Last week, I had the opportunity to meet Gary Vaynerchuk at a book signing/networking event at World Market in St. Louis. Now, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t seen many of his videos and have never purchased a bottle of wine in my life, so I certainly can’t claim to be his biggest fan. However, after meeting him, I can safely say that this is one guy that really knows what he’s talking about, especially when it comes to knowing where the web is going. On top of that, he’s super nice.

After standing in line for about 20 minutes to get a signed copy of “Crush It,” I met Gary, shook his hand, and told him I had a strange request. My buddy Brad(@imbradmiller) couldn’t make it to the event because he was stuck at the office working late. Naturally, I had to rub it in that he couldn’t be there so I thought, “what’s better than putting him on the phone with Gary Vaynerchuk? Nothing.” So I handed my iPhone to Gary with Brad on the line. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember him cursing at Brad, asking him why wasn’t able to make it. After joking with him a bit, he let him know that he was genuinely sorry he couldn’t be there. After hanging up with Brad, Gary signed a book for me and proceeded to kick my butt in an epic thumb wrestling match.

After the signing, Gary spoke for at least an hour. I think the most important thing he spoke on had to do with the companies he’s been investing in, Gowalla and Matt Galligan’s own SimpleGeo. After the event/talk, there were quite a few of us who went over to Robust Wine Bar and had some time to talk with Gary in a much more casual setting. I also met some awesome folks from the Social Media Club St. Louis. All in all, it was a great event and I’m certainly glad I was able to participate and spend a little time getting to know the Jets-loving Gary Vaynerchuk.

The video I posted is part 1 in a series of 7 videos posted by Karen Goodman (@karenstl), a real estate agent in the area, who runs a blog called Arch City Homes. I would encourage you to watch all the videos if you have time, as the advice and information he shares are indispensable. And also, big thanks to Karen for posting the videos!

To promote the release of the highly-anticipated Aperture WordPress theme, one of the most flexible and beautiful themes in the known world,  I went ahead and put together a desktop background for your downloading pleasure. Go ahead, tell your friends.

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Because it’s Monday and because I like you, I am releasing a vector scale icon that comes with 4 PNG icons in 512×512, 256×256, 128×128, and 64×64 and a PSD that has a smart object Illustrator file that can be edited for your needs (CS4 compatible). Click on the image above to see the sizes of the PNG versions. If you do happen to use the icon for anything, please do let me know, I’d love to see where you use it.

Download the Scale Icon (.zip)

Scale Icon by Chris Wallace is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.chris-wallace.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.chris-wallace.com/licensing.

One of the cardinal sins in the design community is stealing someone’s work and calling it your own. About a month ago, a good friend notified me that his site and portfolio were completely ripped off by a guy he found on ThemeForest. The guy basically took his entire portfolio, slapped a new logo on it, and uploaded it to his domain. My friend was distraught about the whole situation and had no idea what to do. As a Christian, he wanted to help the person, and wasn’t sure what the best approach would be. Obviously, he wanted to get the stolen portfolio taken down. At the same time, he didn’t want to come off as merciless or cruel by completely embarrassing and discrediting him by blasting him throughout the halls of twitter and Facebook (which seems to be a common practice lately). This got me thinking: What’s the right way to deal with a design ripoff?

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You may not have noticed, but the rest of the world has. Collis Ta’eed and Envato have just completely revamped the Envato Marketplace, including ThemeForest.net. With the latest redesign, I wanted to share some awesome themes that I think really deserve a look when purchasing a new theme for your blog or a client project. These are hot, yo!

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Are you using one of my mind-blowing WordPress themes? Do you have a question that you’d like to ask or potential bug you’d like to see fixed? Well, now you can, thanks to the brand new WordPress Theme Forum. Please remember that any support provided by myself is 100% voluntary and in no way guaranteed.

Check out the new forum and post questions or answers.

With the “smashing” success of Gallery 1.0 I am happy to announce the release of version 1.1, which includes quite a few changes, including a custom write panel (shown below), bugfixes for IE6 (mainly the navigation menu), and other bugfixes. As always, you need to grab and upload both the Gallery and Thematic themes.

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After hearing that my brother was being taught “web design” by a guy calling himself Dr. Dude and is currently “learning” how to make animated gifs and a 360 flash panorama, I quickly became interested in finding out just what exactly is being taught in colleges and universities regarding web standards-based design. Soon after, I reached out to Christopher Murphy of the Web Standardistas in search of answers on the topic of web standards in education. Check it out at Six Revisions.