The Burrell Group » Mark

Tech week begins for Disney’s Beauty & the Beast!

Mark — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:37:54 +0000

The final preparations begin tonight for the Musical Theater of Orange County’s production of Disney’s Beauty & the Beast at the beautiful Nechita Center for the Performing Arts, in Orange, California. Opening night is Friday, July 23rd, but tonight is the beginning of “Tech Week” as the MTOC “Crew Monkeys” (of which I am a proud volunteer member) begin to ‘load in’ and assemble the massive production set that we’ve been building for the past few months.

My son, Michael Burrell, a sophomore at Orange Lutheran High School and veteran of numerous musical theater productions, is cast in the role of Lumiere. This is a role he has played once before garnering outstanding reviews. I can’t wait to see his performance with the MTOC.

This is will be a great show with a talented cast and a wonderful family experience for those who attend. We have several participants from the ‘Disney family’ included as directors, technical production crew and current and former cast members to bring the “Disney Magic” to our production.

This is the full-length musical theater production of Disney’s Beauty & the Beast as presented on Broadway, not an abbreviated version that may have been seen at the Disneyland Theme parks. If you are in the greater Orange County area for the next two weeks, you should add this event to your schedule. It will be an enjoyable evening or afternoon (matinees on Sunday!) for those who enjoy the wonder of live theater!

I’ll be posting some photos along the way to show how we’re doing. Anyway, that’s all for now and I’m off to the theater!

WordPress Website Workshop Mastermind starts July 1st!

Mark — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:14:11 +0000

My WordPress Website Creation Workshop and Mastermind begins on July 1st. Each student will build their own blog in class and learn to customize and manage it for their particular niche. Workshop includes training webinars, homework assignments, Q&A follow-up sessions and 6 months of weekly coaching/strategies for growing your blog. Click here for information and to register.

Blogging 101 with WordPress $9 Webinar Special

Mark — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:13:09 +0000

WordPress is the popular tool for building search engine friendly Website and blogs. With the release of WordPress 3.0 it’s added some great new features and capability for creating a high-traffic, lead-generation machine. Join me this week for a special “Blogging 101 with WordPress” session at a Friday Special tuition of only $9 (Regularly $39). It’s a two-hour Webinar plus a one hour follow-up Q&A/Review session. Click here for details and sign up link!

Upgrade to WordPress 3.0 checklist

Mark — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:17:41 +0000

Here’s a quick checklist to help you in upgrading an existing WordPress site to WordPress 3.0:

(Note: it’s a good idea to check first with the author of any theme or plugin you are using to see if there are any special notes or issues they ahve with WordPRess 3.0)

Here are steps to take to upgrade to WordPress 3.0:

Back up your blog. (I recommend the Backup Buddy plugin – makes the process super easy)
Copy widgets (I would take screen shots of the code or copy out to notepad file just in case)
Upgrade Plugins to make sure you have versions compatible with WordPress 3.0
Deactivate all Plugins (you’ll reactivate them after the upgrade)
Upgrade WordPress
Reactivate plugins one at a time and check to make sure they are working properly.

Explore the new features of WordPress in your Dashboard.

Enjoy WordPress 3.0!

WordPress 3.0 is finally here – should you upgrade?

Mark — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:22:42 +0000

WordPress 3.0 was just released as an upgrade to WordPress 2.9.2. WordPress 3.0 is a major upgrade (hence the 2. to 3. version jump) offers some nice features and will definitely be worth your consideration – however it is a first release (hence the .0). I will be providing a more detailed analysis regarding 3.0 shortly, but my recommendation at the moment is NOT to upgrade just yet. Let’s see what shakes out in the next couple of days as many thousands of experimenters (suckers? LOL) upgrade and will (I’m sure) report the results (good and bad) on the various blogs and forums.

Having worked with WordPress 3 beta versions in testing environment shows it will be a very nice upgrade HOWEVER, maybe not at the 3.0 level. I would recommend waiting until at least the next several days as the reports come back. If you are setting up a NEW WordPress blog (vs. upgrading an existing WordPress blog) then you can go ahead and check it out, but I would not upgrade an existing important blog immediately.

My $.02 worth. Hope this helps. Stay tuned.

Here’s the official WordPress 3.0 video tour: