In preparation for upgrading a whole mess of sites to using the latest version of WordPress I decided it was time to finally upgrade my own site and to implement the new design I’d been working on for a while (for over a year now).

Check it out: www.gabrielserafini.com

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It’s super simple: Click this link, then join the Facebook Causes group for Monteverde Conservation League and donate any amount.

Right now, if we can get another 7 donors in the next 22 hours the Children’s Eternal Rainforest will get $1,000 for free. So your tax-deductible $10 donation could help save another $1,000 worth of rainforest in Costa Rica.

Check it out, and give a little if you can:
Join the Children’s Eternal Rainforest cause on Facebook

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I’ve had this domain name for a while and finally built something on it. The idea is to figure out good ways to save money on car insurance. We have USAA for ours, which makes it nice because it is a pretty good rate. Some people need extra help, though, to find the best prices. Hopefully this site will assist them in their search.

Check it out: Car Insurance Connection

It is built using WordPress, and will hopefully pay for itself through the Google Adsense ads.

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I’ve been helping Benton Consulting work on the new design for the I Live Inspired website (now launched) and came across this story about the founders who have decided to walk 100 miles across the state of Indiana for a chance to meet the Dalai Lama. Their service is pretty cool, it delivers inspirational text messages each day to your cell phone. I hope they accomplish their goal of getting a meeting and that it goes well. Having messages come directly from the Dalai Lama each day to your phone could be pretty amazing.

Read all about their adventure: As I was walking that ribbon of highway

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Our kitchen now has a website (using WordPress of course). Lots more content to come soon, including the secret story of how the river came to be, the inspiration behind the pipes and the amazing triumph of getting everything finally finished.

Visit the site: Serafini Studios Kitchen - Welcome to Kristin and Gabriel’s kitchen.

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Portrait of Kristin and the Kitchen, originally uploaded by gserafini.

Kristin and Kuma posed for this lengthy timed exposure to capture the blue glowing light from the countertop. Illumination was provided by the dining room light (the overhead kitchen lights were off). This lets the river show up properly.

See all of the kitchen pictures here: http://flickr.com/photos/gserafini/sets/72157594153594016/ (they start at the beginning).

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Miro (the open source video player formerly known as Democracy) is running a contest right now to design a revised one-click subscribe button.

A Fun Little Design Contest
Design up to three buttons and submit them as links in the comments. On August 20th, we’ll create a blog post with all of the submissions.
There aren’t a lot of constraints on what you can submit. Our goal is to have a selection of buttons that would look nice on a blog sidebar or myspace page. We hope to see a variety of sizes and colors.

Here are my three submissions, shown on different backgrounds. My goal for this is to create simple, clean, and usable buttons.

	#FFFFFF	#666666	#000000
Option #1
Option #2
Option #3

I’ll update this post once voting is started so you can vote for my submissions if you like them

Update: Thanks to everyone who voted for my submissions. (I won the grand prize. )

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Found this useful plugin from this site while working on a site that was in the middle of getting dugg/reddited:

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

Get the plugin here: Ricardo Galli, de software libre - WP-Cache 2.0

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Bruce spent a good amount of time researching the 6 best “green” sports cars. Some awesome pics there, including the Tesla Roadster.

These are our favorite “green” sports cars. Some get awesome gas mileage while smoking the competition, and others use advanced bio-fuels to eek out ever higher performance over their gas-guzzling brethren. Big Oil doesn’t like any of them, because they all mean one thing: if you buy them, Big Oil makes less money.

Read the article and check out the desktops: Fast Wallpapers Blog - Blog Archive - 6 Sexy Sports Cars Big Oil Doesn’t Want You to Buy

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