Peter Jobst

Stuff happens all the time on WordPress.com. You’re blogging, commenting, liking, and following like never before. Every hour a record is broken and someone’s day is made. We’ve always known about your love affair with stats. We like watching numbers grow, too. And we also like to see the events that the numbers represent. We think of Notifications as a magnifier for Stats: you can zoom in to see exactly who did what and then connect with them.

The original Notifications menu first appeared in the WordPress.com toolbar as a small orange button and a stream of activities related to your blogs and comments. It was a good start but we’ve had bigger plans all along. Today we deployed a new toolbar button and, more significantly, a new tab on the WordPress.com home page.

The New Button

The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no number. We axed it out of compassion. It all boils down to how people feel about inboxes. In giving you a notifications stream, the last thing we wanted to do was cause more stress! So we dropped the unread count and now the orange color simply means there are new notes since you last looked. An icon shows the type of your latest notification.  The icon now also refreshes while you’re on a page, no need to reload a page to see new notifications.

You might also notice that unread notes are still white until you open them, which turns them gray. We didn’t entirely remove the concept of read/unread; we just stopped counting them. Feel free to turn them all gray if that’s your thing, or let some notes stay unread. Either way, we won’t pester you with a number.

The New Panel

In case you like to browse back through older notifications, we built a page that lets you do that. Just go to the WordPress.com Notifications panel and scroll to your heart’s content. Are you proud of a certain achievement from last month? Relive old glories as often as you like.

Other than letting you scroll to older notes, the new panel isn’t much different than the one in the toolbar. That will change soon! We have a list of features to add, as well as new notifications to send, that will make the new panel one of your favorite places on WordPress.com.

Today we’re sending one thousand notes every minute (ten million per week) but we want to send more. We have lots of ideas for new notifications. What kind of things would you like to be notified about?

Small Print

These changes are not compatible with Internet Explorer versions earlier than 9. We will devote some time to maintaining backwards compatability as long as it doesn’t delay the development of new features for modern browsers, but we encourage you to upgrade. Meanwhile, the old version of the toolbar will be displayed for older IE browsers.

With the official first day of summer right around the corner, now is a great time to start collecting recipes for your favorite warm-weather treats.

You’ll find endless inspiration by browsing through topics like recipe, grilling, and summer in the WordPress.com Reader, and discover tons of great ideas by exploring our collection of recommended food blogs.

Here are seven mouthwatering recipes from a handful of fantastic blogs that are sure to delight all summer long:

The Patterned Plate

We Call Him Yes! Chef!

The Faux Martha

In Pursuit of More

Just Homemade

Love + Cupcakes

The Craving Chronicles

Do you have an all-time favorite summer recipe? What new recipes do you hope to try out this season?

Now that you’ve been snapping away, you’ll want to build your photographic following. WordPress.com has an excellent photo blogging community, which you can tap into by following these tips and tricks.

Tags, topics, and phloggers, oh my!

Tags work to connect your blog to the larger WordPress.com community, so you can see others who are writing, or photographing, the same subjects as you. By tagging your post as “Photography” or “Black and White,” your posts will be included in the respective Topic page so that other viewers can find your site. If you haven’t added tags to your posts before, you can learn how to do so here.

However, tags can be used for more than just bringing traffic to your site, but as a networking tool as well. As your photo blog grows, taking some time to look at other photo blogging sites can both help you to find inspiration, tips and tricks, and new ideas, as well as put you in contact with your fellow photo blogging compatriots.

You can start following new topics in your WordPress.com reader by going to the WordPress.com Reader and inserting “Photography” or any related tag into the “Add a Topic” text box.

Building Connections

One of the best ways to boost readership and build a following is to do the same in return. This means that when you see a photo blogger that you like, comment on their post! Comments and pingbacks help to create connections between bloggers and their readers.

Blogging is about community and sharing, and this sets the tone. Just recently, I wrote a blog post inspired by a post on 1000AwesomeThings.com. I linked back, and hopefully turned a bunch of new readers onto the site. Because there was a decent amount of traffic sent to his blog, or maybe because he received a pingback, Neil Pasricha then came and commented on my blog! This is the author of two #1 International Bestselling books! I was so thrilled. I emailed Neil to thank him, and that began a back and forth, where I was able to ask him his blogging tips.

From Bestselling Author Shares 3 Tips for Building Your Blog Audience

In browsing other photo blogs, you may see that many photographers add information about their camera and set up to each post. Generally, photo bloggers will include the camera they used to shoot the image, the aperture and f-stop information, and the lens. This is a great way to explain both the tools you’re using as a photographer and another method of contributing to the photo blogging community by sharing your experiences.

Protecting Your Work

Through consistent posting, commenting on other blogs, and tagging your posts, you can continue to build your photo blogging readership. As you get your work out there, it’s also important to make sure that it’s protected. For photo bloggers on WordPress.com, we recommend that you watermark your photos. This means adding a copy right, such as “© Erica’s Photography,” directly to your image with a photo editing program. Watermarking your photos helps to prevent others from taking your images and pretending they’re their own.

If you’re interested in licensing your work as well, the Creative Commons license is an excellent way to both protect your work, while still contributing to the photographic community as a whole. Creative Commons licenses establish you as the owner of your product, but still allow for others to use your work. For example, among the various Creative Commons licenses, you can state that anyone is allowed to use your work as long as it’s attributed to you and they’re not using it for commercial purposes. Better yet, they can follow all of the above rules, and may also build on your work, similar to sampling when it comes to music beats.

Now that your photo blog is well on it’s way, don’t forget to stay tuned for more tips and tricks with our final post on Photo Blogging 101. (Missed the first post? You can check it out here.)

Trying out new themes is fun, isn’t it? I think so! The thing about changing my blog’s theme that has traditionally bugged me, though, is the 10-15 minutes right after you click “Activate” when you have to rush through uploading a new custom header, maybe resetting the background, fiddling with a new sidebar configuration, and other transition adjustments so that people won’t see your site in a half-switched state. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to that — I don’t like to leave things half-painted either — but luckily for me we’ve just finished a new feature to improve this very thing. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to our new theme customization tool* and say good-bye to half-painted websites.

The customizer provides a live preview as you play with Appearance settings, and can be used to customize a live preview of a new theme before you activate it, or to make changes to your existing theme. It allows you to edit the site title and tagline, custom headers and backgrounds, navigation placement, front page selection, and other options that vary by theme. It works with both free themes and premium themes. Shall we take a test drive?

Imagine you want to change themes. As you are browsing on the Themes screen, notice the new “Live Preview” link and click it.

You’re taken to the customizer. As you make changes, the preview in the right-hand part of the screen updates live so you can get things just right.

When things look the way you want them, click the Save & Activate button in the lower left (or Save & Purchase if it is a premium theme) and boom, your new theme and custom settings are live!

You can also use the live preview feature to customize your existing theme. On the themes screen in your dashboard, you’ll now see a “Customize” button that launches the previewer.

And don’t worry, you still have access to the regular screens for adjusting these and other features. Just use the navigation for the Appearance section like you always have.

So, please try it out, and let us know what you think in the comments! I hope you like  it as much as we do. If you hit any snags, let us know in the forums so that we can help.

But wait, there’s more!

Yes, more! Here are a couple of smaller additions also aimed at making it easier to customize your site and make it look just the way you want it.

• When choosing a custom header image, you can now choose from your Media Library. I looove this, because I have uploaded the same header image at least a dozen times to re-use it when I changed themes.
• For themes that support it, custom headers now have a recommended size rather than a fixed required size, so you can be flexible with the height and width of your header images. I love this too, because sometimes I really like a theme but the header image I want to use is taller or shorter than the theme design allows. Now, the power is in your hands to decide! The goal is for as many themes as possible on WordPress.com to support this feature, but you can see if we’ve added it to yours yet by checking the list of supported themes.

And one last thing…
If you know HTML, you can now add links and a little bit of formatting to your image captions. This is great for people who want to link a photo credit to the photographer’s blog or to a Creative Commons license, or want to make some text bold or italicized. At some point in the future we may add a WYSIWYG option, but for now you’ll just need to learn some basic HTML tags if you want to use this one. Just type the HTML right into the caption field in the image uploader, and your links will appear like magic. So this:

becomes this:

I’ve been wanting this feature for four years now, so I’m really excited.

Have fun with these new features!

*Fun Fact: While this feature was in development, it was originally conceived as a wizard, or guided walkthrough. We codenamed it Gandalf.

There’s something about this time of year that always makes me wistful for the good old days—the simpler times, if you will—when all that mattered were family, friends, and a whole lotta blogging about everything under the sun. I miss those days, don’t you?

Fear not, my fellow blogging friends. We’ve got you all covered today with a theme that will make you want to stop time and write about everything in your lives until you can’t write anymore.

A Simpler Time, designed by Denise Chandler, is a theme that’s beautiful, bold, and memorable—pretty much exactly like the types of stories you’ll be writing alongside it on your WordPress.com blog:

It’s a traditional blog theme in the sense that it offers everything you’ve come to expect from a WordPress theme—widgets, custom menus, and custom headers, and more—and it also looks incredible. If you’d also like to mix it up with different colors and fonts, try the Custom Design upgrade. You can do all of that and more.

A Simpler Time is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Update (May 17): Since this feature went live we’ve had a bunch of feedback and it looks like following comments by default is not a good fit for a lot of bloggers (and their readers) after all. We looked at a few different options, but for now we’ve just changed things back to how they were before. To follow a conversation, make sure you check the box when you post a comment.

It’s now much easier for you and your commenters to keep track of the conversations you’re involved in across WordPress.com. Some recent tests have shown that by subscribing commenters to new comments by default, they are more likely to stay engaged and come back and comment more on your blog. With that knowledge, we’ve changed the default comment following behavior to help you get more conversations going on your blog.

We made the initial changes last week and after great feedback from you we just launched an update. Here’s how it works:

• By default, posting a comment will now subscribe you to receive follow-up comments via email for that specific post, keeping you updated on the conversation. This is indicated by the checked box in the comment form.
• If you have a WordPress.com account, you now have a global setting to change this so that by default you will not be subscribed. If you don’t have an account, then you can create one over here.
  
• If you don’t want email notifications for a thread, just uncheck the box when you post your comment. If you’ve disabled the feature, you can also subscribe to a specific thread by checking the box in the comment form.
  
• There is also a link at the bottom of every notification email that will allow you to change your subscription options.
  

If you’d like to find out all of the details about how this works, we’ve also updated our support documentation about following comments.

We’ve added a user showcase where you can view stunning customizations made by people just like you. From complete redesigns with CSS to adding pizzazz with Custom Fonts to clever use of options like background and header, this showcase will spark your imagination and inspire creativity.

Discover details about what each showcase blog is doing with WordPress.com themes and customizations by clicking a thumbnail to see a colophon-style list of credits on the left.

We’ve also updated footer links so blog owners can show off the types of customizations they’ve made and visitors can learn more by clicking the “Customized” link in WordPress.com footers. A “Customized” link will appear next to the theme name for blogs that are using Custom Design tools like fonts or CSS.

Things we like to see when looking for showcase-worthy customizations are blogs with good traffic, beautiful design, well-written articles or stunning images, recent content updates, and involvement helping out in our CSS Customization forum.

Be inspired, customize your blog and make it that perfect place for your creations.

Spring is in the air. With the weather warming up, now is a great time to get started on a photo blog. Creating a photo blog is a wonderful introduction to blogging on WordPress.com or an opportunity to refresh your current site. Ready to get started? You can sign up for a new blog right over here.

Getting started

Photo blogs, sometimes called phlogs, use pictures instead of words. While many photo bloggers choose a type of photo that they want to focus on, such as portraits, others use their photo blog to document their life’s events. Photo blogs come in a variety of styles, including those that focus on vacation photos or even snapshots of friends. With images, we can capture moments in our life in a way that sometimes words cannot.

When starting a photo blog, you’ll want to choose a theme with a wider content area to help to showcase your photos at full size. Similarly, choosing a theme that is minimalistic helps to reduce any noise that may detract from the focus on your photography. Popular photo blogging themes on WordPress.com include Nishita, Duotone, and Modularity Lite. Looking for some inspiration? Be sure to check out the photo blogs below or more of our recommended photo blogging sites for examples of photo-friendly layouts.

Want to add photo flair to your site without starting a whole new blog? Adding a photo blogging category to an existing blog is a great way to revamp your site. In fact, you may consider doing “Friday Phlogs” or a similar weekly special to help incorporate these tips consistently into your current site.

Tools of the Trade

What do you need to get started? Nothing but a camera and an internet connection. Photo blogging with a smart phone is growing increasingly simple, particularly with the Quick Photo button in the WordPress for iOS and Android apps where you can point, shoot, and publish. If you’re already a pro at the WordPress apps, you may be interested in taking a look at Camera+ and Flickr, which allow you to automatically share your photos to your WordPress.com blog.

If you choose to use a more traditional camera, there are few tips to keep in mind when uploading your photos to ensure they represent the full quality of your original picture.

• Don’t resize your photos after uploading them to WordPress.com. Instead, leave your images at full size so we can see your work in all of it’s glory. WordPress.com will automatically generate the appropriate dimensions for you.
• Make edits to your photos before uploading them.
• Save your photos as JPEGs. JPEGs are the best format for photos online. You can also use PNG if you’re looking to add a transparent image to your site.

Welcome to our series on photo blogging! Stay tuned for more tips and tricks over the next few weeks.

Happy Thursday! We’ve added some exciting new themes to our ever-growing collection, and we’re happy to tell you all about them.

First out of the oven is…Just Desserts. Yep, that’s a theme! Designed by Andy Rutledge, Just Desserts is a deliciously stylish premium theme that’s perfect for blogs centered on food.

With its responsive, single-column layout and unique presentation of images and posts on the front page, Just Desserts gives you a delectable canvas on which your mouthwatering photos and text can really shine — even when viewed on smaller mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

There’s much more to be said about Just Desserts, and we’ve provided all of the tasty details on the Theme Showcase.

If all of the dessert goodness left you breathless, we can supply you with some…Oxygen. Yep, that’s also a theme. Although, it may also leave you breathless because it’s simply stunning.

Designed by DevPress, Oxygen is a minimal yet beautifully crafted free magazine theme. With the help of your amazing images, the crisp and well-balanced design will transform your blog into an online magazine that looks sharp and professional.

Oxygen contains many features and customization options, including a showcase page template with a featured slider, featured images, seven widget areas, and a carefully tailored responsive layout. To read about these features and more, you know where to head — the Theme Showcase.

Happy blogging! We look forward to seeing what you bake, photograph, and write, armed with these great new themes.

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.