Please send your “Bio”—long or short, however you would like to have it printed—for the booklet we hope to prepare.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know what everyone has been up to!!!

 As we do not have your contact information, for ease of communication, please include telephone number and E Mail address, via E Mail or snail mail to:  

The Saints Reunion Committee

“I’d like to think that time and age are like cousins—they’re relative.  Who said you have to go by actual miles?  If you didn’t know how old you were, how old would you be?”

http://www.mutterz.com/onine-marketing/marketing-tools/padpressed/

Traffic is the biggest issue for any webmaster  – how to get it, how to keep it, how to increase it, and any other relevant ‘how to’ you can think of.  As more and more ways of digesting information on the internet are presented to people, keeping up with them becomes more and more of an issue.  It is essential that you do – nothing puts off a user faster than not being able to access their favourite site on their newest gizmo.  You are also losing a potential market.

The web is going mobile and consequently we have to take our sites mobile too, turning your blog into an iPad app can be very expensive, the inquiries I made gave me cause to wince!  Then I came across PadPressed, a plugin for WordPress that effectively turns your blog into a native app, without all the hoo hah of development and going through the App Store approval process.  When your site is accessed from the iPad, it is presented in a very nice format – posts are two columns in the vertical, three in the horizontal, and with all the things you would expect from an app.  The home page has two side bars into which you can drop widgets as you normally would.

Built in social sharing, swipe featured slider,  custom home icon, featured category slider, swipe to advance, touch navigation and so on are all there, though I would suggest you upload your own icons – I still have that small job to do.  When your reader bookmarks the site, a nice little icon drops onto the screen for direct access and fits in perfectly with the usual app icon, even down to the highlight.  Uploading your own logo is simple enough too.   In fact, it gave me a little glow of pride when I saw my logo sitting there on my iPad screen – simple things please me immensely!

There are a number of  ‘Themes’ that you can choose from and I understand that there are plans in the pipeline for more and also for further development.

There were a few issues, when it first hit the streets last week, but credit to the support team, they got it sorted quickly.  The support forum is well monitored, so problems get picked up and sorted.  Installation was simple and it only took a few minutes to sort out.  I still have to do some fine tuning, in terms of what I want in the sidebars and icons for the main categories, but you could be good to go on the iPad in less than ten minutes.  You do need to think a little bit about post formatting and images, but nothing too onerous, just common sense, really.

It is a paid plugin – $49.99 – but compared to the cost of developing an app--that is peanuts.  I’m delighted with it, and will be rolling it out on a number of my and my clients sites over the next few weeks.  Combined with WPTouch for the iPhone etc – free or relatively inexpensive for the pro version – you can have your site mobile in minutes which has got to be good.  You can get further details here > PadPressed

In the meantime – a short video demo for your delight

PS – Yes, it is an affiliate link…  that doesn’t mean you pay any  extra.

Graduated from UVA in 2005 and put my history major to work co-founding reddit.com. Sold it to Condé Nast in 2006 and continued doodle the reddit alien for another three years until retiring for a Kiva Fellowship in Armenia. Founded Breadpig, Inc., an uncorporation that's responsible for bringing geeky things into the world like LOLmagnetz and xkcd: volume 0 -- and donating all the profits ($93,000 given away so far!). Thanks to a whale, I gave a TED talk in 2009. [Joy!] My dad and I are also professional downtrodden Skins fans.

Oh, and I'm the guy responsible for the reddit alien. It comes in different flavors. If you've ever told someone about reddit, breadpig, or any of my projects, I owe you a beer. (Thanks!)

Few people outside of friends & family knew about the following at the time it was going on; bringing it up now, long after I've left reddit, feels less self-serving and will hopefully be instructive. This came up briefly in a talk I gave at MIT, but this feels a lot more comfortable to write than to speak about.

Steve and I spent every waking hour (and some dreaming, no doubt) after graduation with reddit somewhere on our minds. The time we spent working on it together only reinforced the marriage metaphor everyone uses about cofounders.

My life -- and thus Steve's -- was dramatically changed during those startup months for reasons beyond my control. I've lived a ridiculously fortunate life, so I knew it was only a matter of time before something was going to knock things a bit off course; I just didn't think it'd happen like this.

Just a month after we started working on reddit, Steve and I were wrapping up a game of WoW around 4am. I'd only been asleep for an hour when my cellphone rang.

My girlfriend's mother was on the phone. Her daughter had been studying abroad in Germany, was due home in just a couple weeks, and was now in the hospital. She'd fallen out of her apartment window. Five stories.

I spent a good part of our YC summer in Germany beside her hospital bed. Her mother remained until December when she finally came home after months of coma, surgeries, recovery, and rehab.

(It's worth noting that German taxpayers kindly paid for every day of this world-class medical treatment. Danke.)

I can't stress what a tremendous recovery she's made. I had the honor of attending her graduation from the University of Virginia. Although we're no longer together, she remains someone who consistently inspires me.

Keep calm, carry on.

Little did I know, a couple months after my girlfriend's fall, I was due for another call.

My mom called me one Monday morning in September. She was distraught. Max, our family dog, had just died. Poor boy had been fighting Cushing's Syndrome for quite some time; my mom found him that morning in great distress and rushed him to our vet. There weren't very many options.

The most humane thing to do was euthanasia. I never got a chance to say goodbye to the good boy, but I take solace knowing he was with my mother, who doted on him like a son once I was out of the house.