From the small amount time I spent in New York City, I was able to make up my mind in regards to what job I wanted to take. NYC is a cool city but it’s very dirty, fast paced and much different than Las Vegas. For the past couple of years I’ve been sleeping in everyday until like 11 and calmly going about my day, which for the most part took place in the night time, while the day time hours were very relaxed and chill. While in NY my scheduled consisted of waking up at 7:30AM to catch 2 different trains to commute to my office in mid-town Manhattan where millions of people were flooding the streets and even though my shift was over at 5:30PM, I wouldn’t get back home until 7:00PM after waiting for trains and fighting with crowds of people.

I pretty much had my mind made up before I got to NY that the job offer I got in Vegas would be much better than the position I was taking in NYC but since I already accepted it and had things lined up to move, I decided to give it an honest chance, because I could have very well loved it and stayed since money isn’t the most important thing to me. Since the job wasn’t that appealing to me and I was unsuccessful at finding a permanent apartment that was decent and reasonably priced my decision was made pretty quick.

Now I’m back in Las Vegas, living in Panorama Towers – basically right on the strip. The WSOP is going on so I’ve been playing a lot of Poker and the action in every room has been real good. in addition to the WSOP at Rio, Venetian is hosting their Deep Stack Extravaganza Tournaments, so needless to say I’ll be busy working and grinding at the poker tables.

I decided to take a Full-Time position in the web development team at WBR and continue to freelance on the side. I enjoy freelancing and the freedom it provides but all that aside it’s never been great money unless you really are willing to commit and apply yourself by putting in countless hours of work, making new clients/connections and finding as much work as you can handle.

I’m pretty excited about the position I’ll be filling at WBR. Basically the company coordinates events/conferences all over the world for many different industries. Each one of these events needs a website and each website has a a 3-stage cycle including an annual redesign. So given the amount of events they already host there should be plenty of website design work for me during my time here. I’m happy with the starting salary they offered me and the job comes with lot’s of benefits, which is something I haven’t had while freelancing.

I think all in all it’s going to be a good change for me, waking up each morning hoping a train into the office to work until 5 then I can leave my work at the office and not always think about work. That is what I would end up doing while freelancing, never not thinking about work or rarely not on my computer when at home. Even though I’ll still continue to work on personal projects of mine and on some freelance work I imagine it will be in a much different state of mind, since it’s just side work and not my main source of income.

The office I’ll be working out of is located on 5th Avenue right around 45th St. which is midtown east Manhattan. I’m looking for apartments in manhattan but until I find something permanent I’ll most likely take a roommate situation temporarily, because I need to get out there by next week.

Originally created by UneekGrafix, Chris wrote an article about the recent sale of his brand as well as my tweaks to the mark and new web site that is the new home of his Scriptflipper brand.

Original Mark

New Mark

I’m happy with the new brand and my revisions to the logo. I’ve also made quite a bit of design changes to my site, brought back a light color scheme, changed the typography and included CU3ER, a Flash 3D Image Slider, on my homepage. I will likely be adding some features and additional flare around the site within the next couple of days, right now I need to make some new cards, make sure all my old links are being forwarded to the new domain properly and get back to some client work, that I’d been neglecting during this transition.

My initial approach was to use the is_home() conditional tag from the WordPress Codex. Problem with this method was whenever you browsed through the previous 10 entries using the navigation links on the home page the next 10 articles would be displayed in the same manor as the first 10; The top article would show as a full post while the next 9 would show excerpt only, even tho the top article is not always the latest article published.

So what I wanted to achieve was, when a user lands on my homepage they would see the latest article’s full content and in reverse chronological order and 9 more posts showing the excerpt only. If the user clicked the navigation links (previous 10 entries) I wanted the next 10 entries to show their excerpt’s only without a full post at the top.

After thinking about it for a couple minutes there was a simple solution by adding a simple counter to my while loop and evaluating what number post (of 10) was being returned and returning 2 different results.

If the count is at 0 (1st time through the loop) and we are on the the homepage then return the_content rather then just the_excerpt:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <?php static $ctr = 0;
        if ($ctr == "5" && is_home()) { break; }
  else { ?>
  <div class="post">
      <h4><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Permalink to &quot;<?php the_title(); ?>&quot;"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h4>
      <p class="meta"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> | <?php the_category(', ') ?><span class="alignright bubble"><?php comments_popup_link('0', '1', '%'); ?></span></p>
      <div class="entry">
                <?php if ($ctr == "0" && is_home() && !is_paged()) { the_content("Continue Reading..."); }  else if { ?>
          <?php the_excerpt('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); } ?>
            </div>
        </div>
    <?php $ctr++; } ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

This is a very basic example of what you can do with this, you can also use this to display the number of posts to display within your loop, rather than the default “10″, but be creative and and experiment with this to make your latest WordPress post stand out from the previous entries anywhere you might be listing your posts.

The project is the following website: www.gamblingthemes.com, check it out but in brief I’ll explain what the scope of the website will be. I’ve been working with Online Poker Affiliates, playing poker and working (almost daily) in WordPress for the past 2 years now. My idea was to start a WordPress Theme Store and design some decent looking ‘gambling’ oriented WordPress themes for those promoting online poker/casinos, publishing gambling content or just running a blog of their poker strategy, sessions and adventures. Sometimes I get into conversations with other poker players at various card rooms and after I explain what it is I do for a living, a pretty common response is “oh I want to start a website (or blog). Now with my Gambling Themes project I can refer them to my site for what will soon be a 1-Stop shop for anyone wanting to start a gambling oriented website.

Building organically

The premium WordPress Themes market is pretty competitive with a ton of talented designers (Press75, WooThemes etc.) distributing awesome themes of their own and it’s not going to be easy to just start up a theme market place (by myself) and expect to compete with these seasoned pros but I think marketing to my niche of customers I should have some mediocre success eventually.

I just did a soft-launch yesterday, many areas/pages of the site are left un-developed and I currently only have 1 theme that is completed and ready for sale, but I really didn’t want to keep putting this off until I was completely satisfied because I’d never get it off the ground. A big problem I see is that my competitors have 30+ excellent themes to choose from, all of which have a similar theme of either: News/Magazine, Professional/Business or Portfolio/Photo Gallery so this is where I see some opportunity.

I have another theme in the lab currently, that I’m expecting to release some time this month which would only put me up to a total of 2 themes and still no where that I’d like to be at but I’m hoping to generate some income by selling the themes currently available and make some money that I can put back into the site and have a plethora of themes designed in time.

Theme Frame Work

I really like how WooThemes has a custom framework that they use with each of their themes, and I’m going to try to eventually have the same system packaged with each of my themes. I’m currently looking for a PHP/WordPress developer to work with and build a theme framework that will include many custom, groundbreaking features and options for a great, simple to use WordPress Theme. If you’d like to know more about this or think you’d like to take on the opportunity, please contact me.

That’s all for now, I hope to finish up soon and for things take off as planned. Check out the site, jump on my mailing list to keep up-to-date and give me some feedback if you’d like.

GamblingThemes.com is a WordPress Theme Market that I recently started as a personal project. I’ve been working with poker affiliates, and writing poker blogs for quite some time now, so I figured I’d combine the two things I spend most of my life doing and that’s thinking about poker and working in WordPress. Check out: www.gamblingthemes.com

Front-End Design & Development delivery in a WordPress Theme

The Droid is actually a really decent phone, I enjoyed using it and I think the Android OS is also very good and well eventually become much more popular. The phone had some great features like a slide out keyboard, which was a nice change since I’ve been using iPhone touch screen to text and email for about 2 years now. The camera 5.0 MP camera was also very good but besides the fact of it having a Flash in dark settings the quality of pictures was not better then iPhone pictures. The touch screen on the Droid is decent but definitely falls short of the iPhone, there’s just something about the iPhone’s screen that makes everything so accurate and sensitive to touch and easy to use, it also supports multi-touch gestures while the Droid does not yet. My favorite feature on the Droid that the iPhone does not offer was the ability to tether via the 3G when my connected to my computer with a USB cable, this is more the network then the device but it was definitely nice to have internet access where ever I was (with no wi-fi). My only real problem with the phone was the overall size of the device. It was quite heavy ad just didn’t feel as nice as an iPhone does in my hand.

One thing I really missed was my Mobile Me service that synchronized all my iCal and Address Book data from my Macbook to my iPhone instantly and wirelessly. Mobile Me also has some other features that I just recently discovered; If you lose your iPhone you can log into your MM account and use the locate my iPhone tools which consist of a pulse that can be used to locate your phone if it’s hidden under your couch, a GPS location feature that brings up your iPhone exact location using Google Maps and also the ability to complete wipe your phone out and send a custom message to it, if it happens to fall into the wrong hands.

In the end I’m glad I was able to test out the Droid and Verizon for a couple weeks risk free but am definitely glad to have a new iPhone 3GS, which is actually an upgrade from my 3G. I can now take video and I notice the speed in UI transitions is a bit faster.

Within the last couple of months, AT&T’s 3G network has been a nightmare, just terribly slow and I believe cluttered with so many iPhone users, I think more so for me because I live in a rather big city that happens to be located in a valley between lots of mountains. I was really beginning to lose patients with the service when what at first was a tragedy turned out to be somewhat of a blessing. I dropped my iPhone on my mothers tile floor and it shattered the screen pretty bad. After calling AT&T and inquiring how much it would cost me to replace my broken iPhone I decided my best and cheapest out was to get a new phone from another service at a new customer price.

I decided that I’d go with Motorola’s Droid after hearing pretty good feedback on it and the Verizon network which I learned from my own experience is the best service available in the states. I’m glad I didn’t replace the iPhone for full retail (~$500) and went with a new phone/contract, It cost me $200 out the door and i’m locked into a 2 year contract for the same price I was paying at AT&T only now I’m confident I have a service that will work not only in more places but my 3G speeds with be much faster.

I’ve had the Droid for 2 days now and I’m still familiarizing myself with the Android OS, which is surprisingly good. I think the Android phones are really going to become much more popular unless Apple decides to get out of the exclusive contract with AT&T because I feel many iPhone AT&T customers are stuck with AT&T only for the iPhone. If Verizon was to eventually get the iPhone I would likely get it again, but I feel a reliable network and service is more important then the phone itself.