From August 6th through August 15th I will be away from my desk attending MINI Takes the States. If you would like to follow along, you can do exactly that at Whiteroofradio.com.

I expect normal service to resume on or about the 16th.

Nobody is in charge this time. Just don’t forget to close the fridge door. All of the cheese went bad last time and that stuff is expensive!

Yet another for the portfolio page and one of my highest profiles sites to date! This one for the SpeedTV show Chop Cut Rebuild.

If you’re a hard-core gear-head, you’re on the road to the right place. Get your fix with host Dan Woods as he reveals what it takes to be a custom classic builder. With demanding deadlines quickly becoming a reality and roadblocks rising left and right, two talented teams must come up with dynamic, innovative ways to survive the mission.

This site took me a while to get right and I still have a little bit of tweaking to do. This is my first magazine style WordPress theme that I’ve used on a live site and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I used some of my better CSS tricks and a few of my favorite plugins to get the job done, and the customer is pleased with the results.

This is one that I wanted to work on for quite a while. Let me show you why.

Oh yea, Flash navigation in a page created with Microsoft Front Page. No way for it to get updated unless they called their web guy and he always wanted the obligatory $500 to do said updates. Moving them to WordPress will not only save them money, but give them the ability to update the site themselves whenever they like or need, providing their audience with the freshest content possible.

I can do this for you, too. Just let me know when.

Sure. There are quite a few different image gallery systems out there these days that will allow you to do just about anything you want with photos on your site. But what if you only want to be able to easily upload some images and display them in a nice way? Do you really need all the bells and whistles of a full blown gallery system?

I don’t think so.

I just finished doing a quick gallery for Todd to display photos of cars that he has applied graphics too. Mostly used by his local MINI dealer, he needed a way to be able to do exactly what I stated above. Quickly upload images to a page and have them display nicely to anyone (yes, it works on your phone, check it!). And yes, I did it all with WordPress.

For those of you that don’t know, WordPress does a very good job with images right out of the box. And, with proper tweaking of the CSS and WordPress settings, it does even better. Add a plugin for some cool effects like lightbox, and voila! You have a quick and easy image gallery that is easy to use for both the person adding images to the site and for the user that wants to look at the site.

I love WordPress. What can I make it do for you today?.

Site Updates

Donburnside.com has been chugging along nicely for about 5 years in some form or another. Back in 2008 I moved all blogging functions to this site and spent about 6 months dialing in the layout and functionality. Over the years, I have continued to tweak it until I’m happy, then tweak it some more. Which is what I have been doing this morning.

• The Blog. Nothing today, but I have recently created a custom page dedicated to recipes if you haven’t seen it.
• Photos. My entire Flickr stream is avaible right here, in case you were wondering.
• Portfolio has been updated to display my latest web projects first.
• Tech projects have been updated to include some of the more recent projects I have completed that weren’t previously listed.
• Services has been updated with more contact options and a few more services listed.
• The About Page was updated a few months ago if you missed it. If you wonder what WordPress plugins I’m using here, it’s a great place to look.

I hope that all of you Mom’s out there had a great day!

Just added a new site to the portfolio. Actually, it’s a recycle of my newest theme that I used for Intrepid Cycles. I’ve made some slight tweaks and design changes to make it more fitting for diplaying photos.

Complete with lightbox functionality, a spam proof contact form and password protected gallery pages. I think it turned out pretty well.

/horn tooting

I’ve been busy over on the other side lately, so be sure you are following along over there. There is some very cool stuff coming in the next month and change that is MINI related and I’m pretty excited about all of it.

I’m also going to making some changes (again) to this site. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many resumes I send out, I just can’t seem to make anything happen. So it’s time to take off on my own and try to generate some income anyway possible. I need a website that reflects that.

What does that mean to you? I’m not sure yet. Of course it will be cool, but that might mean that I move my more ‘personal’ blog posts over w(t)f and keep this more technical, which I’ve already started.

Anyway, go to the MINI sites and see what’s happening. If you are in SoCal, stop by and say hi when I’m at MINI of Ontario or catch me at AMVIV with almost the entire WRR crew.

The site is actually for the business owner and will serve as a place for customers to contact her, sign up for an upcoming email newsletter, follow along at Twitter and read articles that are written by her or yours truly. You can check out the site in full by clicking the screen shot above.

2 sites down for the month, at least 1 to go that I will be telling you about next week (I hope).

So ends the self pimping for this January 9th, 2010.

Yet another anniversary of my time on the internet has passed. And by quite a bit.

Turns out, I have now, officially, been putting words to screen (and it’s verifiable) for just a bit over 7 years! If you were to go back through the archives here, you will find my first post, at what was windthefrog.net, happened on November 5th, 2003. Of course, I’ve been doing for a bit longer, but those were posts that were eaten by Blogger or vaporized by Greymatter when I switched over.

7 years and change. Anyone curious what that means? According to the handy dandy WordPress Dashboard it means

• 1,428 posts contained within 41 categories
• There have been 1,927 comments made, 1,911 approved
• I’ve used 642 tags

I’m not really sure what the word count is, but figure that each of the posts that I make here is usually around 300, than means that I’ve typed out over 400,000 words. Staggering. And that’s just here.

To get the full look back, I need to include the posts from dbmini.us, which started September, 2002, those stats would look something like this.

• 2,491 posts contained within 68 categories
• There have been 3,760 comments made
• I’ve used 721 tags

Using the same math as above, but assuming an average word count of 200 per post, that gives me a grand total over the past 7 years of almost 500,000 words that I have put to screen.

And that doesn’t even count the 6,657 posts on Twitter or the 2,591 posts on Tumblr. It also doesn’t count the hundreds of posts at Motoringfile that I have my name of them, or the 658 posts at White Roof Radio. If I had to guess, that’s got to be close to 750,000 words that I have put to screen in the last 7 years (and change).

Amazing.

I have decided to go back to the “I wonder who will find me” model of personal publishing, instead of forcing it onto your screens. I’ve been pushing stuff to Twitter long enough, so you know it’s all here. Now to see if you keep coming back.

To be a little more clear, anything that I post here, on dbmini, w(t)f, Vimeo or Viddler will no longer automatically get posted to Twitter, which also no longer automatically posts to Facebook.

I will be putting everything back into Friend Feed if you want a one-stop-shopping experience for everything I share online, but that’s as far as it goes.

If you are one of my Facebook or Twitter followers and want to be able to keep up with my shit, might I recommend taking the time now to discover the absolute brilliance that is RSS and Google Reader. Everything I do has an RSS feed and it’s a great way to keep up. Bonus is that there are a ton of sites out there that also have RSS feeds, so you can easily subscribe to them to get the latest updates.

If you are one of my Twitter or Facebook followers that is tired of reading duplicate posts or seeing links from me, you won’t any longer. You’re welcome.

Finally, I will be removing FB Connect from donburnside.com and reset the WordPress comment rules appropriately.

As always, thank you for your time.

If you are thinkin’ about doing some shopping at Amazon this weekend, a good place to start would be by clicking the banner at the top of the page (or this link). It’s only going to be there until Monday, and yes I do get a kickback. But, since you are going to be shopping anyway, why not help me out a little bit, right?