So goes one of the most memorable quotes from the television series M*A*S*H, spoken by Dr. Sidney Freedman, as he reminds the camp to remember to take time to enjoy life every so often.

If there’s one thing that I remember about this time one year ago, it’s that I was quite nervous and anxious about the uncertainty that lay ahead of me. For the first time, i was leaving pretty much everything familiar in my life behind, and had absolutely no idea what my life was going to be like even a week away. And it was with these thoughts that I arrived at American University, and launched myself headfirst into a bunch of general-education classes (read: classes that helped me figure out what I don’t want to do with my life), an insane and needless late-night impeachment scuffle, surviving through the snowiest winter in District of Columbia history, organizing a televised presidential debate (and almost losing my sanity doing so), and quite a bit more. Throw in seven (count them, seven) all-nighters, six of which were during the final six weeks of spring classes, and a bunch more late-nighters throughout the year, plus a truckload of papers and homework, adjusting to living away from home, and all of that, and I had one hell of a freshman year.

And that is why I bring up Dr. Freedman’s quote to start off this post, because that’s what I want the theme of my sophomore year to be. This year is going to be different. This year is going to be enjoyable. This year I’m going to take things less seriously and enjoy my time at American University.

Now, I’ve had a wonderful fourteen-and-a-half weeks of summer to recover from that hell of a freshman year, and boy, I’ve soaked up every minute of it. (Literally: I’ve probably gotten more sleep this past summer than I did during my two freshman semesters combined.) Yet at the same time, this has probably been one of my most productive summers to date:

• I passed my driving test and now have my driver’s license. (But don’t expect me to do much driving in Washington; we’re going to cut off my insurance once I fly back.)
• I completely re-designed my personal website with a design that I’m very proud of.
• I released my first public WordPress plugin.
• I made major progress on yet another ATV website re-design (and there’s still a bit more on that site yet to come).
• I got nominated to be the new Director of Information Technology for the AU Student Government, and in that role, developed a ground-breaking new website that will be launching on Tuesday evening, August 24th.
• I researched and taught myself about Mac OS X Server and Final Cut Server, skills that I hope to be able to put into practice soon at ATV.
• I went to Portland, Oregon for the OSCONvasion 2010 meetup event which I spearheaded.
• I completed an online AU class on “Current Concepts of Nutrition,” rounding out my general education requirements at AU.
• Once again, I volunteered as a poll worker for the June 8 Primary Election.
• And, I got to spend a lot of time with my family, including learning and performing a couple of new pieces with my parents in our harp-flute-cello trio.

But this long summer wasn’t only about getting lots of work done, it also served a secondary purpose of helping me to unwind and detach myself from all the stress that I endured during my freshman year. When I flew home in the beginning of May, quite literally, the only thing drawing me back to AU for another year was the consideration that I’d probably have a harder time transitioning to a different school this year if I tried. But man, I was so happy that my freshman year was over and that I was out of there.

But now, a little over three months later, I’m actually looking forward to going back to AU. And maybe it’s because of a couple of reasons. For one thing, now that I’ve decided on my major–Public Communications–my classes will actually be pertaining to that major (plus one pertaining to my minor, Education Studies). Sure, they’re still the core classes required for that major and minor, but I’m hoping they’ll be a bit more engaging. Plus, from here on out, I’m only taking four classes per semester (plus music), which I’m hoping will greatly lighten my load from last year. But even more so, I’m finally feeling much more energized to do some great work at ATV, particularly on Tech tAUk. And furthermore, I now have a new position in the Student Government that’s much more involved in the organization (in a positive way) than simply being the Parliamentarian would be. (But I’m still going to be the Parliamentarian, so I guess I get the best of both worlds.)

Actually, this is what my fall semester is going to look like:

• Psychology of Education — Mondays and Thursdays, 8:30-9:45 AM (3 credits)
• Communication and Society — Mondays and Thursdays, 9:55-11:10 AM (3 credits)
• Understanding Media — Mondays and Thursdays, 11:20 AM-12:35 PM (3 credits)
• Writing for Mass Communication (Honors) — Mondays and Thursdays, 12:45-2:00 PM (3 credits)
• AU Symphony Orchestra — Mondays and Wednesdays, 8:15-10:30 PM (1 credit)
• Chamber Music — Weekly, TBD (1 credit)
• Cello Lesson — Weekly, TBD (1 credit)
• Applied Music Performance Lab — Wednesdays, 12:45-2:00 PM (0 credits)

Now a few observations about this schedule: First off, yes I know that I’m doing four classes in a row twice a week. Some people may think I’m crazy, but this is a little experiment that I think might work. My idea when scheduling these classes was an observation that I felt like I mentally did better on days when I had two classes right next to each other, because it helped to compartmentalize my classes into a particular section of the day, leaving the rest of the day free and open for me to work on other projects. As opposed to days when my classes were widely spread out, which gave me pockets of time in-between but not really enough to tackle anything major. So this is a bit more of a high-school style schedule (and yes, I’ll have to be a bit more aggressive about getting homework for all four classes done earlier, and being able to carry a snack along with me to keep me going for the full five-and-a-half hours of classes), but I’m hopeful that it will work out well.

This schedule has already been very helpful in allowing me to allot time for my various commitments. For example, if I’m confirmed as the SG IT Director, I’m going to be required to have 15 office hours per week. So I’ve made them Monday/Wednesday/Thursday at 2:30-7:30 PM, perfectly filling in the gaps between my last classes of those days and my evening commitments. I can thus dedicate Tuesday and Friday, which are completely free, towards work that I have to do for ATV and for Tech tAUk, which generally involves large editing projects that I may need a full day to be able to complete. Other regular activities and commitments can then fall into place, leaving any remaining open slots for study time or recreational/exercise time.

And best of all, whereas a year ago I was pretty much “winging it” for the entire year as I was feeling around, trying to figure out which activities I should or should not take part in, this year I’m already set with an organized schedule of what I’m going to do and fully energized to take the plunge.

But once again, my resolution for this year is going to be to not take the stresses of this year as seriously and to try to enjoy myself more at AU. The Undergraduate Senate will come up with something mundane to endlessly debate over, The Eagle will find some controversy to raise a stink about, and AU’s inflexible bureaucracy will cause some kind of maddening chaos that will screw everything up for everyone. But I don’t want those concerns and those feelings to be the defining aspect of my sophomore year. I want to remember just how fortunate that I am to be attending university, to be in Washington, and to have so much support from so many friends and family members in all of the different ventures that I decide to take part in. And so this year, I intend to take Dr. Freedman’s advice. I will pull down my pants and slide on the ice.

Metaphorically, that is. Hopefully this year there won’t be so much snow again as to make that a literal statement.

I’ll cut to the chase first — I’m flying back to Washington, DC on Monday. I’m taking off on Southwest Flight #1142, departing San Francisco (SFO) at 9:50 AM and arriving in Phoenix (PHX) at 11:45 AM. Then, after a long two-and-a-half-hour layover there, I’m hopping on flight #155 at 2:15 PM, which will arrive at Baltimore at 9:35 PM.

But from here is where the story gets interesting. Originally, I had planned from there to hop on a Metrobus, then hop on Metro, then hop on the AU shuttle to get back to AU, getting in at around a quarter after midnight. Late, yes, but I would be able to check into my dorm, since after all last year I arrived at AU two days earlier.

Well, on Tuesday, August 3rd, I received an e-mail from the Resident Director of Anderson Hall (my dorm), cheerfully welcoming us to the start of the new year, and buried deep within the e-mail was a nasty little message:

Halls open for returning students to begin to check-in at 9am, Wednesday, August 18th. Please note that if you intend to arrive and check-in before your designated check-in time and date, please visit our website and fill out the Early Arrival Request form no later than July 30th.

Umm, okay, hold on. A few problems here. First off, an Early Arrival Request Form? What’s that? Why is this the first I’ve heard of it if it was due four days ago? Second off, I’ve been on the Housing & Dining Programs website quite a bit this summer, and there was no Early Arrival Request Form on there. I know, I searched for it after the fact. But no, AU’s Housing & Dining Programs was not willing to be flexible whatsoever to simply take my file from one stack to another. Oh, American University bureaucracy, how I haven’t missed you.

So now what? I’m slated to arrive two nights before AU wants me there so that I can get important work done at my student-run television station and for the Student Government. I’ve been making plans for the work I have to do this week for the past three months. I booked this flight back in May and it’s way too late to change it now. Well, there’s a couch in the ATV office that I suppose I could sleep on for two nights, even though technically doing so isn’t allowed. (If anyone from AU’s Department of Public Safety is reading this post, please forget what you just read.) Except that I’m really nervous that I may no longer have swipe access to get into the ATV office where the couch is. Which wouldn’t be a big deal for the second night (since someone can let me in during the day), but I’m a bit nervous on the first night, when I’m scheduled to get there after midnight. And what if my flight is delayed? After all, DC has been hit by scattered severe thunderstorms for the past week or two that have been wreaking quite a bit of havoc over there, and more are on the forecast for at least the next straight week.

So after some investigating, I found out that rooms at the BWI Red Roof Inn were available for only $70/night on next Monday night (compared with $37 for a shuttle should my flight be delayed). Plus it had the added bonus that I will be mentally reassured during the long flights that I won’t be homeless when I arrive in DC on Monday. So I was able to convince my parents to spring for the cost, meaning that I will be spending Monday night in Baltimore. On Tuesday morning, I’ll return to the airport to catch the express Metrobus to Greenbelt, MD, from which I’ll take Metro onward to Tenleytown/American University. Tuesday night, I’ll sleep on the couch. Then on Wednesday night I’ll be back in my dorm room, the exact same one I had last year.

From there, however, my travels don’t actually end. Hot on the heels of last month’s OSCONvasion in Portland, next Thursday evening I’ll be hopping on yet another train, this time traveling the short distance up north to New York City for Libertyvasion 2010. Unlike OSCONvasion, this is an actual official phpBB users conference put on by the phpBB teams themselves, and many of them are flying in from all over the world for this event. Even though I’m preparing to step away from phpBB Weekly at the end of the month, following over three-and-a-half years doing the podcast, I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to meet many more of the team members that I’ve been collaborating with (directly or indirectly) over the past five years or so. Even better, I’m going to be speaking at the conference next Saturday, and will doing a bunch of other coverage of it for my podcast, so it should be a great experience.

The three-and-a-half hour train rides may not be quite as exciting as the nineteen-hour train rides I did 3-4 weeks ago, but they’re still worth mentioning. I’ll be departing next Thursday from Washington Union Station on the Northeast Regional train at 3:29 PM, and arrive at Penn Station in New York at 6:52 PM. On Sunday, I leave New York at 12:05 PM, and arrive back in Washington at 3:25 PM. I’ll be in New York for three nights, staying at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square. (And a big thanks to the phpBB teams for helping a broke college student like me be able to stay under their section of booked rooms so that I could afford the trip!)

Finally, with all of that fun and excitement out of the way, my classes will be formally starting on Monday, August 23, as I begin my sophomore year in college. But I’ll have more on that in my next upcoming blog post, so stay tuned…

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!