The stage is set for Stir Fry Sunday as we prepare for another “collaborate and create” work session.

We’ll be rolling BYOL (bring your own laptop) style with wifi internet access and the sound of Groovera Low Mercury radio in the air.

Group discussions will be held on personal online branding, WordPress platform leverage and how to create killer blog posts.

Check back for more updates, we’ll keep ya posted!

Stirfry Startups meets again, this time in San Francisco at the DS, Rowena’s wonderful and cozy home near Dolores Park. There is a grill! On the deck! Within walking distance: Muni, bakery, Philz Coffee (you *need* a Philz coffee. Trust me.), even a dry cleaners if you need to kill more than one bird.

Ben has promised kale and peas, fresh (presumably) from a Fog City Garden.

Here’s our list of topics, combining both personal and collaborative activities:

• Ben:
  1. Collab21 redesign. Get back to basics. Figure out what I need, draw it out. Maybe start redesigning in WordPress.
  2. Business Plan. I won’t finish, but I’d like to put a dent in it.
• Walter: Do my own html-in-a-weekend:
  1. Finish working thru html / css manual (Visual Quick Start Guide series) prior to Incubation
  2. Conceptualize website
  3. Load WP Journal theme for WP sites
• Dave:
  1. Retheme and redesign the Stirfry website
  2. Create content for Website-In-A-Weekend.
  3. Help everyone else solve WordPress problems (and write up the solutions at the same time). Specifically, look into Sean’s questions regarding moving Only The Valiant to WordPress from Drupal.
• Sean plans on revamping his entire Only The Valiant site:
  1. Saturday – Get the site up, and structurally correct. Configure WordPress and hack and slash the wordpress code to create the data structures and website hierarchy I want. Integrate the libsyn hosted files into the website.
  2. Sunday – Design the visual presentation of the site. Lotsa Photoshop and CSS.
  3. Time permitting, write an alternate CSS file for handheld devices, so people can access the site and listen to episodes easily with their iphone/blackberry.

  Sean also needs these questions answered:

  What WordPress plugins should I be using? What SEO and other features of WordPress should I be using that I am not? Can WordPress do the following:

  1. Edit the loop displayed on the home page so that only the most recent post of a certain type or catagory shows up on the front page.
  2. Create custom post types with additional fields, the presentation of which can be automated and customized.
  3. Display abbreviated posts of a certain type or catagory as a list in the sidebar.
  4. Create a page which is a list of posts of a certain catagory. I think this question boils down to: can I create pages that contain PHP code, rather than just text? (The difference between this and the built in catagory view is the URL, which is important to me)

• Rowena will be providing a big screen TV for plugging in laptops, and would like to lead a discussion on web site design. She’s also in charge of the food… she makes an amazing meatball and linguine dish!

  More tasks on her list include:

  1. Some thought as to where I want www.manprowler.com to go. I may not find the answer this weekend but some ruminating will be good.
  2. I have a wordpress app on my iPhone but don’t know how to use it or get it hooked up.
  3. Take care of this akisment thing on my wordpress
  4. Take away some good info on what an attractive website means to different people.
  5. Be Inspired!

We won’t get all of that done, but we will get a lot of it!

Another successful Stirfry intensive weekend concluded!

Everyone got a lot done.

Here’s the whole enchilada for the weekend:

Feb. 6, Friday

• Sarah registered http://bohemianwarrior.com/, http://sarahkurhajetz.com/ using Dave’s bluehost.com affiliation.
• Walter checked on adsense and traffic updates
• Discussed vision for Stirfry: We want to share experience and culture so that each of us can build something bigger together than we could build by ourselves. We each benefit by helping each other.
• Discussed Sarah’s vision for Woman’s wellness center and she can leverage her grant writing experience to succeed in her new ventures.
• Baby napa cabbage with ginger and scallion beef, lemon tart with whipped cream.

Feb 7, Saturday

• Breakfast: more ginger scallion beef, garnished with fish sauce, rye toast with honey, pears, bananas and honey. Pictures: http://tinyurl.com/b3wdj6
• Dave worked on http://website-in-a-weekend.net/, adding posts for bluehost affiliate (http://website-in-a-weekend.net/getting-started/getting-started-finding-a-web-hosting-provider/) recapping Friday night’s work with Sarah, and for installing Twitter Tools (http://website-in-a-weekend.net/social-media/adding-a-twitter-widget/) on a WordPress blog.
• Dave added pillar content outline to personal WP mindmap.
• Stirfry discussion: Let’s go beyond value. How can we create shared experiences? Shared experiences between ourselves and between our customers and our audiences.
• Romy Harness and Pepe stopped by to visit: http://www.romyharness.com/
• WP-Twitter installed on http://website-in-a-weekend.net/, http://daviddoolin.com/, http://howtobuyasurfboard.net/, http://reasonwhyadvertising.info/, http://moderndda.com/.
• Twitme installed on http://walteryu.com/,
• Preliminary SEO analysis of tradewines.net. They have no traffic yet. Hard to do SEO with no traffic.
• Sarah installed WordPress on http://bohemianwarrior.com/
• Walter posted on walteryu.com, did maintenance and updating on yourankfirst.com
• Rowena: site maintenance, fixed username issues, got twitterfied, posted beauty products review to manprowler.
• Follow http://twitter.com/saketome
• Dave worked on Projects page for http://inventiumsystems.com/, posted http://tinobox.com/wordpress/productivity/how-to-easily-write-a-lot-of-blog-posts-being-prolific-is-easy/

Feb. 8 2009 Sunday

• Dave posted articles about how to write goals pages for websites on website-in-a-weekend
• Rowena worked on Goals for manprowler.com
• Ben updating twitter tools…
• Dave installed Recently Popular plugin on http://tinobox.com/wordpress/, couldn’t manage to get cformsII contact form working correctly, replaced all cforms with “Contact Form 7″ from the WordPress plugins repository, which works out of the box.
• Sarah worked on funding list (who) to send proposals to (when).
• Sarah is blasting barriers… installed Contact form on BW blog.

Play list for Stirfry Reloaded

Elastic Beats from Plump DJs, Emil Gilels Beethoven piano sonatas, Bassnectar, Tripswitch, Chilled C’Quence, The Secret Art of Science (drum and bass), Armin & Tiesto mashup, Oakenfold, DJs only mix (various artists, house & trance), Miles Davis (Sketches of Spain)

Stirfry websites to add to your RSS feed

• http://walteryu.com/
• http://yourankfirst.com/
• http://youwebtwo.com/
• http://bohemianwarrior.com/
• http://manprowler.com/
• http://website-in-a-weekend.net/
• http://tinobox.com/wordpress/
• http://inventiumsystems.com/
• http://1-minute-do-it-now.com/

Rowena does video!

My last task at the of Incubation Stirfry Reloaded weekend was to set up a YouTube channel for our videos. (And notice the awesome email address! w00t!)

Anyway, here’s the channel. With the 2 videos I’ve taken so far. Clearly I need to cut back on the caffeine as I’m a bit shaky; I promise to be more conscientious during future videos. And as you will also notice, I’m fooling around with annotations, etc. Hope to get better at this too!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxymplyd6QU

If you guys have a Youtube account, subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/user/stirfrystartups

Photos of how we start mornings at Stir-fry, followed by this weekend’s full menu:

Saturday Starters: http://tinyurl.com/ahe6gl

Super Sunday with The Opportunist, Saketome (http://twitter.com/saketome): http://tinyurl.com/cdr2n7

Saturday:

Brunch
banana pear/banana/honey mixer
braised baby napa/gai choi with red-pepper seasoning
napa/gai choi stir-fry & ginger-scallion beef with potato-flour noodles
proscutto/provolone/onion/red potato hash
honey wheat toast

double espressos with heavy whipping cream

Dinner

zen choi stir-fry with scallions/garlic/ferment tofu
ho fun with ginger beef & fish sauce
taro cake w/dried shrimp/pork

lemon tart w/whip cream, almond thins, belgium waffle thins

Sunday

Brunch
bacon/asiago omlette on wheat toast
ho fun scramble with ground beef
roasted baby potatoes and onions with asiago cheese
ho fun with parsley, ground beef & fish sauce
full slab bacon!

-Walter

Sean worked remotely from NYC

Here’s what Sean did:

I fell very behind on a project for work, and got to the point where I had to focus on getting this work done all the time. Everything was put to the side until this was done. THis project was my life through Wednesday of last week.

On Wednesday I went to New York for, amongst other things, the New York Comic Con. Here are some of the productive things I got done over the weekend.

1. Interviewed Jim Shooter for my podcast. This is a BIG deal, and a major accomplishment for the podcast. Jim is the visionary and creator of the comic company that my podcast is about. There is nobody more relevant to the topic than him.
2. Caught up with JayJay Jackson, former comic book creator and currently starting a t-shirt production company.
3. Met Sean Chen and Bernard Chang, former artists for Valiant comics. Recorded a short interview with Bernard Chang.
4. Went to the Museum of Modern Art in NY. The SF MoMA is a kiddie pool compared to this museum.
5. Caught up with east coast friends Joe, Frank and Eric, as well as a number of people I know from comic book collecting communities.
6. Froze my ass off.

 

Walter threw down hard

1. Updated with WP plug-ins on my websites:
   • http://walteryu.com
   • http://yourankfirst.com
   • http://youwebtwo.com
2. Repaired WP plug-in installer (previously crashed during update/new installations)
3. Generated SEO report for Tradewines.net
4. Applied SEO toolbar to research for Tradewines.net
5. Installed Twitme on WP (tweets blog posts onto Twitter account)
6. Structured http://yourankfirst.com into 3 distinct, SEO-friendly categories to drive traffic
7. Posted onto http://yourankfirst.com: http://tinyurl.com/dzy2d5
8. Updated Paypal account, made payment to Voice-overs by Rowena
9. Setup Facebook page for http://yourankfirst.com and istockphoto.com account for imaging
10. Kept Stir-fry crowd well-fed and taken care of all weekend long!

Ben’s massively productive Sunday afternoon

1. 1. Hooked up Twitter to WordPress based on David’s recommendation at http://website-in-a-weekend.net/social-media/adding-a-twitter-widget/
2. 2. Wrote a blog post here:  http://collaborationchronicles.com/collaboration/successful-collaboration/
3. Researched current state of things on Bluehost account with collab21.com and sharksinthepark.com. Need to do some housecleaning and move source code to collab21.com. Also found that all subdomains are not resolving. Sent two tickets to support to fix issues I can’t fix.
4. Purchased and parked two domains on the default domain at bluehost: workshopwednesday.com and workshopwednesdays.com
5. Found some great articles on how to make a WordPress theme and on CSS. Will read through and use this Thursday when starting to redo the sites.