Small Potato Out of Hiding: An Interview with Tung Do ∞
Posted at 3:46 PM on May 25th, 2009
If you’ve been involved with WordPress the past few years, odds are you know Tung Do (a.k.a. Small Potato), who ran WPDesigner.com until it was sold last year to deadbeat owner Pawel Ciszewski for $66,000. SP made the decision to leave the WordPress community while frustrated WordPressers watched WPDesigner sit for months with no trace of Pawel or SP to be found. It has been a year since all this went down and I thought it might be nice to catch up with SP and chat about how everything went down and what he’s been up to since last year. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, leave them in the comments and he may just stop by and answer them at some point.
1. Known in the WordPress community as “small potato,” you built up wpdesigner.com with great tips, tutorials, the first viable theme club, and a really tight community of WP-ers, what sparked the decision to sell wpdesigner.com?
i sold it because of personal reasons. i posted those reasons on my other blog (braintied.com), which is no longer online. basically, life didn’t turn out right. i was getting tired. i knew i had to change it so i did. although i could’ve kept partial ownership of wpdesigner.com, leaving it all behind was best.
2. Do you have any regrets after selling it with the way it’s been reduced to what amounts to an affiliate landing page?
No regrets, just disappointed.
3. After selling wpdesigner, you pretty much only use the internet for email these days. What have you been up to in “real life” since then?
After selling the site, I wanted to travel to find whatever I was looking for. I guess you could say it’s soul searching… sort of. And following some long, long vacations (hehehe), I decided to go back to my roots, which is Viet Nam. Prior to moving there, visiting Viet Nam felt like coming home and I wanted to hold on to that feeling. Besides traveling, moving to Viet Nam, learning how to pick-up girls (with some success hehe) and learning how to play the guitar, I gather experience here and there like the time I tried out teaching english to Vietnamese kids. Also, for some time, I was working on a new WordPress site. Unfortunately, it never went online. More than anything, it was wrong timing.
Right now, I’m designing again.
4. You had a pretty public falling out with theme designer and entrepreneur Adii as a result of a critique of one of his themes for Unique Blog Designs. Have you followed any of his work since then? In addition, what do you think of WooThemes?
I’d rather not comment on Adii and WooThemes. Whatever I say will simply continue the back and forth betwen me and Adii. It’s pointless.
14 comments so far
Oops. I dribbbled.
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I designed this for a big announcement on the UpThemes blog.
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Working on revisions to a logo we were commissioned to design.
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Client requested some color changes.
Steal this design. See if I care.
Hand-crafted in the year of the tiger.
[...] Do also known as Small Potato has finally reappeared in the WordPress community. Chris Wallace recently published an interview with the man to talk about the decision to sell WPDesigner.com, his thoughts on what has become of the site, and [...]
Hi mr. wallace
i have the lasted version of wordpress and i found you template and egallery 1.1.1 and let me say its wow amazing.
and ps your cotact pluging form isnt working !
have a great day sir
Ah such a brief interview, but still great to hear news about Small Potato.
I have no questions, hopefully somebody else will come along with something.
I just wanted to say that it’s great to see that SP is dabbling with design again. Please posting something soon – when you are comfortable and ready of course.
i miss that guy.
I think we all do.
[...] Small Potato Out of Hiding: An Interview with Tung Do (tags: WordPress community) [...]
[...] Small Potato Out of Hiding: An Interview with Tung Do [...]
[...] Small Potato Back In Action [...]
The whole design community owes this guy big time!
I only just came across SP and the website pictured in this post just recently (in the last month or so) and I must say I was extremely impressed with his giving attitude. Man, no wonder people really valued him. I wish and hope for the best for him.
Good for you SP! Sounds like quite an adventure, and one that I wouldn’t mind taking as well
Let us know what you’re up to!
I’m currently working my way through his WordPress tutorials… a great resource for WordPress newbies.
They are very easy to follow and believe me if I can understand them, anybody can.
I would recommend his tutorials to anybody new to WP.
I wonder if he has a twitter account. I’d love to follow him.
[...] He has basically retired and he recounts details of his current plans with Chris Wallace [...]