Tell your own story ...
Earlier this week a member of the WordPress community, Jacob Santos, aired his concerns with WordPress’ decision making process on the oft distracting WP Hackers mailing list. His argument, in response to a WordPress.org forum thread regarding 2011 roadmaps, comes from the idea that WordPress development is not driven by community input.
On the one hand, I agree with him… [Read more...]
The year is quickly coming to a close, and many of us are sitting down beginning to write out lists of resolutions and goals for the next year. We do it every year. We chalk up a list of regrets and unfinished to-dos from the year that’s passing and place them on a list of like-to-dos and wishes for the year that’s coming. Kind of like a never-ending bucket list, really.
Not that there’s anything wrong with this practice; like I said, it’s something we all do. The trick, though, is to make our lists actionable. A list that reprises itself year after year does nothing to help anyone. A list with clear, measurable objectives, though, can build a stronger person. [Read more...]
I’m never really been a fan of Christmas music. Chalk it up to two winters working retail in large malls and shopping centers, listening to endless reprises of the same tired old music over and over and over and … you get the picture. You can only listen to recordings from the 1950s or a young Michael Jackson singing I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus so many times before you tire of listening to the radio.
But this year, I’ve heard some interesting new music. Remixes of old carols with new melodies and choruses. Even a handful of completely new songs, too.
So today, while you sit warm by the fire with family and celebrate a day of rest, here’s my new favorite Christmas song from this year: His Favorite Christmas Story by Capital Lights.
Find more artists like Capital Lights at Myspace Music
From time to time, the GPL comes up in less-than-friendly conversation regarding WordPress. Everyone has their own opinion of what the license means, and strings of “but I am not a lawyer” litter every discussion. This turns any lively discussion into a heated debate because “well this is what I think” quickly turns into “you’re not a lawyer, so you’re wrong, but even though I’m not a lawyer, this is the way it is.”
The result is a very frustrated WordPress user base, a cluttered mailing list, tickets opened on Trac that do nothing more than piss off developers, and a community of new-to-WordPress-development users who don’t want to get involved at all. [Read more...]
When I was in elementary school, I was required, like most students, to take a basic penmanship class. We learned the basics of writing in print, in cursive, and in some weird hybrid style they claimed was italics. (I learned later that this third style was just a particular form of cursive writing, but I’ve since forgotten it completely.)
Throughout my life, my handwriting has changed dramatically. At one point in time, I was graded on my ability to take notes. My teachers would collect our notebooks at the end of the week and tell us whether we were recording too much or too little. To my surprise, though, I always got low marks for my note taking. Not because I didn’t write enough – each page was numbered and cross referenced – but because I often couldn’t read my own handwriting later. [Read more...]
First a caveat: JavaScript is a prototype-based language, not an object-oriented language. Now that we have an understanding of that very important fact, let’s learn how to use JavaScript as if it were object-oriented.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to teach a couple of my colleagues how to code with JavaScript. We’re building a cross-browser plug-in that’s meant to interface with an external device. The plug-in itself is written in C++, but the entire API is written in JavaScript. I was right at home, making API calls from within the scripts that drive the web-based UI. But my colleagues weren’t. Their first pass at converting their code from a real object-oriented language to JavaScript was … well … frightening. [Read more...]
