Wow, we’re only 3 weeks from WordCamp Dallas, and we’ve still got plenty of seats left, but I have a feeling they are going to go fast. So you seriously need to get registered before we fill up! What is WordCamp Dallas?

Well, it’s basically a “free” ($30 pays for the T-shirt and meals) blogging convention that is organized by users of the wildly popular WordPress blogging platform. And it’s a one and a half day weekend event that will teach you more about blogging than you will learn on your own in a year. I guarantee it.

Don’t believe me? Fine! Check out the roughly 75 WordCamp videos I’ve already filmed and posted for you guys and you’ll see what I mean! Of course, there is also my lecture from last year on 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog, and here is the video.

Why would you want to start a blog of your own? Hmmm… well, to participate in a community of interest? To establish a reputation as an expert? To open doors for job opportunities? To earn money from your blogging efforts?

Heck, this blog generates $1,500-2,500 per month in ad revenue and I don’t even try (remember, I donate it to charity)!

Now, we’ve got an all star line up of speakers – each of which has generously volunteered their time and energy to make this event what it is. You’ll hear from some online titans on topics that will be immediately actionable after the conference.

But more importantly, you’ll meet hundreds of fellow bloggers with whom you can swap tips and build relationships that will last for years. And you’ll have free and unfettered access to people who can, and will, help you with anything related to your blogging efforts.
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Dammit! Very few things actually infuriate me more than spammers. That is because Spammers are thieves! There is no difference between a spammer, and someone who would go around stealing pennies from everyone they can find. The logic is exactly the same too, “well, if I only steal from them a little, they won’t notice – but if I do it from a lot of people, I’ll get rich!”

I swear to God, I think the crime for spamming should be death by firing squad. And their entire families should be branded with a scarlet letter and humiliated. And their bodies should be burned until nothing remains but ash. Then, the ashes should be put in a plastic baggie which is also topped off with cow manure and a small chunk of lead. The bags should be loaded on a cargo ship crossing the ocean, and then dropped in when the boat is directly above the Mariana Trench.

Here, let me rank criminals for you:

1. Child Molesters
2. Rapists
3. Spammers
4. Murders
5. Politicians

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For those of you who don’t know Barry, he’s the mastermind behind the infrastructure that powers WordPress and all of their various services (Akismet, bbPress, Gravatar, etc.). He seriously knows a lot about hosting infrastructure, as he demonstrated when he gave this lecture about WordPress performance at WordCamp SanFrancisco 2007.

Anyway, this morning he posted a little article about the newest WordPress data center and included a video shot by Aaron Phillips. Watch really closely and you might catch a glimpse of my cameo…
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This evening I ate a 16oz. New York Strip, along with a bunch of other stuff, at The Weber Grill in Chicago. Mmmm! It was tasty.

But as good as the meal was, half the fun was the entertainment value. You see, my buddy Chris from Layered Tech and I braved the -10 degree temperatures and snow to walk 3 blocks to eat there. And when we got there we sat in the bar at a counter overlooking the Grillmeister!

The following photos came from my iPhone while he was preparing our, and many other, steaks. So, here’s to you o’ master of the flames! Budweiser should make a commercial about you.
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Ok. This is hill-arious. Aaron Phillips, and by that I mean the one behind Another Man’s Blog, just invited every other Aaron Phillips on Facebook to be his friend. When they asked him why they should be his friend, he said:

We have he same name!

Duh.

Aaron is also announcing Aaron Phillips Expo 2010 which will be held in a desert location similar to Burning Man. When I inquired as to the nature of the conference he told me:

I am getting them all into one room and killing them so there is only one Aaron Phillips to rule the world.

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Listen up folks, cause I’m only going to say this one time. If you are choosing your site’s theme based on how many ads you can shove in your visitor’s face, or if people come to your site and have to scroll down the page before they see anything other than Google Ads, then your site sucks. And you do too.

Here’s an example:

Someone stopped by my site and left a comment on the blog with a link to the site in this image. I marked it as spam as soon as I verified the site was MFA. I’ll continue marking MFA sites as spam until the day I die, and I hope that all of my fellow webmasters admin their comments and do likewise.
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Since I got an iPhone I’ve been dying to test it’s abilities as a remote blogging tool. Well, here is the first test!

At this very moment I’m at On the Border in Plano, TX pigging out on fajitas. Here’s a snapshot to make you hungry!

If you are using WordPress with the built in image uploader, and the image align characteristics are not working for you, the fix is a simple modification to your theme’s Stylesheet.css file.

In the Admin control panel just navigate to Design | Theme Editor and over on the right side of the list of files select your Stylesheet to edit. It will usually say: Stylesheet (style.css)

Add the following lines anywhere you want within the stylesheet and then save the document and you should be good to go.

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}
a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
a img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
a img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

If your Stylesheet is not editable, you may have to use your FTP client to go in and change the permissions on the files.

This post is for a very select group of people. Namely, bloggers who have been using WordPress since before version 2.3, and specifically those who were using the UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior) plugin.

In version 2.3, WordPress introduced native “tagging”, which is what enables those little tag links you see below this post. Prior to that, those of us who wanted to use tags had to turn to an external plugin – the most popular of which was UTW.

When the upgrade to WordPress 2.3 occurred, it allowed us to import our existing tags into a different table in the database, but it did not delete the old UTW table even if you uninistalled the plugin. Here is how you can go ahead and clean up your database to keep things neat and tidy and running smooth.
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Stephen O’Grady gave a lecture on Open Source Business Models at WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco. Stephen’s main point was to prove that Open Source projects and profitability are not mutually exclusive concepts. His assertion is that there is definitely gold in them there hills!

By the way, I’m sorry for the poor audio quality in portions of the video. Again, I was not in control of the audio system and the guys running the equipment were way off at times.
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I know that a lot of you may be bloggers, but might be unfamiliar with WordPress. Perhaps you’ve considered migrating your blog over from another platform, but aren’t really sure how to go about it. Well, this next presentation is just for you.

Lloyd Budd gave a presentation to illustrate the finer points of switching over from that old platform you’ve been blogging with to a shiny new WordPress installation! So, if you’ll invest 20 minutes in hearing him out, you’ll learn how easy it can be to make the move.
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Ben Huh, the proprietor of I can haz cheezeburger and other popular sites gives a lecture at WordCamp San Francisco on the Secret of Virality. I got most of the slides in the video, but if you want to download and read along, you can get the slides here.

Ben’s lecture talks about how you can achieve viral results, and why certain things work and others don’t. His message is great, and if your goal with your site is to grow your traffic like crazy, this video is going to be required “reading”.
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