TheWriteStuff is now Deelightful Musings.

I never intended for “TheWriteStuff” to stick for as long as it did. It was sort of a placeholder until I came up with something that I felt really described what my journal is about in a nutshell. After a lot of soul searching — and with the help and support of my genius sister — I’m happy to put a new name to an old journal. The contents are still the same. I will continue to write about what I love: design, photography, and technology.

Thanks for visiting. Hugs and giggles.

Due to the gaining popularity of Internet-capable mobile devices over the last few years, I have installed a new plugin for my blog to be served in its full glory via 3G/Wi-Fi network. The Write Stuff is now iPhone compatible! Formatted for simple navigation and ready to be viewed by all iPhone users.

For all you WordPress bloggers, check out this essential plugin:
WPTouch is a simple, powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

The theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your website’s regular theme.

For more information, visit http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch-pro.

To download and install WPTouch for your blog, visit WordPress Plugins.

I just spent the last three hours restoring my WordPress blog back to 2.9.2 because I tried upgrading to 3.0.1 and realized that it was incompatible with my plugins. It gave me a 500 Internal Server Error and wouldn’t allow me to go into my admin screen. Luckily, I backed up my entire blog before attempting to upgrade so all I had to do was dump everything and reload 2.9.2. I’m still having trouble with a few of my plugins but at least I can get in my admin screen and reconfig my settings.

To learn more about backing up your WordPress blog, check out Online-Tech-Tips.

Visit WordPress Support to learn more about how to downgrade from 3.0.1 to 2.9.2.

If you’re a web developer or someone who works with color schemes and color palettes, you might already rely on software or tools to help you find the best set of matching and harmonious colors.

ColorSuckr is a cool online service that allows you to create color schemes based on pictures. Just enter a image URL and the website will generate 12 of the most common colors on that image. You get a preview of the actual color and color codes in Hex value, web safe value, and RGB numbers.

The website also has a few other useful features such as the ability to enter the URL for a webpage, instead of just a single image. It will scan the page and show you all the images and let you choose from there.

You can also install the ColorSuckr bookmarklet for the Firefox add-on. This is great and convenient if you work a lot with color palettes. Just click on the bookmarklet button from the webpage you’re on containing the image you would like to work with and go from there! Enjoy!

Visit ColorSuckr to start extracting your color palettes!

After looking through my blog comments, I noticed how many people didn’t have Gravatars.

What is a Gravatar?

Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars created by Tom Werner. Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. They help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, and is recognized by your email address every time you leave a comment.

Leaving behind an avatar image on every blog comment is a relationship builder. It will also create awareness with the blog owner and other readers that come to that blog post. Most people can connect more with an image of a face or a logo than the default image place holder. It is much harder for people to connect with a default image because it lacks personalization.

If you are really active in leaving blog comments in niche communities you will get notice a lot by others in that community. If people see your comments everywhere it is like “Wow this gal or guy is everywhere!”

So how does Gravatar work?

You upload your image to the Gravatar website where it is stored on their computers. The Gravatar is attached to an email address that you specify during setup. Anytime you leave a comment on a blog and enter your email address you specified during the setup process, your Gravatar image appears next to your blog comment.

I’ve revamped my blog to include Gravatars to appear next to your comment(s) on my blog entry pages so sign up and start customizing your Gravatar!

Visit Gravatar.com to customize your globally recognized avatar.

Interested in having Gravatars appear on your blog? Check out WordPress Codex to learn more.