What my plugin does is it utilizes your information from the WP dashboard on your profile. It makes better use of the fields by removing the Yahoo IM one and adding a Twitter field. Then it will pull the information from that and the URL and Bio of the post author, as well as display the Gravatar of the author by getting the authors email address. Then it adds a nice box in between the post and the comments.

I am extremely excited about this. I never thought I would ever be able to complete it, and get it working. I managed to create the functions and simulate it over at New2WP, but getting it to work in a plugin has been a bit more work. I am still working on cleaning it up and adding the finishing touches, and then I will submit it to Wordpress.

You can see an example of it below, I am currently using it on this site, and I’d love to know what you think!

So what is this

I just wanted to quickly explain what $(this) is since it was so confusing to me while learning jQuery.

$(this) is easier to understand separately in 2 parts. $() is a function call plain and simple. $ is a reference to the jQuery function, so therefore, $() is a shorter more simple way to write jQuery().

If you use another JavaScript library that redefines $ then you would want to use either jQuery() instead of $(), or you could use jQuery.noCoflict().

What ‘this’ is can be more confusing since it’s used for many things. It is used in an object’s methods to refer to that object, itself. Sort of like talking in 3rd person or something.

$(this) may make you even more confused, so let me know if you have any questions.

And be sure to come check out more jQuery and Wordpress tutorials at New2WP.com

The art of Stop Motion is one that takes A LOT of time and patience, not to mention the planning involved and the obviously required need for imagination.

Stop motion animations can take as long as 1,500 hour or more to create, 8-Bit Trip for example. That is the reason I personally would never create my own stop motion video, at least not one as long and complex as some of these. Though, I do very much enjoy them, and give the creators tons of credit for their work.

Here are 6 of the my favorites

Stop Motion T-Shirt War

The PEN Story

Human Skateboard Stop Motion

Stop Motion Stick Figure Body Art

7×7x7 Stop Motion Assembly

My Animated World

How you enjoyed these as much as I did. There’s a lot of hours spent making these videos. Show respect, they’ve worked hard and deserve it.

The whole weekend really was basically nothing more than ordinary as far as birthday weekends go. It’s not like I couldn’t find stuff to do, I just wanted to do what I do, and it made me depressed.

I did go to the Cheesecake Factory with my family on Sunday which was nice. Also went to a small gathering of friends, where I only knew 3 people, and was only there for an hour or two. I used to do cool stuff, but now I’m boring I guess.

Anyways, I wanted to include in this extremely compelling post a list of Wordpress blogs for designers and developers that I used a lot over the weekend, and many times in the past. There’s a lot of great information for learning Wordpress on each of them and recommend checking them out.

Digging Into Wordpress

New2WP

WP Beginner

Cats Who Code

WP Recipes

WP Hacks

Weblog Tools

Am I the only one that sits at home alone on a computer on my birthday?

A little over a month later Shorewood High School, a longtime rival school of Shorecrest in sports and band decided to show them up by releasing their own music video to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.” What’s even more amazing about their video is that it is shot in reverse. All of the students learned to lip sync the song backwards. After seeing OneManSho’s sing songs in reverse that aspect of it is not quite as impressive to me, not to discredit them though. I’m sure it isn’t an easy thing to do, but it seems less difficult after previously seeing this done.

Either way both videos are amazingly well-done.

I have worked with video recording, production, and have studied film and am more aware of the level of difficulty involved in shooting a 4 minute long continuous shot. I think that is the most amazing thing of all when watching these videos.

Shorecrest High School | Outkast – Hey Ya!

Shorewood High School | Hall and Oates – You Make My Dreams Come True

There is a poll up on King5.com for people to vote for the video they think is the best. I personally like the one by Shorecrest better because I love the song “Hey Ya!”, and I don’t like the song by the other school at all. I also think they didn’t do that great in lip syncing the song, granted it was done backwards, it decreases the quality of the video.

This isn’t over yet though. Shorecrest has stated that they are already working on their next video but are keeping quiet about what they have planned. It will be interesting to see how far this goes and what they come up with.

I wish I were growing up in the age of technology, like teenagers are today. When I was in high school we had old Macintosh computers that we used in “computer class”, which was called Keyboarding. Yeah, learning how to type. I’m only 26, so it’s not like I’m old, but we sure as hell didn’t learn how to do advanced video editing and producing like this. They even teach web and graphic design in high school these days. If I started doing that back then, I would know so much more, and be so far beyond the point I’m at now in my abilities. Kids today don’t know how well they have it, and they take it for granted. OMG I’m starting to sound like my mother. Dammit!

So which video do you think is better?

Post a comment below stating who you’d vote for.

Ok So What Do I Do?

I got to the Microsoft N.E.R.D. Center in Cambridge, Ma., where it was being held, at 7:00 am Saturday morning, and I was one of the people that couldn’t figure out how to get into the parking garage since it appeared to be closed until someone showed us that you just had to drive up, take a ticket and the door would then go up. The Microsoft building was completely automated apparently, and extremely cool of course. It was the perfect place to hold an event like this, and there’s probably not many places better for such a thing. After getting checked in and briefed on what we needed to do, I went to the info booth where I spent most of the morning helping people as they arrived.

The organizers for Wordcamp did such an amazing job, and were really on top of everything from what I could see. It made things for all of us clueless vollies so much easier. I couldn’t have had a better experience, except for maybe being able to see more sessions, but there’s always next year. The only real complaint I had was that my back was killing me from standing for so long at times, which made me wish I was back at the info booth helping out there, but that’s okay, I lived. I’m just glad I wasn’t one of the people who got locked in the stairway. Don’t take the stairs if you ever go to Microsoft, you won’t get out.

All in all, I’d say there was about 400 or more people who came, including attendees, speakers, sponsors and guests, all with one similar interest in mind, Wordpress, and they all had a laptop, iPhone or some other device connected to the internet in hand too by the way at all times…nerds? It was really cool to see that many people who have the enthusiasm about Wordpress as I do. I met and talked to so many interesting people, and got some cool swag including one of the blue Wordcamp Boston hoodies that so many people were jealous of. I might have been willing to trade them mine for the green Wordcamp messenger bags they all got, had I been offered, but I’m happy with the hoodie.

I did get to catch a few sessions during my break like Oh Oh It’s Magic: WP And HTML 5 and Lock It Up Security, as well as some others too. Overall it was a great experience and would totally volunteer again, that is if I’m unable to get a ticket. I can’t wait until next years Wordcamp Boston and would like to try and go to one before then wherever they may be held around the country this year. Until then, I will check out the slides from the sessions I missed, and continue using Wordpress since it’s so awesome.

Pictures From Wordcamp Boston

Here are a few shots I took, and some others posted on Flickr from event at the Microsoft Research builing. There are some really great photos that people got which you can see more of on Flickr here. I was only in 1, yes 1 picture out of the thousands that were taken by people.

I’d like to thank @Amanda Blum and @Chris Traganos for your help, and the chance to be apart of Wordcamp Boston. It was really a great time.

Want To Learn More?

For anyone from Wordcamp who wants to learn more on how to do things or needs help with Wordpress, a friend and I will be launching a website hopefully this week (if I can finish coding the theme in time) called New2WP.com. It will be a great resource to those that were in attendance there, and anyone else that’s looking to expand their knowledge of the best free open-source blogging software there is. Any requests are welcome, and we are willing to help with anything you may need. The site isn’t ready yet, but if you want to subscribe to the RSS feed, you will be one step ahead, and won’t miss a thing.

I’ve tried to learn how to create photo manipulations which you may have seen in previous posts. There is one on these two resource lists, photo manipulation tutorials, 3,000 Photoshop resources, and another one on the last masters of design post I did, which in my opinion cannot compare to the works of others I listed there.

The first few of these I found a while back with the intentions of posting them, but never got around to it until now. They are truly breathtaking, and I can only dream to someday be able to create such unbelievable work such as this.

Have you ever done any photo manipulating?

Let’s see your work! I’d love to see anything you’ve created.

One thing thing I would like to implement here that I have included in the new theme I’m making is post thumbnails. If you haven’t noticed the index page of this site has a post thumbnail but it isn’t displayed using custom fields. I simply include the image html code in the Excerpt field along with the post description. The post excerpt is all that shows.

I talked about how to use excerpts in your theme here, and wanted to Using the excerpt to display just the post description, and custom fields to display the post thumbnail, you can have more control over the appearance, and it’s just a better way to do it.

Adding excerpts with thumbnails to your theme

In your WP admin on the post write page you will see the Custom Fields box. You may have to expand it if it is collapsed, but it looks like this.

For adding post thumbnails, you can just upload an image the way you normally would add images to your posts by clicking above the post panel then copy the image url and paste it in the Value textarea of the custom fields, and set the Name to Thumbnail.

You will need to edit the index.php template of your theme. If you want to show the post excerpt with the thumbnail image on your blog homepage you will need to add the the code to show excerpts and to get and display the custom fields. First find the code the_content(); in your index.php file, and replace it with this.

This will show the post excerpt instead of the whole post.

Below that add this code.

The get_post_meta() function gets the value of the custom field that has the name “Thumbnail”. For more information on the usage of this and other functions that have to do with custom fields, you can find it here on Wordpress.org.

You can do this for many other things too besides images. Imagine the possibilities!!

Entire Code

This is the code I used in index template for the new theme I’m making, including the HTML.

Here is the CSS I used for styling it.

With this you should be able to make a nice looking index page complete with excerpts and post thumbnails. If you have any questions let me know.

That doesn’t have to be the case with jQuery though I’ve found, because it is a lot more simple, and even more simple than I think it is too. It’s still programming yes, but it’s more “normal” than what I consider Php to be. Though, despite all that, I have still found myself not sitting down and actually learning it. I’ve tried, but when I do, I tend to get distracted with all the millions of things on the internet that are there to distract me. Have you had this problem ever? It can be annoying at times.

Many times when I try to focus on stuff like this, I start by looking up sites and finding resources which I can use to help me learn. Well, that’s when the distraction starts. I then start finding more and more and more, until I find myself basically creating a resource roundup that I can make a new blog post with, for others trying to learn the same stuff, instead of using the resources to help myself learn.

I apologize if this is the cycle which you have found yourself in right now too. I did not intend to distract you, but providing you with a ton of resources which you want to learn about, but have yet to do so. On that note, here is the list.

How Do You Learn jQuery?

Here are 14 ways you can start learning it.

With the release of jQuery 1.4 today, I’ll start with:
14 Days of jQuery.

I have found the best and most useful of these to be the sites that have video tutorials showing you visually since that’s how I learn. That’s why jqueryfordesigners.com and jQuery for Absolute Beginners 15 Day Video Series were the most helpful for me in my quest to START learning jQuery, instead of gathering information about it, in hopes that someday I might actually learn something about it.

I think I was hoping that the more resources about it I found, I would somehow magically know how to do it without putting in the work and learning how to do it.

So how did you learn jQuery?

Leave a comment with any tips you might have.

This is a very long tutorial, but the result really pays off. If you’ve ever wanted to create something so amazing that everyone sees, like what you see posted online made by some of the best artists, then you must try out this tutorial.

Vivid Themed Illustration Part II Tutorial Details

• Program: Photoshop CS3
• Difficulty: Advanced
• Estimated Completion Time: 4-5 hours

Create An Abstract Illustration With Simple Hand-Drawn ElementsCreate An Abstract Illustration With Simple Hand-Drawn ElementsCreate An Abstract Illustration With Simple Hand-Drawn ElementsCreate An Abstract Illustration With Simple Hand-Drawn Elements

View the first half of this tutorial created in the Vivid Themed Illustration Tutorial Part I