Today marks the one-day-less-than-two-weeks point in the competition. Submissions are still due by 12:00 AM (UTC) on July 29, 2007. Lots of Sandbox-related questions have been answered over in the Sandbox Forums and I have received several submissions already, as you can see from the Participants page.
So stop reading this and get back to designing. 
The best news that I have to offer is that PressHarbor has kicked in US$300 for the competition, raising the current total of cash prizes to US$1950.00. The first-place winner will now receive a more than reasonable US$850 (More at The Details). The total for prizes is now US$1950.00.
If you’re a WordPress user like me who finds himself often explaining how to get started blogging to friends and family, you might want to bookmark PressHarbor. Here’s the info from their site:
Born out of a vision to help bring web publishing to an even greater audience, we’ve developed a platform to make it easy to get started on the world class WordPress publishing tool. Our installation service makes it a breeze to get started with your own WordPress blog and your own domain name, and our automated updater keeps your WordPress software current and secure.
The final bit of news is that the judges have hopefully been finalized. The goal of ten judges has been met and I think everyone can be assured that we have a qualified panel of designers, bloggers, and blog designers to ensure solid final results. These individuals have been kind enough to volunteer their time so let’s be sure to give them our thanks.
One judge, Sadish, stepped aside from the competition due to some controversy related to some accusations related to the Theme Viewer. I would like to point out that I emailed Sadish for his side of the story and he handled the situation very graciously and chose to step aside. Thanks, Sadish.
I’d also like to thank all the sponsors who have provided the financial backing to reward the hard-earned efforts of all the participants. With everyone’s eye on the real prize, these folks are the ones who providing the backing for the SDC to move forward. They also all agreed to simply provide the money and step aside with absolutely no influence on the competition policies and/or procedures.
This competition will have set the standard for future WP-related competitions with its thoughtful rules. And all those future competitions can be happy because all the policies and procedures used here are licensed with the GNU Free Documentation license. 
So I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the designs continue to come in and happy that the community is really going to have some exceptional new work to spice up their blogs with. 
8 Comments
I’ve updated the “Sandboxed” zip file (local copy of the Live Preview blog used for judging) to include comment forms thanks to Scott’s help in setting up an account.
Thanks to you for taking the time to provide this great tool for the participants.
That’s a leveled playing field.
Great post Scott lets keep things rolling and bring on the momentum. And Engtech your resourcefulness amazes me and by the way this is the 5th blog where I have seen you commenting looks like we have a lot in common
@Scott: The zip file was more for me than anyone else. I have a rule of thumb where I try to only build things that I’ll use.
It’s always good to eat your own dogfood.
Mmm. My dogfood, I suppose, is rather gritty.
Great.. I just come to know about that from engtech’s blog..
Congratulation for raising a lot of price! I have one suggestion about the price. I think it would be so great if we give small price amount to more people instead of giving a lot of amount to a particular person..
What do you say?
I think given the scope of this type of competition, six total prizes is suitable. Also, for those who are really trying to win with the best possible design, I think a bigger total pot raises the stakes.
Sorry.. should be prize (not price).. spelling mistake.
>>>six total prizes is suitable. Also, for those who are really trying to win with the best possible design,
Okay..