During my time with the school, I made a lot of friends and gained great experience. I’m sad to leave the people and a place that has been good for me, but I’m happy to be moving onto something new.

For the past 6 weeks, whenever I wasn’t at SVSU, I was working for Automattic. Thursday was my first day as Happiness Engineer for the company. My main focus is to provide support for WordPress.com but I also get my hands a little dirty with WordPress and other things. Automattic is a young company with a bright future. I’m thrilled to join a very talented team.

How did this come about?

Late in 2003 I was looking for some software to run a blog. I landed at Photo Matt and liked the way the site was setup, so I shot Matt an email. He suggested I give WordPress a try and I’ve been using it ever since. Over the years, I’ve contacted Matt a few times and earlier this year at the MacWorld WordPress meetup I had a chance to meet him in person. A week later I was browsing around the Automattic web site and noticed some jobs openings, so I applied. Now here I am…it’s my job to work with WordPress. Somebody pinch me!

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• NickBook - first generation black MacBook
• nickPhone - first generation 8GB iPhone
• iNick - 10 inch iMac purchased as soon as Leopard was released
• nickTV - Apple TV purchased last week

I need to figure out what to name my first generation 4GB iPod nano. Maybe the iNick nano.

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Comment Author URL Stripper

Could I have chosen a longer name for the plugin?

I had thought about including an option to prevent any previous comments with the specified words from displaying their URL, but decided against it. I used the following in phpMyAdmin to quickly do the work…

UPDATE `wp_comments` SET `comment_author_url`='' WHERE `comment_author_url` like '%PUTWORDHERE%'

* If you’re using a different table prefix, make sure to change wp_comments to reflect it.
* Replace PUTWORDHERE with hotmail as an example.

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Hold down the control key and click on the preference pane. This will display a menu with one option, Remove “Name of Application” Preference Pane. Click on this menu option (the only option) and the pane will be removed from System Preferences. Voila!

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The options page for the plugin also gives some handy bookmarklets and a couple of AppleScripts that can be used with Quicksilver for quick posting on a Mac. I’ve been using the plugin for a few weeks now and it has become my replacement for Twitter. While out at MacWorld last week I was posting quick posts left and right all week.

For more information about the plugin and to see a few screenshots, visit the Simple Post plugin on WordPress.

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The first person I met was Andrew because I noticed a WordPress sticker on his laptop while we were in line ordering food. Shortly after we sat down, Matt walked in. I’ve been using WordPress since version 0.72 back in 2003, so it was nice to finally meet him. Marianne and Nicole were a couple of others I met and talked to for awhile. Everyone was great to meet and hang out with.

There were others I talked to and even more I didn’t get to meet. Since this was my first meetup I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was a lot of fun. I’m going to try and start a meetup back in Saginaw, MI when I get home.

I didn’t meet Lisa, but found her blog while doing a Google searches for other posts about the meetup. She has a few photos from the event posted. I’m in the blue shirt sitting down with my back to the camera in one of the photos.

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Two “films” come in the package. They are easy to remove, can be cleaned, and reused. The film isn’t sticky or “shrink wrapped” onto the phone like a lot of the screen covers. It simply uses static cling to stay in place. I’m not sure how well this will work over time, but it’s been great for a day. It literally took me longer to open the package then it did to get it on my iPhone correctly.

In addition to protecting the glass screen from being scratched, the film has a matte finish which does a great job at preventing glare. More importantly though, it keeps fingerprints from taking over your view and I think it makes the multi-touch display even easier to use. My fingers no longer get hung up due to the oils and sweat on my skin coming into contact with the glass.

I am in no way affiliated with the company and have not been compensated in any way to write this review.

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Series of Posts - Redesigning MtDewvirus 2007

1. The New MtDewVirus
2. Separating Content Types
3. Better Use Of Sidebars

I really wanted a way to separate different parts of the web site, so by going with two sidebars on the new design, I have a lot of extra spots. The right sidebar always shows links to my other web sites and advertisements. The left sidebar is dynamic and changes depending on what you are viewing in the main content area.

Even though the left sidebar is dynamic, there are a couple of parts that will always show. The little About section, the Search box, and Feeds are always shown. I think these parts are very useful so I decided to show them all of the time.

When viewing the home page, the left sidebar will show the last 15 Quickie posts. This helps to keep the site fresh and changing with new content. When visiting a single post’s page, the left sidebar displays details about the post, has a link to the comment section, Share This, tags for the post, and links to related posts. By pushing all of these pieces off to the side, it keeps them accessible but also gets them out of the way so the content can have its space.

If you visit any other page besides the home page or a single post page, the left sidebar will show links to the 10 most recent posts, recent comments, categories, and a link to the tags page. I decided that if you are viewing any of these other types of pages, you aren’t looking at anything really specific, so I wanted to display links to a wide range of things to get you around the web site.

I still have some other ideas for things to do with the sidebar, but I think the changes I’ve made so far help to make the site more usable, clean, and fresh.

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• Friday - Party in Mount Pleasant with friends.
• Saturday - White elephant Christmas party at my sister’s house.
• Sunday - Christmas party with my Dad’s family.
• Monday - Christmas Eve at my parent’s house. Crab legs for dinner and gift exchange later.
• Tuesday - Christmas with my Mom’s family.
• Wednesday - My 28th birthday.
• Thursday - RECOVERY!

How does your schedule look?

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