It’s time again for WordCamp San Diego 2012. Sat Mar 24 and Sun Mar 25 will be two days filled with WordPress geeky goodness, a full conference on Saturday and a developer hack day on Sunday.

I’m speaking in the Developer track on Saturday at 2:10 pm—my topic is Theme Busters R Us:

Breaking themes for fun?! Crazy talk. Busting your WordPress theme–on purpose–can be both fun and useful. The process is a crucial part of building sites with WordPress, whether it’s for a client project, a personal blog, or releasing an awesome new theme to the world.

See the rest of the talks on the full Saturday schedule; there are two tracks to choose from (End User, Developer) with great speakers and topics.

If you’re not at the event you can still join in, the talks will be live-streamed. Check the WordCamp San Diego 2012 website for details.

Things went very smoothly — I followed instructions in the WordPress.com Support documentation and in various dashboard screens, and they were very helpful. I especially was impressed with the Google verification steps and how easy it was to add MX records for my Google Apps integration.

Probably the most annoying thing was waiting for propagation after updating nameservers, but there’s not a lot I could have done about that anyway.

A few hiccups:

• Old email subscribers: I had to email my old list to ask them to subscribe again on WordPress.com (I was using FeedBlitz before).
• Link importing: I had to split up the OPML file to import with categories, otherwise I’d have a flat import with no categories.
• I used Textile on my old blog, so I had to run a small PHP script to update the content in posts/pages to plain old HTML.

The plugins I’m going to miss the most are:

• Readernaut, which I used to list books I’m currently reading in my sidebar, as a widget.
• Broken Link Checker, used to find broken links in my old posts.
• Live Comment Preview: I love this feature, I often used it myself to make sure my comment is good to go before posting it.

For my theme I’m using Twenty Eleven with the Custom Design upgrade, including some custom CSS and Typekit fonts for the blog title and all headings.

Here’s a detailed description of what I did.

Before the switch:

• Review all plugins, make a list of those I can’t live without.
• Review custom functionality that I would lose in the switch.
• Register a WordPress.com blog to use as the placeholder.

A few weeks went by in between. On the switch day, I started out by changing my nameservers at my registrar (GoDaddy). I knew I’d have access to both sites during the switch, so I started the process immediately.

During the DNS switch:

• Export all my self-hosted WordPress content and import to WordPress.com blog.
• Export OPML for links, import one category at a time into WordPress.com blog.
• Set up contact form in new page, using the contact form shortcode.
• Create a custom menu for top-level navigation.
• Set up General Settings (reading, discussion, time zone, et cetera).
• Clean up Textile in posts and pages. (I used a quick PHP script to read content, change it to HTML, and save it back to the database).
• Enable new theme —Twenty Eleven — and purchase Custom Design upgrade.
• Set up Gmail and Google Apps to work with domain mapping at WordPress.com (support docs). Specifically, under step 8, add my DNS to WordPress.com.
• Changed some settings for other sites and services that relied on the domain, simpledream.net, going to Dreamhost.
• Moved Subversion repositories, backups, archives, tools, and several self-hosted web apps to a new domain that I’ll keep at Dreamhost.

After the switch:

• Verify my site with Google Webmasters.
• Make sure stats are working on WordPress.com.
• Test posts and pages.
• Have a cold drink.

I don’t think I’ll miss updating my plugins and core WordPress files; it’s awesome to just concentrate on publishing content.

The focus for the 3.2 release was making WordPress faster and lighter. Highlights include a new distraction-free writing mode, a completely refreshed admin UI, faster updates (only updating files that changed), support dropped for IE6, PHP 4, and MySQL 4, and the new default theme, Twenty Eleven.

Go update now! (3.2.1 is out now, by the way, with some minor fixes.)

Here are the links I mentioned in my talk.

• WordPress 3.2 official announcement post, including an awesome video overview of the new features.
• Browse Happy
• Twenty Eleven demo site
• Twenty Eleven demo site, showing it set up as a photoblogging theme with no code changes, using only the theme options.

The next Tucson WordPress meetup is scheduled for September 7th, 2011. Mark your calendars, and see you there.

Thanks to Andy Nacin for allowing me to use his slides from WordCamp Columbus as a starting point for my talk.

Set up the install

The WordPress install must be a Subversion checkout. You can grab the bleeding edge source with a command like this:

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ .

If you aren’t familiar with Subversion, start here:

• Working with Subversion (Codex)
• Using Subversion (Codex)

Schedule the updates

Add the cron job from the command line.

1. Edit the cron job list.

   crontab -e

2. Add the cron job (edit the path to your WordPress install).

   MAILTO=""
   # Update WordPress install every six hours
   * */6 * * * svn up -q ~/path/to/your/wp-install

3. Save and close.

To learn more about editing cron jobs from the command line search Google for man cron and man crontab.

You can also use a GUI tool like CronniX on Mac OS X to manage the cron jobs.

Notes

• The -q parameter tells the svn update command to run silently so that you don’t have to worry about any output from the cron job. But, you should add the MAILTO definition if you want to completely silence output.
• Some systems don’t recognize the */6 syntax for hourly notation. If you get an error when trying to save the cron job you might have to change it to comma-separated values instead: 0,6,12 or similar.

• Introduction to HTML5 on May 19th, 2010
• WordPress Meetup on May 25th, 2010

I’m particularly excited about the “Introduction to HTML5” talk since it’s my first time co-presenting with long-time friend and former coworker Aaron Wagner. I will cover new features in HTML5 and CSS3 while Aaron will talk about the new JavaScript APIs and browser extensions. Plus, he’ll give us a demo of an HTML5 application called “Times Up” that he built for his church. Can’t wait!

Join me and the Tucson Digital Arts Community for an evening of WordPress discussion.

So, just what is this Automattic Theme Team anyway? In a nutshell, we’re a bunch of people who really care about WordPress Themes and want to see them get better and better on WordPress.com and for every WordPress.org user. And this is our blog.

Be sure and subscribe to our blog at ThemeShaper.com.

(via What Is The Automattic Theme Team?)

Since starting simpledream web studio I’ve told people often that I’d like to be a freelancer for the rest of my career. I love working from anywhere—in the RV, co-working at Spoke6, in my home office.

That said, I have kept an eye on a few companies I’d love to work for: companies dedicated to open source software, that allow for location-independent employees, and have a great reputation in the industry. Automattic ranked high on that short list. When Matt Mullenweg contacted me about working with Automattic, I jumped at the chance.

I’m proud to announce that they’ve offered me a full-time position, and I’ve accepted it. I feel I’ve found a perfect match with the fine folks driving WordPress.org, WordPress.com, BuddyPress, Gravatar, Akismet, IntenseDebate, PollDaddy, and many other great projects.

Why would I love working for Automattic? It’s a distributed company: I can work from anywhere. They work on exciting, innovative projects. They are a prominent and active member of the open source community, and I want to be involved in that. There’s room for me to learn and grow. My day-to-day schedule won’t change much—I’ll be working a similar schedule and setting my own hours.

I’m stoked about my position as “Theme Wrangler” with Automattic. I’ll be working on web design and development projects, mostly revolving around themes and WordPress.com. I’m sure I’ll also use my Spanish and French skills since people all around the world use Automattic products.

If you want to learn more about Automattic, explore Automattic.com. And if you’re looking for an engaging job with smart people, check out the Jobs page and How We Work.

What’s going to happen to simpledream?

It’s been a great run! Five successful years managing my own business is easily one of my best and most fulfilling accomplishments. I learned, grew, and prospered as a consultant and contractor. The lifestyle I dreamed of—traveling around the US with my wife and working remotely–became a reality. The business, simpledream web studio, enabled that to happen.

I’m closing down the business soon. I’ll be helping to migrate my clients to new companies, passing them on to the capable hands of other web designers and developers.

I’ll be keeping the simpledream name, domain, and site alive as part of my personal brand. I plan to continue posting here about web design and development, web standards, and—of course—cool stuff going on with WordPress themes.

Stay tuned!

I want to share with you an example of a non-traditional use for WordPress. As I’m sure you may know, WordPress is the most popular blogging software on the market. It is easy to use and customize, makes web publishing simple—it gets the job done. What you might not know, however, is that it does more than just blogs and simple CMSs.

I’d like to share one specific example of how I use WordPress to collaborate with a remote team. I figure I can kill two birds with one stone: I am going to show you how to use a WordPress custom theme for collaboration in a work environment, and at the same time I hope to encourage you to explore alternative uses of WordPress.

I live in an RV and travel around the country, so most of the time when I’m working with my colleagues, I am working remotely. That means that how I collaborate with a dispersed group of people is extremely important since we don’t have lots of face to face time. Even if you aren’t a stay-at-home or remote worker, you still have to collaborate, right? Even if it means sending an instant message to the guy in the cubicle five feet away from you.

Who’s done that before? I think we all have. My point is that even if you are in a traditional office environment, it doesn’t mean that all your interactions happen face to face.

We all know that good communication is the key to getting things done. And I think my example tonight applies to in-house web design and development teams just as much as it does to freelancers or remote workers like myself that typically use email, instant messaging, and project management software to collaborate; those technologies take the place of the face-to-face interaction.

What I am doing right now?

Collaboration might not be the right word… I’m not going to cover what it means to manage projects with clients and how to collaborate on tasks and timelines. Instead, I want to talk about the simple communication that happens all day long. Answering this question, “What I am doing right now?”

How do you normally share that type of information with your group? And how do you keep tabs on your coworkers’ updates as well? Typically that would be done via email, phone calls, short meetings in the hallway, putting colored cups on top of your cubicle (hey—don’t laugh at that one, it works really well in some situations).

My sister once worked in an office where one way of saying “what am I doing right now” was exactly that: they had a red cup that meant “I’m busy”, and a blue cup that meant “I’m free.”

When these traditional methods don’t work, or if they aren’t practical, we often look to other tools for sending out quick and simple updates. Updates that are sent without much preparation or the need to open software. Updates that are asynchronous—meaning other people don’t have to respond right away—the message will be there for them when they are ready to read it.

Twitter

Lately it seems like there are more and more products being created to handle this type of communication. One great example is Twitter. It’s awesome, right? You get 140 characters to describe what you’re doing or how you’re feeling, or to post a link. Twitter is extremely popular because it gives you that “chatroom” feel of constant conversation. It’s quick and easy to post but can be engaging and effective.

It can be a really great way to simulate being in the same room with someone.

Twitter users share their personal updates with each other by answering the question, “What are you doing right now?” That question is typically a label on the text entry field on the Twitter website, for example. It’s the same action as updating your Facebook status to say you are having a bad day, or what you movie you are going to see that night. You just want to share a quick update without writing an epic saga or opening up your blog software to write a new post.

Twitter has changed how people interact. It’s effective precisely because it’s so simple. No tags or categories, no spellcheck, no formatting, just post it and it’s out there for all the world to see.

But what if you just need to communicate with one small group of people?

About a year ago, right here in Arizona, the makers of WordPress (Automattic) were having their yearly company gathering just north of here, in Oracle. They were thinking this same thing, and there they came up with a theme called Prologue that replicates Twitter-like interactions within a WordPress website.

Just like Twitter, Facebook, and other social web apps promote lifestreaming, Prologue promotes workstreaming for your team. Workstreaming is the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues. Some might say that it’s also a way to convince your boss that you’re actually working!

What are you working on right now?

Prologue helps you answer the question, “What are you working on right now?”

My work as a consultant sometimes means being part of a small team—for one team I work with often Prologue has become one of our most-used communication tools. Besides constant updates on what we’re doing, we use Prologue as a scrum tool: every morning we all post our daily goals and roadblocks.

We also use it for sharing links and tips. But the main purpose for using Prologue is to update each other on our status.

Prologue helps you collaborate

How does Prologue help you collaborate better? Prologue is successful because it requires almost no work to post an update. The easier you make it for your team to post, the more they will use it.

• It encourages short updates.
• It allows a quick post on the home page—there is no need to view the admin site.
• It allows comments so you can create a conversation around what you posted.
• You can add tags and categories just like normal blog posts in WordPress, but you don’t have to. Like Twitter, you can just type and post.
• You then use RSS feeds to track your coworkers’ updates. Or if your the boss, you sit there all day and hit Refresh! (Just kidding!)

Prologue is free, and easy to set up and use. All you have to do is download and install the theme, then enable it. It’s that easy. Even easier, you can sign up for a free WordPress.com account—it’s a default theme there, so you don’t even have to download it.

Here’s how easy it is to start using Prologue with a free WordPress.com account.

1. After you’ve signed up for a free WordPress.com blog, log in and enable the theme.
2. Then go to the blog home page, and post an update.
3. Invite other users to join by adding them to the account.

That’s it!

Based on the default WordPress privacy settings, your Prologue setup can be public, or password-protected (meaning available only to your group). The password-protection is available with WordPress.com by default—if you are running your own WordPress site, then you’ll need to implement password protection on your own.

Try it for yourself

View the Automattic team’s live Prologue demo, and I’d encourage giving it a test run on your own WordPress site.