Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Monthly Archives: March 2014

Refills

Refills is a lightweight framework with SASS mixins, grids, and common web page design patterns.

Refills

My Electronics Kit

Since I rekindled my electronics hobby last year, I’ve accumulated a lot of new stuff. Arduino compatible boards and shields (Digispark, DigiX), a Raspberry Pi, lots of components and sensors, LED strips, power supplies, a new soldering iron, etc. Due to a lack of a real workspace (maybe one day I can clear out the garage workbench), a lot of this stuff was accumulating in boxes, bags, and padded shipping envelopes on our bedroom floor.

My wife, Susan, had suggested getting some sort of portable storage container, and one day we found this ArtBin cake decorating box (aff link) on clearance at the craft store. It’s actually designed for holding cake decorating supplies. But it works pretty well for my needs. It has a top compartment that’s about 4 inches deep, and three separate pull-out containers, with divided sections.

I probably need to get a couple more of these to hold the rest of my stuff, but at least this is a start. In the end, I’ll probably wind up shuffling things around a bit. I’ll probably try to group things together at least a little more logically, like putting microcontrollers together, sensors together, passives, support ICs, power modules, etc.

And I definitely need more stickers to go on here. Actually, there was a Dangerous Prototypes sticker, but it seems to have fallen off.

Ooh, a gladiator!

Paula and Susan posing with the Gwinnett Gladiators mascot, Maximus. #hockey Published via Pressgram

Call me Pawpaw

As of 7:50 a.m. this morning, My wife Susan and I are officially grandparents. We will henceforth be known as Mammaw and Pawpaw.

Welcome, Carson Alexander Buckner. 9lbs 10oz, 20 3/4 inches. And congrats to proud parents Mary and Shane!

Pictures to come. Lots and lots and lots of pictures, I’m sure. 😉

 

Pantheon Platform Adds WordPress Support

Pantheon, long known as a platform provider for Drupal hosting, has now added official support for WordPress, as well. Pantheon provides a scalable web platform with devops-friendly dashboards and tools for deployment and management. The first and most obvious thing we did was ensure the platform was WordPress-friendly. This is the only piece of work that wasn’t on our roadmap already, but luckily it wasn’t very hard. The requirements for running Drupal vs. WordPress are … Continue reading

Spacebrew

Spacebrew allows you to connect multiple client nodes via websockets to create realtime interactions. There are libraries available for connecting Arduino/Processing devices.

Spacebrew

mysql vs mysqli in WordPress

I recently ran across an issue that I was previously unaware of, so other developers could run into it as well. I was having problems with a plugin, which started misbehaving. The plugin had previously worked fine (it generates a sidebar widget), and I wasn’t actively working on my site, so I wasn’t really sure when it had quit working. In the course of debugging the problem, I discovered that the plugin was throwing warnings … Continue reading