It’s been a while (in fact, it’s been several months..) since I last posted and declared my urge to become a more active blogger. As much as I really want to blog more regularly, I’m finding that free time is hard to come by these days! However, I have been keeping up with my RSS feeds and bookmarking those that I think I’ll go back to. To get my blogging back on track and to start things off, I’ve compiled a list of inspirational and helpful WordPress sources. I hope the links in this post are useful to you!

Inspiration: Wordpress Design/Usage

• 30 Untypical WordPress Sites | Web Designer Wall
• 25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS | Noupe
• 11 Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress | Design M.ag
• Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices | Smashing Magazine
• WordPress Gallery | We Love WP
• Showcasing the Best WordPress Sites on the Internet | WPInspiration

Resources: Wordpress Themes

• 100 Amazing Free Wordpress Themes for 2009 | Smashing Magazine
• The 50 Best Premium WordPress Themes | Design Reviver
• Download “Gallery”: A Free WordPress Theme | Smashing Magazine
• 40 Stylish, Minimal and Clean Free Wordpress Themes | Speckyboy
• The Top 7 Quality Free WordPress Themes Released in February 2009 | 2experts Design
• 140+ Brilliant Free Wordpress Themes Around | instantShift
• Free Theme: Magazeen. Style & Functionality in one Theme, now on Smashing Magazine | Function
• 15 High Quality Free Premium WordPress 2.7 Themes | Noupe
• 100 Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes | Back to Essentials

Resources: Wordpress Plugins

• 13 Beneficial Wordpress Plugins For Your Design Blog | The Design Cubicle
• 10 WordPress Plugins for New Blogs | ProBlogger
• 12 Wordpress Plugins to Display and Highlight Code within your Blog | Speckyboy
• 10 Wordpress Plugins We Cannot Live Without | Harkins Creative
• The Power of WordPress and jQuery: 25+ Useful Plugins & Tutorials | Noupe
• 25 Great WordPress Plugins! | TechZoomIn
• 24 plugins that I currently use on my blog and why you should use them too | HowToMakeMyBlog
• 17 Really Useful Wordpress Plugins That Probably Are Essential | SmashingApps
• Top 5 Twitter plugins to incorporate into your blog | HowToMakeMyBlog
• Top 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins ever | HowToMakeMyBlog

Tutorials, Wordpress Hacks, Code Snippets, and Techniques

• Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress | Smashing Magazine
• Quick and Easy Code Snippets for Wordpress | Arbenting
• 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress | Noupe
• 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks | Smashing Magazine
• 10 awesome .htaccess hacks for WordPress | Cats Who Code
• Top 50 Wordpress Tutorials | Nettuts+
• 15 Useful Wordpress Tricks to Make Your Theme Even Better | For the Lose
• 20 WordPress Tricks to Improve Your Blog | Design M.ag
• Numbering your comments, pingbacks, trackbacks or all | WP Engineer
• Make the Move from FeedBurner to Google | Pro Blog Design
• Create a Custom WordPress Plugin From Scratch | Nettuts+
• My Wordpress Cheat Sheet | Graphic Rating
• Info: How to Style Nested Comments in WP 2.7 | Blog Perfume
• Building Custom WordPress Theme | Web Designer Wall
• Add Widget-ready Sidebars to Wordpress Footers | Blogging Sueblimely
• How to: Style author comments in WordPress 2.7 | Wp Recipes
• Secretly “Test Drive” a WordPress Theme | WebDazzling
• 10 Killer WordPress Hacks | WebDazzling

Tips

• The Ultimate WordPress Guide For The Absolute Beginner Part 1 | Elite By Design
• 9 settings I always adjust as soon as I install a new WordPress blog | HowToMakeMyBlog
• 10 Things to do After Installing Wordpress | Pro Blog Design
• 13 Tips for Working with WordPress on Client Sites | Design M.ag
• 13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for MAX Performance | Noupe
• 10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress | Smashing Magazine
• Wordpress Security Tips | Lost In Search

Other Posts to Check Out

• WORDPRESS GOD: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog | Mashable

I’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave me a message below if you have any questions, comments, or any other links to add to my list. Look out for other posts from me in the future by subscribing to my RSS feed, and make sure you follow me on Twitter for my latest finds!

I hope everyone’s new year was great (I know I’m a few days late..)! Much of the time during my winter holiday was spent moving my hosted files over to Media Temple and designing a logo for JeffStyle. I’ve imported all my blog entries from labs.jefflindesign over to this one, which was extremely easy thanks to the great import/export functions in WordPress! I’ve also tweaked my blog design a bit, and I’m not completely content with the entire setup, so I’ll be modifying the design from time to time to try new things out.

As 2009 has already begun, I’ve decided that I’m going push myself to be a more active blogger! I hope that will inspire myself (and maybe even others) to push my skills further and also allow me to expand my network with more talented people in the industry.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my new RSS feed (via FeedBurner), and follow me on Twitter.

As attending FITC in Toronto for the first time last year was a life changing experience, this year I bought my super early bird ticket, in hopes of another great event. And it was. In fact, in the past year I feel that I’ve advanced pretty far in terms of knowledge related to the industry (a lot of it thanks to Matt Wright from Rokkan, Adam Barnum, and Jason Arena as well as my other professors from RIT New Media), and I’ve had a lot of enlightenment from the websites of many of the speakers that were present at FITC; it made each and every presentation that I went to all the more valuable.

This year, the amount of RIT New Media students that attended the event has almost doubled, and so we definitely didn’t get as lost in the crowd – in fact, we were the crowd! (at many of the sponsored parties, at the least! ) It’s good to see more of the underclassmen there at the event, taking advantage of both the student pricing and the close distance that Toronto is to our school. I’m sure a majority of them enjoyed the event and were inspired by the speakers.

On Sketchnotes: In my last post, I had written about Mike Rohde’s inspirational sketchnotes from sxsw. Sketchnotes are hard. Whilst sitting at Jason ‘JTed’ Theodore’s creative presentation, How To B.S.(BrainStorm) Better, I attempted to take sketchnotes, but I found that often JTed was speaking too quickly for me to actually take notes neatly. I ended up re-sketchnoting the notes from his presentation, which ended with the result below:

Next time I’ll probably have a regular pad to jot down my notes, and rewrite/sketchnote them after the presentations. I also noticed that, at the more technical lectures, there were less to actually sketch out, hence the two liner at the end that simply was a url to Colin Moock’s lectures (the url’s actually moock.org, and not his full name colinmoock.org).

Some of the other notable Presentations I attended were:
Si Scott - Challenging Imagination
Mike Downey – Adobe Keynote
Erik Natzke – Beyond the Knowledge: TheArt of Playing
Mario Klingemann – The Pixel Whisperer
GMUNK – GMUNKICKDOWN 08
Ralph Hauwert – Flash 2D & 3D Effects
Scott Hansen - ISO50:Blending Analogue & Digtial
Ryan Honey & Orion Tait – How Buck Goes About Making Commercials & Stuff
David Eriksson – North Kingdom – An Inside View
Jarnes Eberhardt - 2D Barcodes for Mobile Devices
Brett Forsyth – Building Multi-Touch Interfaces with Flash
Grant Skinner – My Favourite Things

Unfortunately, I missed the last three presentations, but I had hoped to watch/listen to Group 94, The Ronin & Dstrukt, and Robert Hodgin. All of the presentations I was able to attend, though, were really informational and I enjoyed them a lot. Overall this year I think it was definitely better than last, I’m really looking forward to going to FITC and other conferences like that in the future!

thanks for the linkups!:
jted!
jonezy

A few weeks ago I had been surfing the net and found an inspirational drawing that was just drawn in a moleskine notebook ~ it was then that I impulsively ordered some moleskine sketchbooks off ebay (for cheap!) in hopes of finding new ways to being creative and inspiring myself. I received them in about a week but I’ve been busy working on new media team project stuff and enjoying this rare sunny Rochester weather, so I haven’t opened them or looked at the stack of moleskines sitting on the corner of my desk. This morning, while surfing WeHeartIt, I came upon Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes(pictured above) from the SXSWi 2008 conference. I found them really inspirational, so I think I’m going to start keeping some sketchnotes, and I’ll probably have a moleskine in hand while at FITC! We’ll see how my sketchnotes come out! If you’re reading this post, Mike, thanks for scanning & uploading your sketchnotes, and inspiring me!

I helped my classmate and friend Keith Beltramini design and develop a website to display his 3D, Motion Graphics, and Animation work. His work is outstanding, so be sure to check him out!

After not having a new site in over a year, I finally got the time to finish up my new site – Jefflindesign Version 6 is now up and running! There’s also a new demo reel on there that I haven’t posted before, so make sure you check it out too!

Keith Beltramini, Matt Robinson, and I joined forces for Virtual Entertainment class to work on this project together. Originally we were going to tie in Flash Media Server on this project and make a multiplayer game, but as I was the only developer on the team ( Keith made some awesome in-game graphics and animation and Matt designed a great user interface), developing the game and learning Flash Media Server at the same time proved to be a difficult task to accomplish within the 5-6 or so weeks that we were alotted to this project. Thus we were forced to simplify our project a little, and this is our product – a mini flash game that allows users to login, play, and save their best times. There’s a few things that need to be tweaked, but overall I’d say the project was a success; it’s a playable game and encourages return visits for users that are competitive (most gamers would be!). Check out Breakout!

I was looking for a shoutcast channel in my winamp shoutcast browser and I spotted a sunsilk banner, and out of curiousity, I clicked on it to see where it would take me. Lo and behold, it took me to Sunsilk.us and on it was the site that I helped Rokkan work on! Rokkan picked me up in late December and had me develop the shell as well as the front page; and I worked on it until sometime towards the end of January. The most time consuming part of it all was exporting all the graphical assets out of photoshop and into flash, especially because this site was so image heavy. It’s pretty cool to see stuff that I’ve worked on up on the net, and it’s always a pleasure working with the folks at Rokkan!

I’m pretty excited how many of my classmates’ work have been picked out and praised in the past year or so, including Justin Schrader (FWA), Brian Cain (Motionographer), and this morning, Errol Schwartz (FWA). Good job guys, it shows that RIT New Media is just kickin’ ass and that the time and effort we all put in aren’t going to waste! Congrats!

Also, check out Rachel Diesel’s new website, just released this past weekend.

I’ve been working on my new site, but it’s not done yet, look for it soon!

This was my first project done in AS3, I’ve been putting off doing a project in AS3 because I wanted to wait and practice the AS2 OOP skills I developed at Rokkan over the summer. It was well worth the wait. It was a pretty smooth transition for the most part(and with the migration documentation)! The only things that drove me crazy were the syntax changes, small things such as the removal of the underscore from, say movieclip._x (it’s now just movieclip.x in AS3).

Anyway, about the project! When clicking on the project, it will create a movieclip that changes scale and color based on the audio input (be it from mic or the output of your sound card), and when clicked again, the movieclip is frozen and placed on the stage. Repeat the process until a desirable design is created, then right click > print to pdf or printer. If you print it to pdf, the shapes are still retained and you can open the pdf from illustrator to tinker with positioning and colors or add post generation effects.