Posts

Web Service Authentication APIs

For a project I’m working on, I’ve been looking at a lot of web service authentication/verification APIs lately. I thought folks might be interested in the results. Here are the methods available for a variety of web services/applications online, with links to their appropriate docs:

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BackPress, Your New Best Friend

If you’ve spent some time poking around in the code for either WordPress or bbPress, you may have come across comments that mention “BackPress”. You may have wondered what this BackPress thing was, well, wonder no more.

In the last few days, I’ve put together a quick site to try to help introduce people to the BackPress project. From the site:

BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.

So effectively, BackPress takes all of the best core functionality (on a code level) from WordPress and bbPress, and makes it available to you and your next PHP-based web application/project. By using BackPress in your projects, you are then able to use most of the code you’ve come to rely on while working on WordPress-based projects, such as $wpdb, trailingslashit(), make_clickable(), __(), wp_remote_fopen() and more. The site includes some details on how to use BackPress in your project, and has the beginnings of a collection of documentation covering the main parts of the code library.

I’m personally really excited about this because I think BackPress has huge potential as a library for other folks and other projects. It allows them to benefit from the lessons learned through years (and thousands of “man-hours” worth of development) on the WordPress and bbPress projects. I’m using it as the core of my HTFS project (not released yet), and I know that some other projects are starting to use it as well. As a developer who has spent a lot of time in “WordPress land”, it makes life so much easier to be able to continue using a lot of the design patterns and techniques that I’ve become accustomed to.

Check it out, and please let me know what else we could get on the site, what needs more documentation etc!

On Cafe Working

Since arriving in Santiago, I’ve been posed with the challenge of finding good locations to work from. I like to work from cafes, which I refer to as “cafeworking”. Whether you’re traveling or just wanting to get out of the house for the day though (assuming you work from home, like I normally do), your selection criteria are probably similar either way. I decided that I’d document some of the things I look for when I’m trying to find a good place to work for the day. Feel free to add your own criteria in the comments.

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I’m Speaking at WordCamp Indonesia

WordCampID – January 30, 2010While I’m here in Santiago, one of the things I’ll be doing is putting together a presentation for WordCamp Indonesia. I’ll be keynoting, although I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be covering yet; it’s sure to be something interesting 😉

If you’re anywhere near Indonesia, book your tickets around January 30, 2010 and come and chat about WordPress with a bunch of like-minded folks! Michael Koenig (a fellow Automattician) will be joining me, and spreading the love about IntenseDebate (which is a major sponsor of WordCamp ID).

Idea: Bookmark Plugin for WordPress

I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.

Indeed.

According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.

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Inline Collapsed Content with jQuery

One of the things I find ListML really handy for is planning a presentation/talk. I write up a hierarchical list of all the things I want to cover using ListML, then I can work from that list to build out my slides/demos/etc. For the recent WordCamp NYC, I needed to present 2 structured talks, so I went to work in ListML and knocked up 2 lists of things to cover. Once I was done with the talks, I realized that there was some good content in these lists that a) served as a bit of a transcript to the talks themselves, and b) in some cases wasn’t actually covered (for time reasons, or just because I forgot them).

I wanted to be able to post these lists to my site along with the presentations, but didn’t really want to post a whole separate page for each one just to put up a simple HTML list.

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New Project: ListML

If you’re anything like me, you write a lot of lists. I use lists for pretty much everything — note taking, planning my day, managing projects, shopping, organization, etc etc etc. I have lists of lists. It’s a bit out of control. Over the years, I’ve coalesced on a simple, basic format, where I write things using indented (tabbed) lists of plain text (in TextMate). I kept finding myself converting some of these lists to HTML, so I’ve written something up that will take a plain text list and reformat it as HTML, given a simple set of formatting rules.

That project is available for download now, under the name ListML. Check it out, I use it all the time, so will probably continue developing it. At the moment it’s just a simple script that you drop into a directory, then drop other TXT files in there to view them as HTML. We’ll see where it ends up. If you’ve got any suggestions or find any bugs, feel free to post them as a comment here and I’ll fix things up. I already have some ideas on new features:

  • Ability to load external files (from URL)
  • List files in the current directory if none specified
  • Cut out the parsing engine properly to make it more portable
  • Make the HTML view (optionally) into a lightweight editor as well
  • Quick UI for grabbing the HTML snippet of just the list (sans CSS/extras)

WordCamp NYC Round Up

This past weekend, WordCamp NYC was held at Baruch College in New York. It was (I believe) the second biggest WordCamp to date, if not the biggest (by number of attendees), right up there with WordCamp San Francisco. WCNYC was an incredibly busy event, with so much great WordPress stuff going on at any one time that it was hard to decide what to attend. I was lucky enough to be able to present/be involved in not just one, but 4 presentations throughout the weekend, and I wanted to get some slides and details up here for reference.

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GSoC Mentor Summit, 2009

This weekend I attended the Mentor Summit that winds up the Google Summer of Code. It’s an event where up to 2 mentors from each organization involved are invited to hang out at the GooglePlex for a weekend, mingle with folks from other open source projects and see what happens. We discussed all sorts of things related to the Summer of Code program, in addition to a variety of other, generally open-source topics. It was operated as an unconference, so we made up the majority of the schedule as we went, and modified it as required.

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