Nice idea from Jane Hart, your top 10 tools (will be reading through that list with interest).

Here are mine, in no particular order :)

On the laptop…

Firefox – Well, duh, what’d browsing the web be without it.

EditPlus 2 – Best . Text . Editor . Ever .

Filezilla – A tad annoying but overall great FTP app I use all the time.

Skype – Doesn’t need much explanation.

uTorrent – Nicest bittorrent client around

On the net…

Edublogs – But of course :)

Gmail – Ridiculously useful

WHM / cPanel – Helps me do everything I do everyday

Pingdom – Brilliant site performance monitoring tool

Google Reader – Great aggregation app.

Just can’t tweet enough? Back once again with those VodPodding beats?

Come on over to edublogs –  ‘cos we’ve got Twitter and VodPod widgets setup and ready to go for you!

Have been doing a few individual WP installs of late – and the more I do them, the more I realise how much of a nightmare it is to keep on installing and testing all this stuff… so why don’t you let us do it for you :)

About time – finally a slideshare tool that allows you to synch audio – brilliant!

And, what’s more – you can just copy and paste the code they offer for wordpress.com into your edublog and, bingo, your slides will be fully embedded.

Yay!

So, after failing to get a WPT via even the most blatant of hints, and even though red ‘aint my favourite colour (maybe I’ll get a free blue one ;) I just parted with GBP14 for this little number.

I haven’t been so excited about a T-Shirt since Ned’s Atomic Dustbin released God Fodder (or maybe that Carter USM Sherrif Fatman one, you know, with the big orange lettering on the back.)

One word… nice!

It’s been a good week at edublogs!

We’ve successfully upgraded the entire site, installed a whole heap of groovy new functionality,the purpose of which will become clear in the very near future…

And added another 20 themes (so there are now 86) many of which now come with completely customisable headers… just upload an image, crop it in the back of your blog and hey presto, edulogging never looked so darn nice.

If you’re at all interested in the WP-theme-sponsored-link debate, you should most definitely read this post from wpdesigner.net.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this more from a philosophical standpoint, related to WPMU DEV Premium in a way, along the lines of where and how OS meets commercial, and if, and why and what of it. But the beauty of Small Potato’s post is that, besides being a good read, it really details the issues and kinda lets you make up your own mind.

“I know it’s easy to simply point out what’s wrong and not offer suggestions. However, I’m not going to offer any suggestion this time.”

I loikes.

So it looks like everyone else has caught up with Alan and Stephen, and started creating Voicethreads, which are rather cool really.

So, todays bit of Edublogs news is a guide as to how you can embed your very own thread in your Edublog.

And how, in fact, you can easily embed any flash object, no worries whatsoever.

So get threading!

Ladies and Gents, we give you WPMUDEV Premium.

This is a joint project between Andrew Billits and myself that aims to find a way to provide complex custom plugins, materials, hacks and support for WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) for a fraction of the amount you’d have to pay a developer.

It’s already stuffed full of goodies; there’s the multi-database code that’s used on Edublogs (happily supporting 50,000 blogs on the one domain), mu-plugins to give you the lowdown on all your user activity (active users, posts, comments and more!), unbranded support videos for you to use on your WPMU site and a new bumper theme pack with uploadable headers a gogo.

And lots, lots, lots, more… which we’re going to be adding to all the time.

Plus there are comprehensive support forums to back up all of the code there.

Oh, and you can suggest projects that you’d like to see, and if they’re feasible we’ll look into developing them… not bad huh!

Sure, in an ideal world we’d like to be releasing all of this for free, but an *enormous* amount of time has gone into developing it and we’d like to get a system going whereby we can actually support ourselves (and eventually others?) in providing an equal amount of ongoing development and support… while being able to afford to eat.

So, here you have it… let us know what you think and, um, tell all your friends :D

Fascinating example of community facilitation gone somewhat askew (some might say very!) over at the WordPress.com forums over the last few days.

To sum it up, drmike, a ridiculously active and giving moderator / helper both there and at the WPMU forums got his credentials revoked.

Now, obviously I don’t know *anything* about the stuff that led up to that, so I’m not going to even attempt to comment, but the principle of essentially firing an unpaid, stupendously involved and committed community member comes across as a bit odd to me… unless there are extreme circumstances.

You know, abuse / crime / vilification etc. I’m not sure if ‘certian stresses’ fall under that banner.

Oh, OK then, I am commenting a bit, drmike has impressed me greatly for sometime and he hardly seems to be likely to engage in any of the above!

But more to the point, can you really do that (ditch an unpaid & committed moderator in that way)? Is it OK? I know there are users on the Edublogs forums who know more than I do about using the software and probably contribute more time than me… would I de-list / de-mote them?

To be honest I don’t think I would, or even could, unless I was compelled to do so for legal reasons. Very few issues can’t just be talked out, or dealt with in a more humane way. Not doing so, and just flicking the switch, is a bit lazy / evil.

And besides, that’s part of being big… especially really big… you’re going to have dissenting employees (paid or unpaid!), issues and stresses, and a heap more ‘stuff you might not personally like’ – it comes with the territory huh.

Either way, I hope this works itself out, as drmike is a very valued community member, but at the same (and purely selfish) time this is worth following an excellent case study in how to (or how not to) manage community interaction in the open source meets commercial meets blogging world.