I just wrapped up my final exams for this semester on Wednesday and will soon be boarding a flight to San Francisco for a week of vacation filled with visiting friends and exploring California again among other things. I will probably have some downtime to write here but if not I thought I would put this up. Continue Reading »

Over 300 people have suggested via Skribit that I chime in on what’s involved with maintaining, writing and developing for this blog. With this post I aim to cover every aspect of how I work and keep PaulStamatiou.com rolling. Some things might be common sense while others might make you wonder. Enjoy. Continue Reading »

Depending on where you reside, 2008 will be arriving shortly or is just a countdown away. This blog more than doubled in subscribers in 2007 so I want to take this time and do another “roll call” type post. The spotlight will turn to you and I ask you to post a Continue Reading »

I hate to solicit things on this blog but I’ve been selected as a top 20 finalist for the $10k blogging scholarship I wrote about a while ago. If you’ve got the time to spare, I’d really appreciate your vote. Compared to last year where there were only 10 finalists, there seems to be considerably more competition this year. As I’ve mentioned in the past, out-of-state Continue Reading »

Over the last two weeks I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of PaulStamatiou.com. It has been around for over 2 years, served up over 4 million pages (1 million of those in the last 4 months), amassed over 15,000 comments over 850+ posts and grown a dedicated readership. PaulStamatiou.com has always just been a hobby as I’m passionate about everything Continue Reading »

I have recently been keeping revisions of my shoddy coding practices with Subversion, which I ignored until I picked up a “Practical Subversion” book a few weeks ago. Naturally, I figured it only logical to expand this to my own WordPress installation, making WordPress updates as simple as a single SVN command. That’s all kittens and daisies, but for some reason I thought it would be cool to update to trunk Continue Reading »

Daniel Kovach, the guy responsible for The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation from which I received a $1k blogging scholarship last year, is running a web design scholarship contest. If you’re a college student and can design a WordPress template by August 13th 18th (extended), you could have $5,000 taken off your tuition. Continue Reading »

Just an FYI to everyone that reads, subscribes and checks this site incessantly, I recently entered the ranks of the Top 100 blogs as tracked by Technorati, out of 70M+ blogs. Technorati takes into account unique links within the past 6 months, or at least that’s how they used to do it. Continue Reading »

There are several milestones for kids growing up in the US. There’s the 16th birthday which is when you can get your driver’s license, the 17th birthday when you can view R rated movies, the 18th birthday when you are legally an adult and then there’s the 21st birthday. On your 21st birthday you can Continue Reading »

For the past month, I have been working closely with designer Mike Rohde on developing some personal branding - essentially a logo for this site, my business cards, etcetera. The logo has been completed and as such I tweaked this site a bit to accommodate for it. Continue Reading »

Every week I receive more than a handful of emails from people asking me what I use to display my Twitter status on this blog, as well as how I do the “popular this month” block and display random blog stats in my sidebar. Hopefully this post Continue Reading »

Spring semester 2007 has finally come to an end. After two weeks of completing final projects and studying for my computer science final, I’m glad to say that it’s finished and I can finally get some sleep. For some reason I thought I was borderline D in my CS class, but now that the final has been graded I might get away with Continue Reading »

All interesting stories, at least on my campus, start out “So I was Googling myself..”, and this news snippet is no exception. So I was Googling myself today and noticed that I am now the second result (at least in the US) for a “paul” search on Google.com, passing up Paul McCartney. I think that’s the highest I’ll be able to go considering the first spot is Continue Reading »

Just a reminder for all WordPress bloggers - check your Akismet spam in the admin panel from time to time. I just bailed out 9 legit comments. And to think how many comments have wrongfully been marked as spam and deleted. If you ever find that a comment you posted Continue Reading »

Back in July I “realigned” this site’s design after having gotten bored with the old design. I began thinking this realigned design lacked some branding and could be tweaked up quickly. I ended up taking a break from watching all the cool SXSW happenings on twitter to “refresh” the design tonight. If you’re reading this through RSS, click on over to see the new look. Continue Reading »

There might be some downtime today as I move from my older (dv) 2.0 to a (dv) 3.0 server. Downtime would likely occur at 4PM EST and on, if even noticeable. Just wanted to get this notice in my feed before it happens. Thanks. In the meantime check out browsersize.com - great resource for web developers.

Reader Jason Sanzone made a nifty RSS widget for OS X users. You might recall that Anthony Deloso made a Yahoo! widget for pstam.com back in the summer, after I got my own OS X dashboard widget listed on Apple. Thanks Jason!

I just got back to Atlanta to find out that my RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll look into this after I unpack. Update: Hrm, now I’m getting “Server returned HTTP Error 500: There was a problem retrieving the feed” with the fix mentioned in the comments. Update 2: I just undid the fix and it seems to be working, weird. Update 3: Nevermind, the feed is acting up again. Just put the fix back and resync’d, we’ll see what happens.

2006 was a great year for me. I got to experience working at a big web company, started blogging more often and took some interesting courses at school. I plan to keep up with that for the most part, but overall I will be taking it easy while working hard. There’s no need to overwork myself taking 6 classes. Continue Reading »

Keeping in-line with last year’s successful Happy Holidays Contest, I introduce to you the second annual Happy Holidays Contest. I got a lot of great suggestions and comments with the last contest. Last year I gave away a year of free Media Temple hosting on their (ss) shared server. However, a lot of things have changed over at Media Temple since last year. Continue Reading »

Okay that title might be a little ambitious but I truly believe that 281 is different from most WordPress themes. 281 is a joint project between myself and Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising. Neil approached me a while back and we started talking about how there was really no strong WordPress theme that combined slick minimalist aesthetics, speed and search engine optimization. That’s exactly what 281 promises to be. Continue Reading »

After 9rules released their comprehensive new search feature on Monday, allowing users to search member content and receive results from Flickr, YouTube and Technorati, it was only a matter of time before someone created a Firefox search plugin. This got me thinking that it would be pretty cool if PaulStamatiou.com readers could have that same convenience. Continue Reading »

I had no idea how many of you guys used coComment, the web service that lets you track and share your conversations, until I recently checked out the coComment Sites page. That page lists the websites with the most coComment-tracked comments and surprisingly PaulStamatiou.com is currently on the top 20 list, with digg dominating most of the list. Continue Reading »

I wrote my first real post on this blog exactly one year ago today. This post marks the 473rd entry which means I’ve blogged roughly 1.3 times per day. Those posts have accumulated over a massive 6,700 comments. However, I’m not here today (actually, 2:01 am in the morning) to tell you the current status of this blog, you already know about that. Continue Reading »

Tonight I replaced the dead and uninteresting links page with a just as badly named page, linkage. This page keeps track of my ever growing list of accounts for various Web 2.0 services and helps you find me on those sites. I also wrote a bit about each service, how I use it and why I think it rocks.. things like that. Check it every Continue Reading »