There is so much happening around the place right now that my head is spinning. I closed my eyes and when I opened them it was August. I have no idea what happened to the first half of the year – although to be fair, I think I say that every year. August is my favourite month as it is when I celebrate my birthday week, fondly dubbed (by me) the Hawkstravaganza. More to the point, the new month means the start of a couple of new things for us at the SitePoint community.
The most significant of those things is my ‘Get To Know Us’ campaign on our Facebook page. A few weeks ago I asked you for feedback on what you’d like to see on the page and there were two key themes that emerged. One common request was for interactive challenges like games or quizzes and the other was the desire to get to know more about the people behind SitePoint. I have always found the latter of those two subjects fascinating but I won’t go into it in great detail as it’s the subject of the next Community Crier. What I will say is that I’ve taken your feedback on board and have come up with the aforementioned campaign.
So this is how the campaign will work. Each month I’ll focus on a specific subject. For August that will be WordPress. I have created a new tab on our Facebook page labelled ‘People’. Every Friday I will run the biography of a SitePoint staff member that is using WordPress in some way in our business. I’ll tell you what they do for us, how they are using WordPress and why they chose it. At the end of the month I’ll run a quiz based on that information and we’ll be giving away copies of our brand new book Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes as prizes. If that sounds like something that you might be interested in, make sure you stop over to our fan page this week and check out the new tab (coming any day).
The start of a new month also means a new competition at the SitePoint forums. This month we have decided to run with a programming competition for the code slingers amongst you. Because we love all programmers equally, you can use your language of choice for this one. What we want you to do is write a SitePoint Private Message Utility Application. You have just two weeks in which to complete it, so get cracking.
The last of the special August features that we have running is our series of Photography tutorials. If programming and people aren’t your things then being part of a development community is perhaps not the best place for you UNLESS you want to learn how to take great photos for web sites! If that is the case, then drop by the Photography forum and check out the introductory tutorial. The series will follow through our latest book Photography For The Web and is being conducted by a keen forum mentor, Shaun(OfTheDead).
Hot Topics This Week
The geeks are talking dependency injection and action controllers in the PHP Application Design forum. Come on, you must have something to add to that!
In General Chat they’re having a laugh at each other’s phobias. If you’re not scared, go and check out Fear is the Mind Killer.
The conversation amongst the bloggers this week is about installing plugins in a free WordPress blog over in the… you guessed it… WordPress forum.
If you haven’t taken the time to stop by our newest forum Developing For Mobile Devices yet, now is your chance. Right now there is an interesting thread about the best way to direct mobile traffic to the mobile version of your site.
That’s more than enough from me for one day. Later.
Feature image by Chris Roberts from Digital Precision
Sarah HawkFormerly a developer in the corporate world, HAWK (known as Sarah by her mother) said goodbye to the code and succumbed to the lure of social media to become the Community Manager for the SitePoint network. Now Hawk is working with Discourse to build their product and community.
