Search results for: “wordpress”
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Micro.blog’s iPhone app
Manton Reece recently published an update to Micro.blog’s Kickstarter showing a video demonstration of the iPhone app he’s creating for the service. He mentions a really important point that I think many are missing (as I mentioned just a few moments ago). He says (at 53 seconds into the video): Now, you can have Micro.blog…
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What I saw this week #22: December 2, 2016
SwitchResX – A small preference pane for macOS to help you set more specific resolutions for your displays above and beyond what Apple provides by default. NEPA.js – A new meetup in Scranton, PA for people that want to learn JavaScript. Lion – A gorgeous photo by Sam Scrimshaw. Italy, Boat, Wedding – My friend…
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Saving cognitive load: Notes
In my line of work (mostly programming) it can be incredibly difficult to keep all of the details of what is going on in my brain. In fact, it is impossible. To save cognitive load I employ a rigorous note taking strategy that frees up my working memory and allows me to focus on singular…
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Thirty days of images
Each morning, at around 9am Eastern, a new image is published to my blog. I schedule these posts each weekend (I even built a WordPress plugin to help me) and they publish automatically without any other interference from me. I’ve just hit 30 consecutive days of this schedule and I’d like to keep it up in…
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Hacking rather than waiting
Yesterday afternoon Sarah Pressler retweeted Jono Young’s request for a plugin that would add a submenu to the WordPress’ Admin with the current pages for the site under the Pages menu. This would reduce the number of clicks to get to the page editor. I was waiting for an upload to finish and I thought, given the code…
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You’ve been granted h-entry
This morning I took a few minutes to add microformats to the HTML of my blog. I had done so in the past when my site was using a completely different theme and hadn’t taken the time to add them back in. Shame on me. I should have done it much sooner since it took less…
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A few updates to my site
Late last week and over the weekend I’ve made a few subtle updates to my site. I saw that this weekend was Indie Web Camp in Brighton and while I can’t travel a few thousand miles to hack on my blog I can sit at my desk and do a bit of hacking. The main things…
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Building a single page web site using an Excel spreadsheet
Need something like this? Consider hiring me for your next project. I was recently asked by a client if I could use an existing Excel spreadsheet and create a single-page web site from it. This way, their team would be able to use the work they’ve already done and the data they’ve already keyed in and wouldn’t need…
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Migrating Subscriptions from one Stripe account to another
Update June 2021: I’ve had enough interest in this service that I’ve created StripeTransfer.com — Please visit this site to schedule your consultation. Learn More at StripeTransfer.com One of my recent client programming projects (hire me here) was to help a company migrate all customers, cards, plans, and subscriptions from one Stripe account to another…
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How I converted from Custom Post Types to Post Formats
It wasn’t too ugly. But it wasn’t exactly a cool swim either. I thought I would jot down why and how I moved from using a Custom Post Type for each type of post that I publish here — status, photo, audio, and normal post — to Post Formats. First, why move to Post Formats from Custom Post…
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Observations about “tweeting” from my site
It is hard to believe that it has been over 6 weeks since I began posting status messages from my site rather than through Twitter or Facebook. Here was my first status update. Here are some observations that I’ve made: I figured out my process of updating, and replying, within about 10 days and have…
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Publish anywhere you can export your data and keep your URLs
Dave Winer recently wrote that if you have something you want to publish that you should publish it anywhere but Medium. His argument is that Medium could shut down or change course at any moment and your content and your URLs would then be in jeopardy of disappearing. He’s right. That could happen. But that…
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App wishes
I saw that Bijan Sabet wrote a short post enumerating a few things he’d like to see in some of the applications that he uses. I thought that was cool so I’m doing to do it too. git, the command-line source control tool that I use, has every conceivable feature you could imagine. Except undo.…
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Simplenote’s moment
The running theme the last few weeks is how many people, including myself, are leaving Evernote behind for either Apple’s Notes or Simplenote. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the people that are leaving Evernote are those who first started using it when it was still simple and mostly text-based. So while there are likely thousands and thousands…
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Why WordCamp Scranton is important
Disclosure: I’m not an organizer of WordCamp Scranton, though two of my companies; Plain and Coalwork are sponsors, nor am I speaking for anyone involved with the event. I’m personally grateful for the coverage on WNEP about WordCamp Scranton but I believe it could have been so much better. I believe WordCamp’s organizers could have…
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Commuting to NYC with an Oru Kayak
Tal F commutes to NYC on a bicycle and has done so for years. He decided to shake things up and use a kayak to commute into work — and not just any kayak, an Oru Kayak. Tal F, on his excellent blog: Predictably, the process of setting up and dismantling the boat in Manhattan…
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WordCamp Scranton
WordCamp is a big deal in the WordPress community and I’m very pleased that Joe Casabona, fellow Coalworker, is organizing one for Scranton, PA. There are only 88 seats left so run and get your ticket. Side note: I’ve been to WordCamp’s in Hawaii, California, Texas, Arizona, New York, Philadelphia etc. I’m looking forward to…
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Starting over with Barley
Kyle and I have decided we love Barley too much to let it die. So we’re starting over with it in hopes we can find the right fit for it in the market. That is why we are going to sharpen our product’s focus by starting over and we’re going to ask that you follow…
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Why Shopify is valued higher than Woo Commerce by a public market
I saw a discussion on Twitter while laying in bed last night. You can catch up right here. Essentially, it asks… why is Woo Commerce, which has a larger install base, valued so much lower than Shopify by the public market? A bit of background; Woo Themes, the company that built and maintains the Woo…
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Good Old-Fashioned Marketing
Joe Cieplinski, on his blog, writing about the press surrounding the launch of Fantastical 2 for Mac — which I recommend you grab a copy of: It’s brilliant. And it obviously works. But only because it’s genuine. And only because he’s willing to put in that time. That incredible amount of time. Not coding. Not…
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What is the definition of blog?
Ben Thompson, in a posted entitled Blogging’s Bright Future which I saved in Unmark for over a month… says sites like TechCrunch added to the confusion over the word blog: A big problem with this entire discussion is that there really isn’t a widely agreed-upon definition of what a blog is, thanks in part to…
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Automattic wins DMCA case
Ernesto Van Der Sar of TorrentFreak: The case is mostly a symbolic win, but an important one. It should serve as a clear signal to other copyright holders that false DMCA takedown requests are not always left unpunished. DMCA takedown notices are an enormous amount of work for any company offering a service that allows the…
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The what is more interesting than the how
Recently I read Charlotte Spencer’s blog post about being a new developer. The entire post is worth a read but this bit jumped out at me: As a new developer, I don’t care what you are programming in, I just want to know what you’re building. A programming language is just a programming language to…
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A case for modernizing blogs
Marco Arment: If we want it to get better, we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know that I agree with him. And I also don’t pretend to know the answers. Here…
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14 days of committing
It has been 14 days since I said I’d be committing for 30 weekdays straight. I’ve committed code 12 out of those 14 days. (This weekend Eliza and I painted our living room so you’ll have to forgive me for not pulling out my computer.) What have I accomplished? What have I learned? These last…
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The Case for Slow Programming
Jeffrey Ventrella: Any coder who claims that fast programming is the same as slow programming (except that it’s fast), doesn’t understand Design Process. For the same reason that many neuroscientists now believe that the fluid-like flow of neuronal firing throughout the brain has a temporal reverberation which has everything to do with thought and consciousness,…
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30 weekdays of commits
Similar to the 30 weekday blog challenge… I’m going to challenge myself, and you dear reader, to 30 weekdays of committing code to one of your projects. Any project. The projects I’m challenging myself to commit to, for 30 weekdays straight, are Barley CMS, Barley for WordPress, or Unmark. What does this mean? I will…
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A blogger meet up at Coalwork
Finally, a meet up that is going to be less about technology and more about blogging. I’m excited for next month’s NEPA WordPress Meet up. Don’t let the name fool you, this one is simply a place for bloggers to chat and enjoy each other’s company. At Coalwork. I have very fond memories of blogger…
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Tom Hickey
Tom Hickey, of Cork Ireland, on his personal blog in a post titled Stop feeling sorry and start living: I write a blog that’s mainly about my life coming to terms with facial disfigurement. I wanted to share my pain, hopes and dreams, and show you that despite so many setbacks I managed to come…
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It feels good when people say nice things about your hard work
When people are willing to talk or write about your product it is a good thing. It doesn’t matter if what they write is positive or negative — if they write negatively you can fix the issues they mention and if they write positively you can sit back and smile. This morning I walked into…
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The longblog
There is so much awesome going on in the resurgence of personal blogging. I can’t stop reading and linking and smiling. Brent Simmons: My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll…
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Blogging every weekday for 30 days
Who’s in for the challenge? I’ll give it a shot. Fred Wilson pointed to Lockhart Steele and Elizabeth Spiers. Spiers mentioned trying it for 30 days so I thought that was a good idea. Writing has never been an issue for me. I’ve typed a bunch of posts here. But I’ve strayed from the personal…
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The future of blogging
I don’t know what the future of blogging is. I go back and forth between feeling that the glory days are long over to feeling that the best is yet to come. Some think that today’s social web, while it has stifled blogging tremendously, will still end up providing some value to independent blogs in…
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I say, it’s OK to use HTML
Jonas Downey, of Basecamp, on Signal vs. Noise: It would surely be easier to do that with 8 simple, straightforward HTML files than with some custom WordPress installation that’s several versions out of date. So what if I have to repeat the navigation markup 8 separate times? It’s not that hard. We used to do…
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Crafting link underlines on Medium
Marcin Wichary, on Medium: Unfortunately, for all the advances in web typography we’ve seen during the years — better CSS properties, more support for internationalization, custom web fonts — underlines remained mostly as they were, with very little customization available to web designers. Marcin goes on to show exactly how they did the best they could to clean up…
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Developer Tip Tuesday
Dara Skolnick, who has a beautiful personal blog, writes a tip on Tuesdays for developers. She has a two-part series on developing locally. As you’ve probably already figured out, WordPress is written in PHP, which is a server-side language. This means that the website has to communicate with a server in order to display the…
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Writing is Thinking
Sally Kerrigan, on A List Apart: When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has. Totally agree. I also find speaking…
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In dependence
Jeremy Keith has chimed in on the conversation started by Jason Kottke’s "The blog is dead" piece from a few weeks ago with In dependence. Many of us are feeling an increasing unease, even disgust, with the sanitised, shrink-wrapped, handholding platforms that make it oh-so-easy to get your thoughts out there …on their terms …for…
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Homesteading
In March 2008 I began to regret using so many different services to store and share different types of content like photos, tweets, videos, links. And so I began to plan bringing all of those services together on to my personal site. I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing…
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The blog isn’t dead. It is just sleeping.
Jason Kottke, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab: The design metaphor at the heart of the blog format is on the wane as well. Ina piece at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says that the reverse-chronological stream (a.k.a. The Stream, a.k.a. The River of News) is on its way out. Snapchat, with its ephemeral media, is an obvious…
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The Information
Jessica Lessin, ex-WSJ reporter, has launched The Information after collaboratively reporting via her own WordPress-powered personal blog for several months. Why? She writes. Technology news needs a reboot. There are more stories and outlets than ever, but a troubling cycle is playing out: The race for pageviews and ad dollars is causing publications to focus on quantity over…
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Writing is the how I think
Yesterday Chris Dixon tweeted a link to this thought-provoking blog post by Cal Newport about needing downtime to truly get into deep work. I agree with much of it, such as this nugget: If you’re looking for the next Tao, in other words, ignore the guy checking e-mail while running to his next meeting, and…
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What I saw this week #6: October 6, 2013
There was no link list last week because I was at the beach. And this week I’m a few days late because our team had a half-day with some festivities. My apologies. I hope this week’s video-heavy list makes up for having none last week. 575 Free Movies Online – A boat load of movies…
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Complexity and control, simplicity and peace of mind
Justin Blanton, in a piece only a veteran-nerd-blogger-type like myself could enjoy all the way through, is dancing on two directions to take his blogging technology. On the one hand, he’d like to stop worrying about the entire stack and just get down to writing. On the other hand, he wants to be up to…
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How do blogs need to evolve?
This is a subject that is near and dear to me. It is a bit clich to say this but I’ve been blogging since before it was a common verb. I’ve watched, very closely, as the blogging world has evolved over the last decade and even took some small part in that evolution. It wasn’t…
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This site makes, at most, 39 connections
In a recent tirade against what some are calling Shit-ass Websites (pardon my french I try to keep it clean ’round here) there has been a bit of a backlash towards websites that make an overwhelming number of connections. Also, the size of the entire page load. This site makes, at most, 39 connections and…
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Everyone is going Github
A few days ago [I linked to CodeIgniter on github](http://cdevroe.com/links/ci-github/). Now [Crowd Favorite](http://crowdfavorite.com/), a WordPress development shop, has [moved all of their stuff there too](). It would be so awesome if sometime soon [WordPress](http://wordpress.org) itself moved to Git and used Github.
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Using Markdown
I know I’m late to the game but I’m now using John Gruber’s [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/markdown) for writing on this site as well as documentation at work. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Oh, I’m using [Mark Jaquith’s](http://markjaquith.com/) [Markdown on Save WordPress plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/markdown-on-save/) and it works great.