It’s the Summer of WordCamps!

After an amazing WordCamp Seattle last month, I’ll be attending three more WordCamps in rapid succession:

• WordCamp San Francisco – July 26 – 27
• WordCamp Portland – August 10
• WordCamp Vancouver – August 17

In fact, my company, IvyCat is a sponsor of WordCamps Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.  We’re doing what we can to give love to the WordPress Community in the Pacific Northwest. 🙂

Hear Me Roar

I’ll be giving a talk at WordCamp Vancouver entitled 10 Tips for Better WP, Plugin & Theme Support, so if you’d like to see me sweat and stammer in public, or simply cheer me on, show up. 🙂

There are plenty of tickets still available for WordCamp Vancouver so I hope to see you there.

WordPress Seattle Meetup

Finally, the WordPress Seattle Meetup, which is over 1000 members strong and growing, has a new venue and format.

This new venue is terrific and will afford us the opportunity to have a mini-WordCamp every month with three separate tracks for Users/Bloggers, Designers/Themers, and Developers.

Hope to see you there.

WordCamp Seattle 2013 is on June 8th this year, and tickets go on sale this morning at 10am.  Pick up your tickets at:
http://2013.seattle.wordcamp.org/tickets/

If you’re into WordPress, it’s an outrageous deal for just $20.

Install Parallels Tools in Ubuntu

Every time Parallels Tools needs to be updated for my Ubuntu virtual machines, I have to remember exactly how to do it, which usually involves a few clumsy Google searches.

So, for the sake of posterity, and to help anyone else in the same situation, here’s how I upgrade Parallels Tools on Ubuntu:

1. Open your Ubuntu virtual machine in Parallels.
2. In the Parallels menu, click on Virtual Machine/Reinstall Parallels Tools.  You should see a disc image (looks like a CD) appear on your Ubuntu desktop.
3. Open a Terminal and navigate to this (virtual) CD by typing: cd /media/Parallels\ Tools or cd /media/"Parallels Tools" and hit enter.
4. In your terminal window, type sudo sh install – Parallels will open the Parallels Tools Installer, which will guide you through the setup.
5. Click Next
6. Select Upgrade and click Next
7. Parallels will warn that you’re about to install and that it’s probably a good idea to save data and close open applications.  After you’ve done so, click Next.
8. Hold on while Parallels works its magic and, when it’s done, it’ll thoughtfully congratulate you and ask you to reboot.
9. Restart Ubuntu and you’re done!

WordPress 2.9 has just been released and it’s another great step in the right direction.

I’ve already upgraded two sites using the automatic update from within the WordPress Dashboard and everything went off without a hitch. 🙂

There are a slew of new features and under-the-hood optimizations making WordPress even more pleasurable to develop with and use.

Check out the new WordPress 2.9!

This web-based tool written in PHP makes it easy to search and replace text strings in a MySQL database.
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