First, a shout out to Dance Bochette, the studio: this was the studio’s 59th annual Holiday Open House. That is quite an accomplishment, isn’t it? Their spring performance is really something special, in an auditorium with stage lighting and guest artists; the holiday show is a little more casual, at a local church’s gym (hence the backgrounds), but it is always delightful. I love seeing all the different ages perform–they are usually delightful and this year was no different! Click the arrow right there in the center of the picture and enjoy just a few of my favorite images from this year’s show:

The second purpose in this post is to show off my newly upgraded blog! There is so much I could say, and some of it I’ll share for a future post, but ProPhoto Blogs has been my blog theme for over a year and a half now, and the newest iteration, ProPhoto3, came out today! I have to say, every iteration of this theme has been better than the one before it, and they have all been pretty outstanding. Some of the crazy awesome new features include:

• built in slideshows (see above), meaning having a slideshow in every post is super easy (before, every post took me several steps). I also don’t have to count out an exact number of images for every post like I did before.
• I can have a sidebar! Or not! I’ve chosen to have a sidebar on my home page, but not on individual post pages. I like that I can rearrange the site to have things like my twitter feed in the sidebar, and the tag cloud, so that you don’t have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see some things. I love that I don’t have to sacrifice the yummy big images for the actual post. If you’re on the home page and want to see the pictures bigger, just click on the post title and you’ll get the full page spread.
• built in “social media” icons–I like the wood grain myself, but there are some other nifty options, or, if the creative bug strikes me, I can make my own. That one probably won’t happen for me, but it could!
• I like gravatars, I admit it. Now I can have them in the comments. Do you have a gravatar? If not, go get one!
• If you are really finicky and want to have everything on your blog “just so”, you can. I haven’t even scratched the surface with my site, y’all, but there are places for you to put in custom accent images, add backgrounds to the content area, not just the standard page background, custom post separators, all kinds of things.
• And of course, if you want to, you can make everything all lower case. Or not.

If you have been on the fence about buying the ProPhoto theme, please hop off now and get it. You don’t have to know any code to trick out your site seventeen different ways–if you can edit a picture in Photoshop, you can do this, too. Apparently my referral code needs to be updated–when I have a new code, or if the current one works (RCORNETT232), I’ll update that information here. But the referral code should save you $10 (not on the upgrade price, but I’d upgrade regardless. And apparently if you bought P2 since 12/1/09, your upgrade price is only $20).

update: The referral codes are working again, so if you want to use mine, RCORNETT232 (in all caps), that will save you $10. Thanks!

On the photographer’s end, however, it’s really really hard, because every slideshow is set to music, and one thing you can know about me right up front is that I am not musical. I don’t actually listen to a lot of music, even though I love it, and I have no sense of rhythm, either. Just being real, here! John King of Metta Audio is super musical, though, and he just saved my sorry self, because, get this: he writes music and now sells royalty free music for photographers, and what’s even better, he includes custom timings for ShowitWeb (remember, I said I had no rhythm? Sad, but true!). Thank you, thank you, thank you, John!

So, for the visiting photographers, check out John and his work on my little slideshow. For the potential clients who are visiting, check out Betty’s family, the new and improved version (family, not pictures)! Yes, the gorgeous redhead, Megan, was David’s girlfriend for this session. She is now his fiancée!

First, because I think I’ve favored my girls in pictures over my son (mainly because he is a reluctant photo subject):

Disclaimer: these plugins are ones that I personally have found to be useful. They are all listed in the plugins directory on wordpress.org; or, if you are running WP 2.8.4 or higher (and if you’re not, whyever not?), you can also install them from within WP itself.  Please note: I am not an expert and am therefore advising you that you can use and install them at your own risk. Always backup your website before making significant changes in case a new plugin doesn’t play nice with something you’re already using.

General Blog Tools: These are good to have on any blog to help keep you safe, backed up, and search engine friendly:

• Askimet: Every WP blogger should use this plugin. It does an amazing job of weeding out spam comments.
• All in One SEO Pack: for helping make your blog search engine friendly.
• Google XML Sitemaps: more search engine friendliness. If you don’t already use Google’s Webmaster Tools this one won’t mean much to you.
• WordPress Database Backup: If you are not backing up your WP database frequently and often you are just asking for something bad to happen. This plugin backs your database up on any schedule you like.

Image Display: I use these to present my images.

• NextGEN Gallery: I use this plugin to place images in every post. It’s easy to use once you get it set up to your liking (adjusting thumbnail sizes, etc.). One caveat is that it apparently only sends the thumbnail size images to your blog subscribers’ readers and emails, which kind of defeats the point of the whole subscription setup. Erik of Erik Teichmann Design solved this problem for me by adding some code to my blog. I recommend contacting him to ask for his help with that, because it’s certainly beyond me.
• Lightbox2: NextGEN Gallery has a variety of image display options to use, some of which require installing an extra plugin. This is the one I personally chose but there are others listed in the NextGEN resources.
• SlideShowPro: This program is not part of WP at all, but it’s what I use to display my gallery images and I really like it. It does cost money and requires either Flash (not the player) or Lightroom.
• Kimili Flash Embed: I found this plugin and instructions on the SlideShowPro user forums to help me embed my gallery into a blog page. I believe it has other uses as well but that’s what I’ve used it for.

Social Networking:

• Sociable: I’ve just started using this to make it easier to share blog posts via email, twitter, and facebook.

For other resources I like, and friends I recommend, and random good people, visit my page about the people I’m glad to know. For those of you who are interested in this list, I hope you’ve found it helpful. And if you’ve been on the fence about buying ProPhoto, using referral code RCORNETT232 (in all caps) will save you $10.

For those on the fence about buying this theme, go ahead and jump.

This is more than a theme, or just another template. Jared has put together a “theme management system”, for lack of a better phrase. Even if you consider yourself “not a computer person”, if you can click a mouse button, you can take this and make it completely your own. What you see on my blog is just the surface of what this theme is all about. Where it really stands head and shoulders above the crowd is on the back end.

If you are a photographer and are interested in learning more about this template, please visit Jared’s site (you can use code RCORNETT232 for an extra $10 off… that code would be all capital letters, which of course doesn’t show here!).