Some reading for today, and my occasional commentary:
- Jonathan Bailey has an indepth article at Blog Herald about orphan works legislation, copyright, how bloggers and illustrators/ photographers could be affected, as well as what you can do about it.
- Steve Imparl, a lawyer and writer/ blogger, has a guest post at Daily Blog Tips that enlightens us to some legal points for bloggers. (Though I’m surprised at his opening sentence, which says there are millions of bloggers posting daily. Are there really? Wow.)
- Also at Daily Blog Tips, Daniel suggests we Twitter less, blog more, which is a counterpoint to James’ post here about why Twitter is the blogger’s new sidekick. Personally, I’ve yet to find Twitter as anything more than digital navel-gazing and an interesting sociological phenomena. If there were other elements/ features and it were turned into a sort of followable personal dashboard, then it would interest me. Okay, maybe there are some important uses, such as helping free an American student arrested in Egypt.
- Jonathan Morrow has a very interesting post about who makes the better blogger: valedictorians or class clowns. Jonathan asks, “do you remember who your class valedictorian was?” He says none of the people he asked could remember, but that class clowns stand out. (I used to remember the valedictorian of my high school year, but not anymore. As for class clown, well that was me. So if Jonathan is right, that’s good news for me.) Let me take a slightly different take on this. Class clowns feel the need to be recognized, for whatever reason, and I’m guessing those who blog actively (but not necessarily freelance bloggers) do too.
- Eden, the people who’ve brought you PSDTUTS, NorthxEast (recently sold), FreelanceSwitch and other sites, now have NETTUTS, which covers the coding side of website development. The first three articles include building a portfolio site, creating tabbed content areas using CSS & jQuery, and creating PayPal payment forms. So for those of you wanting to delve more into coding but haven’t the time to learn programming, you might find NETTUTS helpful.
- jQuery is an increasingly hot JavaScript code library that makes it easier for non-programmers to slick up websites with all kinds of dynamic features. I linked to one jQuery tutorial in the last item, and Design Reviver has an article on horizontal accordion menus. If you find that these are the types of design features you’d like to add to your site, I urge you to look up more about jQuery. There are jQuery tutorial articles popping up in blogs all over, and if there’s any demand for it, I might post some with screencasts.
- David Peralty at Xfep mentions that WP 2.5.1 is out, but that 2.5.2 is probably about to follow soon. I can’t find it, but I did come across another post elsewhere that strongly suggests NOT upgrading to 2.5.1 because several other features are broken. They suggest waiting for 2.5.2, or sticking with 2.3.3. If you’re not sure what to do, you can read my Why I Hate WP 2.5 post – and my Why I Love WordPress post for balance.
- If you missed the announcement, V2.0 of ScribeFire, the fantastic in-browser (Firefox) editor extension, has just been released (and a 2.0.1 update). This version offers a long-awaited feature: multiple file editing using a tabbed interface. Now your blogging should be even more productive.
- Webware recently announced the 2008 winners for their web apps awards. WordPress.com was amongst the winners in the publishing category.
- I’ve recently started writing about freelancing at both FreelanceFolder and FreelanceSwitch, and I’ll be contributing approximately weekly.
- Brian Gardner, whose WP themes make up part of Performancing Themes’ archives, recently released three variations of Revolution Blog theme. (Though despite having a name in common with a series of premium/ magazine themes, it’s not a premium theme. However, it is clean and crisp. And free.) Variations include 2-column, 3-col right, 3-col left/right.