Need some Christmas List Ideas?

With Christmas just a mere 13 days away, it’s time to start finishing off those Christmas lists! We’re here to go ahead and give you some ideas of gifts to get for others, or yourself. We know that some of you opt for the cash/gift cards so you can get what you want… Now it’s just a matter of figuring out what that’s going to be!

Computer Periphials

intp-hero The Black Magic Intensity Capture Card is perfect for individuals that have always wanted to get into capturing but just didn’t know what card to get. Not only is this card perfect if you want to capture in HD, but now you can also use your HDTV with it, or maybe even skip that DVI on your 24″ HDMI Widescreen LCD so you an experience HD in all its glory. This card is also perfect for those that perhaps want to capture their gameplay from Halo 3 or COD5.

20-231-145-03 Do you run Firefox, Photoshop CS3, an IM client, and other programs all at once? If you are I’m sure you’re starting to notice that you’re running out of RAM and things are slowing down. Well, if that’s the case then I think it’s time you upgrade that RAM! Newegg constantly has great deals on RAM, and currently has G.SKILL 2x2GB DDR on sale for $44.99. If you’re not what kind of RAM you need, install CPUID which can give you a detailed spec report of your computer.

31us7cxpzl_ss400_ Another perfect addition is always adding on extra hard drive space. If you’re not savvy or comfortable with adding another hard drive, no worries! An external drive is just as functional as your internal drive–just easier to setup and portable! Amazon currently has the Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard drive for $79.99, as it has $50 off! :) If you’ve got an Apple computer with Leopard, now you can take advantage of setting up and utilizing Time Machine!

Gaming

935846_80519_front If you played on a Nintendo 64 years ago, you may have played Banjo-Kazooie. Well, almost a decade later and we’ve got a new release from the lovable bear and that every so annoying bird: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. In this new release we’ve reintroduced to Gruntilda the evil Witch, and a new evil, the Lord of the Games. Complete all the challenges from LOG to win the the right to being the rightful owner of Spiral Mountain.

78-112-002-02 A necessity for almost all Wii owners should be a wireless motion sensor bar. NYKO Wireless Sensor Bar runs $15.99 through Newegg and currently has excellent customer reviews. No more having to worry about the wire hanging off from the side of your tv, or moving your Wii around only to forget your sensor bar is still hooked in, and having it fly behind your tv. This is also perfect for those of you that take your Wii with to a friends house to get everyone involved. Less wires to deal with makes it easier to travel with it!

74-502-001-02 If you’re big into playing on Xbox Live with games like Halo 3 or COD5, you know that one of the key ingredients to good teamwork can be communication. So replace your Xbox headset with the Turtlebeach Ear Force X1 [wired] Headset.No relying on batteries, as it plugs directly into your 360′s USB port. The headset features comfortable ear padding, as well as a volume control. Quality on the mic is decent, with minimal background noise. The wired headset is $49.99 or you can opt for the wireless pair running at $97.99.

Just Cause

zebra If you don’t need any new techy gadgets in your list, how about some awesome t-shirts? Threadless is home to user-created designs ranging from cute and cuddly, to dark and gloomy. T-shirts can range from $5, $10, $15 or $25 depending on the sale and if the shirt is a new release. Take advantage of their points system which can earn you free swag. Pictures of yourself can earn points, as will referring new sales to them. So what are you waiting for, Race your stripes off.

acda_r2_fish_training_school Don’t have room for a pet, or can’t get one? No need, because now you can get a goldfish and train your goldfish to play football, basketball, swim through hoops, and zig-zag around poles. ThinkGeek has come up with an amazing training kit that will seriously train your fish to do that. Now you have no reason to be lonely because you don’t have any pets! And besides, how many people do you know that have a goldfish that can do more neat tricks than their dog?

polyvinylwall2 Looking to spice up your room a little bit? Or are you not able to paint in your apartment or dorm? No need to have a boring room, so check out Blik’s wall decals. You just peel them off, and stick them anywhere you want them, be it a bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom. They’ve got a variety of decals to chose from (some are from Threadless designs!) to spice your any room in your place. My favorites are the Pug family and the Fake Pandas Have More Fun.

Readers: What Christmas list ideas do you have that you’d like to share?

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WordPress Community Sites

The greatest advantage with WordPress is that you have a vast amount of resources at the tips of your finger tips. You don’t have to worry about having limited support, or very little add-ons. The WordPress community is so vast, that sometimes it’s hard to chose what to stick to, or what you should pay attention to the most. Some communities, like wpdesigner.com, have come and gone, while others strive and manage to stand above the rest.

If you are looking for a new WordPress resource site to add to your rss feed reader then we’ve got the perfect list for you.

2008-12-10_1415 WPCandy.com – WordPress themes, Plugins, Tips and Tricks
Created in October 2007 by Michael Castilla, WPCandy has risen to the top of websites providing excellent WordPress posts related to themes and plugins. The greatest advantage came during V3 of wpcandy which showed exactly what WordPress was capable of: being your all-in-one-solution to managing a website. Some of my favorite posts from WPCandy include (but is not limited to):

Automating my WordPress Workflow – If you do a lot of testing with WordPress themes, your main concern should be efficiency. Instead of wasting your time creating Lorem Ipsum posts, you can easily grab the XML file from WPCandy, and import that into your WordPress Development. It gives you posts the include unordered and ordered lists, headings ranging from 1-5, as well as posts using the read more functionality. No need to spend an hour or to creating fake content!

The WordPress Starter Theme Project – This is included within the Automating My WordPress Workflow entry, however if you are just looking for a blank theme to work with, this is perfect. Rather than editing a previously designed theme, start with a clean and fresh one that’s void of any design-specific tags. Start off on a nice, organize, and clean slate.

2008-12-10_1451 WPRecipes.com – Daily Recipes to Cook With WordPress
Jean-Baptiste started wprecipes when he received plenty of WordPress questions, but felt that just sharing them with the person who asked them via email wasn’t enough. WP Recipes not only features posts answering WordPress related questions, but also features various tips, and how-tos with WordPress.

A couple posts that I have helped me immensely with WordPress:
How Can I Display Comments and Trackbacks Separately – This post gives you the proper code necessary to edit your comments.php file in order to separate the trackbacks and comments. I initially needed this because I wanted to keep the two separate as some of the entries had more trackbacks than comments but caused a gap from comment to comment.

How To Display Your Latest Twitter Entry – I’m not a fan of using flash widgets, or having to include a hosted item from another website. It can not only effect your website’s loading time, but what happens when the site goes down or no longer exists? I just needed a quick fix to show one lastest tweet, and this quickly did the job, after I added it into the WordPress theme file.

Some other sites of interest:

Readers: If you have any WordPress community websites that you’d like to share (that haven’t been mentioned), please leave a comment with links to them! We will then use those links you provide to build a reference list to include to our Holdfire clients that are WordPress users.

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FeedDemon – RSS News Aggregator

I’m an avid user of RSS feeds for most of my resource websites (like wpcandy.com, nettuts), video streaming services (hulu.com, fancast.com), and more but the problem I was facing was that the web based reader could not keep up. I was using Pageflakes to view all of my feeds, but between the slow loading time for the site, added with the amount of feeds I had, it was no longer feasible.

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My option was essentially nix RSS feeds altogether or find a [Windows] desktop application to handle my feeds. After much googling around, a friend finally recommended that I look into FeedDemon. It’s a Windows (98 and higher) application that would be one stop for any and all of my RSS feeds. Upon downloading FeedDemon and installing it, you are given the option to setup a NewsGator Online account which gives you the ability to be able to access your feeds on your desktop application from a web browser on any computer. Neat, right? You also have the ability to install FeedDemon onto any other [Windows based] computer, and sign your NewsGater account into it–this gives you the chance to synchronize all of your feeds, so you won’t have to sift through RSS feeds that you may have already read.

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With FeedDemon you have the ability to add categories, and then add your feeds into those categories. Each category you are also given the opportunity to chose a theme for how it’s styled. But the best part is that you don’t even have to leave FeedDemon ever, to read a full feed (and not just an excerpt.) FeedDemon integrates Internet Explorer (whichever version your PC has) and uses IE to view websites that you click within FeedDemon whether it’s to read more of an article from your RSS feed, or a link that was included in a post you were reading.

The one last advantage might not be for all users, but there is even an iPhone application called NetNewsWire. Again, you are able to use your NewsGator Online account to sync your feeds.

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Rev.iew.me – A web page reviewing site

Re.view.me Our first post for our Freebie Friday is going to be a little different than any other Freebie Friday’s we’re going to do. Rev.iew.me is a community web page reviewing website, catered towards peers reviewing websites for free. It’s simple too! All you need to do is register an account there.

Rev.iew.me works off of a points system, so in order to add your site, you need to earn some points. This helps to increase activity within the community, and reduce spam. To add your website to the directory, you simply need to earn 5 points. Each review that you submit to any user that is at least 100-299 words will earn you 1 point. 3 points for 300-999 words, and 5 points for 1000+ words. Once you hit the 5 point mark you can submit your website to be reviewed.

The best way to get your website reviewed sooner than later, is by being an active member of the community so that others can see your own personal profile, and see your website available to be reviewed. There are over 500 active members within the community, with dozens that have the aptitude, knowledge, and experience to give you a worthy review of your website, to help you recognize what might need work or what is perfect just as it is.

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Monday Thru Friday Features

Every day of the week we’ll be blogging something specific to that day’s special category. Of course this will just be a Monday thru Friday feature, so we get the days off during the weekend ;)

  1. Application Monday
  2. Typo[graphy] Tuesday
  3. WordPress Wednesday
  4. Techy Thursday
  5. Freebie Friday

If you’ve got an application, WordPress theme, font, icon set, or anything you’d like for us to feature, shoot us an email to blog@holdfire.net :)

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