The Stutz Artists Association will host its 18th annual open house April 29 and 30, 2011 and Watershed Studio will be welcoming visitors both days in Suite B-310.  Come visit our studio and check out some of Brian’s photographs & artwork.

Courtesy of Verizon Wireless we will be demoing the Motorla Xoom on Friday night, so if you’re curious about tablets, be sure to swing by for that.

And on Saturday bring out the kids and spur their creativity. Rumor has it that there will also be free ice cream for the kids in the building on Saturday, and what kid doesn’t love ice cream?!

Stutz Artists Association Annual Open House

More than 70 artists open their studios to visitors during the two-day event. It’s not only an opportunity to see the work of 70 local artists in one place at one time, it’s a chance to see where and how the work is created. Artwork ranges from paintings, drawings and photography, to sculpture, jewelry and furniture.

Win FREE Tickets

Would you like a chance to win a pair of FREE TICKETS to attend the Stutz Artists Association 18th Annual Open House?  If so, please leave a comment on Naptown Buzz’s post by 1pm EDT on Friday, April 29, 2011 and one lucky winner will be chosen at random.

We hope your 2011 is off to a fantastic start!

To kick off the new year we’re offering our Silver WordPress Website Maintenance Package and our Gold WordPress Website Maintenance Package for an amazing 25% off!

Your time is valuable and time spent maintaining your WordPress website takes away from the time you could be doing what you really love. Allow us to take charge of your WordPress maintenance tasks and sleep well knowing that your WordPress based website is in good hands.

Also, as a WordSprung WordPress Maintenance Package customer, monthly consulting time from Watershed Studio is included in each package, as are discounts for other Watershed Studio services. It’s a win-win for everyone!

If you are interested in signing up for either the Silver or Gold WordPress Maintenance Package, please do so today as this offer is only available for new orders placed through Monday, January 31, 2011.

Have a great new year!

When I saw this story this morning, my jaw dropped.

Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet.

This $300 “business privilege license” is for all local bloggers – even the ones that make no money off their words.

The city doesn’t stop there. In addition to the $300 for the license to write on the World Wide Web, bloggers must pay city wage taxes, business privilege taxes and taxes on any net profits — on top of state and federal taxes — even if the blogger only made $11 over two years, reports the City Paper.

Full story at NBC Philadelphia

Even though I’ve never heard of anything like a blanket “business privilege license”, I understand paying taxes is something we all have to do. If that’s how it is in Philly for any business, then fine.  But when you automatically label bloggers as businesses then I have a problem with that.

Taking a step back to the mid-1990′s, I used to publish a ‘zine (and yes, ‘zines are still alive and well in 2010).  We printed 100 copies, got some free music to review, had a few small ad sales, and if we were lucky we broke even.  But it was about our passion for the subject and it was nothing more than a hobby for a group of college kids.

Step forward to 2002 and I jumped head first into blogging and haven’t looked back.  The idea of being a zinester & the idea of being a blogger were pretty much the same thing for me, but with blogging there was a lot less overhead and many more potential eyeballs.

Now jump to present day 2010 and I find myself making a living off of blogging.  (Note that I didn’t say from blogging.)

When Watershed Studio was started back in 2004 our focus was on web design and building PHP based web  applications since that’s what I was doing as a day job back then. Today that has morphed into a lot of WordPress development for clients as well as social media related consulting, coaching & training.  Last year WordSprung was launched as an extension of our WordPress services and earlier this year we launched Indy Media School to focus on the social media training side of things.

On the flip side of the coin, in 2006 the decision was made to separate our content (blogs, podcasts, writings, etc) from the design & consulting side of things and Surge Bucket Media was formed.  Four years later Surge Bucket Media (SBM) consists of dozens of web properties, many of which are networked together.  The difference here being that SBM is currently nowhere near the money maker that everything under the Watershed Studio umbrella is.  And a lot of that is on purpose as we are trying to keep advertising down to an absolute minimum and frankly we do that because we like to do it.

All of that to say, we have seen quite the spectrum of blogs & bloggers throughout the years. While many of our clients are businesses, both small and large, we also have numerous clients who blog out of their own pockets. In other words, their blogs are their passion and they are funding them themselves without a concern for monetary gain.  And it’s this crowd that the vast majority of bloggers would fall into.

Going back to Philadelphia, I honestly don’t see how this will hold up. There are just too many issues at hand, not to mention the moment when freedom of speech and press are brought up (and Philly should be pretty familiar with those, right?).   If I were a small potatoes blogger in Philly I wouldn’t be packing my bags just yet, but I certainly would raise a ruckus with your city government.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Please leave us a comment or leave a voicemail at 317-565-4250.

The Watershed Studio March 2010 Newsletter is now online.  Be sure to check it out for recent Watershed Studio news and information including:

• 17th Annual Stutz Artists Open House
• New Joint Business Venture
• WordCamp Indy 2010
• WordPress Q&A
• OIOpublisher Coupon Code for March 2010

The Watershed Studio February 2010 Newsletter is now online.  Be sure to check it out for recent Watershed Studio news and information.

The Watershed Studio January 2010 Newsletter is now online.  Be sure to check it out for recent Watershed Studio news and information.

Watershed Studio’s OpenCart Table Rate Shipping Module v1.0 has been released.

The OpenCart Table Rate Shipping Module adds table rate shipping options based on the sub-total of the shopping cart. The code is released under the GPL.

And if you need help customizing this module to suit your own needs, please request a quote.

After a lot of hard work with the teams at Health.com, Automattic and a slew of other people I’m probably forgetting, the first Health.com TalkPress VIP based forum, Ask the Natural Living Experts, was launched yesterday.  (As far as I know, this is the first live TalkPress VIP based forum.)

The TalkPress* VIP project is a continuation of the ongoing WordPress VIP project Watershed Studio has been working with Health.com on since 2008 (a good overview of that can be found on Automattic’s WordPress Publisher Blog).  In a nutshell, the various areas of Health.com’s website are ran by different underlying software applications which are all pulled together with the same template/theme in order to make visiting the website fluid.

So if you have a minute, please take a look around the new forum.  And if you have any feedback, good or bad, we’d greatly appreciate it.

* TalkPress is Automattic’s hosted forum solution and is based on their open source bbPress offering.  Many of the new features are not currently available in the stable release of bbPress, but should be when the next version arrives.

[Update - April 9th, 2009: Sam Bauers talks about TalkPress on the bbPress Blog. Sam has been an excellent help in getting this rolled out.]

The WordPress Category Posts plugin, version 2.0, has been released and is now available for download via the WordPress Extend Plugin Directory.  WordPress Category Posts is a plugin for WordPress that creates a linked list of the posts in a specific category.

As a formal announcement, Watershed Studio’s work on our WordPress Versioning Plugin has been discontinued since this functionality is now part of the WordPress core as of version 2.6 which was released on July 14, 2008.  Kudos to the WordPress developers for adding Post Revisions to the core!

The Chicago Tribune published an article a few days ago that discusses business blogging and in particular includes portions of an interview with Robert Mark from CommAvia about their JetWhine blog.  I hope to see more of these sort of articles (business related or otherwise), as there are so many facets to blogging that could be explored.

CommAvia has been a client of ours since November 2006, right after the initial launch of the JetWhine blog, for the various WordPress services and tasks necessary to keep the blog up and running and growing.  It’s rewarding to watch a client’s blog and blogging grow and excel, especially in what I’d consider a relatively short time-span.

Watershed Studio’s WordPress Tab Default to Pages Plugin v1.0.1 has been released.

This release features two minor cosmetic changes:

• We fixed the top level tab highlighting
• We moved the page submenus in front of the post submenus

And if you need help customizing this plugin to suit your own needs, please request a quote.

Watershed Studio’s WordPress Tab Default to Pages Plugin v1.0 has been released.

This plugin simply sets the main write and manage tabs to to default to “page” instead of post. The code is released under the GPL, so someone may find it useful to build upon (adding and removing other menus/submenus).

And if you need help customizing this plugin to suit your own needs, please request a quote.

[UPDATE (03-05-2008): Comments are now closed on this post.  This plugin does work on WordPress 2.3.x.  Version 3 will be out very soon, so be on the lookout for that.]

[UPDATE (10-25-2006): Check out the WordPress Email Notification Plugin v2.3.2 Alpha post. There is a possible spam issue that is being addressed.]

The Word Press Email Notification Plugin has been updated to version 2.3.1.

Updates to this version:

• Blog names with commas now display correctly in the from field
• Changed the default location to look in the WP directory for the wpemn_config.php file
• Updates the sent flag before sending future dated posts in order to cut down on duplicate e-mails being sent

If you see anything that looks like a bug or the documentation needs corrected, please comment.

I needed to create a nice, simple list of all posts in a single category and couldn’t find any WordPress plugins to do what I needed, so I created the WordPress Category Posts v1.0 Plugin.

Check it out and if you see anything that looks like a bug, have any questions or the documentation needs corrected, please let me know.

[Note: This has been updated.]

The Word Press Email Notification Plugin has been updated to version 2.0.

Updates to this version:

• Added Option To Choose Whether or Not To Notify
• Added Install Script
• Added Configuration Area
• Added Import Email Addresses Functionality
• Added Export/Backup Email List Functionality
• Added Option To Send Announcements To List Members (non blog posts)
• Removed Rewrite URL’s Functionality

If you see anything that looks like a bug or the documentation needs corrected, please let me know.