But one thing that remains consistently wonderful throughout all of his films is the music that fills them.  I bet Mr. Anderson made some killer mixtapes for his high school girlfriends. In recent weeks, I’ve found myself putting the soundtracks of his films on heavy rotation.  I’m not exactly sure why.  Probably the not-too-soft, not-too-rough sound that makes them perfectly kid friendly.

So I decided to compile the best tracks from these soundtracks into a single playlist.  Enjoy “Take dead aim on the rich boys” over at boombox.shinynewtoy.com.

You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich. But here’s my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it. Thank you.

- Henry Blume

Contributing to the WordPress Community

When Holly and I formed Shiny New Toy earlier this year, we talked a lot about all the people we have learned from over the years.  Included in that discussion was the community of people involved with WordPress.  Holly and easily agree that our favorite online community are the developers, designers, hackers, and evangelists involved with the WordPress software.  That community has shared so much knowledge and has never hesitated to share their knowledge with anyone interested.  It’s a big factor (in fact it’s probably the biggest factor) in making WordPress one of the best solutions for publishing content onto the web.  Holly and I felt a desire to do more to participate in this community and so, we came up with the idea of WP Screencasts. It’s another effort in our continuing meme of  ”giving back.”

Another reason we love WordPress so much is how much thought has been put into the user interface of the WordPress dashboard.  We’ve encountered many web-based content management systems over the years and the usability of the WordPress admin screens outshines that of competing CMS packages.  However, we continue to run into challenges with teaching content managers how to use WordPress to add, edit, and manage online content.  It’s not that training users on WordPress is impossible, we’ve just found that different people learn in different ways.  Some folks require a significant amount of hands-on training and we’re happy to provide that.  Other folks do well with reading the information found in resources such as the WordPress Codex and books like WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

What we found missing for WordPress users was a comprehensive set of video based training content for learning how to use administer content in a self-hosted WordPress based websites.  WP Screencasts aims to fill that gap and complement WordPress learning resources already available on the web and in print.

A Living Resource

Our initial set of videos that we are launching with is just the beginning.  We’ll continue to expand by adding additional screencasts over time.  If there is a task that isn’t covered in a video here, let us know and we’ll do our best to include it in the future.

WP Screencasts can be found by visiting http://wpscreencasts.com

To play a little six degrees of WordPress separation…

1. The WordPress Charity Scavenger Hunt benefits 826 Valencia
2. 826 Valencia was founded by Dave Eggers
3. Dave Eggers won the 2008 TED Prize and had his wish granted as part of winning the prize
4. Dave Eggers wishes that everyone get involved with a public school and to chronicle the involvements, the web site Once Upon A School was created
5. Once Upon A School was designed and developed built by Holly (while working for Hot Studio)
6. Holly used WordPress to get it done

MeltingSpot, a free email newsletter and website, is an Internet version of the American “melting pot” society – a place where Americans and immigrants come together to close the culture gap. Read MeltingSpot for advice on how to survive and thrive in the U.S., at work and in the community!

Not being a web programmer or developer, Danielle was interested in a simple way to manage her web content without having to resort to using Dreamweaver or reading HTML.  WordPress to the rescue!  But at the same time, she wasn’t interested in having MeltingSpot appear as a blog.  In addition to developing a custom WordPress theme, we showed Danielle you how to  use WordPress features, such as excerpts and category templates, to have her magazine style website content appear exactly how she wishes.  We also included some banner ad management utilities so that she can insert and set ad rotations from within the WordPress admin dashboard. Finally, we integrated email newsletter subscription utilities.

MeltingSpot is located at http://www.meltingspot.com