Peter Jobst

I’m pleased to announce the latest addition to the ever-growing collection of free themes here at WordPress.com. Retro-fitted by Justin Tadlock mixes subtle textures with clean lines and shadows to create a beautifully balanced composition perfect for all types of blogs.

Retro-fitted can be personalized in a variety of ways. Customize the look of your blog by uploading a header and background image. Take control of you navigation by configuring the dropdown menu. Add widgets to the sidebar for a two-column layout or leave it empty for a single column design.

Check it out in the Theme Showcase.

A few months ago we added Notifications to the WordPress.com Toolbar and recently we released a Chrome extension so that you can always keep up with the activity on your blog. Today we’re adding comment notifications, complete with comment moderation and reply functionality.  When your post receives a comment, you’ll get a Notification that looks something like this:

If you’re using threaded comments, you’ll see if someone responded directly to you, right in the notification.

You will see Approve, Spam, and Trash links in your comment notification if you have permission to moderate comments, allowing you to moderate the comment from within the notification:

Clicking Reply automatically approves a comment and displays an area for you to type a reply in. When you’re done, just click Reply and you can get back to whatever you were working on, without having to navigate to the dashboard to manage your comments.

You can still manage comments in your dashboard, but we hope you’ll find the comment notification a convenient shortcut.

For more information about comments and comment moderation: Comments, Manage Comments.

Happy Tuesday! We’ve got two unique free themes for you today, and they are quite a study in contrasts.

Our first theme, Splendio, dazzles with an unconventional yet stylish design from Design Disease that pops out of the box — literally.

How you use this theme is limited only by your imagination! It comes loaded with features: six widget areas (one in the right sidebar and up to five in the footer), featured header images, and a custom background. In addition, there’s a showcase page template (pictured in the screenshot above) that includes a featured slider for sticky posts, and a nifty compact listing of your latest posts. For details on how to set up the Splendio theme on your blog, consult the Theme Showcase.

Our next theme, Suburbia, is as orderly and minimalistic as Splendio is eccentric and playful. Designed by WPShower, Suburbia’s attractive arrangement of posts inside a grid make it an excellent choice for magazine-oriented sites.

Suburbia makes use of featured images to display your posts in a clean, refined style. If you’d like a post to have a larger featured image, mark it as a sticky post. In this manner, you can highlight your most important content. In addition to featured images, Suburbia supports five optional widget areas (four in the footer and one in the sidebar on single posts and pages), a custom background, and custom header image. As always, you can click on over to the Theme Showcase to read more about Suburbia.

We look forward to seeing how you use these two great themes.

Would you like to post videos to your blog while you’re on the go? Are you interested in a photography theme that’s also video-friendly? Well, look no further, because we have some news for you.

The VideoPress upgrade, which allows you to upload and embed your own videos on your blog, now comfortably handles videos from iPhones and iPads. You can shoot vertically or horizontally, and we’ll take care of rotating it for you so that your video looks great when it’s published on your site.

If you don’t already have VideoPress on your WordPress.com account, head on over to VideoPress.com, we’ll get you up and running in no time. And don’t forget to install the free WordPress App on your iPhone or iPad!

Duotone: Now Video-Friendly

If you’re a photoblogger, you’re probably familiar with the cool Duotone theme, which changes color to match the first image in every post and page. The big news is that Duotone now seamlessly supports VideoPress videos, so now you can engage visitors with photographs and videos!

Learn More about VideoPress

If you use VideoPress on your self-hosted WordPress site, keep an eye on the VideoPress Blog – we have some exciting annoucements coming out soon, just for you!

You can find more details about VideoPress by checking out the following resources:

• VideoPress.com
• WordPress Support: VideoPress

Today, I’m excited to introduce the latest additions to our collection of premium themes.

Designed by Andy Rutledge, Currents, is a responsive, minimal yet attractive premium theme from WooThemes.

Currents is perfect for news driven sites. The phrase, “less is more” couldn’t be more true. This clean and minimal design maximises your reader’s focus on the content. Having said that, the theme is packed with many customization options — a wide featured post slider, custom news areas, six alternative color styles, and more. Together, all of these features help you to control how to present current events you want to share with your readers.

Think your readers might check your site on a mobile device? No problem! Currents makes your site look great on an iPad, iPhone or any other mobile device.

This is not all about this great theme, Currents — so be sure to read about it on the Theme Showcase.

Next up is Debut – a beautifully designed theme by Luke McDonald of Press75.

Debut is a mobile-ready theme custom tailored to present your content in a professional and eye-catching manner. Five beautifully designed post formats provide you the flexibility needed to display media of all types. Musicians may be specially interested in the audio post format which expands into a multi-track playlist. Highlighting specific content couldn’t be easier with Debut’s Home page template which includes an innovative, customizable content slider as well as a featured area that can display in both grid and list styles.

Read about its features in detail in the Theme Showcase!

We’ve recently noticed that a fair number of you have been bringing your tumblelogs over from Tumblr to WordPress.com using one of the variety of Tumblr to WXR conversion tools which exist on the web. We thought you would appreciate an easier way to import your content, so we bring you 3 easy steps to import your content.

Authenticate with Tumblr

To bring your tumblelog’s content to WordPress.com, head to Tools → Import in your WordPress.com dashboard and look for the Tumblr importer. If you don’t already have an account here on WordPress.com then head over and sign up first.

Click the link to get started and then enter the email address you used to sign up to Tumblr, your Tumblr password and click Connect to Tumblr.

Start the Import

The importer will then fetch a list of your blogs and let you pick which one to import. Click Import this blog to get going.

Once you have started, the import progress will be shown on the import page and you will be sent an email when the import is finished. We try super hard to make sure that all your Tumblr content, including your Videos, are imported into your WordPress.com blog. Videos you had uploaded to Tumblr are imported into VideoPress and other embeds are converted to use shortcodes. Sometimes the importer finds an embed it can’t convert and a list of these is included in the import completion email for you to check.

If your Tumblr site has a custom domain (like you.com instead of you.tumblr.com), then you’ll need to disable the custom domain temporarily while the import is processed. You can do this by going to your Tumblr Dashboard, clicking on the Settings button and then un-ticking the “Use a Custom Domain” checkbox:

Then you’ll want to set up Domain Mapping on your WordPress.com blog so that your readers can use the same domain to reach your site as before.

Style Your New Site

WordPress.com supports Post Formats which allow you to distinguish between the different types of content you post on your site. While you wait for your content to be imported why not customize the design of your site by picking one of our post-format-enabled, Tumblelog-ready themes.

If you have any trouble importing your blog  you’re welcome to contact support where one of our Happiness Engineers will be glad to help out. To learn all about WordPress.com’s features, we encourage you to check out our handy tutorial. We also provide comprehensive feature documentation at our support site.

Want to receive WordPress.com notifications instantly, even when you’re not on WordPress.com?

Add the new WordPress.com extension for Chrome and as soon as you get a new follower or a new like on one of your posts, a notification will appear in your browser:

Simply click the icon to view your latest WordPress.com notifications:

Start following new blogs without visiting WordPress.com

The Chrome extension also makes it easy to follow sites from your WordPress.com account by displaying a Follow button whenever you’re browsing a site that has an RSS feed.

Clicking the Follow button will add new posts from the website to your reader, and send you an email each time an update is published. (You can change your default email settings if you like.)

When you visit a WordPress.com site, you’ll notice that the extension icon will turn blue, but keep in mind that you can follow blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, and other services, too.

Quickly post cool stuff you find while browsing the web

Press This is a lightning-fast way to publish content on your blog without ever visiting WordPress.com. Click the WordPress.com extension, then select Press This whenever you find something on the web that you’d like to share on your blog, and a pop-up editor will appear:

Select the blog you’d like to post to, then hit publish to share a link to the site. Your blog will be updated, and you can continue browsing the web from wherever you left off.

If you’d like to publish an excerpt of text along with the link to the site, simply highlight the material with your cursor before clicking Press This:

And it will appear in the editor for you to publish along with the link:

We hope this makes it easier for you to share cool stuff on your blog quickly! If there’s anything you’d like to see in future versions of the extension, be sure to let us know.

Are you addicted to checking your site stats? You are not alone. The stats dashboard has always been one of the most popular admin screens. It’s gratifying to know that people are visiting your place online.

With the WordPress.com front page evolving into a one-stop shop for posting, exploring, following and reading blogs, it seemed natural to put your blog stats there, too.  Stats are becoming more and more about interacting with your readers and other bloggers.

You’ll still see your summary stats and chart on your main dashboard, and the full stats page in your dashboard will remain for a while, but the My Stats tab on the WordPress.com front page will soon become the home for the most comprehensive view of your stats.  Stats will also continue to be available by clicking on the sparkline in the admin bar at the top.

While adding the My Stats tab to the front page, we also gave it an updated look by making the panels regularly spaced, using rounded gravatars for your commenters, and giving it an overall lighter feel:

We’ll be adding even more features to your stats and the WordPress.com front page soon.  We’re working on adding country stats of your visitors, which many of you have requested.

If you’d like to attract more visitors to your site, check out these great resources on boosting your blog readership:

• Learn WordPress.com: Get Famous
• WordPress.com Support: Getting More Traffic

(Note to Jetpack users: Your stats will still be available in your wp-admin dashboard. However, you may still enjoy viewing your stats on WordPress.com.)

As we mentioned last week, you can like and reblog posts directly from your reader, which displays a stream of all the updates published on all the blogs you follow from your WordPress.com account.

We’ve also brought the reblog button back to the toolbar that appears at the top of the screen when you’re logged into WordPress.com. Note that you’ll only see the like and reblog options while you’re looking at individual posts.

For example, you’ll see this on the left side of your toolbar while viewing http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs:

And your toolbar will look like this while you’re browsing the home page of en.blog.wordpress.com:

How does reblogging work?

Reblogging is a quick way to share posts published by other WordPress.com users on your own blog. People have been reblogging others’ posts since blogging started, but our new reblogging system enables authors to retain greater control over their content.

When a post is reblogged, it shows up with a link back to the blog it came from, the first image in the post, an excerpt of the post’s introduction (if it contains text), and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains. It also shows any comments left by the person who reblogged the post:

Reblogs published on blogs you follow will also appear in your reader:

What happens when my posts get reblogged?

An excerpt of your post will be published on the reblogger’s site (with a link back to your original post), and you’ll receive a reblog notification in the post comments (you might need to approve it first):

You’ll also receive an email notification of the reblog.

Do I get credit when someone else reblogs one of my posts?

Absolutely! All reblogs contain a link back to your original post, so the more people reblog your posts, the more likely it is that you’ll attract new visitors (and perhaps new followers, too!).

What happens if I reblog a reblog?

If, for example, Stephane reblogs a WordPress.com announcement on his site and Lori reblogs Stephane’s reblog, Lori only re-publishes any comments Stephane made about the announcement. If Lori wants to share the original announcement, she should reblog the post from en.blog.wordpress.com, not from Stephane’s reblog. But if Stephane leaves a really clever comment, Lori might want to share it by reblogging his reblog on her site.

Can I edit a post I’ve reblogged?

You can go back and edit the comments you left when you reblogged a post, but you cannot edit any parts of the original post excerpt (including the post title). If you like, you can add categories or tags to the post. Reblogs show up under Posts → All Posts in your dashboard, and they can be edited the same way you edit your own posts.

I have made my own personal site http://www.peterjobst.com get the 411 on peter jobst.

visit my friends site, there a New Media Development company

http://www.stauffer.com

and my page

http://www.stauffer.com/about/our-team/peter-jobst-1

Im doing a test with ryanjacobson.com to see what it takes to get ones name on the top of the search indexes.

http://twitter.com/JobstConsulting

Here’s an interesting article about the latest phones on Jobst Consulting http://tinyurl.com/y95tkfr

join me on linked-in
http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterjobst

Our review of the four most desired phones for Christmas:

Nokia N900

Fastest of all four in this lineup, however it has no 3G support. 32GB of memory, expandable to 48GB- so storage will never be an issue here.
It’s got a nice quality camera (photo and video).
Currently it also has a limited number of applications.

Pros:

Debian Linux based smart phone with lots of memory (32GB expandable to 48GB).
Very intuitive, so no Linux knowledge is perfectly alright, though if you are a Linux user (or even better, a Linux power user), the sky is the limit.
Processing power is awesome, if you tend to run a lot of applications at once (camera, web browser, email, notes etc), this will not be a problem!
Beautiful high resolution display

Cons:

Not a whole lot of extra applications available yet (compared to
iPhone, Droid etc.), however if you’re a knowledgeable Linux user, you can get some of the Linux apps {for PCs} to work on this phone- making it very resourceful).
Although it comes with 38GB of memory, only 2GB are allocated
towards applications (again, if you’re into Linux this shouldn’t be a problem as you can resize)

Nokia N97

pros:

Very nice resolution.
Like N900, has quality camera lens
HD 720 video recording
Full QWERTY keyboard
3G, Wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS

Cons:

Responsive with nothing else running, but does not multitask like
N900. Note- this is NOT a multitasking phone.
Clunky touch interface (have to touch the screen harder than other
models on the market, which could cause buyer’s remorse)
Outdated (Symbian) Operating System
Although it comes loaded with apps and features, you have 15 days
of Adobe and Office before you have to pay for licenses (which IMHO
is a shocker when you consider the initial cost of the phone)

HTC Touch Pro 2

Sleek, beautiful looking phone. Designed to fit perfectly in your hand with a larger 3.8 inch hi-res display
for far greater viewing area, this phone is quite impressive!

Pros:

Advanced, responsive touch experience optimized for one handed use
Sleek, large sreen
5MP camera
Windows Mobile 6.1 (can flash to 6.5)
Long battery life

Cons:

Windows Mobile (can be bulky performance wise)

Motorola Droid

The much hyped Droid phone packs a good delivery of features, despite the pointed/box-shaped look.
The 3.7″ display surpasses the iPhone’s and its resolution is full and rich with very impressive graphics.
Performance is adequate, but it’s not a super-phone either. For the price it’s certainly the most bang for the buck (especially if you’re stuck in a contract).

Pros:

Call quality is great
Gorgeous screen
5MP camera with LED flash
Non-plastic casing, much faster processor (unlike the G1)

Cons:

“Flat” keyboard
Camera known to be a little slow
Wifi chip not as good as other models
Touch-screen a bit too sensitive

For more information, check out this side-by-side comparison:

http://www.infosyncworld.com/reviews/cell-phones/compare/?name1=Motorola+Droid&name2=HTC+Touch+Pro2&name3=Nokia+N900&name4=Nokia+N97&compare=Compare

I recently deployed a Fedora 11 server and found that Red Hat keeps on doing themselves up upon each release. I love the new EXT4 support and and planning on benchmarking some speed tests in the future. Stay tuned…. oooohhh ahhh
The installer (Anaconda) continues on with its simple GUI interface and they have added options for downloading updates from the installer. I tried it the first time around but found that is was so slow to download updates and I couldn’t continue on with the installation until they finished. So since I was in a crunch for time I decided to stop the installation and start over and skip the download updates.
Once the server was up I found it had every utility I needed to get the system configured and locked down enough to put on the network securely. I was able to download samba, proftp, and other servers simply through yum.
After that came the mounting of our large storage array. I was hoping to go larger but I ran into a limitation on EXT4 that limits the partition to 16 TB. So oh well I have to live with 16 TB instead of 18. I can use that extra space for virtual drives. The formatting with EXT4 was the same process as EXT3. Very straight forward.
So now came the time to get everything up 2 date. Ahh but we don’t use up2date any longer. Now we us yum. Yum is Linux’s anal retentive twin to Microsoft’s Windows Update so it took a looong time to get all the updates downloaded and installed. I’ve got to find a fast repository for Fedora 11 because it took 8 hours for all the updates up get installed.
But I rebooted in the end and all was well.
Much more fun to come out of this server. I feel Red Hat has done an excellent job.
That’s my personal experience

Initially, the USB drive device or thumb drive was a simple way to copy files from one computer to another. They would be something you would pick up at trade shows that where branded and had the company’s product catalog on it. Now, if you search the internet for USB drives you will find thousands of sites offering USB’s in millions of different forms and molds. You will also see companies that are utilizing this media in various business models and markets world wide. (www.aderra.net) With the increase in available capacity, you can now have movies, music, documents and utilities all on a portable drive that fits your pocket or looks like Yoda. (www.cfgear.com ) The CD and DVD physical media are quickly being eliminated as the reusable, portable and sometimes fashionable USB devices are taking over. I recently had a technical problem that required a USB.
Can a USB device be a boot device? Could it be possible? Yes it is. We were recently contacted by a client who had a laptop that he locked himself out of by incorrectly typing the password Over and Over and Over. He didn’t know the administrator password. Of course this laptop didn’t have a floppy or a CD/DVD drive. All of the new laptop mini’s only have USB drives. We tried everything we could think of to get logged in. We came across a company called Password-reset (http://www.password-reset.com/index.php ). I quickly found that they had a Bootable USB version of their software. I followed the simple instructions to create the bootable content, format the USB and copy the updated content to the USB drive. Using the bootable USB and this software I had the password reset and logged back in quickly.
Pretty slick.

It’s been almost two years since I started running Windows Vista 32bit Business on my Dell Precision Laptop with 2 GB Ram, 2.2 Ghz Intel Centrino processor, with a 128 MB graphic card. When I purchase this laptop I figured it would be a stellar, fast, and enjoyable laptop, but with it running Windows Vista I have just been disappointed and extremely frustrated. I really wondered why Microsoft would release an operating system that is so bloated, buggy, slow and a step backwards from their ever so popular Windows XP Pro.

I really wanted to see what the future for Microsoft is holding and I wanted a peak of what Windows 7 is all about. So I formatted and installed Microsoft’s Windows 7 RC 64bit onto my Dell Laptop. The process was relatively simple (minus the fact that I had to format in order to install the 64 bit version). I downloaded the Windows 7 RC from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/download.aspx which comes as a DVD ISO, burned it to a DVD and booted into the install.

The installation went fast and I could already tell that Microsoft has done their home work on this version. The installation went smooth and my laptop was up and running within and hour. It took a couple more hours to install the updates, I installed some basic applications and then viola, I had a new beautiful Windows 7 Laptop.

The biggest improvement that I have found are in the Aero translucent desktop, the speed of booting and going to sleep, the smoothness of the operating system, and its fast fast fast. While both Vista and Windows 7 share the same kernel Windows 7 is vastly superior.
As an IT professional I rely on Microsoft to perform well on corporate network and up until now I could only recommend Windows XP Pro to my clients. I am extremely excited about the future and my continued partnership with Microsoft. They really got the message that people would not stand for a product like Windows Vista.

So soon Vista will fade into Tech history as another Windows ME and Windows 7 will finally allow us to all move forward. I am very interested in the deployment of Windows 2008 Server with Windows 7 clients as this is going to be a knock out combination.