But irregardless of that, the Automattic designed VaultPress backup solution for your self-hosted WordPress blog is finally exiting private beta.

For some background on the product itself, check out a post I wrote back in March on THE Tech Scoop here.

Essentially, VaultPress is built on the compute grid that serves the over 11 million WordPress.com blogs and somewhere upwards of 250 million monthly hits – this is a seriously robust system folks.

What’s nice about VaultPress is that there is a real-time image of where you are when you’re creating content and, should disaster occur, you can restore your data to that point-in-time prior to the disaster. That should relieve some heartaches from blog owners and content creators.

When you’re ready, head over to vaultpress.com to get signed sign up.

A bit of background as to why I liked the idea of this app so much. When holidays and my birthday comes around, I typically tell folks instead of buying me material gifts take that money and donate it to a charity in my name. For a while my family couldn’t grasp that and I’d still get the package of socks or the new pair of dress pants. Soon enough though, they caught on and realized that the specific charity didn’t matter to me, as long as it’s a legitimate cause, but I don’t care if it’s cancer, hunger, PETA or whomever.

Now comes technology into the picture, and the Touch To Give application for the iPhone. With this app you can make a free donation to animal rescue, breast cancer research, and hunger relief; all from a simple point and click interface on your iPhone.

Along with the core donation, you can also learn how you can take further action to help others and even shop to give more through the GreaterGood Network (which is the home web presence for The Animal Rescue Site, The Breast Cancer Site, and The Hunger Site).

I love the simplicity of the app. I love the good nature and the overall purpose of the app. Looking at the numerous reviews; many seem to feel the same way. There were some early comments about the inability of the app loading properly and sporadic freezing, but I haven’t had any issues in my usage and testing.

If you’re into the idea of giving to charity I recommend checking this app out. It’s free in the App Store and you can get it at the link here.

Version 3.0 will bring about some much sought after functionality to the CMS/blogging platform that has seen tremendous growth in its user base within the past couple of years.

There are numerous enhancements, but here I’m going to focus on what I feel are the Big 3 (in no specific order).

1. Multi-Site

The functionality that was once only available to the WPMU (Multi-User) folks on a custom install of WordPress is now going to be available to everyone (irregardless of where you host your WordPress installation). Being able to have a multi-user site opens up tremendous functionality; including, but not limited to, having a hyper-local site where multiple authors contribute content on the site and each has their own look and feel. Also for those sites that need to expand their presence to satisfy various niches or topic areas, but still need to fit under one larger “site umbrella” this multi-site functionality is going to be a welcome addition.

Now, activating multi-user will require some back-end coding. It has been somewhat straight-forward during this beta phase and I expect there to be more automation and ease of setup once the final release hits.

2. Menu Management

While I am personally most excited about the multi-site capability, I must say that the new menu management system is running a close 2nd on my list of things to look forward to.

If you’re a user of WordPress themes from WooThemes you’ll be pretty familiar with this functionality as Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has worked with the WooThemes team and leveraged much of that flexibility into the 3.0 release.

With the new menu management you will have full control over your site’s navigation menus. Using a drag and drop administrative interface you’ll be able to include pages, categories, links (internal and external to your blog), etc. to your top navigation. Trust me, this is huge – I’ve already disabled 3rd-party plug-ins on some of my blogs that performed this functionality now that’s it’s going to be integrated into the core of WordPress.

Image via: http://www.mashable.com

3. Custom Post Types

This bit of functionality is important and with all the fanfare around some of the other new cool features, the importance of custom post types could get lost in the shuffle. So let me explain just why this is a big deal.

Today in WordPress, you can publish two types of content; either a post or a page. That’s fine and dandy, but incredibly limiting. Now with custom post types consider this; you have a a collection of content you want to publish that contains nothing but photos. Now imagine creating a custom post type for a photo gallery, for example, and have a fresh “custom” look and feel for photo galleries within your blog. Again, this alleviates the need of 3rd-party plug-ins that handled this capability since here it will be integrated directly into the core of WordPress.

I’ll throw one more in for posterity sake…

4. New Default Theme

Image via: http://www.blogohblog.com

Ah yes, Kubrick has run it’s course. I think I recall Matt saying at WordCampSF that the Kubrick default theme had been around for about 3 years. That’s way too long. The new default theme, aptly named 2010 brings about an incredibly clean look and feel and added functionality that complement what we can expect from version 3.0.

One of those components is the ability to have a custom background image for every page/category of your blog.

Again, with WordCampSF wrapping up and a productive two day code sprint immediately afterward it was good to see Beta 2 released to the user community. I know there are six WordCamps remaining on the calendar before the end of May, and if progress continues to happen as it has, we should see not only the release candidate but the final version before the end of June.

Review post courtesy of

Ok, here I sit reviewing a website as a guest blogger for @ErinBlaskie, and of the 3 sites she was looking at I drew Placepop.

It’s basically a mish-mash of FourSquare and Twitter, and so far as I can tell, it doesn’t do either of them very well. I signed up only to find the damned thing has a city in Ghana as the default hometown of everyone who signs up. It took me a whole 5 minutes to realise this though, and a further 2 to change it. I would like to have those 7 minutes back, really, as they were really quite wasted.

Now that I have my location fixed and some of my Brampton, ON haunts added to my places, you might wonder then…’what now?’ That’s what I’m wondering myself, what is this site all about? I didn’t see an FAQ about it, so I realised I’d have to figure this one out on my own, so I decided to click on ‘find places’, thinking this would give me some clue. Guess what I found, the people who frequent this site are by and large in San Fransisco, and browsing members gave me more than 300 pages of members who joined and got bored very quickly. 20 members to a page, and maybe 20 pages of regulars, most from San Fran, almost all from the States.

What we have here at it’s core is a social scene for San Fransisco, but do keep one thing in mind; I’m doing without the iPhone app because…wait for it…I don’t have one! Yes! I’m a Blackberry user, and Apple is the only phone manufacturer not ignored which if you look at the included chart, you will understand why only an iPhone app and nothing for any other smartphone is indeed a bad idea.

Apple doesn’t even appear in the top 5, according to IDC, it gets lumped in with ‘others’, the app being little but a nod to trendiness. Maybe I’m not getting the whole experience because I lack an iPhone, I don’t know, but Placepop gives me the picture of form coming over function. The site is presented fairly well but is ultimately crippled by trying to do too much. If you want a generic ‘here I am’ site, the give it a try, it’s free at any rate.

In this episode, Erin Blaskie demoes Runkeeper (iPhone), introduces you to Nike+ (iPod) and takes you to Free Form Fitness in Ottawa to get a personal training demo from Jean-Luc Boissonneault.

Sit back and get ready for a fun-filled, fitness-focused episode…

From their site:

In this episode we chat about Aperture 3, 1Password, and Apple Care. We also compare Run and Canabalt, and by compare I mean we raise our voices a couple octaves and argue which is better. The outtakes are pretty funny so make sure you stick around for them. Please subscribe to our videocast in iTunes.

Make sure to check out Macgasm.net and follow them on Twitter!

From Livescribe’s website:

Livescribe is fundamentally changing the way people capture, access and share information with pen and paper. Founded in 2007, Livescribe has developed a breakthrough low-cost mobile computing platform which includes the award-winning Pulse smartpen, dot paper, smartpen applications, Livescribe Desktop software, Livescribe Online Community, and development tools.

Since its launch in April 2008, the Pulse smartpen has won multiple awards, including Popular Science’s Best of What’s New 2008, Popular Mechanic’s 2008 Breakthrough Award, and MacWorld’s Best of Show in 2009.

Renee Moore is a Virtual Marketing Director who works with pharmacists who make customized medications and holistic health care practitioners who love what they do but they don’t love the marketing quite as much. She has worked with over 100 pharmacies and holistic healthcare practitioners all over North America helping them to attract Moore patients, bring in Moore business, and ultimately make Moore money. You can learn more about Renée Moore at www.muchmooremarketing.com.

Check out the video podcast below and be sure to check out their website at www.Macgasm.net. If you’re a Twitterholic (like me) you can find the Macgasm crew at @Macgasm.

Now, while this app is still capable of tremendous works, please do not expect to be creating much other than some basic photo editing, and then maybe some sprucing up (if you’re in the mood to do it). You can either take a picture that you already have on your device, or you may take a new picture (iPhone users only) and edit that. When you open your picture in the application, you’ll notice the options right on the screen in menu format:

• Photo Management: Cropping, Straightening, Rotating, & Flipping
• Photo Colour Filter: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black & White, & Contrast
• Photo Options: Sketch, Soft Focus, & Sharpen
• Photo Effects: Effects & Borders

On the bottom of the screen, you’re able to cancel the project, revert to last modication, go forward to newest mod, and then either Save/Save & Upload. Some great options there for any style (and experience) of photographer. With the mobility available these days, it doesn’t get any more mobile than this. Imagine this. You’re on a shoot somewhere, and on the shoot, your laptop by chance loses power; battery is very very low. You have to take the train back home and it’s a 30 minute ride. You could take the photos you just took, transfer them on to your iPhone or iPod right there and enjoy your ride home while editing some of the pictures. I fooled around with some of my own photos and came up with this change.

Like I said, not much to the picture. I just added a saturation change with a few changes to the soft focus. Overall a good picture to begin with, with the outcome of another nice picture. I might not able to super impose the picture on an ex-girlfriend on the face of an ugly dog, I can spruce up pictures of this beautiful pug and upload them to my Photoshop.com account right from my iPhone.

It’s not a bad deal, and by no way is it not worth a trial. It’s a free app on the iTunes App Store and definitely among the best photo editing apps on the device(s).

Look & Feel: Now, as I mentioned, the actual Photoshop.com is more appealing in almost every way. However, with that in mind, this app is not entirely unpleasant. It has a quite good design… it just pales in comparison to it’s parent site. You won’t be blinded by bright colours, nor will you be confused by the branding of the app, it’s Adobe perfect in every aspect. 8.0/10!

Ease of Use: The ease of use of the application is rating very high. I almost wish this is how you can edit on the actual Photoshop software. You’d be able to do some real digital finger painting. This may is definitely going to be a tough section to deny a good score. I can’t find a bad thing about the usability for the app. 10/10!

The Good, The Bad, & The WTF: The good thing is that the software involved is very highly rated and powerful for a hand-held device. I experienced no lag whatsoever in my experience and found it incredibly easy to manipulate my photos with (and here’s the bad) the limited amount of options on on board with the app. As for the WTF, why is Adobe this incredibly awesome for releasing this app for free? I’ll add a bad to the WTF, because really there is a very limited amount of features to the app, and in the age of DLC, where is it for this app? 8.0/10!

Total Score

87/100

Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://www.ethusiasm.com/review-photoshop/feed/ 0 http://www.ethusiasm.com/gowalla-on-the-iphone-gowalla/ http://www.ethusiasm.com/gowalla-on-the-iphone-gowalla/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:29:04 +0000 Erin http://www.ethusiasm.com/?p=414 Gowalla is an excellent social app that allows you to check in to locations all around the world. In each location, you also have the opportunity to drop and pick up items to possibly become a founder of that location. It connects up to popular social media networks also to share your location with others.

If you’d like to friend me (Erin Blaskie) on Gowalla, check out my profile here.

Watch the video demo here: