Here’s a few of my favorite TED talks from the past couple of years:

Sylvia Earle’s 2009 TEDPrize Wish Presentation

One of the first TED presentations I watched and the one that motivated me to get involved in raising awareness for our oceans.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

Jamie Oliver’s 2010 TEDPrize Wish Presentation

I had never heard of Jamie Oliver until he won the TED prize this year. Great presentation. Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty

A fantastic use of data visualization to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Still not convinced to switch from “disposable” bottled water to a reusable water bottle? Then check this out too – The Story of Bottled Water.

But wait, there’s more. I have to include my own little video attempt:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aside from the ecological benefits of switching, there’s the monetary benefit. It’s cheaper for you. It’s easy. It will help save the oceans. It’ll save you money.

Watch the video. Don’t get offended by his swearing. Just ignore it and soak up his energy and passion and take to heart his message. Do some introspection and see what it is you really want to do with your life. Then pursue it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Obviously I don’t expect anyone to be able the details of this. The detailed steps will be shown and discussed afterward. If you’re wondering, the site I’m setting up is a fictitious business site for my dog, Sookie. She’s going to have some schwag to sell (wag schwag?) like T-shirts and services as well. The capture and editing of this was done with Techsmith’s Camtasia, exported to .mov, then imported to iMovie, sped up, then exported again.

Every business needs a website. But historically, to build a website, you either needed to know how to code a website, or hire someone who did. But with the advent of free, open source internet publishing tools like WordPress, you don’t HAVE to know how to code. Though it started out as a blogging platform, WordPress is now a very capable online publishing tool and content management system that you can use to build your entire site with – not just a blog. So, why is this good news for you? You can create a website and update its content on your own without having to know HTML. You can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple text editor.

As part of a series of workshops sponsored by High Tech Maui for the local Maui business community, I’ll be doing a workshop in May about setting up a website using WordPress. The date is tentatively set for Tuesday, May 25, 8:00 – noon. Seating will be limited to 20. Stay tuned for registration details.

I’ll also be posting much of the content of the workshop, as presentation or video, here on this site after the workshop. Peter Liu will be doing an introduction to blogging for business workshop on April 29 that might be a good prerequisite for mine. Registration is now open for that, but will likely fill up fast.

I’m still working on content and material for the workshop, here’s what I have so far. It will start with a conceptual overview of WordPress, followed by a presentation of screenshots and videos to show the basic process of setting up a web site from scratch in WordPress. After that, we’ll segue into a live demonstration and hands-on, interactive portion so that attendees can jump in and try it out in the workshop.

Subject matter I plan to cover:

1. Why use WordPress for your business website
2. What is WordPress
3. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
4. Sign-up and activation for WordPress.com
5. Themes
6. Publishing Posts
7. Publishing Pages
8. Posts vs Pages
9. Managing media
10. Managing Comments
11. Managing Links
12. Basic settings
13. Site structure
14. Widgets
15. Signing up and installing WordPress.org
16. Plugins
17. Static home pages
18. Backups
19. Security

That’s a lot to cover in four hours, which is why I want to go through it all in increasing levels of detail, starting out at a high, conceptual level, then diving down a little deeper and showing the process of the items above, then, once through that, demonstrating it live and getting the participants hands dirty doing it themselves.

I’ve put together a quick overview video of the process of going from scratch to a basic structure to show people how simple it is and how there’s doesn’t need to be any coding done to get a basic site structure up and running. Check it out.

Think you might be interested? Stay tuned to this site and my Twitter feed, as well as the High Tech Maui site for more details on dates and registration.

For various reasons, the remainder of the two sites were custom-built using Coldfusion. But the news sections were implemented with WordPress in order to allow MEDB staff to update the news sections themselves. The WordPress implementation included creating two custom WordPress themes to match the new, branded look for each of the sites. While I wouldn’t recommend custom WordPress theme creation for anyone not familiar with HTML or CSS, if you have an intermediate level understanding of the two, chances are good that you can create your own WordPress theme. That’s a testament to how powerful and flexible WordPress is in my opinion. If you’re interested in learning how to create your own WordPress theme, check out the WordPress Theme Development page.

MEDB WordPress News Section

High Tech Maui WordPress News Section

NextGen Photo Gallery for WordPress from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.