Last year, I organized a phpBB users meetup for the first time coinciding with the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, called OSCONvasion 2009, thanks to the fact that OSCON was in San Jose. It wasn’t a huge meetup, but it was a great experience to get to meet with a number of the colleagues whom I’ve worked with over the internet, and it was a lot of fun. And we resolved that we wanted to plan this again for 2010, and maybe even see if the phpBB project could sponsor a booth.

Well, this year, OSCON moved back up to Portland, Oregon. So, unperturbed, we made plans last January to follow it up to Portland, and will be having yet another OSCONvasion 2010 meetup this week. Plus, the phpBB teams are also going to hosting their own booth there yet again.

Of course, in order to get to Portland, there is one added variable appearing on my radar that I didn’t have to worry about last year: travel. However, I’m actually really looking forward to this one, because for the first time, I’m not going to be flying out of state; I’m going to be taking the train! Specifically the Amtrak Coast Starlight, on a 19-hour ride to Portland from San Jose. (I’m departing from San Jose because of this pesky thing called the San Francisco Bay that gets in the way of trains on the peninsula. It’s actually kinda cool, because I can joke that I’m running the “Olympic Relay” from last year’s OSCONvasion to this year’s!)

When I depart on Monday evening, I’ll first be taking Caltrain to get to San Jose, departing San Mateo at 6:57 PM and arriving at San Jose at 7:32 PM, comfortably early. My Amtrak train will then depart at 8:39 PM, and arrive in Portland on Tuesday at 3:40 PM.

While in Portland, I’m actually staying with a friend, Lorelle VanFossen, whom I’ve gotten to know well at past WordCamp San Francisco events and who lives in the Portland area. After the long bout of travel, I’ll meet up with her at the train station, and won’t have anything else planned to do on Tuesday.

Of course, the awesome thing about OSCON is all the amazing stuff available for free (mostly on Wednesday & Thursday). Not only is there an amazing Expo Hall with some of the best in the open source software ecosphere, but also a number of free sessions, attendee-organized Birds of a Feather sessions, and lots more. In between bouts of volunteering at the phpBB booth, I’m also going to be roaming around the expo hall interviewing folks at the booths for special episodes of phpBB Weekly (hopefully involving video).

The OSCONvasion 2010 festivities take place on Thursday, with a schedule quite similar to last year. Once again, I will be moderating a special phpBB “Berties of a Feather” session as the main attraction for OSCONvasion. (It’s really a Birds of a Feather session, but we like to rename it after Bertie, our mascot.) A number of presentations are on-deck for our hour-long session, which we are planning to once again stream live via phpBB Weekly (hopefully with live video, or at least live audio). After the BoF, we’ll have an open group dinner at the nearby Burgerville restaurant.

Finally, on Friday, we’re going to meet at the Convention Center and then go for a group visit to the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, which should be a fun experience. (Last year, we went to the San Jose Tech Museum on kind of an impromptu decision, so I thought, why not plan for the same kind of idea this year?) After the OMSI and lunch, I’ll be heading back over to Portland Union Station to catch my return Coast Starlight train, departing at 2:25 PM and arriving in San Jose at 9:55 AM on Saturday. From there I’ll take Caltrain back up the peninsula, completing my four-and-a-half day trip.

This year’s OSCONvasion doesn’t quite look like it will be as big as last year, or maybe it will be about the same. These smaller meetups really are hit-or-miss, especially given that we’re doing it as part of a larger convention, where really anyone could come along and join us. But one thing that I learned last year is that size doesn’t matter. What matters is the experience, and getting to interact face-to-face with colleagues whom you’ve previously only gotten to interact with through a computer screen. It’s a unique and special opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh, and the nineteen hour train rides. I’ve always loved trains, but have never ridden on one for more than two-and-a-half hours before. That should be an interesting experience, and may very well cause me to spit out a number of follow-up blog posts.

So with that, it’s T minus 43 hours until my “All Aboard,” so keep following me on Twitter as I start my trek up along the West Coast! Maybe I’ll see you there.

Apparently Steve Jobs thought so, and I couldn’t agree more. And so, even though its obviously going to ricochet to become the hottest YouTube video, I felt that it deserved recognition in my Smorgasbord Series of YouTubes, because I want to be able to look back at my archives years from now and stumble upon this video, and remember how happy I was that someone finally got the correct moral of the story out of this whole iPhone antenna jumble.

“If you don’t want an iPhone 4, don’t buy it. If you bought one and you don’t like it, bring it back.”

Long-time viewers/readers know that there’s one person in the tech industry whom I idolize. No, it’s not Steve Jobs. Not Bill Gates. Not even the genius creators behind The Joy of Tech. It is New York Times Technology Columnist and CNBC Contributor David Pogue.

I idolize him because when it comes to covering the latest trends and gadgets in tech, Pogue does it right. He cuts through all the complex specifications and marketing hype that the tech industry spits out and goes straight to the point. And on his videos that he produces for CNBC and the NYT website, he throws in a healthy dose of humor to help him say his piece.

Pogue’s column in today’s paper, “For Those Facebook Left Behind,” is a very well-written article for those who are still unfamiliar with all of this social networking stuff. Sure, social networking has become second nature for those of us who use it all of the time. Heck, my first instinct when I read this article was to tweet about it, but I stopped myself when I realized the irony of using Twitter to link to an article that was written for people who have no idea what Twitter is.

But even so, I would highly recommend reading the article, as you may still learn a few things about social networks that you aren’t using. I for one have never touched LinkedIn or Foursquare and really had no idea what those services were for, partly because I’ve never bothered to check them out myself, before reading this article. Or maybe you’ve got some friends or relatives who are still in the dark about social media. Or if nothing else, watch the embedded video. It’s quite entertaining to see David Pogue in a dress.

If that didn’t grab your attention, well…

Problem #1 is that the Mac OS X Finder does not support FTP, hence demonstrating the need for a client. But even if the Finder did, it would not be adequate. People who really use FTP clients aren’t merely managing files that they’ve created on their computer; they’re uploading files to the server from their computer and downloading files from the server to their computer. En masse. (There’s a reason it’s called “File Transfer Protocol,” after all.) The Mac Finder simply does not give you what you need to make that work efficiently, even if it did support FTP.

The long-time king of Mac FTP clients has been Panic’s Transmit, which I’m pretty sure was the first FTP client to implement the two-column browser, implementing a blatantly obvious label of “your stuff” versus “their stuff” to differentiate them. No longer was it necessary to have multiple windows to find your files or have to drag them on- and off-screen.

The problem was that the Panic folks let a lot of time lapse between versions. Transmit 3.0, a major improvement to their software, was released in February 2005 amidst much fanfare and many awards… and then sat there for over five years. Other Mac FTP clients with snazzier interfaces and newer features emerged over time. Even I switched earlier this year to Flow when I got it as part of the last MacHeist bundle. (The MacHeist Bundle page for Flow took direct jabs at the staleness of Transmit 3, declaring “1998 called, it wants its file transfer app back.”)

About two months ago, Panic finally roared back onto the scene with the release of Transmit 4. Boy, did they make up for lost time! This new release of Transmit is packed with features and refinements that launch it at least five years ahead of any other FTP client out there today.

The most obvious new feature in Transmit 4 is its completely redesigned user interface. Much like comparing the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 3GS, Transmit 4′s interface makes Transmit 3 look downright clunky in comparison. The two-column “your stuff”/”their stuff” view is still there, though the names have been replaced by a new white vs. black color scheme that clearly differentiates the two sides. But the line between the two has been blurred dramatically. Transmit now includes a toolbar button that lets you switch into a single-column view if you prefer, and each column has a little icon in the upper-right that lets you switch the column from a “your stuff” view into a “their stuff” view. Which means you can now use Transmit in completely new ways, such as transferring files between two folders on your own hard drive, or transferring files from one FTP server directly to another. (The server->server transfer really does work, but it’s kind of slow because it probably has to cache the files on your hard drive first. But it’s nice flexibility to have.)

Transmit includes built-in support for FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, and WebDAV directory access, not to mention browsing the files on your own computer. It also has built-in MobileMe support and can connect to your iDisk or another user’s iDisk, and can also connect to network systems using Bonjour. Managing favorites also includes a much-improved interface that lets you set a favorite icon for your sites if you wish. Plus you can identify one of your favorites to automatically upload files to if you drop files on the Transmit Dock icon using the “DockSend” feature, or even save your favorites as a droplet. This creates a “mini-application” on your computer that you can drop files onto, which will automatically upload them. These features are great if you’re frequently uploading files to the same location on a server.

Browsing files is easier than ever in Transmit 4, thanks to its complete support for the browsing features Mac users are used to. All four views that the Finder uses (icon view, list view, column view, and even cover flow view) is fully supported in Transmit 4, and you can switch between them with the toolbar icon. (I personally prefer list view, so I can view the size and date of each item.) Transmit even has full support for Quick Look–even when you’re previewing directly from an FTP server! No need to download the file first. And when you’re navigating, Transmit shows you the path of directories you’ve opened as breadcrumbs along the top–a single click on any of the directories instantly jumps you back there. It’s much more efficient than using a pop-up menu to backtrace, but a pop-up menu is also available if you wish by clicking on the name of the current (highlighted) directory. And at the upper-left of each column, Transmit 4 has a feature called “Places.” Essentially, this lets you specify your most frequently-accessed directories on a server (or on your local hard drive) as a “place.” Then, just click the Places icon in the upper-left (or Shift-Command-S) and a translucent view fades in, giving you single-click or drag-and-drop access to each of your Places.

Transmit has long had a Synchronize feature that allowed you to synchronize the two directories that showed up in both columns so that they matched each other. Transmit 4 greatly enhances this feature and makes it a lot less scary. When you click on the Sync button in the toolbar, a pane slides down allowing you to specify the direction of the sync and optionally control a number of the rules that determine the sync. You can even simulate the sync if you want to make sure that you’re not going to lose anything sensitive, and a nice blue thought bubble explains exactly what you’re about to do before you do it. Nice feature.

And that’s just looking at how you browse the user interface of the application–Transmit does a fantastic job of actually transferring the files. Panic’s website claims that Transmit 4 is up to 25 times faster than Transmit 3. Of course, a lot of that depends on how fast your internet connection is and how fast the server on the other end is; personally I can’t wait to see how fast this baby screams when I upload a file from the faster internet connection at my university. Also, part of the reason that Transmit 4 is so much faster is because it tries to establish multiple connections to the FTP server so it can upload multiple files at once. This won’t work with every server; my old web host locked me out of my account because I had so many FTP connections at once. My new web host seems to be better able to handle the load. Even so, Transmit is definitely noticeably faster at uploading files–especially large numbers of small files–than its predecessor. It also has a great interface for monitoring uploads. Not only does it have a unique kind of progress bar–which uses different opacities of progress to show the overall progress and the progress for just the current file on the same bar–but it has a nice queue that you can slide up by clicking on the arrow in the lower-left of the window. It’s a very tight and intuitive interface that is leaps and bounds ahead of the old floating Activity window.

Transmit 4 also includes a novelty feature (it’s “One More Thing…”) called Transmit Disk. This feature actually allows you to mount a remote FTP server on your desktop as though it were an external hard drive, and browse it in the Finder. It’s a really interesting feature, but in my limited use it seemed to feel a little quirky. I had some initial difficulty getting files that I saved in the Transmit Disk to upload to the server, and not having the visual indicators that I’d come to love in the Transmit application made me treat the Transmit Disk as though it was a piece of delicate, fine china than just another disk. Plus, I kind of found that for my purposes, I preferred working within Transmit’s interface, or else editing files directly from the server using Panic’s integrated Coda application, over working from within the Finder. Quite frankly, I consider Transmit Disk to be more of a novelty extra, not part of Transmit’s core reason for being.

But overall, Transmit 4 is a must-have upgrade for anyone who lives in FTP, the way I do. The masterful integration of features, functionality, polish, and raw file transfer power make Transmit hands-down the best FTP client out there, and arguably one of the best Mac apps ever designed. Apple could not produce a better FTP app themselves if they tried.

In terms of my use going forward, I’m going to be using Transmit alongside Coda, which I reviewed three years ago. Coda will be my app of choice when I want to make edits directly to files on an FTP server, and Transmit will be my app of choice when I’m in the market for transferring big bulks of files around.

But seriously, if you transfer files around regularly and use a Mac, give Transmit 4 a try. I got hooked on it within the first minute of using it, and I’m sure you will too. Transmit 4 costs $34, but believe me, it pays for itself. An upgrade from Transmit 3 costs $19.

I would just like to ask every member of AU’s Undergraduate Senate, every member of AU’s campus media, and every student at American who has ever been critical of or pessimistic about the AU Student Government to watch this video.

This is what Student Government is really about.

(As a side-note, the funniest new feature that strikes me is the addition of a filter called capital_P_dangit() that forces any instance of “WordPress” being written without the P being capitalized gets automatically fixed to what it should be. I’d try to demonstrate, but you know, the filter would eliminate that effort!)

After working with WordPress 3.0 very closely for the past week, and also playing with the Release Candidates for a few weeks before that, here is my list of my six favorite new features in WordPress 3.0.

#6: Changeable Admin Username
Finally, one of my biggest pet peeves about WordPress has been addressed. Until 3.0, when you installed WordPress for the first time, the default administrator username was set to “admin” and you couldn’t change it. Not an entirely big deal for single-user blogs, but when I add a bunch of users to a site I generally like to utilize some kind of system for logically managing usernames, and “admin” flew in the face of that effort. Finally, upon installing a fresh WordPress 3.0 site, you are prompted to set the initial admin username to whatever you want. Yay!

#5: Help on Every Screen
Ever since the advent of the new admin interface in WordPress 2.7, there’s been a little “Help” tab on the upper-right that, when clicked, would slide down some information about what the different options on that page did. At least, for some pages. Most pages only showed links to the WordPress Codex and the Support Forums. Finally, WordPress 3.0 ensures that every admin page built-into the default WordPress 3.0 gets a full help treatment.
Now this isn’t really going to be directly helpful to me, because I know my way around WordPress quite easily. But a lot of my sites are soon going to be introducing a lot of brand-new wide-eyed users to the WordPress admin, and so now I’m quite glad that I can finally rely on those collapsible help screens as a resource to help the newbies. Which means I won’t have to spend as much time being a support technician.

#4: Twenty Ten Theme
I first started using WordPress when it was at version 1.5, in 2005. At that time, WordPress had just adopted Kubrick as its new default theme. It was a gorgeous theme, with custom header options, and even custom do-it-yourself gradients! Wow. But then, WordPress evolved, and became more about building a “site” than a “blog.” Site-wide navigation bars became hip. Widgets started moving beyond the sidebar and into new places. Kubrick stopped being so much of a “default’ theme as a “placeholder” theme to use until you found a better one.

WordPress 3.0 finally retires Kubrick (and the even older “Classic” theme, which no one used) with a new theme called Twenty Ten. This theme is loaded with awesome features that set a new standard for other themes to cling to. It comes with a number of custom header images, or you can specify your own. It even integrates the custom header with a featured image for each post, if you’ve set one. It also supports custom backgrounds, while still maintaining a bit of whitespace around the content to make the background look more like a nifty wallpaper. Throw in a navigation bar with great drop-down menus, special styles for asides and galleries, choice of one- or two-columns, support for widgets in the footer alongside sidebar widgets, and enhanced support for printing posts, Twenty Ten is now a default theme that many bloggers would be more than happy to stick with. I’m even using it for the website for my upcoming OSCONvasion 2010 meetup.

Probably most important about Twenty Ten is that it represents the most visible evidence of an official change in methodology for WordPress truly being recognized as a CMS, not just as a blog. Other terminology tweaks throughout 3.0 properly refer to a WordPress installation as a “site” now, not just a “blog,” because that truly is now how WordPress is being used by most people. And my next top 3 feature picks go much further into defining WordPress as such.

#3: Custom Menus
Navigation bars have become all the rage in WordPress themes, but getting them to look right has always been a pain. Navbars for different themes worked differently depending on whether your homepage = your blog posts or a different page. Getting them in the right order required tweaking the “order number” of your pages to be what you want; creating submenus required establishing a hierarchy of pages, which wasn’t always what you wanted (not to mention that it lengthened permalinks). And if you wanted to exclude a page from the navigation, or add a custom link that was unrelated to your pages, time to dive into the PHP code!

Finally, WordPress 3.0 introduces a custom menus interface that is quite slick, and fairly familiar to anyone who knows how customizing widgets works. You can create an unlimited number of different menus, and then boxes listing your site’s pages and categories are provided, which you can use to select the ones you want and add them to the menu. Then, simply drag-and-drop menu items to get the order you want, and create sub-menus by indenting menu items. Expanding the menu item lets you change the display text used in the menu (great for SEO) and add a title attribute (tooltip) if you want. Adding a custom link is also easy, just enter the link in a separate box, provide some display text, and the menu item is added.

Themes that offer support for custom menus will allow you to pick one (or more) of your menus to be displayed in a particular location. You can also display any custom menu of your choice via a new Custom Menus widget as well. However, I actually found that it wasn’t too difficult to add custom menu support to my existing themes using this tutorial. All you have to do is add a few lines of code to the theme’s functions.php file in order to a) let WordPress know that this theme now supports custom menus and b) register the place(s) in the theme where menus can be added. Then, dive into the theme’s header.php (or wherever) and identify where the HTML code for the current navigation bar is located. This is where you have to be clever, by customizing the elements passed to the wp_nav_menu() function so that the custom menu output will properly emulate the <div&rt; (or <nav&rt;) and <ul&rt; elements that are already being used by your theme, with the proper calls to CSS classes and ids. It takes a bit of trial and error, but for each theme I’ve tried I was able to get everything to work in no more than 15 minutes.

Custom menus plugs a big hole in terms of providing customization abilities for key areas of WordPress, and again is a big plus to have for CMS veterans. Now all I need is for WordPress to add customizable footers, and I’m all set.

#2: Custom Post Types
This is a big feature specifically for developers, ripped right out of the feature list of a traditional CMS. It took me a bit of reading to recognize just how powerful this feature can be, but I’m really excited to start working with it.

Here’s the idea. WordPress comes with a number of different types of items that are postable. These include blog posts, pages, links, media, etc. They are each treated differently because they have different metadata and are displayed in unique ways. But as far as the WordPress MySQL database is concerned, all of that info is actually being deposited into the same places alongside each other.

Custom Post Types let developers define additional types of posts that can be created and displayed independently of these other types of posts. For example, let’s say that I enjoyed cooking, and wanted to have a place to post my favorite recipes, but I wanted to display them on a page of my site completely separate from my normal blog posts. I could create a ‘recipes’ custom post type, and this would literally add a completely new tab to my WordPress admin (under Posts/Media/Links/Pages/Comments) called Recipes. I could go there to post a new recipe or manage my posted recipes, just like managing regular posts or pages.

What’s even cooler is that as the developer, I could dictate to WordPress a whole bunch of other options to truly customize my recipes post type, such as:

• Whether my recipes should be public–for everyone to see, or private–just for me to see
• Whether they should appear in search results if someone runs a search on my site
• Whether my recipes should be hierarchical (act like pages in WordPress) or chronological (act like blog posts in WordPress)
• Specific control the types of capabilities and permissions available to users to read/write/edit/delete recipes
• Full control over what posting options are available, such as title, text editor, comments, trackbacks, revisions, author, excerpt, thumbnail, custom fields, page attributes, etc.
• Ability to create custom taxonomies (kind of like categories of tags), which I could use to allow visitors to filter my recipes by types of ingredients, or type of meal, or season–three examples of custom taxonomies–the same way users can filter blog posts by tags
• And lots more.

Then by creating a custom template for my WordPress theme, I can create a completely separate section of my site for browsing and viewing my recipes with a lot of available display options based on the WordPress Loop.

I can see a lot of possibilities for using Custom Post Types–probably the first place I’m going to try them will be on the next version of the ATV website where I’m going to create custom types for video clips and full episodes for the different shows. But I truly believe that as I get more familiar working with Custom Post Types, it’s truly going to change the way that I develop for WordPress going forward.

For more info on Custom Post Types, check out this tutorial, or check out the Custom Post Type UI plugin.

#1: WordPress Multi-Site
WordPress MU has been around for a couple of years now, and I started working with it last fall when I developed the ATV website. Essentially it’s a wrapper around a number installation of WordPress which allowed multiple blogs to spawn off of a single installation of WordPress, either through virtualized subdirectories (example.com/blogname) or subdomains (blogname.example.com). It powers the tens of thousands of blogs running on WordPress.com, and it really offers some nice functionality.

But there were a number of downsides to using WordPress MU:

• WordPress MU was pretty much maintained by a single WordPress developer, who had to pull an all-nighter or two to update the MU package by merging over changes made to the regular WordPress package–this meant that WordPress MU updates would generally come out 2-10 days after their standalone-WordPress counterparts.
• As a separate product, fewer people used it & supported it, and finding plugins specifically to take advantage of MU features was a challenge.
• The instructions for using MU were unnecessarily intimidating and confusing, which is why it took me a long time to get up the nerve to start using it.
• Lots of confusion over the name. MU was supposed to stand for “multi-user,” but really MU’s functionality was to create multiple blogs. The standalone WordPress already supported multiple user accounts. Not to mention that it was intended to be referred to as “mew,” after the Greek letter μ, but many people called it by its initials “emm you”. (The website also suggested that if you were feeling bovine, you could all it “WordPress moooooooooo.”)

WordPress 3.0 takes the brilliant step of formally merging the old MU functionality in with the core WordPress, which fixes all of those downsides. Now, if you want to create a multi-site version of WordPress, you merely download and install the regular WordPress normally. Then, in wp-config.php, you add the line define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true); — this line magically makes a “Network” page appear under the Tools menu in the admin. From here, you enter some multi-site-specific configuration options, and then WordPress spits out some more code that you should add to wp-config.php and your .htaccess file. And just like that, you magically have a working multi-site version of WordPress!

**A word to the wise: You have to choose right then between subdirectories and subdomains; you can’t change your mind later. If you’re choosing subdirectories, make sure that you’ve setup a “virtual subdomain” through your hosting control panel — usually this is done by adding a *.example.com subdomain, pointing to the root of your WordPress install. Your WordPress install also has to be on the top-level directory of your domain name if you’re doing subdomains, and you need to make sure that your WordPress URL settings DO NOT have “www” included in them.

By merging the multi-site functionality in with the core WordPress, all of those downsides that I mentioned go away. Multi-site users will now get updates at the same time as standalone users (since it’s the same package), and now that this functionality is more readily available to everyone, more people will certainly start supporting it. We may even start seeing multi-site-capable plugins in the Plugins Directory now, hopefully.

There’s also a lovely terminology overhaul for multi-site users. The confusing “multi-user” name becomes “multi-site,” much more appropriately. Whereas you used to have a “site” containing “blogs,” now you have a “network” containing “sites,” also more appropriate. And because of that, the person who has total control over the entire network is no longer a “Site Admin,” but a “Super Admin.” The only terminology that hasn’t changed is the mu-plugins directory, except “mu” now stands for “must-use.” Even better, “must-use plugins” now show up in a special section of the WordPress admin, which is a welcome improvement.

This is my #1 feature of WordPress 3.0 because I’m now heading up three different multi-site based websites, and after maintaining the ATV website under versions 2.8 and 2.9 of WordPress MU for the past nine months, all of these changes have made working with multi-site installs far more intuitive and enjoyable. Think of it like Steve Jobs’ “one more thing” on top of all of the other great features that have been delivered as part of this upgrade.

So thank you, WordPress developers, for all of your hard work that you’ve put into this new release of WordPress. I can’t wait to see how much more I can do as I continue developing under it during the weeks and months to come.

Interestingly enough, I’ve held a personal blog for myself for about five years now, and it’s gone through a number of iterations as my experiences and needs have changed over time. I actually went back a ways to refresh myself with the history of how it has evolved:

• First Webmacster87.info (March-June 2005) — I didn’t know what I was doing, so I actually set up a phpBB2 forum and posted my blog posts on there. Needless to say, it didn’t last too long.
• Webmacster87.info 2 (June-July 2005) — My first experience with WordPress, version 1.5. (My, how it has changed since then!) This version utilized some kind of notebook-like theme. Though I didn’t stick with it for long, you may have noticed that I’ve since returned to those roots, eh?
• Webmacster87.info 2.5 (July-November 2005) — I remember actually declaring this “version 2.5.” Unimpressed with the notebook theme, I adopted a cooler theme with red/silver boxes that glowed on top of a black background. It was kind of cool, and my most meaningful content here was commentary on Hurricane Katrina. Went down due to web hosting issues.
• Webmacster87.info 3 (1 Week in January 2006) — I don’t even remember why this went down, but for a week I had a black-themed K2 version of WordPress 2.0 which I used solely to post Macworld 2006 photos.
• Webmacster87.info 4 (April-August 2006) — This was the first time that my blog truly had a good design. It ran K2, but had a header with a big “W” themed like Apple’s logo for Mac OS X Tiger, made by a good friend. However I was using a friend’s webhosting service for free, and he unexpectedly abandoned it in August, causing me to lose all of my content.
• Webmacster87@WordPress.com (October-December 2006) — I restarted my blog WordPress.com with the same theme and layout, again on K2.
• Webmacster87.info 4.5 (January-April 2007) — On January 1, I took advantage of WP.com’s new Domains feature to reinstate Webmacster87.info with my WP.com blog, reinstating its proper name. Nothing else changed. (I still have all of my blog posts since 1/1/07 posted on this site!)
• Webmacster87.info 4.6 (April-June 2007) — Maybe I got itchy feet, but I decided to splurge and pay for web hosting (partly in order to host a new site for phpBB Weekly), and so I moved Webmacster87.info off of WP.com. Same theme and design, still.
• Webmacster87.info 5 (June 2007-June 2009) — This was the biggest redesign of my personal site ever and represented my first effort digging into the WordPress codebase and tweaking stuff (which is now second-nature to me). I loved this design, particularly the header, which is why it stayed in place for two straight years.
• Smorgasboard 1.0 (June 2009-June 2010) — I had purchased the DouglasBell.us domain back in early 2008, which originally redirected to Webmacster87.info. However, as I readied to graduate high school, I recognized that Webmacster87.info was getting hard for a lot of people to type, and I started to have a desire to “graduate” from Webmacster87.info, which represented my high school years. Unfortunately, this version was somewhat rushed, and did not serve me particularly well over the past year.

New Design & Features
Smorgasbord 2.0 represents about a month of planning, followed by a week of actual work, doing a lot of planning and fine-tuning of many corners of the site. It takes advantage of the newly-released WordPress 3.0, and a really nice new theme called Wood is Good. While it doesn’t have very many more features than the previous version of Smorgasbord has, it presents them in a much cleaner, more organized manner.

The homepage puts much more emphasis on the blog posts, thanks to some CSS which I stole from a website I like. The Google Calendar is still here, and sits side-by-side with a Twitter widget. (Much more attractive than the unordered list I used before.)

The Weather has now moved to the sidebar, using the new WP-Weather plugin, and my Social Media listing is now back on Dustin Bachrach’s ShowYourself plugin, a blast from the Webmacster87.info past. A new Linkroll links to other organizations that I’m affiliated with, and then there’s the Random Quote. And I’ve gotten rid of the “Tip Jar,” because I got some flak about that previously.

I’ve built-in some customized location-awareness to the site. As a special addition to the theme, you’ll notice an extra slip of paper in the header identifying my current general location, which is also where the date/time/day of year is now shown more prominently. Plus, the rest of the site, including the Weather and Google Calendar has been tweaked on the back-end to be integrated with this location awareness as well. So now you’ll be able to quickly see where I am as I take my cross-country journeys and follow along. Not bad, eh?

Finally, I’ve made some updates to my About Me page (formerly called the Colophon, but I decided to apply a clearer name), and I have a new Portfolio page highlighting my web design work. The Portfolio is just the first of a few more pages that will be coming soon to highlight some of my more professional work and other projects. That’s right, there are a few more features still in the pipeline.

New License
Like many people, I want to see the internet become a more open place. Not the Facebook-kind of “open,” where people have no privacy, but “open” where people are more willing to share knowledge and ideas with each other. And so it is in that spirit that I have changed the license used on this site to a Creative Commons Attribution License. The previous Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license allowed reproduction of my work but still established rather strict guidelines. The new license now allows anyone to reproduce my work in any way, shape, or form, with the only condition being that my work is attributed to me.

New Commitment
I used to be a frequent blogger–blogging every day or two–up until the end of summer 2008. Then, I must have gotten busy or something. And during the first year of Smorgasbord, I almost entirely abandoned this blog. This is something that I want to change, which is why I am also committing to blogging, on average, at least once per week. I’m also going to try to broaden my scope from just blogging about myself, to also blogging about more general thoughts on college life, issues affecting my local area(s), technology, etc. In short: I want more content and better content on my blog, and I’m going to try to make that happen for at least the remainder of 2010.

So that’s Smorgasbord 2.0. Not exactly a huge slew of new features, but a lot more polish and cohesiveness that will make this a personal site that I can be proud of again. I’m looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it in the weeks and months to come. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

Seriously, I miss last September’s impeachment hearings.

Four very strong candidates threw themselves into the running for Student Government President: Nate Bronstein, Anthony Dunham, Nirvana Habash, and Seth Rosenstein. Through my past six months as Student Government Parliamentarian, I have gotten to know each of them very well and have worked closely with most of them. Nate Bronstein was an enthusiastic Senator when I joined last September, and is now the Director of Outreach for the SG. He’s the one who put on a Winter Semi-Formal before finals last semester (actually the biggest SG event that actually happened so far this year), and got everyone excited about it by having a sense of humor about it–such as naming sponsorship levels for the event “Bronstein” and “Fiery Passion.” I didn’t have an opportunity to get to know Nirvana very well as she was abroad during first semester and only rejoined the Senate after the Snowpocalypse, but she has definitely shown herself to be an active member of SG. Seth Rosenstein was first sworn in as Senator on the day that I was sworn in, and I’ve seen him take a very active role as an advocate for key campus life issues in the Senate, particularly stepping up after AU’s housing policies flip-flopped last January. And Anthony Dunham was instrumental in helping me get acquainted with the Student Government; he was the Speaker of the Senate when I first became Parliamentarian (making him the person I worked closest with during my first month or so transitioning into my role), not to mention he was my predecessor as Parliamentarian in 2008-09.

See what I did there? I just said something positive and complementary about all four candidates and my experiences with them, without pointing fingers, criticizing their thoughts about running, or saying anything about the state of AU’s Student Government. Nor did I endorse any of them. I know who I’m going to vote for tomorrow–it wasn’t easy for me to decide–but I’m not going to spew out a meaningless endorsement as though one of them is immensely superior to the other three.

And that’s because I don’t expect any kind of huge partisan politics to arise out of a presidential campaign for Student Government. We’re not here to fight over foreign policy or health care positions; we’re all here to advocate and do what’s best for the students of American University.

Last Thursday I produced the televised SG Presidential Debate co-sponsored by ATV and The Eagle. It took a lot of work over many weeks to put together, and a number of communication issues caused me a lot of undue stress in preparing the live production. But in the end, as far as the production was concerned (which was the primary area of my concern), the debate went very well. Feel free to watch it here.

If you do watch it, you’ll probably notice that a) it’s kind of boring, and b) the candidates seem to agree with each other a lot. Knowing all four of these candidates well (as I’ve already mentioned), I wasn’t at all surprised that they would agree a lot with each other. Yet for some reason all of the viewers, campus media commentators, and the other crew members that were working with me on this debate seemed surprised that there wasn’t more drama. For some reason some short-sighted commentators seemed to miss the obvious fact that we at ATV were not responsible for what the candidates actually said. In my view, the debate exemplified exactly what the Student Government and the candidates should stand for.

And outside of last Thursday’s debate, what we’ve been getting out of this week-and-a-half campaign season has been anything but civil, yet the stupid part has been that the primary group responsible for making these elections such a firestorm is the board within SG responsible for overseeing the elections themselves.

You see, AUSG has a whopping seven pages of election regulations that place all kinds of restrictions on campaigns, and it’s up to the Board of Elections to enforce them. Of course it doesn’t help that the Board of Elections chair resigned just a week or two before the elections started getting underway, so the newly-installed chairwoman of the Judicial Board (which oversees the BOE) decided to also take on the role of Acting Chair for the BOE. Hopefully there wouldn’t arise any possibility of a conflict of interest.

Except that a conflict did arise when a staff member on Nirvana Habash’s campaign sent a campaign e-mail through an academic mailing list without permission from the BOE, a clear infraction of the election regulations. The BOE responded by suspending her campaign and removing her from the ballot. (Huh, just for sending an e-mail? But wait, it gets better.) She appealed the decision to the Judicial Board, which of course had the same chair (though the chair claims that she did not speak or vote in the J-Board hearing and deliberations), and they found that the BOE had failed to provide her with the necessary 12 hours to “rectify” the violation. (Though I’m still baffled as to how one “rectifies” the sending of an e-mail to a mailing list.) Of course this caused plenty of controversy, and after a retrial, or whatever it was, the decision was reached that Habash could continue to campaign but would have to run as a write-in candidate.

Okay, that kind of stinks, but the debate was that night and everything was hunky-dory. After the debate, the current SG president endorsed Nate Bronstein in a song, and then Friday came. And then all hell broke loose.

• Friday 3/19, 2:46 PM: Habash calls for student misconduct charges for the acting BOE chair
• 5:48 PM: The Judicial Board chair sends out a Judicial Order in which she steps down as acting BOE chair and announces a replacement
• ~6:30 PM: Some idiot sends a fake e-mail to numerous list-servs, reaching over 1000 AU students, claiming to be an endorsement for Nate Bronstein.
• 8:43 PM: The Eagle posts an editorial arguing that all the presidential candidates ought to just run as write-ins to make the election “fair” again

Oh, and yet another e-mail violation happened the next day.

Now to keep this blog post from getting extremely long, I won’t go into just how crazy all of this was for the candidates, the Board of Elections members, and everyone else in the SG. Let’s just say that it feels like whatever shred of legitimacy the SG may have had simply vanished during this campaign. The idea of having all candidates run as write-ins never happened because apparently–according to the other candidates–Seth Rosenstein refused to do so. Fortunately the fake Bronstein e-mail did not cost him anything (since it was so obviously fake), though paradoxically the next e-mail supporting him that was sent out the next day by an actual member of his staff didn’t cost him anything, despite being similar to the one that hurt Habash. So now there’s all kinds of allegations about every such thing flying around in terms of who did or didn’t violate some rule or act unethically, and there’s no shortage of Senators who claim that they’re going to vote invalidate the election results (I wish them luck, because for some strange reason, our bylaws necessitates a 3/4 vote for that to happen). I’m sorry, I thought we were supposed to be focusing on which candidate would make the best next Student Government President?

Even though I strongly disagree with his unfounded comments towards last week’s SG Debate and his “the world revolves around me” attitude when it comes to AUSG, I would have to agree with him on these comments. But then one scrolls down and reads the mudslinging between the candidates over their different interpretations of what the future of SG should look like–there’s just no need for it. (I guess I should applaud Nate Bronstein for not getting involved when the comments turned into a virtual food fight between the other three candidates.)

As I said, I’ve decided whom I’m going to vote for. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t vote for any of the other three candidates. All of them are active, passionate members of SG and have a wealth of good ideas that they will bring to the office which they seek. None of them deserve to have less-than-an-equal shot at the office because of some insignificant, harmless “violation.” Ultimately though, one thing that this campaign is showing clearly is the attitudes of each of these candidates, and that’s going to be the key to selecting the cream of the crop for this office. The American University Student Government is so dysfunctional right now that–while it may not be anywhere near as bad as the actual government just a few blocks away from us–it is going to take a leader that can reach out to all sides, build bridges, establish good relationships, and especially be able to exude a sense of humor when it’s fitting to do so to help bring the AUSG closer to where it should be–an organization that represents, serves, and advocates for students. And most of all it’s going to take more than just the newly-elected President; everyone in SG and everyone at American University are going to have to stop lighting fires and start building bridges if AUSG is ever going to change direction.

I hope that despite all of the new fires that this election has fueled, we will walk away from this election having selected a leader that will help turn the sprinklers on so that we can all cool down and move forward.

So enjoy this video as much as I did. And if you like basketball, you’ll probably also enjoy this one.