Matt and the WordPress team have released a substantial upgrade with an epic dashboard built by our good friends at Happy Cog. We’re psyched to already have it available as our Wordpress one-click installer for all (gs) Grid-Service customers.

if you already have WordPress installed on your Grid account, Do not(!) use the one-click installer to upgrade your current version of WordPress. It will break your blog and erase all of your hard work. WordPress has info on upgrading here.

Check out all newest features and visit the one-click install page in the AccountCenter to get setup right away!

Last but not least, (mt) would also like to send a special thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the entire Wordpress team and Happy Cog for all of their hard work. Congrats!

Congrats are in order for the all of the SXSW Web Award winners and nominees. But 3 of the winners are (mt) clients and we’d like to give them a proper shout out:

Elfyourself - amusement category
Minuit - music category
Paper Critters - student category

And let’s not forget all of the nominees who rock and host here as well;
The Big Noob (great contest guys)
Bitstrips
we are DAG
GOOD Magazine
Scene 360
Defy all Challenges
Leaflets
Burst Labs
Songza
and Jina Bolton

Cheers to everyone.

The Party!
We’re throwing another infamous Top Shelf (mt) Media Temple Closing Party coming with dual finger guns a-blazin! Expect our usual exceptional DJ selection, delicious ever-flowing beverages (Special Mixers by Daily Juice ) + the premier of the exclusive (mt) Media Temple Collective Motion Project.

DETAILS:

DJ’s:
Prince Klassen (Resident at Beauty Bar)
Dj RaeDawn (Tiger Beat)
Special performance by ASTROVAdj

Party kicks off at 8pm, Tuesday.

LOCATION:
Union Park (Map Below)
612 W 6th St, Austin, TX
(512) 478-7275

The All Star Panel!
Chris Lea, our Chief Technologist, will be speaking on an all star panel called Considerations for Scalabale Web Ventures Joe Stump and Kevin Rose (Digg), Matt Mullenweg (Word Press), and Cal Henderson (Flickr) on how to build the next big thing that actually scales efficiently. This happens Tuesday @ 3:30.

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Our good friends at Happy Cog and A List Apart are kicking off their An Event Apart tour this year in New Orleans. (mt) Media Temple has been working with AEA since the beginning for a very good reason: Content Is KING at these events. AEA focuses on delivering crucial design nuts and bolts from industry leaders.

We’re proud to sponsor the 2008 tour and excited to get valuable face time with you at the (mt) Media Temple opening night mixers.

We are offering an exclusive $100 discount on the New Orleans show for our special (mt) Media Temple audience! To get your $100 discount (exclusively for Media Temple customers), enter discount code AEAMEDI while registering for this An Event Apart conference at https://store.aneventapart.com/ . And remember, if the code is used during the early bird period, that means a total of $200 off the regular cost of registering!

7 years ago, we chose Parallels (previously SWsoft) as our provider for VPS technology. Today, Virtuozzo Container technology is still used for every (dv) Dedicated-Virtual and (dpv) Nitro product. As a testament to their quality, we’re one of the largest deployments in the world (over 10,000) and we surpass all but a few giants in the worldwide hosting industry.

The world of hosting is beginning to move towards VPS solutions and it’s coming to the same conclusion Media Temple had in 2001. We’ve seen great benefits and we discuss those in Parallels case study about us.

From a simple blog to a balanced, stackable, complex Fortune 100 solution, (mt) has earned its place as one of the largest, most experienced, virtualization service providers in the world with one of the highest customer retention rates in our industry.

We’re excited to announce the next generation of (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Servers! Now available for immediate purchase, these new (dv)’s feature updated software including PHP 5, MySQL 5, CentOS 5 and Plesk 8.3.

With new optimizations, we’ve reduced the OS memory footprint for the (dv) Base by 30%. This means you’ll have more memory available for your applications. Other notable features include automatic tuning for both Web Server/Database heavy scenarios, Python 2.4 and Ruby 1.8.5 pre-installed, and new features for resellers in your new Plesk 8.3 control panel. Lastly, we’ve added an all-new default page that we think you’ll really appreciate.

Visit the new (dv) product page for more details.

(mt) Media Temple, in collaboration with Motionographer, Hellohikimori and SCAD bring you the (mt) Collective Motion Project! Collective Motion is a collection of motion pieces created by (mt) partners, clients and anyone with a passion for motion design. This collection, edited and brought together by the minds at Hellohikmori, will be a centerpiece projected at (mt) events around the globe. Accepted entries will also be displayed in a gallery on mediatemple.net. For full entry details read on…

(more…)

A new informational site, EveryBlock, launched yesterday! This unique resource allows you to find out what’s happening nearby. And by “nearby” we really do mean it. The site, which currently has information for Chicago, San Francisco and New York, will index information that is local to your neighborhood, down to the specific block that you live on. If you haven’t already, you should definitely head over and try it out. We can hope that more cities will be added in the near future. We are proud to be hosting it here at (mt) Media Temple.

EveryBlock.com was co-founded by Adrian Holovaty, who also happens to be one of the creators of the Django framework and one of the co-authors of The Django Book. Accordingly, we’d like to remind everybody of the cool Django beta program that we have going right now.

If you have an existing (gs) Grid-Service with us, then you are eligible to apply to the beta. We are anxious to get as much quality feedback as we possibly can, so as an incentive, we are going to offer a free printed copy of The Django Book to the top 25 participants. What are you waiting for, go sign up!

Since (mt) has hosted it for two years, we knew ‘07 was the biggest elfing season ever. Today, Advertising Age chimed in with a great elfyourself.com article and video showing how it’s become the all-time, record breaking, viral sensation to date.

One in 10 Americans visited elfyourself.com to make 122 million elves this holiday season (that doesn’t include what we saw for scroogeyourself.com). For (mt), it was exciting to see the stats surge and our (dpv) Nitro’s stream holiday fun for all (we’ll have a case study online soon).

We’d like to say thanks to the teams at Office Max, Toy and the wizards at EVB for choosing (mt) as their trusted hosting provider. For two years in a row, it’s been a pleasure working with them and we’re proud to be a part of internet history.

Struggling to find a gift for the tech savvy person on your list? The Hosting Gift Card is available for email delivery all the way up till Christmas Day, December 25th! Instead of buying another gift card to those boring big-box super stores, help someone start something big (a blog, the next great Web 2.0 app, and much more)! Visit the Gift Card page for all the details.