John sent me a bookmark of his over delicious this afternoon with regards to a company called CommonCraft.

First things first, if you’re unfamiliar with delicious, here’s a tutorial called “Social Bookmarking in Plain English” that just happens to be from those very fine folks at CommonCraft.

Now, the bookmark in question linked back to this blog post about screencasting:

Screen cast videos are one of the most powerful ways to show off anything on the web. They are also quite difficult to do well. [ReadWriteWeb]

It’s true, about a year ago I produced my first screencast for the company I was working for at the time. It wasn’t until early 2008 however, that I started putting up some of my own, casual tutorials about things I had learned to do with WordPress.

Using the best technology around and honing our skills for the professional market, sixty4media can be commissioned to produce and publish custom screencasts so you can show off your business or product on the web as well.

We can help with everything from writing your screencast script, working out a storyboard or timeline, show you sample video footage, edit, and publish to the platform of your choice.

If you would like to explain, educate, or promote using your very own product in an easy-to-share and view video, please feel free to contact us.

The success of CommonCraft and their years of mass ‘2.0′ education videos goes to show that they have had the right idea all along. Products and services can be explained “In Plain English” and that’s what people truly want to see from an online video tutorial.

We’ve been running some installs of WordPress 2.6.1 on various sites and can report that everything seems tip top. There hasn’t been any major issues with plugins, and performance on the latest version of WP seems a little more snappy.

This falls on the heels of WordPress 2.6 that was released a few months ago. The upgrade brought much needed improvements to security, but there were a variety of tweaks done to the back end administration. Many elements have been improved when it comes to managing posts, comments, and plugins, saving time when you need it the most.

2.6.1 brings many international enhancements to the core of WordPress, making it more accessible to users around the world.

If you are behind on WordPress upgrades for your site, feel free to contact us for some assistance in bringing you up to date.

There have been a few WordCamps in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley over the last year but none have compared to the scale and grandeur of San Francisco’s master gathering of WordPress enthusiasts. Duane from Brave New Code attended this year and is bringing back all sorts of ideas for the city’s next WordCamp, which sixty4media will be co-organizing with him at BarCamp Vancouver.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

All attendees are encouraged to give a demo, a session, a presentation, or help with one. All attendees are expected to be participants. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.

Presenters are responsible for making sure that notes/slides/audio/video of their presentations are published on the web for the benefit of all and those who can’t be present.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

If you have any suggestions about what you would like to see at WordCamp during BarCamp feel free to drop us a comment. We’re hoping to incorporate some elements from San Francisco as well as bringing in experts to share their thoughts and knowledge on all fronts. This will be a learning session for rookies and veterans, all celebrating our favourite blogging platform.

As we have been slowly molding sixty4media into shape, we have recently made our very own Twitter account open and available to the public.

Twitter is a popular social media site that combines micro-blogging and instant messaging to an international phenomenon of letting people know what you’re doing. Sounds insignificant to some, but there are more ways to use it other than telling people that you’re hungry or doing the laundry.

For instance, we use a great plugin for WordPress called WordTwit. This was made by our good friend Duane at BraveNewCode, and the whole purpose of it is to make an update to your Twitter account when you publish a new post on your WordPress site. Combined with any other updates we do on the account, you can get the latest news from our site as we publish it.

In the age of iPhones and Blackberries, what better way to connect to your audience directly?

Apologies for not promoting this event sooner, but WordCamp Fraser Valley is going on right now. In fact, Raul is up in the front of the room and giving his presentation on switching to WordPress from Blogger, so we are in full swing out here in Langley.

Rebecca is doing her best to live blog most of today’s event, so head over there to get more information.

It’s worth noting these types of events for being great places to meet other WordPress users. There is also a wealth of ideas that we find by attending gatherings like this. Whether it’s finding your voice as a blogger or discovering new tools to make your postings better, finding events like these are worth your time when it comes to wanting to find out more by what you can do with your blog.

Update: There was a question raised during Rebecca’s presentation that prompted me to make a quick blog post on my personal blog about “Designing drop down menus with CSS on WordPress“. This is something that we did for one of our clients, No Boundaries.org. If you are curious about this topic, please check out my post there.

A post made yesterday by Ryan Boren points to the next, major release of WordPress could be launched as soon as tomorrow.

Version 2.6 has more fixes on the horizon, but there are a number of new features as well. Some worth noting are built-in support for image captions, support for Google Gears to increase page load time, and better notification of plugin updates in the WordPress Dashboard.

I have had a little time to install WP 2.6RC1 and give it a little bit of experimentation. For the most part, it’s not a huge departure from the latest version, 2.5.1, but the addition of image captions will be an added boost for many users who are not the best when it comes to adding such things by writing HTML and CSS into their posts. See a post on my personal blog that I made a while ago about using CSS to attribute photos in your blog posts.

Granted that any other major bugs are not found in this release, watch for WordPress 2.6 to land as soon as Monday, July 14, 2008. We’ll be paying close attention for sure.

Going back to the beginning here, I decided it might be a good idea to do a screencast about how to make a screencast - this episode focusing on Mac OSX users.

You can view more of my tutorials on Miss604.com although they will soon have a permanent home on the sixty4media blog.

This is a topic that you can go circles in, but it’s one worth thinking about if you have a blog because simply put, RSS feeds are your life line. If people want to stay up to date on the latest that your blog has to offer, this is how they are going to do it.

The problem, depending on how you view it, is what you put into that RSS feed.

For the most part, you know that you’ll have all your content displayed in all of its glory on your site, but for those that subscribe to your RSS feed, you tend to have two choices. Do you give them the summary or the full post? Let’s examine the difference between the two.

The summary is just that. It’s usually short and limited to a particular length of characters or words, depending on your settings or plugins you have on your blog. The point is that it’s basically a coming attraction of what’s actually on your site, but you have to load the web page in your browser to see the complete product. In the end, you are driving traffic to your site, which is what many content producers love.

On the other hand, you might actually hurt your chances of growing your audience due to users who rely on RSS feeds for much of the information they consume. This means that when they see your summary on their RSS aggregator, be it a non-browser program or hand held device, they won’t read your content in its entirety. In fact, some users un-subscribe from RSS feeds based on the soul fact that only summaries are available.

Full posts allow everything to be supplied open and freely to the world, getting your content to as many people as you possibly can. And generally, power users love this. They are able to read your content when and however they can. On top of that, if it’s something worth really noting, they will pass it on in a blog post of their own or through numerous other social networking outlets like Digg, Facebook, NowPublic, or Del.icio.us.

Will this affect traffic to your site in terms of stats? Honestly, it might. However, if you really care about getting your message out, this is something to think about. Stats versus a wider audience of your content. In the end, it’s up to you to decide as to which is more important.

Side note: If you are scratching your head over what RSS is, watch “RSS in plain english” by our friends at CommonCraft to help get you started.

Continuing in their series of explaining all things new media and Web 2.0, the great folks at CommonCraft have released “Social Media in Plain English“. You can view the video below and help yourself understand what social media is all about. Better yet, use this to help yourself explain what social media is to those who might not be in tune with what social media means.

If you would like to see some of the other creations from CommonCraft, please visit their website.

Pano from Trainharder.com contacted us a few months ago with great aspiration for his website which he wanted to grow into an all-encompassing resource for the outdoor community. He has been blogging on his WordPress-based site for the last few years and the overall design was something he wanted to rethink in the hopes of expanding his readership. Having the basic idea and concept of what he wanted to achieve, he looked to sixty4media to help him reach that next step.

The previous design of the site was a four column layout that had outgrown Pano’s vision of Trainharder.com. Cranking out great content relating to “an adventure resource and news site for people who like to get outdoors in B.C.” takes a lot of work, especially for someone who is getting outdoors himself on a regular basis. On top of regular posts, there is an events listing to create an on going hub of information relating to outdoor races or gatherings. Doing this on a small scale basis is a large task, to say the least so optimizing the content output and the flow of the site was key.

sixty4media’s custom theme cleaned up the overall design of the site, giving more focus on the content. The front page was revamped with a three column design while a two column design was applied to the individual posts and pages. The idea was to cater to two specific groups of audiences: those who are frequent visitors to the website’s front page for visual appeal and those who are RSS subscribers that tend to pay more attention to getting the raw information out of the content.

Elements were specifically tailored for this WordPress-powered site and by using the events calendar plugin, we were able to customize listings, which helped to make this portion of Trainharder.com more effective as a resource. Essentially, if there is a foot race or trail running event in B.C., there is a good chance that it will be listed here.

Last but not least, we brought the WordPress install up to the latest version of 2.5.1, a much needed upgrade to the back end of the site.

Feel free to visit Trainharder.com if you are interested in seeing how the plan came together. Pano is actively building a community based on this unique market, making this a very strong online portal for folks who get outdoors and away from their computers. It’s very cool stuff.