Yes, yes, I know it’s an odd name for a blog post but let’s be creative! The only reason I like St. Patrick’s Day is for one particular dessert that you can only get from one place. Shamrock Shakes from McDonald’s! I spend the entire year craving their minty flavor and on St. Patrick’s the planets align and the fast food industry gives MickieD the power to give us green shakes. Or something like that. If you haven’t had one yet and if you aren’t in the 2% of people who don’t like ice cream, then go out and get one. It’s worth the $4 or whatever ridiculous price they charge. One of these days I’m convinced to buy a shake-maker and fill it with mint ice cream. It would be like selling hotdogs at a baseball game.
Alright, enough temptation of desserts (I do apologize if I made anyone break their diet). On to the second part of the title. A plugin. This particular plugin is for WordPress, is my favorite. And comes with lots of wonderful updates. It’s known as Fluency Admin from Dean Robinson. I personally have found it to be the best plugin I’ve ever used. In addition to making it compatible with WordPress 3.1 (the plugin now stands at version 2.4), he also adding in a “Just Write” function which cuts away everything except the post/page editor. It is quite useful for long posts where focus on content is important and eliminating distractions is essential. Here’s a screenshot: 
Along with the Just Write feature he also added in a setting to change the administration menu color and made the drop-down menus of the admin bar rounded. I suggest you try it out on your WordPress-powered site. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without this plugin. As always, Donating to him always helps the plugin development stay alive!
It’s here! It’s now! It’s stunning!
I just updated all the site’s of my clients who are running WordPress, as well as this site.
(I’ll write a more comprehensive review once the adrenaline wears off.)
Alright, WordPress 3.1, not only is the software itself amazing to use, it’s built on firm foundations. WordPress as certainly grown from just blogging software to a fully-featured Content Management System (CMS). It’s open-source, which encourages the community to fix bugs, troubleshoot WP-powered sites, and expand the use of it. From themes to plugins web designers and users everywhere can make WordPress do almost anything. This site itself serves as a perfect example of what you can do with it.
The most notable feature of Version 3.1 would be the admin bar. It used to only be available on WordPress.com but is now offered freely to self-hosted sites as well. The bar simplifies the process of editing content and accessing common areas of the dashboard. In addition it should also be pointed out that the Post and Page editing screens have been simplified so it’s easier for beginners not to get lost in too many features. (The sections can be brought back using Screen Options at the top of the post/page editor.) With over 820 fixed issues, this is definitely a proud moment for WordPress and open-source in general. Along with all of that the theme management page in the admin panel has also received some updates; like a feature filter and links to quickly update widgets and menus..
The official WordPress download counter has declared over 400,000 downloads (and it’s only been ~24 hours since the release of 3.1)
http://wordpress.org/download/counter/
(If you are curious to see the admin bar in action, you can simply make an account on this site;
About > Login > Register and then login.)
First off I know the title contains an outdated phrase: “World Wide Web” is now known as just “The Internet” by virtually everyone you meet. However, the use of that term is more appropriate for this post. Let us consider for a minute what would happen if the entire planet went technologically dark. Does our generation even know how to function without Wikipedia, Google, and YouTube to explain things like simple recipes? Is the human mind losing or gaining memory? How dependent are social, economic, and everyday experiences on computers?
I’ll start with the first question, in a nutshell, no. How many people even own an atlas? Could you visit grandma without using Google Maps? Both those questions can probably be answered with another “no”. Then let’s consider everything else, the weather, email, instant messaging (IM), or Facebook. How long would it take before you’re stuck in a blizzard, lose contact with your best friend, and never remember a single birthday? Lots of questions, answer in a comment or just think about it.
Now we move onto the human mind; can you remember all those contacts in your iPhone? What about remembering an email? A phone number? Your own password? As technology grows, so does our ability to manage, store, and retrieve “memories” at will. No more pulling out the photo album when you can just pull up a Facebook album (I point out Facebook because Myspace in just a year has gone from hero to zero). Feel like you’re forgetting simple stuff if it isn’t written down? You’re not the only one.
My last big question. (Obviously there’s millions more but I just wanted to stick to these three.) When is the last time you stopped to talk to someone at the store verses talking to five people at the same time on your Intel? What is the proper way to start a phone conversation? Who ends that conversation, the caller or the callee? (Callee is a real word, I used Google to verify that, see my point?) How about asking someone on a date without texting it?
My entire point being; people need to think for themselves. If we can’t function without technology then what makes us any better than that dusty Mac computer sitting in your attic? Are we ourselves computers? What is software without the hardware? Nothing. Online society is an easy way of killing offline society. (A side note to any readers, I love technology but I love friendly tech, things that better the world online and off- like WordPress. Try limiting your time on social networks, read a book, not on the computer. Take the time to remember things yourself instead of having your harddrive do it for you. Trust me, your brain will thank you one day.)
You would not believe what Ink Ignite has to offer now. We took it up to a whole new level for 2011. There are more options to choose from, faster turnaround times, and the best graphics our company has ever produced. That’s only the web design layouts! Our static sites are now being produced with XHTML. Our WordPress themes have a high level of elegance. And our graphics are to die for.
We now offer the chance for you to get even more from our designers. Imagine Ink Ignite taking your old site and converting it into a professional, clean-cut, and modern design. Not only do we have a variety of choices for you to mix-and-mash, we also have characters and backgrounds to enhance your business potential. We are taken professionally online and now it’s time for you to be too.
Contact us for all your web design needs, we’re more all-inclusive than ever before! The revamp of our site serves as a perfect example of just how committed we are to providing quality content.
*Check out the new FAQ page and the updated Portfolio*
Ink Ignite as a company has several new projects planned for this year; including an entire video game that will be sold exclusively on this site. A demo of the game will be available soon to anyone who wants it. We are planning to expand the scope of our customers and designs. Covering even more counties, along with making our standards even higher than before. So you can expect to see us updated and ready to take on a new year. Along with the video game, we’re going to be launching a small branch of our company to be named “Burning Droplet Studios” to handle game development.
Aside from our new year endeavors, the rest of the computer world has a few things planned as well. One of them being the release of WordPress 3.1 and the much-anticipated release of Ubuntu 11.04. These two software updates should lead to a whole new level of computing; helping more people publish a higher quality of content. Since our site runs on WordPress, this is going to be an opportunity to enhance the entire site for everyone who uses it. Ubuntu is what runs our design computers, so it’s update will allow us to make changes to websites faster than before. Hopefully we will also be seeing the release of Firefox 4. I’ve already tried the beta out in Windows and Linux and I must say it destroys all hope of Google Chrome taking the lead in the browser market.
Just as an added bonus, we’ll give you 30% off, if you ask about the “New Year 2011 Special”. (This is separate from any other specials.)
Fluency Admin
This has quickly become the most elegant and most needed plugin I’ve ever used. It cleanly organizes the dozens of administration pages for WordPress while keeping everything readable and compact.
WP Word Count
I just recently tried this one out. It’s pretty fun to get the exact number of published, unpublished, and per-post words. It’s helped me see how the length of the post often directly effects the number of views.
WordPress 3 Invoice
For me personally this plugin is absolutely necessary to organize my clients, their contact info, and when they need to renew hosting. It also allows for easy viewing of monthly profits.
WordPress.com Stats
I’ve been using this stats plugin for some time now. Not only does it provide a list of incoming search terms (which can greatly help with SEO), it shows the outbound links, inbound links, and what pages/posts were visited.
Jquery Lightbox
I found this when looking for something to better the posts which had multiple images. It allows for a clean and lightweight way to set up micro-galleries on your WordPress site.
W3 Total Cache
What can I say, this plugin speeds up site load times by a significant amount. For people with fast Internet speeds there isn’t much of a noticable difference. But for visitors with slower speeds it is essential to ensuring they stay on your site.
How about you? Any plugins that you think are absolutely necessary for a WordPress website?
Comment below =)
Before you start reading, here’s some music… [powerpress]
While I’ve been teaching myself how to better code and improve WordPress themes, I decided it would be nice to open up a store on the site to sell my digital wares. After a while I expect to fill the store with software, themes, and even books! There is an attractive dropdown addition to the store link in the menu if you wish to view any other areas of our checkout system. The store may be removed if it’s not doing too well, so get the products while you can! If you can offer a substantial link exchange I’ll give you a free copy of the Venom theme (shown above and soon in the store). Contact me for details.
This theme (Venom) also comes free with any of our blog and blog+website packages. Other colors are being planned right now (lime, orange, yellow, pink, and red). Please leave a comment if you’re wanting one in particular and we’ll hurry to finish that color. Note: This theme is WordPress 3 compatible and may not work with older versions.
As a note I am preparing a special Halloween-themed modification for the site, complete with horror music and several easter-eggs of deals. Don’t miss one second of the Halloween Week Specials.
The music is respectfully credited to: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. I recommend you visit his site for more awesome music!
Hey, just thought I’d let you all know that Ink Ignite also owns LinuxHaxer.com and ViperAmped.com. Right now the sites are either redirecting here or dormant. But if you are interested in buying the domains or renting them as a test site, just let us know. Please only serious inquires and no adult content. Otherwise feel free to ask.
We’re going to start using a more complicated CMS (Content Management System) in our projects called Concrete. This along with our WordPress, Flash, phpBB, and PHP-Fusion experience allows us to create pretty much anything you need. We’re gaining some momentum with WordPress MU (Multi User) sites too. Hope everyone else is having a good night, I’m pulling an all-nighter and impatiently waiting for my mouth to heal (wisdom teeth removal a few days ago). You may notice we’ve re-activated the Sharebar plugin and added a “Like?” button into the blog posts, similar to Facebook but usable by any visitor. Feedback please?
WordPress 3 has definitely made some well-deserved changes. Among these; the custom menu option, the mass update function, and the merging of WordPress and MU. In addition to the hundreds of bug fixes and security updates. It has become more than blogging software and is now capable of competing with CMS software on a large scale. There is no limit to WordPress’ functionality.
Custom post types now allow even further categorization of your blog or website. They’ve also updated the default theme which now allows for a more unique blog using only the default (Twenty Ten). Also, you should note that all of Viper Amped’s WordPress themes work with WP3 but not all the features (like custom menus) may be available.
*Will Update If New Information Comes Up*
I recently had to filter through a huge number of spam comments. Very odd….
31 comments to be exact, and I believe they were all from different IPs. I pity any other WordPress bloggers who have to deal with this.
On the other side of the table I had some fun experimenting with GIMP and installing an Ubuntu Cloud Server.
Oh and it’s a lovely 4 degrees Fahrenheit, doesn’t that sound just delightful?
