To say that yesterday was a rather crappy day would be an understatement. For several weeks now I’ve been planning on attending WordCamp in San Francisco. Since I’m paying for the trip out of my own pocket, I decided to try and be a bit more financially conscious than I usually am on trips. So I decided I would fly out of Seattle instead of Vancouver, which as it turns out was around $300 cheaper.
I was actually looking forward to the drive, and burned myself a few CDs. I went into work for a few hours in the morning, and then hit the streets heading for Seattle. Somewhere around White Rock, ...
Yes sports fans, it’s that time again — we’ve been messing around with yet another plugin over at BraveNewCode. But first, everyone should know that we just put the finishing touches on WPtouch 2.0 today. There are still a few small bugs to squish, but hopefully it’ll hit the market sometime in the next week or two. It’s pretty sexy, if I do so say so myself.
In terms of the new plugin, I’ll give everyone a little context. In the last two months I’ve had several people infringe upon my Flickr photo licenses by using my photos commercially. One of those incidences ended peacefully, ...
Updated – I booked a flight and a hotel for this weekend, so I’ll definitely be at WordCamp on Saturday. I love San Francisco, and I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone in the Bay Area. If you see me on Saturday, feel free to flag me down and say hi. Drop a comment if you’ll be there, and I’ll try to find you!
This Saturday is WordCamp down in San Francisco. I registered to attend, although the jury is still out on whether or not I’m going to go. Flights aren’t that expensive to be honest, but accommodation is kind of a killer considering how much traveling I’ve done ...
San Francisco is without a doubt one of my favourite cities in the world. It’s situated right on the Pacific Ocean, nestled snugly between Marin Country and Oakland. While Napa Valley is usually extremely hot, San Francisco boasts a fairly moderate climate, with sunshine occurring on most days of the year.
In August, there’s going to be a WordCamp session down in San Francisco. Given that I’m a huge WordPress advocate, and that I love the Bay Area, I registered today and made the quick, impromptu decision to attend. Flights out of Vancouver are around $400, but are only around $250 return ...
As most people know, both WordPress and Drupal belong to the class of software known as content management systems (CMS). The benefit of these systems is that they allow users to create content easily, often by typing in content via a dashboard or some other simple form of entry. The actual HTML generation is taken care of by the CMS, allowing the user to focus on creating content without worrying about the details of the HTML.
I’ve had my personal blog for nearly ten years now, and have been on WordPress for nearly three. As I write content, there’s always the implicit expectation that my ...
I quickly stopped by Future Shop on my way home tonight and picked up a brand new power supply for my server at home. They had a really nice (that is, if power supplies can be described as such) $150 one that was on sale for $75, so I went with that. The good news is that my old power supply was basically taxed in terms of connectors, and it would have been impossible to add anything else to it. This new one has an extra 300W of headroom on it, and also 3 more SATA connectors.
To be honest, I wasn’t even really sure it was the power supply, but it seemed like a pretty reasonable guess. The good ...
As most of you know, I turned 31 on April 7th a few weeks ago. At roughly the same time (and coincidentally, on the same day), somewhere over in Victoria, Lloyd Budd was welcoming his son into the world.
Lloyd Budd is a hardcore WordPress user, and an all-around nice guy. I meant to post something about this a while ago, but just got swamped (with WordPress stuff). That aside, I want to congratulate Lloyd and his wife on their new addition to the family. Given that he shares the same birthday as me, I’d recommend stocking up on beer now. ...
Last night was Vancouver’s first ever WordCamp down at the Network Hub downtown. I got there about 15 minutes early, and was fairly amazed that it was already standing (or sitting, if you will) room only. There were so many people in fact, that they wrapped around the edges into locations where you couldn’t even see the projector. Clearly Vancouver has a very large and supportive WordPress community.
Photo by John Biehler
The open-source community in Vancouver is pretty amazing. Whenever I travel and tell others this, they are always suspect, like it would somehow be impossible for our little ...
I spent most of the last hour on the couch, just thinking by candlelight. It was a nice break from the norm, having a dark apartment sans the sound of computer fans spinning or other randomness that goes beep in the night.
Looking out my window, it’s hard to tell just how many people participated. It seems slightly darker than normal I guess, but for the most part it looks like business as usual in this city.
For those of you who missed it, I took my site down for a few hours in support of the event. Here’s a snapshot Rebecca took:
And lastly, I just want to mention that WordPress 2.5 was ...
After setting up my RAID 5 array last night, I decided that maybe I would take a stab at self hosting my blog again. Up until two years ago, I had always run my blog from home. It’s not really that hard to set up your own Apache server, and Linux can literally run for months or more without requiring a reboot. The downside of course is that home internet connections can be flaky, and most co-locations and hosting companies have UPS backup when things go wrong.
I recently upgraded my home fiber internet connection to a small business plan, so my internet connection at home is actually fairly ...
Thanks to everyone who left some feedback the other day about the new translation plugin. I’ve had some really great comments about it, and even the odd person that’s really anxious to test it out. I’m hoping to put a version up online tonight for people to download and try for themselves.
For those people who didn’t catch it, what I did was write a WordPress plugin that takes advantage of the Google AJAX language API to dynamically translate the content of my blog into whatever language you as a reader ask for (by adjusting your browser settings). This works in both directions: blog entries ...
Yes, they are rare. I’m usually the guy with the camera. But looks like someone managed to snap a photo of me the last time I crawled away from the computer and into the light.
There are lots of people in the photo, and I’m sure I’ll miss some names. But from left to right are Alexa Booth, Scott Hadfield, Rebecca Holt, Ariane, Boris Mann, Matt Mullenweg, (up top now) Phillip Jeffrey, Jessica Mah and me. This was the day after Northern Voice down at Havana on the Drive. Photo By Phillip’s camera. ...
I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for WordPress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website — a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap.
I want to write briefly about WordPress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. Most default WordPress blogs are configured ...
Today I took the plunge and quickly upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.3.3 to the Beta for 2.5. In terms of look and feel on the front-end, I doubt you’ll notice any major changes (especially on sites where you don’t have to login). However, they’ve completely overhauled the administration section in the back to make things a little easier to find.
I’m not going to really review it, because in all fairness it’s not quite done yet. However, the back end does seem a bit slower, maybe due to the new additions. Also, I have been completely unable to add media using the new interface. ...
As you can see, I’ve been trying to push out some of these plugins that have been on my plate for a while. The Media Burner one is now officially in beta.
Media burner automatically extracts media files (MP3, FLV, YouTube, etc) from your blog posts and creates a site-wide player.
An example in actionIf you want to test it out, click on “Media” in the menu bar up top of this site, click here to test it. Head on over to the main page listed below for more information or if you want to download it.
The standard WordPress plugin database just fell over, so I have no way to tell the world about ...
I’ve been dabbling with a new caching engine for WordPress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it’s something I’ve been trying to fix. In particular, here’s what I don’t like about it:
It relies on the entire WordPress engine to do it’s caching
It doesn’t make use of proper HTTP caching headers
The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire WordPress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will always be limited by how fast the PHP parser is ...
Tonight I had a few people over at my place to watch movies, drink some beer, and hack out a few techy type things. My little project for the evening was to try and media-ify my blog somehow. One of the ideas I was playing with was extracting all the media out of all my blog posts and having that in a separate player somewhere. There are other players for WordPress (based on the popular flash FLV player) that do something similar, except with those you have to manually input a playlist or set up a special directory.
A snapshot of the media player
The main benefit of the way I’ve done it is that ...
There are a bunch of guys over at my place right now, messing around with blogs, media, podcasts, and of course, beer. Right now it’s John Bollwitt, John Biehler, and Boris Mann is downstairs with the next shipment of beer. I’ll update this as the day/night goes on.
We all have a few projects we want to do. I’m currently moving all my websites over to Media Temple, which is basically easy but requires a bunch of grunt work to pull off. After that I’m going to attempt to make really awesome movie/mp3 player for WordPress.
John Bollwitt making scrambled eggs, photo by John Biehler
Wow, ...
I’m not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don’t, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don’t remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform.
To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from ...