaScript powered? Most importantly, because we’re consuming the web in different ways. Our JavaScript powered slideshows will work in any browser that supports CSS and JavaScript – even the iPad and iPhone!

The slideshows are simple and straightforward. Upload your photos as a gallery, then click the “Insert slideshow” button, or use the [slideshow] shortcode. The slideshow automatically adjusts its dimensions to fit your blog’s theme.

Without further ado, here are some pictures I took while visiting some zoos over the years.

Click to view slideshow.

This feature is currently only available on WordPress.com. A WordPress.org/self-hosted plugin will be available soon.

We’ve always sort-of had profiles here on WordPress.com — you probably remember giving your name and such when you first signed up for WordPress.com — but they’ve always been a little lame. You’d see your information when you wrote comments, or with some themes, or on the forums. Such basic functionality worked, but you guys have been asking for richer profiles that showed a bit more personality and were as easy and ubiquitous as your Gravatar.

These days you’re not just blogging on WordPress, you’re also posting photos on Flickr, updating your friends on Facebook, and Tweeting (Buzzing?) about everything in between.

What if your Gravatar wasn’t just an image that showed up when you comment, but you could attach more of yourself to it to better represent your style, flair, and personality not just with more photos but with links to all the cool stuff you’re doing around the web.

That’s what Gravatar profiles are, and they’re now live to the world and easy to edit right inside your dashboard.

We’re continuing the tradition of complete openness and transparency that Gravatar (and WordPress) has been known for, so nothing you put into your profile will be locked behind proprietary APIs or a scary terms of service — what you choose to share in your profile will be open to the world.

You’ll find some cool features on the new profiles: you can have a gallery of your favorite photos, add a variety of contact methods, and link your other profiles. Every linked account is verified so you know it’s not an impostor, and we also might be able to do cool stuff in the future like aggregate your content or update your avatar in multiple places when you update Gravatar.

While we’re all getting familiar with this new system, you will only be able to view your own profile on Gravatar.com, so you’ll have a bit of time to spruce it up before we’re out of beta. Check out this handsome fellow:

To edit your profile on WordPress.com just click this link. From there you can edit all of your information to build out your profile. Some of the links will go through to Gravatar.com, since that is the engine behind all of this, and you can also go edit it on Gravatar.com instead, it’s the same thing.

Personal settings and options now have their own page in the “Personal Settings” sidebar menu under “Users” in your dashboard.

Profiles will become public for everyone soon so make sure to check yours out and update it to include (or leave out) exactly what you want. If you remove all information from your profile, then other people will only be able to see your Gravatar, just like right now.

Today, we’re bringing you another new theme. Neutra is a simple and elegant theme. Dabs of color accent this typographically focused theme built upon a solid grid-based design.

The design is extremely inviting. Colors accent the white and gray design, helping showcase your content without distraction. The headers are quite warm and inspiring.

Nice icons accompany the post metadata that sits at the bottom of the post.

To make organization of pages easy, there is a nice styled drop-down menu.

Neutra was designed by maxxu and is available in your dashboard or in the WordPress.org themes directory.

March 24 was Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over on the Publisher Blog we highlighted two women in the WordPress community.

visit my friends site, there a New Media Development company

http://www.stauffer.com

and my page

http://www.stauffer.com/about/our-team/peter-jobst-1

Im doing a test with ryanjacobson.com to see what it takes to get ones name on the top of the search indexes.

http://twitter.com/JobstConsulting

Here’s an interesting article about the latest phones on Jobst Consulting http://tinyurl.com/y95tkfr

join me on linked-in
http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterjobst

Our review of the four most desired phones for Christmas:

Nokia N900

 

Fastest of all four in this lineup, however it has no 3G support. 32GB of memory, expandable to 48GB- so storage will never be an issue here.
It’s got a nice quality camera (photo and video).
Currently it also has a limited number of applications.

Pros:

Debian Linux based smart phone with lots of memory (32GB expandable to 48GB).
Very intuitive, so no Linux knowledge is perfectly alright, though if you are a Linux user (or even better, a Linux power user), the sky is the limit.
Processing power is awesome, if you tend to run a lot of applications at once (camera, web browser, email, notes etc), this will not be a problem!
Beautiful high resolution display

Cons:

Not a whole lot of extra applications available yet (compared to
iPhone, Droid etc.), however if you’re a knowledgeable Linux user, you can get some of the Linux apps {for PCs} to work on this phone- making it very resourceful).
Although it comes with 38GB of memory, only 2GB are allocated
towards applications (again, if you’re into Linux this shouldn’t be a problem as you can resize)

Nokia N97

Second only to the N900 only because of processor speed and
interface (camera, memory etc are the same). It DOES support 3g on AT&T and it’s able to share multimedia files.
Very nice camera, like the N900, and web browsing capabilities.
Being that it’s a slower processor than the N900, it can be slow at times. Users report that the video calling throughout Europe is
very impressive, definitely a good traveling buddy.

 

pros:

Very nice resolution.
Like N900, has quality camera lens
HD 720 video recording
Full QWERTY keyboard
3G, Wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS

Cons:

Responsive with nothing else running, but does not multitask like
N900. Note- this is NOT a multitasking phone.
Clunky touch interface (have to touch the screen harder than other
models on the market, which could cause buyer’s remorse)
Outdated (Symbian) Operating System
Although it comes loaded with apps and features, you have 15 days
of Adobe and Office before you have to pay for licenses (which IMHO
is a shocker when you consider the initial cost of the phone)

HTC Touch Pro 2

Sleek, beautiful looking phone. Designed to fit perfectly in your hand with a larger 3.8 inch hi-res display
for far greater viewing area, this phone is quite impressive!

Pros:

Advanced, responsive touch experience optimized for one handed use
Sleek, large sreen
5MP camera
Windows Mobile 6.1 (can flash to 6.5)
Long battery life

Cons:

Windows Mobile (can be bulky performance wise)

Motorola Droid

 

The much hyped Droid phone packs a good delivery of features, despite the pointed/box-shaped look.
The 3.7″ display surpasses the iPhone’s and its resolution is full and rich with very impressive graphics.
Performance is adequate, but it’s not a super-phone either. For the price it’s certainly the most bang for the buck (especially if you’re stuck in a contract).

Pros:

Call quality is great
Gorgeous screen
5MP camera with LED flash
Non-plastic casing, much faster processor (unlike the G1)

Cons:

“Flat” keyboard
Camera known to be a little slow
Wifi chip not as good as other models
Touch-screen a bit too sensitive

For more information, check out this side-by-side comparison:

http://www.infosyncworld.com/reviews/cell-phones/compare/?name1=Motorola+Droid&name2=HTC+Touch+Pro2&name3=Nokia+N900&name4=Nokia+N97&compare=Compare

I recently deployed a Fedora 11 server and found that Red Hat keeps on doing themselves up upon each release. I love the new EXT4 support and and planning on benchmarking some speed tests in the future. Stay tuned…. oooohhh ahhh
The installer (Anaconda) continues on with its simple GUI interface and they have added options for downloading updates from the installer. I tried it the first time around but found that is was so slow to download updates and I couldn’t continue on with the installation until they finished. So since I was in a crunch for time I decided to stop the installation and start over and skip the download updates.
Once the server was up I found it had every utility I needed to get the system configured and locked down enough to put on the network securely. I was able to download samba, proftp, and other servers simply through yum.
After that came the mounting of our large storage array. I was hoping to go larger but I ran into a limitation on EXT4 that limits the partition to 16 TB. So oh well I have to live with 16 TB instead of 18. I can use that extra space for virtual drives. The formatting with EXT4 was the same process as EXT3. Very straight forward.
So now came the time to get everything up 2 date. Ahh but we don’t use up2date any longer. Now we us yum. Yum is Linux’s anal retentive twin to Microsoft’s Windows Update so it took a looong time to get all the updates downloaded and installed. I’ve got to find a fast repository for Fedora 11 because it took 8 hours for all the updates up get installed.
But I rebooted in the end and all was well.
Much more fun to come out of this server. I feel Red Hat has done an excellent job.
That’s my personal experience

Initially, the USB drive device or thumb drive was a simple way to copy files from one computer to another. They would be something you would pick up at trade shows that where branded and had the company’s product catalog on it. Now, if you search the internet for USB drives you will find thousands of sites offering USB’s in millions of different forms and molds. You will also see companies that are utilizing this media in various business models and markets world wide. (www.aderra.net) With the increase in available capacity, you can now have movies, music, documents and utilities all on a portable drive that fits your pocket or looks like Yoda. (www.cfgear.com ) The CD and DVD physical media are quickly being eliminated as the reusable, portable and sometimes fashionable USB devices are taking over. I recently had a technical problem that required a USB.
Can a USB device be a boot device? Could it be possible? Yes it is. We were recently contacted by a client who had a laptop that he locked himself out of by incorrectly typing the password Over and Over and Over. He didn’t know the administrator password. Of course this laptop didn’t have a floppy or a CD/DVD drive. All of the new laptop mini’s only have USB drives. We tried everything we could think of to get logged in. We came across a company called Password-reset (http://www.password-reset.com/index.php ). I quickly found that they had a Bootable USB version of their software. I followed the simple instructions to create the bootable content, format the USB and copy the updated content to the USB drive. Using the bootable USB and this software I had the password reset and logged back in quickly.
Pretty slick.

It’s been almost two years since I started running Windows Vista 32bit Business on my Dell Precision Laptop with 2 GB Ram, 2.2 Ghz Intel Centrino processor, with a 128 MB graphic card. When I purchase this laptop I figured it would be a stellar, fast, and enjoyable laptop, but with it running Windows Vista I have just been disappointed and extremely frustrated. I really wondered why Microsoft would release an operating system that is so bloated, buggy, slow and a step backwards from their ever so popular Windows XP Pro.

I really wanted to see what the future for Microsoft is holding and I wanted a peak of what Windows 7 is all about. So I formatted and installed Microsoft’s Windows 7 RC 64bit onto my Dell Laptop. The process was relatively simple (minus the fact that I had to format in order to install the 64 bit version). I downloaded the Windows 7 RC from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/download.aspx which comes as a DVD ISO, burned it to a DVD and booted into the install.

The installation went fast and I could already tell that Microsoft has done their home work on this version. The installation went smooth and my laptop was up and running within and hour. It took a couple more hours to install the updates, I installed some basic applications and then viola, I had a new beautiful Windows 7 Laptop.

The biggest improvement that I have found are in the Aero translucent desktop, the speed of booting and going to sleep, the smoothness of the operating system, and its fast fast fast. While both Vista and Windows 7 share the same kernel Windows 7 is vastly superior.
As an IT professional I rely on Microsoft to perform well on corporate network and up until now I could only recommend Windows XP Pro to my clients. I am extremely excited about the future and my continued partnership with Microsoft. They really got the message that people would not stand for a product like Windows Vista.

So soon Vista will fade into Tech history as another Windows ME and Windows 7 will finally allow us to all move forward. I am very interested in the deployment of Windows 2008 Server with Windows 7 clients as this is going to be a knock out combination.

Microsoft announced its release of Windows 7 recently and with the interesting new features you can see how it has got people talking. With the failures of their past operating system, most everyone is optimistic, hoping for a new more stable option. It seems at first look that Windows 7 will overpower its predecessor with ease.

the system requirements are the same as windows vista, so people who are using vista already will be able to easily upgrade without having to worry about buying extra hardware to accommodate.

if you would like to know more, or download windows 7 RC (release candidate), please take a look at the official site http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx.

Windows 7 boasts many new features from a more user friendly interface to better management of all of your hardware, like cameras, printers, MP3 players, and more.

Less annoying pop-ups than its predecessor makes normal everyday use a lot simpler and the “jump list” makes recent documents easy to find.

Take a look at the video below for a preview of some of the interesting features that are available for computers with touch screen capabilities.

Here is a really great video on how Dell is helping to revolutionize educational environments with the Dell Latitude 2100 Netbook through portability, scalability and mobilizing the classroom. Take a look!