Matt Richardson from MAKE magazine makes a USB device button, which when pressed, inserts an alternative word to “awesome”. He demonstrates its use inside the WordPress post editor =)

Alex Denning is putting together an unbiased and unaffiliated resource compiling the best hosts for WordPress. To get the most accurate results, Alex put up a questionnaire for (self-hosted) WordPress users to share their real-life experiences. This is a great opportunity to share your hosting insights and as a bonus enter to win a six-month membership to the WooThemes Theme Club!

Congratulations to Helen Hou-Sandi for winning a free printed copy of Digging into WordPress. Here’s what she likes most about the WP 3.1 update:

Love the admin bar – makes managing one of thousands of pages/posts on a multisite install a breeze. With some custom adding and subtracting of items and things like the Snack Bar, almost everything I need to do while logged in is one click away.

You can read what other people are saying about WordPress 3.1 in the comments of the announcement post. Again, congrats to Helen for winning – your new book is on the way!

WordPress alchemist Jeff Morris turned my custom login/register/password code into a fully functional toolkit featuring tons of awesome:

• Client-Side & Server-Side Validation
• Use as widget, shortcode, or template tags
• Simple CAPTCHA with tamper-proof encryption
• Smart Register Tab

ZB Toolkit also includes a couple of bonus “home-brewed utilities” to make it all sweet. Demo available at the plugin home page in the sidebar – Check it out!

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

As mentioned, the v3.0 printed books are out of stock, but we’re updating DigWP for WordPress 3.1 and plan on printing more books soon. In response to requests, we set up a waiting list for people who want to be notified when the new (3.1) printed books are available.

Empower your visitors to submit posts and images from anywhere on your site and from anywhere on the page. User-submitted posts may include tags, categories, post title, and author name & URL. Submitted-post status can be set to draft, publish immediately, or publish after some number of approved posts. User Submitted Posts (USP) also handles multiple image uploads, custom URL redirects, and much more. And the easy USP Settings Page makes setting up and fine-tuning a breeze.

He’s posted a bunch of good, specific, detailed articles on WordPress lately on 456 Berea St. Worth checking out.

Totally agree:

…people feel more comfortable hacking PHP did and still to this day.

Seriously?

…if I had a dollar every time a significant and loyal TypePad and Movable Type customer confided in me that an employee of Automattic cold called them to encourage and entice them to switch to WordPress I would have quit a rich man.

My opinion:

• Themes are just a folder with of handful of files. That’s easy to understand and play with.
• The UI is awesome.

I think WP Candy is really killing it lately being a great source of breaking quality WordPress news, interviews, and other articles. Now they have an iPhone app they developed in-house to bring all the content to you that way. They are rolling it out “reverse” style, where for two weeks it’s $5.99 then later it drops to $0.99, so it’s an opportunity for the community to opt-in to paying more to support the site, which is neat, especially considering their crazy no advertising policy.

MediaElements.js is an open source jQuery-based project (which I use and like) which allows you to use HTML5 video and audio in any browser all the way back to IE 6. It tests if the browser supports HTML5. If yes, it uses that. If no, it falls back to displaying the media through Silverlight or Flash. Regardless of what it uses, the UI is always consistant.

Now available as a WordPress plugin to make it even easier. Just use simple shortcodes to link up the video and specify what options you want (e.g. autoplay, fullscreen, etc).

Congratulations to all 10 of our Holiday Giveaway Contest Winners! Thank you to everyone who entered (click through to see who won)!

Without touching a line of code, you can harness the power of Ajax to boost performance, improve usability, and fill your site with win.

I created a course for Lynda.com which is an 4.5 hour, in-depth step-by-step tutorial course on creating a WordPress theme from start to finish. We start from nothing and consider our clients needs and CMS capabilities, then to go Photoshop, then to HTML/CSS, then to a WordPress theme. We go a bit further talking about topics like custom fields, JavaScript, and plugins. There is a lot here! Lynda.com subscriptions start at $25/month with no long-term commitment.

WordPress is biggest on all accounts, but when you look at dollars spent, WordPress is only just about 50%.