I recently found myself wondering just how many people are making a living installing/theming/maintaining/pluginning/training WordPress. There appears to be a large ecosystem of freelancers and companies that rely on our favorite blogging tool for (part of) their income.

To get an idea of how big this ecosystem is, I decided to run a little survey. My blog only has a limited reach, so please forward this little poll to other people it may interest. The result may be very interesting and reveal WordPress’ true economical significance.

Please use the poll below to indicate how much of your personal income comes from WordPress-related work. Please do not vote more than once (or less!). There’s probably some sort of IP-based protection against double votes, but please do not try to find out just in case. This is all completely anonymous, I’m not going to steal your customers :).

Thanks in advance for passing this around.

I know. This is basically silly, but some system tray icons bug the hell out of me. Here part of my current setup. See the mushroom sticking out like a sore thumb? I love Cobian Backup, and have recently installed it as a service, but the tray icon is making me itch. Codenamed “Amanita”, version 9 of course needed a mushroom icon, but compared to the black moon icon of version 8 this is pretty bad. A slightly more sedate colour scheme would be nice, as well a proper anti-aliasing.

Unfortunately, I can find no option to change the icon under Vista Home Premium, so I guess I’ll have to live with it. Seen against the greater scheme of things this is of course only a minor gripe, but if anyone knows an easy fix, please drop me a comment.

I haven’t been doing much Flash lately, but each time I needed to edit older projects I noticed how slow the Actionscript editor was since I moved to Vista. It was so sluggish I ended up making all sorts of typos. I googled for a fix, and eventually found one here.

Setting Flash.exe’s compatibility mode to “Windows XP” will restore the editor to its former speedy self. What a relief. Let’s hope this gets fixed altogether in future versions…

I made a little flash movie a while ago that generates a random number and displays it in a fashion that puts slot machines to shame when it comes to pure excitement and drama. I’d almost forgotten about it when I checked my stats last week and noticed that it’s actually being used. I revisited the code last night and ironed out a few mistakes. It for instance no longer attempts to find numbers between 1 and say “monkey”. Nor does it accept negative numbers. It can draw numbers between 1 and any number you want up to a quadrillion. And of course it was in dire need of some easter eggs…

So, next time you need to decide who should take out the trash, who’s diaper-turn it is or who gets the last slice of pizza, go to my random number generator and let a complete unbiased Flash movie settle it.