Techn(ical|ology)

Most posts will probably end up in this category one way or another, because I tend to write a lot about technology and tech-related topics. I work online and really enjoy gadgets and gizmos, so a lot of what I get involved in revolves around those subjects. Anything from regular expressions to iPods to The Magic Bullet is fair game.

o2 at WordCamp San Francisco

I just realized that I never posted anything about speaking at WordCamp San Francisco. This was my 8th WordCamp SF (I’ve been to every one since the first, in 2006), and the second one at which I have spoken. Matt invited me to give a short introduction to the work we’re doing with o2, which is the next generation of P2. It’s not available for external (non-Automattic) use yet, so I had to settle for a relatively surface introduction, and couldn’t give people a link to download it or anything which was a bit of a pity, but it still got a good reception.

o2 is a pretty different approach to building on top of WordPress, and has meant a steep learning curve for my team and me. We’ve been digging deep into the world of front-end development, and ramping up quickly on Backbone.js, Underscore.js and a bunch of new development approaches and workflows. It’s been really fun. I’ll let the presentation do the talking though (you can also watch it on WordPress.tv):

And here are the slides I used, which you can also see on Slideshare.net.

We’re really excited to get o2 out into other people’s hands, but we’ve got a lot to build still before other people can experience it in a similar way to how we do at Automattic. The future is bright.

I Want to Love My Pebble

It’s true, I really want to love the Pebble that I got from being a Kickstarter backer. I want to, but right now I can’t. I can only like it. And I can like it a lot — there’s a lot to like!

  • I have a computer on my arm!
  • I can read text messages without taking my phone out
  • I can control music that’s playing on my phone
  • WordPress notifications on my wrist? Yep.
  • Calendar alerts? Got ’em.
  • The form-factor is slick: it’s slim, super lightweight and IMHO, looks pretty darned cool.
  • Nice backlight, which I can activate by shaking my wrist or tapping the watch
  • It’s waterproof! (although I’m too nervous to actively put that to the test)

So why can’t I love it? Let me count the ways (biggest reasons first): (more…)

Import DokuWiki pages into WordPress

I used to maintain a wiki full of personal ideas using DokuWiki, but at some point just gave up with wiki syntax entirely. A few months ago when I was moving all of my sites and content over to a new server and trying to consolidate things as much as possible, I decided to import all of that old content into a WordPress install (which was actually a single site within the same Multi-site install that runs Dented Reality). I ended up writing the following super-rough script to just scrape the contents of the pages and throw them into WordPress. Scraping the pages meant that I could get the actual output of all plugins etc, and also get full links between pages.

(more…)

TimesOpen Hack Day/Readtrack

On Saturday, I attended the 2012 New Times/TimesOpen Hack Day. It was a long day, but I had a lot of fun. I sat in on an intro session to Arduino which was pretty cool, and also a session on the EchoNest API, which I ended up using in my project. You can find out all about my project on the Readtrack project page.

It’s a bookmarklet-powered little app that analyzes the page you’re looking at (using the AlchemyAPI) and then tries to find related music (using the EchoNest API) which it then plays back to you in your browser (using rdio). I got a “runner up”/honorable mention prize 🙂

One of the most visually-polished projects was “Story Arc”, which showed a visual representation of the frequency of mentions of keywords over the NYT archives. Probably the most fun one was a set of drivers for a DDR pad, hooked up to commands for things like deploying code!

Where is Your Digital Hub/Home?

I’ve been using WordPress to power my own website for a while now, and working with it in some way or another for even longer. Over the years, I’ve developed the belief that it’s a pretty perfect platform for people to build their own “digital home on the web”, considering the range of plugins and themes available, the flexibility of the publishing options it offers, and the fact that it’s completely open source, so you can do whatever you want with it.

That last bit is important in more ways than you might immediately think. Apart from just being able to write my own plugins or tweak my themes, this also means that I own my own data. I think in this MySpace/Facebook generation, people are all too loose with the data trails they create — giving up ownership of their digital self at the drop of a hat. In case you didn’t realize, when you use something like Facebook, it is not the product, you and your data are the product.

(more…)

Moving Jetpack Sharing Buttons

I’m working on a new WordPress theme (for this site, and it’ll be released for download once complete). The theme is deeply integrated with Jetpack, and one of the things I wanted to do was have the Jetpack Sharing buttons appear in a location other than the very end of the content. Normally they are applied as a filter on the_content, so they just appear right at the end. I wanted to relocate them into a different location, and it turns out that’s really easy to do with the power of jQuery.

jQuery( document ).ready( function( $ ) {
	// Relocate Jetpack sharing buttons down into the comments form
	jQuery( '#sharing' ).html( jQuery( '.sharedaddy' ).detach() );
} );

The #sharing selector is just the DOM location where I want to move the buttons to, and the .sharedaddy one is the container that Jetpack places its buttons in normally. We just detach it from the normal position and then dump it into the new location exactly as it was.