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.
A while back, I got a Wakemate and was pretty gung-ho about it being a great device for monitoring your sleep and helping you feel a bit more refreshed when you wake up. I recently picked up a Fitbit as well, so as a bit of fun, I thought I’d compare the 2 devices for sleep monitoring and write up a bit of a review. Here we go.
Apparently I’ve been moved to a new server at DreamHost. Let’s see if that solves any of the performance problems that I’ve been having. I still have an account at MediaTemple that I’m paying for, and haven’t gotten around to moving things over to just yet 🙁
I’ll be at WordCamp Orange County, presenting a session on plugin development, specifically looking at some of the more advanced things we did in Jetpack. It will be fun — you should go.
For the past few months, my team at Automattic (Team Social FTW!) has been working on a super-secret project. Today, almost perfectly synchronized with the NASA space shuttle landing (total fluke, but awesome regardless) we launched Jetpack!
Jetpack is a new plugin that delivers a bunch of popular features from WordPress.com (the hosted site, which Automattic runs) to self-hosted installs of WordPress (such as the one that runs Dented Reality). Once you install Jetpack, you get some of the cooler things available on WordPress.com, automatically enabled on your own WordPress site. The modules you get today are just the beginning though, there are a lot more planned for future releases. We’re going to be targeting some of the biggest features that are easier for us to do on our massive grid/cloud infrastructure, but harder for folks to do on their own shared-hosting accounts.
We also managed to partner with a bunch of leading web hosts, so if you’re doing a one-click install on Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, or Network Solutions, you’ll get Jetpack as part of your install. This is huge for people installing their own WordPress.
This has been the coolest thing I’ve worked on at Automattic so far, and it’s been awesome to be involved in a project that has seen so many contributions internally (over 40 people were involved in everything from UX to design to internationalization to testing and debugging) and so many iterations since its inception. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, and hope that it sets a new bar for the design of WordPress plugins (I really think Jetpack is beautiful, amazing work Joen, Hugo and MT!).
So – check out Jetpack if you’re running WordPress on your own server, and let us know what you think!
Which features would you most like to see in Jetpack? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do 😉
PS: This post proudly proof-read by After The Deadline, as delivered via Jetpack 😉
Since I’m mostly using them on an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I have 2 extra requirements on my earphones (in addition to sound quality etc).
Recently, my Klipsch earbuds suffered the wrath of the TSA when they were munched in the rollers of an x-ray machine. Time for new headphones. I ended up ordering a set of ZAGG Smartbuds. At literally half the price of my Klipsch, I didn’t know what to expect, but have been so far pleasantly surprised: (more…)
If you’re a WordPress Plugin developer, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to maintain one of your plugins across multiple versions of WordPress. Until recently, I maintained the IntenseDebate plugin for versions 2.5 and up of WordPress, including versions 2.6 of WPMU and up. That’s a lot of versions (10 actually, not counting minor revisions). Here are some tips I picked up/developed to try to make my life a little easier along the way.
I get really annoyed when I find myself having to do things over and over that a computer could easily do. I am also really bad at remembering to do small things that don’t seem that important.
The latest intersection of these 2 things is that I’ve been forgetting (or not bothering) to set my status as “Away” or “Back” on all the communications apps I have running when I leave the computer. This is something that a computer should be able to do itself, and something that I’m horribly bad at remembering to do.
I’m in Portland today and taking part in the Federated Social Web Summit, before attending OSCON for the next week. Today is so far packed with lighting presentations from all sorts of companies, projects and protocols in the space to bring us all up to speed. After lunch we’re going to all be discussing and looking at how we can put together all the building blocks and bring to life this concept of a federated social web. Here are my (long) notes on all the projects etc from the morning:
Apologies to any names I’ve misspelled, product names I’ve left out, etc.
One thing that’s always bugged me in writing Posts/Pages content within WordPress is that you have to cater for different presentation possibilities. If you’re into web-standards, then that makes life difficult for things like headings (h1, h2, etc), when a block of content is presented in different contexts.
Ideally, your page should be structured with an h1 tag around the title of the most important concept on the page, an h2 around a sub-topic/concept, etc. On your home page, the h1 usually ends up going around your logo/site title, since that’s the over-arching concept. Then under that, you might have a listing of recent posts. Each of those posts should probably have their titles in an h2. No problem so far, right? You just set up your template like that and you’re good to go. (more…)
WordCamp Savannah, 2010
I was lucky enough to spend last weekend in Savannah, Georgia for their first WordCamp. This was the first time I’d ever been to beautiful, historic Savannah. The humidity/heat was a bit much for me, but in general I had a great time. I gave a short presentation on the new comment_form() function which is available for themes to use since 3.0. I’ve embedded my slides below, along with a link to download a PDF version.
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