WordCamp Miami 2010 – WordPress Plugins for your Next Project from Pete Bernardo on Vimeo.

In this talk I discuss some of the great plugins we use for our client projects. The three main WordPress plugins I talk about are Gravity Forms, Shopp, and Flutter.

Ten days ago we relaunched our company site, Logic By Design, the feedback we have received has been amazing. In the last ten days we have had 7,000 visitors from 118 countries and only 1% were using IE6 (hooray!). We were also featured in cssmania.com, thebestdesigns.com, wpinspiration.com, mostinspired.com, & designfridge.co.uk. We built our site as a platform, so everything on the site is content managed even the images in the header and it is all powered through WordPress.

On that note, a month or so back I was asked to speak at WordCamp Miami, WordCamps happen all over the world and they allow WordPress users of all skill levels to meet/hear others using WordPress. WordCamp Miami was this past Saturday and what a great time. It sold out a few days before the event and the venue at the University of Miami was fantastic. I was batting lead off for the day (9am start), so I expected not that many people to be able to make my talk… we started a little late at but the room of about 100-150 was packed. My talk was about the plugins we use at LBD to help keep all of our clients on the same platform, WordPress. Based on the people that came up to me and the feedback on twitter everyone really appreciated the talk, which makes me so happy. My goal was to keep the talk fast paced and cover a lot of ground so hopefully no matter the skill level they were able to learn something.

Speaking and shooting video is going to be more of a focus of mine moving forward. I have always enjoyed sharing my experience with others with the idea of whatever I put out there will come back ten fold in feedback and value. So, stay tuned…

I thought this was such a wonderful way to tell a story and emphasizes how central Google search is to our lives.

The Big Giant makes his way past the Reichstag (Germany's pariamentary building) in Berlin on October 3, 2009. (AXEL SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

See all the rest of the images on The Big Picture

Here is the latest site I worked on, it was something quick I did with Tumblr for something very important to me: http://stephanieandpete.com/

Hopefully this will be helpful to some of you who travel abroad. Internet access to me is often expensive and hard to find in most European cities. Over the last couple years I have used everything from dailup connections to sitting on street corners that I find open wifi on. This year I decided to spend some money on an option that I can use this year and for the years ahead. Many cell phone providers here now offer usb internet sticks that are pay-as-you-go so I can put some money in the account and just use it for the time I’m here. Connection speeds vary depending on the city you are in, but I tried it in Sicily, Rome and about 100 miles outside of Rome and I was able to get a 3G connection (or faster) almost every time. Right now I’m sitting on a cruise ship about a mile off the coast of Sicily without issue.

I got my “Internet Key” from Vodafone for 69 euros and I put 25 euros in the account, 25 euros supposedly is good for about 5 hours of usage a day for a month. I won’t use anywhere near those amounts but I’ll have some for the next time I’m here. Internet on the ship is something around 89 euros for 1 hour, getting the Internet Key from vodafone makes sense to me if you want/need to check the internet while you are away.

Some General Notes

1. The cruise ship Celebrity Solstice is Las Vegas on water, we love it. 99% of the ship is geared to adults; the food, furniture, atmosphere, etc is all top notch. There is a kids level of the boat but it is tucked away, not in your face. We are super happy with Celebrity cruises, everything so far has gone really smooth and we have already talked about how to get our friends to take this same cruise with us again.
2. I floated the idea of moving to Rome to my wife earlier this week, it was promptly shot down. However if we have the money summer months were approved when we have kids.
3. Here are some photos from the trip so far…. we just started on the cruise so these photos were just from the week we spent in Rome and Siciy with my family.

I have been wanting to get a DSLR for a long time but they were just too expensive, in the last couple years Canon and Nikon have introduced relatively in expensive dslr’s so I tried to save some more money and buy it off eBay I decided on getting a Nikon D60 but instead of buying the kit which included the camera body and lens I bought just the body and then separately bought a lens. I did this because I like taking close up photos (macro) but I also love being able capture a scene so having a wide angle is important. I bought a 18-200mm lens which gives me a really wide angle for regular shots and really great zoom for shots that I need to get close on, it is generally consider a very good all-in-one lens. The kit lens is a good wide angle lens so having one lens that does both was what I was going for.

So I have only really used it twice and here are the two separate sets from Flickr, you get to see wide angle and close up

We have been working on a number of things at Flipshake but our recent priority is an embeddable object that will allow our users to display flips all over the net. Now being able to show the Flip is great but Flips are meant to be collected so one of our goals was to allow the user to collect anywhere our code is used.

Now if a user doesn’t have a Flipshake account they can just put their email and we hold the flip for 48 hours then when they are ready they can comeback, sign up, and they will have their flip in their stack.

Here is the larger version of our player with a Flip from one of my favorite Flipshake artists, Shockbolt. I’ll post some of the behind the scenes info in the future but if you would like to embed flips like Shockbolt’s to the right just click on the Flip and grab the embed code from Flipshake.com.

I have been using OS X for development now for the last couple months and one of the apps I was looking forward to trying out was Panic’s Coda. Unfortunately the first version of Coda was missing a critical feature for me, site wide Search. Recently Coda released an upgrade and among a ton of other awesome new features was site wide search.

One of the first things you will notice is that it is fast, I mean really really fast. Now I suspect that it is because Coda is using OS X’s Spotlight. Now on the other hand I have been using Dreamweaver for the last 9 years, starting with Dreamweaver 3. Dreamweaver does a lot of things very well but it has become a very big application, some what bloated. Search has always been really cumbersome and it becomes more evident when you compare it to Coda.

Since Dreamweaver is on Windows & OS X, I suspect Adobe has not got around to optimizing Search on the OS X version. Take a look at the video below to see how much better Coda is in Search.  I’ll continue to highlight the differences in Coda and Dreamweaver, since Coda is only $99 it could save some people money without losing functionality.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

A couple years ago I went to vegas for New Years and I had the privileged of learning how to play BlackJack properly from my good friend Don, who happens to run a great vegas blog.

Now I like BlackJack but there has not been a convenient way to practice, until now. Apple has a fantastic app store for the iPhone/iPod Touch and one of the free apps is 21 Pro. I had been searching for an app and tried a couple out, 21 Pro is the way to go. This is the simple convenient way I had been looking for.

Besides the basics of betting and giving you two cards the game also has game history, built in card counting that follows your game, and a cheat card in case you need to brush up on strategy.

I get to practice Don’s Hedge Ecomonics on my phone, it doesn’t cost me a penny, and I can make sure I practice not spliting 10s. All in all it is a great app, It doesn’t let you play multiple hands at the table but that is me being nit-picky. Lucky for me I get to put my practice to good use, 7 nights in the caribbean, won’t be free but hopefully I’ll have a better chance at the tables now!