The weekend is upon us again, so as is tradition around these parts, we’re going to see what the bloggers on the Internet have to offer us as we take a tour of the blogosphere. Let’s make this a weekend filled with awesomeness!

No post about being awesome would be complete without Ed Lau. He says that his blog provides 100% of your recommended daily intake of awesome. While he doesn’t have the iPhone 3G S (yet), Ed did upgrade his current iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3.0 software and he’s loving the built-in tethering. Now he can have real Internet access on his laptop anywhere he has cellular service.

The blogosphere just hasn’t been the same for the last few months, because it’s been missing Derek Semmler. Well, the native from the Chicago area has hopped back to his personal blog for a quick update. Did you miss him? In his update, he talks about his day job, getting more sleep, and his Harley.

Like so many other children of the 1980s, Greg Morgan grew up as a big fan of Michael Jackson. He was incredibly influenced by his music, enthralled by his dancing ability, and thoroughly entertained by MJ as a performer. It was definitely sad to see the King of Pop pass away yesterday, but let’s remember the good times… like the first ever moonwalk. The iconic dance has been immortalized on YouTube.

International travel is one of the best ways to spend your money, especially if it means that you get to visit family that you may not have ever seen before. Tyler Cruz is taking advantage of his dot com lifestyle for a two-week (minimum) trip to the Philippines. He’s half-Filipino and he’s going not only to visit the beautiful country, but also to meet up with his 90-year-old grandma and, by his own estimation, 4,023 cousins.

Sometimes, it pays to be a tourist in your own city. Rebecca Bollwitt, who you may know better as Miss604, recently took a trip out to the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver to visit the Vancouver Police Museum. While there, she got a great tour of the old morgue, a brief history lesson on Gastown, and all sorts of views into Vancouver’s underbelly.

Twitter has a feature on their site which shows current trends. The system is setup to show what the majority of people are talking about. For example Iran and Michael Jackson are currently trending on twitter because a lot of people are talking about it.

A hashtag is a convention used on twitter to make a keyword search able on twitter. A hash is just a #. So an example would be #FollowFriday.

From time to time you will see these hashtag trend for things that allow people to learn more about one another. A good example of this is #thingsboyssay and #thinggirlssay which was going around on twitter for a few weeks.

This week I want to try an experiment and see what it takes to get a hastag trend started. With the death of Michael Jackson it brought up the ‘Where were you moments’ conversations on twitter. So this week answer the following and include the following hashtag….

#wherewereyou for the death Princess Di?
#wherewereyou for 911?
#wherewereyou for the Challenger accident ?
#wherewereyou for death Lennon?
#wherewereyou for JFK?
#wherewereyou for M. King? MJ?
#wherewereyou for anything you feel was a where were you moment?

I look forward to seeing how this works. You can follow along and view the results here.

With Linux/Unix, it is possible to set a Message of the Day (MOTD) that will displayed upon a successful login to the system. While the name is a bit misleading, in the sense that the message doesn’t automatically change each day. Rather, it is intended for you to change it when you feel there is something you need to inform those who are logging in about (or just for fun).

While setting a login message probably isn’t useful if you’re the only one logging into your server, it can be useful if you have multiple people that login. Feel free to set one just for fun though. :)

Setting a login message is simple. Login to your server via SSH and open the file /etc/motd. You can then enter anything you like into that file (including line breaks). Save and close that file once you’re done. Now, everytime you login, you’ll see that message. Changing the message is as simple as change the contents of the file to reflect what you want the login message to be.

I came across a video on YouTube the other day where they asked some random passers-by in Times Square whether they knew what a web browser was. The vast majority could not differentiate between a web browser and a search engine, saying that their web browser of choice was (mostly) Google and (sometimes) Yahoo! Obviously, both of these are search engines and not web browsers.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the people interviewed in the clip knew nothing about Google Chrome, Google’s official entry into the web browser market to compete against the likes of Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and others. In this way, Google really did not have much of a chance of converting many of these people to Chrome, because they not only did not know about Chrome; they did not know about the difference between a search engine and a web browser.

In developing your marketing efforts and campaigns, it may be very much worth your while to take on the role of an educator. While industry-specific knowledge may be second nature to you and your direct associates, this knowledge may not be quite as common among your customers and potential customers. They may not exactly understand what you are offering, not understanding how your product is different from an entirely different type of product.

For example, the people behind Google Android could stand to spend some advertising dollars in educating the public on the nature of a smartphone, what it means to have an “open source” operating system, and the advantages of these kinds of devices. Auto manufacturers have long since taken on the role of educator too, teaching us about safety innovations and the benefits that they can provide.

Do your customers really know what you are selling? Help to educate them and your business may grow.

Last week we defined what each of the “standard” theme files was for. This week we’ll be discussing what you should put in those files. Although you are free to use these files how you like (or not use them, in theory you could use just one file for your whole theme), this way of developing themes has largely become the standard way of doing things. This week we’ll go over some of the more basic concepts, then next week we’ll tackle “the loop”.

Before creating your theme, I would recommend that you already have the design coded and ready to go. Once you have that all ready to go, you can go ahead and make it into a WordPress theme.

Let’s start out by talking about the header.php file. This file should contain the beginning of your document, the head of your document and (usually) the “header” of your page. Basically, anything that you want to be at the beginning of every page of you theme, should go in the header.php file.

The index.php, single.php and page.php all use “the loop”, and we’ll be discussing them next week. However, if you think ahead here, if you have a common div that will be used on all these different page types, then you can add it to your header.php. This will save you from the (minor) inconvenience of putting it at the top of these three files.

The footer.php file should contain your design’s footer and your document ending tags. If you do have that common div we talked about, ending it in this file will also be more convenient.

We’ll continue this on next week, with “the loop”. Following that we’ll be talking about some useful theme functions. Then we’ll finish off this mini-series with widgets and (threaded) comments.

Your blog design will come with some natural constraints. Your content area is of a certain width, so the images that you embed should not exceed this width. In the past, the way that you’d be able to show larger pictures to your readers is to direct them to another page where they can see the bigger picture. That’s not the case anymore, thanks to the relatively simple advent of the lightbox.

This isn’t completely novel at this point, of course, but it’s great to see how easy it is to implement a lightbox solution on your WordPress blog. Rather than send a reader to another page on your site, they can remain on the same page, click on the thumbnail, and be shown the photograph at a much higher resolution and size. This is similar to the lightbox effect you get when you hit the Upload/Insert Image tool from within the WordPress “Add New Post” dashboard.

One of the easier ways to implement a lightbox on your blog is to use a WordPress plug-in called Lightbox Plus. The plug-in is designed in such a way that when a reader clicks on the thumbnail, the background surrounding the larger image will dim. This adds to visibility and usability. When they are done viewing the image, they can click anywhere in the dimmed portion to return to reading your blog post.

For more information, including a FAQ, screenshots, and a changelog, check out the Lightbox Plus page in the WordPress repository. It is also there that you can download this plug-in.