Summary: We are kicking things off this year with Christina Warren, a writer, podcaster, blogger, twitterer (@film_girl) and all round gadget-junkie. Christina is a full time writer for mashable.com and you can find her blog at www.christinawarren.com. She also co-hosts ‘Briefly Awesome’ on 5by5.tv We start this week’s show off with Christina as she fills us in on what she is up to at the moment, including heading to Las Vagas this week for the Fourth Annual Mashable Awards, and coverage of the 2011 International CES Convention. WordPress 3.1 release candidate 2 has just come out, and in line with this we get down to the nitty-gritty of custom post formats. Christina explains what they are, and how it all works. The admin bar is a new addition to WordPress 3.0.1 rc2 and is already the source of much discussion. We find out who likes it, who doesn’t, and debate whether it should be an option rather than a default. Christina lets us in on some great tips when it comes to writing and blogging. Considering she writes an average of 1.5 million words a year, we highly recommend taking her advice! One of the tools she uses is TextMate, a Mac text editor. She explains its bundle system and how easy it makes her life when writing blogs and articles. Christina tells us all about the Mashable Awards, its nominees and who to look out for. She lets us in on some of the more unusual companies she will be looking out for in 2011 including the Quora.com Q&A service and Kickstarter.com, a crowd funding platform. Christina gives her top tips for WordPress, talking about Markdown Quicktags, reducing the number of plugins on your site, jQuery and using spiderbug, and some fantastic advice on becoming mobile friendly (essential if you have a business based on offering a service). We talk about the WordPress apps that are out there for the iPad and iPhone. Improvements are inevitable, and we discuss what is really needed, and our opinions on some of the changes that should be made. Christina’s plugin picks and plugins she mentioned: WP Admin Bar Removal Disable Admin Bar Blogsmith Bundle – Has a lot of useful tools for blogging, including IOS linking and a built in thesaurus, word count tools and much more! Markdown Quicktags Joost’s plugin picks of the week: Comment Email Verify – This plugin forces people to verify their email address when they post a comment
