The Lighthouse Keeper’s cat

In short: If you are planning anything social networking… sit tight, wait for WordPress to merge WordPress MU to the core. Once this has happened, BuddyPress and bbPress will be in 1.xxx and we might see some interesting stuff coming up.

Chris Lipscombe (link to follow) told us “How to get it right in order to make it big” with his Business Fundamentals.

Harley Alexander told us a few things about themes. Things you do not really need to know, but are awesome for the advanced theme builder ^_^… wow.

Now Bernard Hickey was a highlight for me today. Real journalists, using the blogger sphere tools to make money while staying independent. I am sure I was not the only one who thought he made a joke when he said he makes money from Bank Advertisement… Which BTW makes way more sense once you move from the blog to the website ^_^…

One (at least I) can learn heaps of stuff about online publishing from a blogger with a solid “real” journalistic background. I loved his phrase on “curating your content”.

“Turbocharge your WordPress” from Jeff Waugh was another eye opener. He seems to know his stuff and if he answers to the remark “…some people say WordPress does not scale to industry size” with something like “… These people are Idiots! They aren’t looking at who is using WordPress, their loss…”. Now a dedicated server with somebody like Jeff tweaking the bits and pieces might help.

Fazit: … maybe the next time I will not ask quite as many questions, and I definitely will wiki the speakers first. It might not be very clever to ask somebody who allegedly got an offer for $200 Mil (Source Wikipedia) for his company, how he makes money ^_^…

I think WordPress got enough love for 2 days… so back to ranting again ^_^…

… I am a big believer in the Linux philosophy small pieces loosely joined. The future of WordPress is not a giant monolithic thing, that has all the features in the world. … which is honestly the direction a lot of competing CMS are going…

Matt Mullenweg – August 8, 2009 WordPressCamp New Zealand

Hear, Hear ^_^ …

To be honest  WordCamp New Zealand Day One was a surprise … a positive one ^_^. The best thing you can take home from any (un)conference is this feeling of being charged with energy, ready to go and make the world a better place… and this time it actually worked…

It was not only the quality of the speakers, it was the mixture. Jason Kemp, Dan Milward and Anthony Cole managed to get a wide range of presentations together, starting with Steven Price trying to keep bloggers out of legal trouble and Dan’s talk about eCommerce plugin. Old fashioned me is skeptical about the theme generator thingy, I admire what Ryan Hellyer achieved… it is just that I myself believe that software only gets you so far. To get your fingers dirty with a bit of code is not a bad thing…

Philip Fierlinger, Work Head of Design at Xero, is always great to listen to. There was heaps to learn from his experience with corporate blogging at Xero.

Now… personally I was really surprised by Matt Mullenweg – co-founder of WordPress and director of Automattic. “… one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web.” (source http://ma.tt/)… whatever that might mean … his answers were smart, engaging and having this flair of professional honesty… you know, the one were you never know what actually is true and what is purely professional. I myself chose to believe the words. I think the world is not completely lost if there are people out there like Mike to keep open source what it should be and not just choosing it as a marketing stand to sell their products or services. Even so – I assume – he is a multi-millionaire, (Matt Mullenweg on Wikipedia) guess what? fair enough…

Gareth Townsend presentation on the new WordPress iPhone App did make me think… yup that is how it actually should work, so once they get this release out, we can look forward to some real cool stuff in the future. And Doug Casement is a legend anyway.

I am looking forward to tomorrow.

My Fazit so far ….

… I will keep on complaining about WordPress… as well as keep using it for all my web projects ^_^ and telling everybody else they should use it, but I will be very careful when I use “kids coding” again. I think the kids grow up fast…

… and I really would like to find an angle to contribute …

P.S. why is Tiny MCA doing this to me… ARGH if I click on remove formatting, I would like you to remove “§$%&/() formatting ….. ^_^…. see?

I love Flickr.

I always did. I pay for Flickr. I respect the rules on Flickr. I got in contact with amazing artist via Flickr. I keep in contact with friends far away and next door via Flickr. I print my business cards with Moo via Flickr. I blog about art I find at Flickr…

Okay in short i am in LOVE…

I am not a social networking type. Not in the real world, not on the internet. I start to enjoy twitter though…but this is another post.

I am usually critical of most internet hypes and interaction website designs. Most internet services make me just mad and angry… very angry… even most of the ones I am involved in ^_^…

So why Flickr?

Now – other than in the real world where I always fall in love with the wrong guy – there are many good reasons to love Flickr.

The team behind Flickr manages to provide a service which actually knows what it does and does it very well. You store and share images.

Graphic design

The design never gets in your way and never tries to outmatch your content. It even makes your content look better.

Just think about how fantastic – and rare – that is. And while doing this it preserves one of the best and most significant brands online, with just (a quite small) logo, 2 lead colours, typo in one font, black and white and shades of grey.

Easily done? Try selling something like this to one of your clients (or mine).

Interaction design

You never have to search for action buttons. They are there just above your content. Titles and descriptions can be added directly. click > edit > save.

The complexity of the tools in use grows with the complexity of the task, as does the interface design. “Organize” (working with hundred of photos) uses a very different interaction design approach and language than any other page.

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Also via Print and Pattern I found LU prints – hand-printed artwork on kitchen linens, table linens and clothing. They have their online shop (a nice one) @ bigcartel. I took a closer look at the application and I think it is a nice shopping system, created for Bands & Record Labels, Clothing Companies, Crafters & Artists and an alternative to shopify. Striped from useless features you will find a plain, simple, easy to use shopping system.
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On my way to the city I passed the Victoria University were i found this sticker on a waste bin…
The sticker is part of the campaign for “this is living” a free online (ad)game by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited. This is a very good example for guerrilla marketing.
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I was looking for a translation vor the german phrase “Wort-Bild-Marke” discribing a logo based on a symbol and a logotype (also called a Wordmark or a Lettermark), something like this you won`t find in a dictionary. So i went to LEO http://dict.leo.org/ (german online dictonary) and search the forums, where i did find this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo.

This is indeed a good resource for designers :-).