And I just read a great post on 10 Free WordPress themes.  There’s some really appealing options in that list.  Despite the fact that we’ve been digging into Thesis lately – we’re using it to rebuild this very site and I recently built Ticketfly’s site with Thesis – and we’re liking it, Thesis is a premium theme that will cost you some dollars. Are those dollars worth it?  That depends. 

If there’s one free theme mentioned in that post that I would personally recommend, it would be Thematic.  Especially if you are building a WordPress site that will have a more traditional page and subpage information architecture instead of posts. 

And as a side note, if you are looking to waste some time today, check out the WordPress Download Counter. Number of downloads have increase by 1,000 since I started writing this post. AWESOME!

The video below provides a quick intro to the new dashboard coming in WordPress 2.7.  The changes to the dashboard are dramatic and will require adjustments from even the most experienced WordPress users.  I will say that the automatic upgrade feature in the beta works smoothly.  Keeping WordPress sites up to date should be easier than ever. 

There’s a number of other items coming with version 2.7 as well, including:

Upgrades and installs over secure FTP
Add media without creating post
Quick Edit inline editing
Shortcuts menu
Comment reply from admin
XMLRPC Comments API
Revised Dashboard
Comment threading and paging
API additions
Navigation expand/collapse in two directions
Bulk editing of posts
HTTPOnly Cookies
Automatic upgrade
Screen Options to hide/show modules/columns on screens
Plugin browser/installer
Inline PHPdoc documentation
QuickPress
New design/layout
Drag and drop on dashboard and post screen
Sticky posts

Event Details:
PodCamp + WordCamp Hawaii
When: October 24-25, 2008
Where: Hawaii Convention Center (Honolulu, Hawaii)
PodCamp + WordCamp website | Full WordCamp Schedule

And for those of you that aren’t lucky enough to be in Hawaii this weekend, you can follow along at the Official PodCamp/WordCamp Hawaii live stream.

Anyway… Now in it’s thrid year, WordCamp anticipated the all the new attendees by holding it at the super new UCSF campus in Mission Bay. It was the first event I’ve been to there and I can see why I see more and more conferences fitting over this space. It was unreal… you would have never know that you were surrounded by traffic, freeway entrances and warehouses. The only real hint that you were in SF was that you could see the tops of downtown buildings and AT&T Park from the courtyard. There was definitely a lot offer this year. The event was split into 2 tracks this year, one for typical users and another for developers. And since I’m a little of both, I had to separate myself between the two. It did get a little difficult to choose at times… like was I really suppose to go to a session about secure coding when Ben and his LOLcats were talking upstairs? Sorry Mark. Anyway, I saw that John Pozadzides was taping everything so hopefully that is out soon so I can catch up. There was also a Genius Bar (like Apple) to help people with their WP questions. I didn’t help out this year, but it looked to be a success so maybe next time.

Some other highlights:

• Lorelle insisting we continue to break WP – Lorelle is so amazing, I’m so glad we have someone like her in our community. I’ll do my best!
• Andy and the state of BuddyPress – I can’t wait for this to come out later this year
• Matt and the state of the Word
• Crazy Horse, 2.7 and WP user testing – I’m not really convinced eye tracking was necessary but Matt said they got a good deal and the results look great.
• Chuck Lewis, the SEO Rapper’s Exclusive WP Rap

Things wrapped up with a great party at Pete’s Tavern – Tron and Hackers on the screen, Heather and her DJ skillz, and of course my fav… free Guinness. All in all it was great to catch up with new friends and from what I remember I some how voulenteered to help out with WordCamp Hawaii so stay tuned on that one.

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

This isn’t a list of the best plugins out there.  It is simply a list of plugins which are installed every time we deploy a WordPress site.  Actually, most of them are plugins that help out WordPress admins and editors. 

Customizable Post Listings
I’ve heard more than one WordPress ninja refer to this plugin as the Swiss Army knife of WP plugins.  What it does it allow you to quickly include lists of recent posts, recent comments, random posts, and other types of lists.  It’s inevitable that somewhere in your site design that you’ll want to include a list like this.

Dublin Core for WordPress
Another plugin that easily optimizes your site for search engines by inserting the Dublin Core metadata as meta tags in your posts and pages. 

The Excerpt Reloaded
Expands the options in using content excerpts in your themes. 

Feedburner FeedSmith
Priceless if you are using Feedburner to monitor your RSS feeds.  Which you should be. 

Google XML Sitemaps
Help optimize your web site for search engines.  The plugins I love most provide a ton of useful functionality without actually having to do a lot, if any, configuration.  Just install and you’re done.

One Click Plugin Updater
Keeping WordPress sites updated used to be a nightmare.  Seemed like every time I logged into the WordPress dashboard, I was informed that I had out of date plugins.  While that still seems to be the case, the One Click Plugin Updater actually makes the process of keeping plugins up to date painless.  Does what it says it does – updates all your plugins with a single mouse click. Eliminates the painfully repetitive process of downloading, unzipping, and uploading updates of your installed plugins one by one.

Search Everything
Expands the search functionality of WordPress to include more than just search of blog posts.  If you are utilizing WordPress as a a CMS, this plugin is an absolute must.

WordPress Database Backup
Does exactly what you think it does.  The beauty of this plugin is that you can use it to configure automated weekly backups of your DB.  Quite honestly, this plugin is mission critical.

What are your essential WordPress plugins?

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

So… what’s the deal? WordPress for the iPhone lets you write, edit, and publish posts to you blogs (yup, blogs with an “s”). It supports both wordpress.org and wordpress.com. What’s also pretty cool is that you can upload photos either from your existing camera library or just snap on the fly and post. I can see this becoming really handy when I get my “What’s Holly Eating Now?” photoblog* off the ground. Actually most of the features are perfect for those quick, “check who I just ran into at [insert conference name here]” posts.

How am I going to use the app? Honestly, I probably won’t be doing a lot of writing from it. This is more of a shortcoming of the iPhone itself, but can you imagine typing up a 700+ word post entirely on the iPhone keyboard? I can barely handle 140 characters for twitter. Auto-complete, spelling and plus that lack of copy and paste for links, you can see where this is going… But if you have small fingers and are master with the touch keyboard, go for it. I can’t handle the keyboard on the iPhone, so I doubt there will be any local drafts for me. However, I can see myself editing existing drafts and publishing on the fly.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the app:

Overall I’m pretty impressed and can’t wait for any additions/updates. I’m hoping for more advanced admin feautres in the next release, like post/comment moderation. If you want to check out more screenshots go here or you can download the app now.

*Sidenote about the photoblog: Over the last couple of years, I noticed that people have a tendency to take photos of me while I’m eating… how awesome would it be to have all that on record.

Web Hosting: Dreamhost

Having used Dreamhost for a few years now, we were pretty proficient with their services and the Dreamhost admin panel.  Additionally, we find them pretty cooperative folks to work with.  The debate over who is the best web hosting company is a heated one.  Ask 10 different people who the best hosting provider is and you’ll probably get 10 different answers.  There certainly may be better providers out there than Dreamhost.  But it doesn’t matter, we like Dreamhost, they’re cool to us, and we’re sticking with them.

Total annual cost for unlimited web site hosting: $320

Public web site: WordPress 2.5

Of course we’re using WordPress to power to our public site.  One of the reasons Holly and I continue to work together is our fondness for WordPress and especially the user community. Simply put, we think its the best online communications platform available today.

Total expense: $0

Email and Calendar Services: Google Apps

Email and calendaring.  Two critical parts of any office infrastructure, virtual or not.  Also, one of those areas where it didn’t make much sense for us to spend time futzing with the best solution.  Sure, using Google Apps means all your data is running thru Google’s servers, but I can live with that.  Maybe we shouldn’t trust Google, but we do.

Total expense: $0

Intranet: Google Sites

Originally, we were using pbWIki and in many ways it is still a superior Wiki.  But when Google made Site available, it made sense as we were already using Google Apps for Your Domain

Total expense: $0

Voice Services: Grand Central + our cell phone plans

Yup.  Grand Central is another Google service.  But it’s super flexbile.  Grand Central provides  you with a single phone number to do what you want with.  You can set it to go straight to voicemail, you can set it to ring on a number of other phone number.  You can switch up these preferences at will.  It’s the Swiss Army knife of phone numbers.

Total expense for GrandCentral: $0
Total monthly cost for cell phone plans: $125

Business Cards: Moo.com

To me bootstrapping means finding solutions that allow remove some of the thinking for you, allowing you to focus on what’s most important.  Your business card is definitely one of those items which you could dwell upon and over analyze for weeks.  But your business card is not critical once you have something with your contact info on it to hand out.  Enter Moo Cards. 

Total expense for 200 cards: $25

Note: We’ve since replace our Moo Cards with custom designed cards printed at Overnight Prints.  Moo Cards are great and we love them.  But their cute, little size is both a strength and a weakness.  Sure, they’re awfully adorable, but when you place them in a stack of other cards you gathered a conference, they are prone to sliding out and ending up on the floor when you gather the stack. That’s no good. 

Virtual Presentations: Google Presentations

The cool thing about Google presentations isn’t that you can use it as a replacement for PowerPoint.  No, the coolest thing is that you can use it a replacement for WebEx.  Google presentations allows you to share your presentation with your audience even if they don’t have a Google account.  You can share your presentation in a remote control format, so your audience sees the slides as you click through them.

Total expense: $0

Invoicing: FreshBooks

While most other decisions we made were pretty easy, choosing a solution for invoicing was a tough one between FreshBooks and Blinksale.  For pure invoicing, both make excellent solutions.  But in the end, we decided that FreshBooks provided us with some additional bookeeping solutions (like time tracking) that could take us to to places that Blinksale simply wouldn’t. 

Freshbooks has an initial 3 client package that is free.  Using Freshbooks to manage up to 25 clients is $14 per month.  Quite honestly, after 25 clients, you might want to look into outsourcing to dedicated accountant to keep your books.

Monthly expense: $14

Project Collaboration: WordPress MU

Most people opt for Basecamp in this category.  And that makes a fine choice.   But what we’ve found in the past is that it tries to do too much and our clients find it overwhelming to the point that it paralyzes them and they avoid participation.  What clients really want to know about their project is what is going on with it.  So we modified WordPress MU with the Prologue Theme so that our clients can easily log in and see the latest activity.  It’s quick, easy, and without all the complex barriers to participation that Basecamp seems to come with.

Total expense: $0

Grand Totals

So we have about $350 in annual costs.  And $144 in monthly cost.  Over the course of a year, that’s a grand total of $2078.  Not too bad.