Please feel free to submit any others you think are cool in the comments below.

The List of Portfolio Themes for WordPress

My Resume (less like a portfolio, but still kinda cool)

Deep Focus – Elegant Themes WordPress Portfolio

Phazed

Creatic

FolioWay

MediaReel

Architectos

Perfekto

Minim

Yin & Yang

Awesome Portfolio Theme

Conclusion… too many to list… go here

After looking around at so many cool portfolio WordPress themes, I have to suggest you check out this site for a whole huge list of truly inexpensive possibilities for a new portfolio site.

Update: Here’s my Pinterest Board where I’m going to collect a bunch more portfolio themes.

iPhone 4	HTC Evo
iPhone 4 Specs Review iPhone 4 Physical Dimensions Height: 4.5 inches (115.2 mm) Width: 2.31 inches (58.6 mm) Depth: 0.37 inch (9.3 mm) Weight: 4.8 ounces (137 grams) Screen Size: 3.5 inches diagonal (88.9 mm)	HTC Evo Specs Review HTC Evo Physical Dimensions Height: 4.8 inches (121.9 mm) Width: 2.6 inches (66.0 mm) Depth: 0.5 inches (12.7 mm) Weight: 6 ounces (170 grams) Screen Size: 4.3 inches diagonal (109.2 mm)
The Evo wins hands down in this category. The only way the iPhone would win in this one is if you don’t want to carry around a 6 ounce gadget. Being that it’s only 1.2 ounces more than the iPhone, if you care that much about weight in your pocket, drop a few keys off your keychain and call it a wash. Results: Evo wins
iPhone 4 Power Review iPhone 4 Power Specs Processor: ARM Cortex-A8 Apple A4 Memory: 512MB Graphics: (960-by-480) PowerVR SGX535 GPU (326 pixels per inch) Storage: 16GB or 32GB Battery: audio: 40 hrs video: 10 hrs Talk over 3G: 7 hrs Browsing over 3G: 6 hrs Browsing over Wi-Fi: 10 hrs Standby: 300 hrs	HTC Evo Power Review HTC Evo Power Specs Processor: 1 GHz Qualcomm QSD8650 (Snapdragon) Memory: 512MB Graphics: (480-by-800) TFT LCD (216 pixels per inch) Storage: 8GB standard microSD card, upgradable to 32GB Battery: audio: 18 hrs video: 6 hrs Talk over 3G: 5.5 hrs Browsing over 3G: n/a Browsing over Wi-Fi: n/a Standby: 146 hrs
In this race, I’m torn. There are big benefits to be had with removable microSD cards (even though it only comes with 8GB standard, which is way way too low) and the award-winning Snapdragon processor. But the practicality of it is that the battery life on the Evo is horrible. It’s so bad, that even attempting to find these specifications took some work because HTC didn’t release them and doesn’t talk about them when they market the phone. It’s very unfortunate for practical use. Throw the great screen resolution on with the iPhone and we’ve got a winner. Results: iPhone 4 wins
iPhone 4 Cool Features Review iPhone 4 Cool Features Specs Camera(s): 5.0 megapixel rear-facing with 720p HD video at 30 fps and LED flash and an 0.3 megapixel front-facing one which takes 480p video at 30 fps Input: Multi-touch touchscreen display Dual microphone 3-axis accelerometer Digital compass Proximity sensor Ambient light sensor OS and apps: Apple iOS 4.0, about 185,000 apps at the time of this writing Buy the iPhone 4 now from Best Buy!	HTC Evo Cool Features Review HTC Evo Cool Features Specs Camera(s): 8 megapixel rear-facing with 720p HD video at 30 fps (which someone hacked to go up to 60 fps) and dual LED flash and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing one which takes video at 30 fps Input: Multi-touch touchscreen display Dual microphone 3-axis accelerometer Digital compass Proximity sensor Ambient light sensor OS and apps: Android, about 80,000 apps at the time of this writing Buy the HTC Evo now from Best Buy!
In this one, it’s really a comparison between the number of apps in the store vs the camera. My vote goes to the camera because with more than 80k apps in either app store, I can just about guarantee that any app I want probably exists. So, hurrah for 8 megapixel cameras. That’s more than some slightly aged point and shoot digital cameras still on the market. Results: HTC Evo wins

Final Results of this Review

In the end, the big kickers of practicality are the things which end up frustrating users the most. The largest glaring mistake HTC made in this phone was the lack of battery power. We might be able to blame the super-powerful Snapdragon processor for that, but regardless, when you can’t go a full day without a charge, it’ll start getting on anyone’s nerves.

The other features of the Evo far outshine the iPhone 4, so if you’ve got a plug at your cubicle or you can plug into your car regularly, the Evo would win. If you travel at all though, you might just stick with the iPhone and enjoy that super-high resolution screen.

For my money, because of my lifestyle, I’m going to stick to my iPhone 2G and save my money for the next gadget that has the best of both worlds in about 6 months.

What did you think of this iPhone 4 vs HTC Evo review? Love it? Hate it? Tell me in the comments, but be civil please. :)

Oh, and if you’d like to formally vote on which is better, you could win an iPhone 4. Enjoy.

This kind of thing didn’t surprise me, coming from Ted. He’s one of the most vigilant awesomeness advocates I know. But, one thing I realized during that conversation…. if he could get the stack of front-end engineers together with the purpose of producing awesome stuff, there would be almost nothing stopping them except for one thing. The same kryptonite which stops all great developers – marketing.

Competition, Collaboration, Complaining

Marketing is the bane of a developer’s existence. It’s the thing we ignore, but we need.

Marketing is similar to tourism. The locals hate tourists, yet they depend on them for their survival in the modern age. It’s a love/hate relationship. Development is no different. We need marketing, but we hate it too. It’s so fake. So contrived. So finicky. Why can’t the quality stuff just get to the top of the list and get popular simply because it’s awesome? It’s sad really.

But, it’s needed. And, there are plenty of people out there who love to market. They just don’t like developers.

Why do developers have to be so agitating, so controlling, so vigilant and annoying to work with? If marketers could just have an idea and get someone to build it without complaining, the world would be a much better place, right? I mean, marketers know the market. It’s what they do. They know what people want, so the developers should just listen to them.

Ah, conflict. Gotta love it.

So, here’s the point… I live in both worlds. I see both points. I understand both pains because I’ve been both. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to shine the spotlight on little projects that developers are creating which are awesome. On the other side, I’m going to highlight some marketers who are pushing some great stuff.

In doing so, I hope to make some connections, smooth out the rough edges, and bring two communities together. There’s nothing we can’t accomplish if we actually get along. My vision is to see developers with great ideas and great talent build awesome stuff, and have a great local marketer pick that up and make it huge. On the other side, I want to see marketers with amazing ideas get their stuff built by some crazy awesome developers. Everyone would benefit from this.

It should be noted that I skipped one major aspect of the community, and that is designers. I didn’t do that on purpose in this article, and I do recognize how different each skill is. I do think design is a major aspect of adoption, usability, etc. Thus designers play a critical role in the awesomeness quotient of a project as well. We’ll add designers to the batter when we get the first two ingredients playing nicely and that’s when the world will explode and finally realize that San Diego has some major powerhouses in all three specializations.

The series they’ve been doing for quite some time now is one I refer to often. It’s essentially called the “Plain English” series in my book. They do the tough job of taking difficult to understand technological words, concepts, and software and break it down into … well, plain English – a language that normal human beings (well, normal for those of us who speak English already) understand.

For starters, let’s take the idea of a Wiki. Where the heck did that word come from? Wiki. Say it a few times and instead of being frustrated, I guarantee you’ll start to laugh at yourself.

But what is a wiki anyway?

This is the perfect example of where Lee and Sashi’s Plain English series comes into play. They’ve created a video for you to explain this very thing. I’m simply going to include it here, but I highly suggest that you go and visit their site (CommonCraft.com) to get more information on other things that you can learn about in plain English besides wikis.

Enjoy

Wikis in Plain English from Project MyShare on Vimeo.

The Iran elections have changed the face of media and government control by a huge margin, and I think we’ve all understood that shift. To bring it closer to home, tonight I watched the following video – a live streaming video from @nrek that explained the hostage situation on 8th and Beech streets in downtown San Diego tonight.

Helicopters weren’t even on the scene until hours later, but we knew just about everything that was going on long before it was reported.

Here’s the video (albeit of course not as professional as a traditional journalist would produce, but still informational). Well done Enrique. Thanks for spreading the news and being on the cutting edge for those of us who watched tonight.

And without much ado, I would like to present to you a bunch of great WordPress photo gallery themes. Some cost money (usually the best ones), and some don’t. I’m not going to put the prices on here because I expect they’ll probably change over time. But, I highly recommend taking a close look at each of these photo gallery themes for WordPress. These are some of the best:

Modularity WordPress photo gallery theme

Download

Wordpress Photo Gallery Theme - Modularity

This theme is super-slick. It flaunts a simple layout but a whack of options behind the scenes. The theme options include the following:

• Built in full-screen HD video player
• Optional homepage slideshow
• Optional homepage Mac-style image slider gallery
• Optional homepage Magazine-style post layout
• Optional homepage blog-style layout
• A theme options page where you can define background, text, link colors, contact info, site tracking code and more
• A homepage settings page where you can choose which apps show up on your homepage layout
• SEO-optimised titles and alt tags
• Four widgetized areas
• Click-down navigation for a compact, minimalist masthead
• Built-in multimedia custom field support
• Automatic thumbnail generation. No need to manage thumbnails using custom fields

Aperture – A WooTheme Photo Gallery for WordPress Photographers

Download

Aperture - A WooTheme Photo Gallery Theme for WordPress

This is a great theme by WooThemes, who does some amazing stuff. I’ve actually purchased themes from WooThemes and been very impressed with the quality, so I expect if you’re a photographer looking for some kind of WordPress gallery, you should find a good set of options there.

BlackCanvas – A StudioPress Photographer’s WordPress Theme

Download

BlackCanvas - WordPress for Photographers

StudioPress themes come with the following features:

• Widget-Ready
• Theme Options Page
• Ready for Advertising
• Comment Functionality
• Developed for Localization
• PSD Files Included
• Lifetime Support
• WordPress & Theme Tutorials
• Approved Designers

I’ll stop here for today, but if you like this kind of post, please say so in the comments and I’ll be happy to keep giving some great themes (whether it’s for WordPress photo galleries or perhaps other WordPress genres of themes). You name it.

do you have a facebook yet?

Last night Facebook launched their Comment Box which at first glance doesn’t look too amazing. But, there are some hidden nuggets (both gold and fools gold) that need to be dug out and examined a little. I’m not going to go in depth here, but I did want to skim the surface and say why I almost – but inevitably couldn’t – switch over to the new Facebook Comment Box for comments on my sites.

Why did they create a comments box?

Let’s be honest here. It’s because they want your content. Their recent fit of insanity which compelled them to release a TOS which uniformly gave them all rights to your content forever. They did recant from that heresy pretty quickly, but still. It’s like saying “you’re ugly…. just kidding, no offense.” They showed their hand and it’s indicative of something else going on.

What’s great about using the Facebook comments box?

Obviously, I already have comments enabled here, so it’s not about that. But, there is one huge benefit to using the Facebook comments box. It’s obviously not the comments themselves. It’s marketing. We all want to have our content spread into more places. The more pervasive our content is, the more we’ll gain in influence. Influence begets influence.

Why I won’t be using the Facebook comments box (yet)

I won’t be using it (yet) because the comments on a blog help with SEO positioning and I have a thing about relational data. When someone comments on a post of mine, I want to keep those comments for myself. It’s the same reason I didn’t use Disqus or the other comment widget providers out there.

I would love to use it for the marketing purposes, so if there were a way to sync the data (and for my blog to keep ownership of my copy of the comment), then I’d be all over it. I love the marketing power, expanded influence into one of the largest social networks in the world, and potentially the SEO (if somehow the link shows up in an SE indexed page). But, right now, the con outweighs the pros. I just can’t give away the content.

Uh oh…

One last note on this development is my belief that Facebook has effectively surpassed Disqus and others. I’m sure by usage they haven’t yet as it hasn’t even been 24 hours since the release. But, mark my ASCII, they will.

I’m not a believer in the “[x] killer”. There can definitely be many services that do similar things in the same space. I just think Disqus has proven that people like to have one login and web property owners are ok with giving up those comments to others under the right conditions. With those two items, Facebook just poised itself to trash Disqus growth considerably. The only thing Disqus has on Facebook right now is that they actually do allow for synchronization of comments. So, to each their own.

What do you think?

So, that’s my review. But, I’m curious what you think about all this? I know I didn’t hit on everything, so feel free to add points and counter points in the comments below.

Cheers.

Tiny Geo-Coder

Thanks to Emily Chang at eHub and Jackson West at LifeHacker.com, the Tiny Geocoder became an overnight smash hit.

With 8 hours of submitting my site to eHub it had been picked up and written about. Not long after, LiveHacker picked up the story and wrote a short article on the tiny, fast service that gives you latitude and longitude in exchange for a human-readable location. Less than 24 hours later there were over 30,000 new mentions across the internet. Today, there are over 70,000 links and mentions and over 200k queries.

With that kind of popularity comes a massive amount of suggestions, business deals, and more. I’m definitely a fan of that. So, of course I had to oblige and add in reverse geocoding too (thanks to many of your suggestions).

And of course, I couldn’t just leave it at that. Cody Marx Baily a.k.a. superphly contacted me and we partnered up to create…

…. drum roll please ….

TinyGPS.org

TinyGPS.org. Think of it as a shortening service for locations. Sure, you could type the address and make people map it. Or, you could just send them a URL like http://tinygps.org/15. With that, you’ll get links to the weather (Weather Underground), where to find beer nearby (Beer Mapping), events in the area (Upcoming.org), good restaurants (Yelp), news about the general vicinity (Google News), and even social media posts by others who are in the area (Brightkite).

We’re going to keep adding services, and might even embed a few into the page itself instead of linking off. But, for now, it’s a great way to share a ton of relevant things around a location without a massively large URL.

So, I’m very happy to have such a successful product make it “big”. It’s been fun watching the stats roll in and see how people are using it. I hope this trend continues with some of the other fun projects I am working on.

Thanks for making it fun to build things! This beer’s for you!

Please listen for a second.  I’ll try to keep this short, but if you don’t want to read anymore, please do me this one favor.

Click this link, register, and vote for our team and our idea:
http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-

Now, for those of you who are a little hesitant, here’s why I want you to click, register and vote.

See, I’ve been a little busy these last few years down here in San Diego.  Of course, I’ve always been busy, but this is different.  A few years ago I started searching for something more than money.  I’ve always been committed to my faith, but I’ve also been a pretty decent business-minded guy too.  Even now I consult other small businesses and non-profits on revenue strategies.  I know how to do that pretty well.

There’s something else I’ve been looking for.  I’ve been looking for a team and an opportunity.  A group of leaders who are self-sacrificing, looking for the betterment of others and willing to do what it takes to give a pure gift.

In 2003, San Diego went through some pretty ferocious fires.  I heard about them and watched a little on CNN while I was at Western in Bellingham.  But, I didn’t pay much attention, as most of didn’t who weren’t in the middle of the crisis.

But, then there were the floods in Centralia and Chehalis two different years that destroyed homes, businesses, and livelihoods.  Now those, we paid attention to.  We were in the middle of them. We had 18 inches in our home and it ruined everything.

Then there was Katrina, Hurricane Ike, the California Firestorm of 2007.  It’s in everyone’s back yard now.  It’s everyone’s problem at some point.

Here’s the problem we’re living with today.

The same problems exist today that have existed for a hundred years.  We still aren’t able to communicate to the people we need to most in times of emergency.

When the phone lines are down, how do you call 911?  When the internet is down, how do you find a map out of your area or the next shelter?  When the radio stations and tv stations are retelling the same stories every 20 minutes, but not talking about your area and whether the fire is over that hill behind your house, how do you find out?

That’s the problem.

But now we’re living in a world of opportunity.

The world is crazy and always has been.  But what’s changed in the last few years is the maturing of one of the worlds I’ve been living and working in for the past 15.  The internet has become a big and awesome place.  We’re now all publishing massive amounts of things.  Text, videos, audio, location-aware devices like GPS is able to all be published.  Real-time.  Like our own TV broadcasts but more than just TV.  It’s all possible today. Not only possible, but actually happening.  And by more than just internet geeks like me.

Some people find all that scary.  Those people are right about the possible threats of publishing so much info about ourselves.  But there’s also a whole world of possibility that we haven’t tapped yet.

So here’s the point.  With all this information being published by people in real-time, we have a chance to fix the problem.  We have the opportunity to make sure the officials and groups who can help us in times of disasters have all the information possible.  Every bit of it.

We need them to know when we’re out of water, food, shelter.  We need them to know when fires cross the roads.

That’s why the team I mentioned earlier exists.

Together, we’re creating the world’s first service which will take all the things that we are publishing and turn it into something useful.

We’re already talking to official public information officers in San Diego and Houston, government officials, traditional media outlets, publicly funded media outlets, citizen journalists and so many more stakeholders.  But this isn’t a company. It’s a project.  This project should have existed years ago, but it doesn’t.

Soon it will.

We’re building it.  For free.

I believe in this team.  I believe they’ve sacrificed time, effort, and skills to help save their fellow neighbors during an emergency.  This is a noble cause.  They deserve this.

Please, go to this link.  Register.  Vote for our cause.  We’re in the running right now for a $10,000 prize which will be split between 15 people.  It’s worth about 1/100th of the amount of time they’re putting into it. It’s a drop in the bucket to them, but it would mean so much to validate their work.

http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-

Please, take the time for us.  I would really appreciate it.

And feel free to encourage your friends and family as well to do the same if you feel led.

Sincerely,

Nate Ritter

The image above, which looks like a broken Death Star, is actually a visual representation of my Social Graph (at least on Facebook).

Rather than explain what a Social Graph is, I’ll just tell you this. First, there’s a new kind of geek in the world now. I’ll call them the Social Geeks™. These are the people who are dubbed “social media gurus“. Second, the Social Geeks® have come up with a fancy sounding term (so they/we can charge more per hour) called a “Social Graph”. You know it as your “friends”.

Now, if I can stop using quotations for a minute, the real point of the Social Graph isn’t for the generic person who uses the internet. It’s an analytical tool so that those Social Geeks∞ can sell their souls to the devil (a.k.a. marketing departments), telling them how to get in touch with your friends so that you can be sold that 4th burrito you really shouldn’t have eaten at lunch (and then the 24 hour fitness membership you’ll use for 2 weeks).

Ok, it’s not all bad. Plenty of academics use Social Graphs to determine behavior, affinity, and other academic stuff. And, as we all know, 99% of what academics study don’t cross over into the business world where it becomes applicable to the generic public.

All that to say….

Pretty cool picture huh?