Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

My Portfolio Site: dougal.us

Aug182010
dougal.us maximus

If you looked closely at the business card image in my previous post, you might have noticed that the URL on the card isn’t for this blog. I set up a separate portfolio site using the dougal.us domain that I’ve been sitting on for quite some time. I am currently using the SimpleFolio theme, found from Smashing Magazine, and created portfolio highlight posts for several projects I’ve been involved in. I’m still not sure if I’m going to stay with that theme, but it’s likely to stick around for at least a little while, until I have time to decide what I might want to do differently. The “logo” is temporary — I haven’t settled on an identity, yet — so that’s likely to change, as well.

This site will continue to host most of my WordPress-related posts, plugin information, and occasional personal posts, while the other site will cover other web site projects that I work on, speaking gigs, general web development topics, and tech news. There will be some overlap from time-to-time (in particular with information about WordPress projects, conferences, and presentations), but I’ll try to keep it minimal, mainly pointing from one site to the other, as appropriate.

Business Cards

Jul212010

I finally got around to ordering some new personal/business cards for myself a few days ago. I’m no designer, but I think they look fairly decent. After I had put the order in, I thought of a couple of things I might have changed, but I’m not going to worry about it at this point. I’m already crushed for time, and these will be fine until I’m ready to get more printed up. One day, though, I’d like to actually be able to hire a designer for stuff like this!

The image of my face is the same one I use for my avatar on Twitter, Gravatar, and elsewhere. It’s not the greatest photo, as it was taken with the built-in camera on my MacBook, with harsh back lighting. I had to scale up the cropped portion a bit to get it framed like I wanted, so it’s just a little pixelated. And of course, I desaturated it, and played with the brightness/contrast a bit.

The PHP code on the reverse side is from HeadMeta, the first plugin I ever wrote for WordPress. I thought that would be pretty appropriate. If I do another batch, I might use some jQuery Javascript code, perhaps from Twitual, my Twitter network tool (which will be getting a complete rewrite and redesign soon). In fact, since Moo lets you use several different back-side images in the same pack, I could make mutiple variations, each stressing a different skill — PHP, Perl, jQuery, CSS. Hmm…

I’m looking forward to the cards arriving at the end of next week. And I’m also looking forward to meeting more people who might want them. I’ll have a few opportunities over the next few months. I might be attending a PHP TestFest in early August, WordCamp Savannah in late August, WordCamp Birmingham in September, and I’ll be presenting at the Atlanta PHP User Group in October. If you see me, feel free to ask for a card! 😉

Important People

Jul152010

I just wanted to state, for the record, that “I am one of the three most important people in WordPress.”

Also, I am a self-proclaimed Bubble-ologist.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to the Mixergy interview with Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg concerning WordPress, Thesis, and the GPL. In it, Pearson claims that he is “one of the three most important people in WordPress”. Ahem, a bold claim, to be sure. You can also check out the #thesiswp hashtag on Twitter Search.

Here are just a few related links (there are many more):

Note, many people are under the impression that the argument here is about “the right to sell themes”. That is not the case. The other major Premium Theme vendors have switched their products to the GPL, and are still selling their products and support just fine. The GPL is not about “free as in beer”, it’s about “free as in speech”. Selling GPL software is just fine. You just have to do it with the understanding that once you’ve distributed the code, the recipient is then fully entitled to do what they want with it (as long as they, too, comply with the GPL). Brian Gardner of StudioPress went on record saying that going GPL did not negatively impact his sales, and that he has no regrets about changing the licensing on his themes to comply.

I agree with Jane Wells that taking the matter to court would be a huge suck. It would be a waste of time, money, and emotional energy which could be better spent on making WordPress an even better platform than it already is. It will distract a key segment of the community from doing the great things they do every day — being some of the most important people in WordPress.

Book Review: Digging Into WordPress

Jun292010

A couple of weeks ago, I won an eBook version of Digging Into WordPress from a giveaway on Twitter. This book was authored by Chris Coyier and Jeff Star, who are both successful WordPress developers, well known in the community. I spent some time looking over it, And wanted to share my impressions. If you’re in a hurry and just want the 5-second review: It’s good, and it’s got something for beginners and experts alike. If you want a more in-depth look, then please read on.

Continue reading →

Dear Facebook Friends

Jun262010

Dear Facebook Friends,

I want to hear about your latest joys and sorrows. I want to be jealous that you got the cool new phone, sports car, or big screen TV. I want to see your vacation pictures. I want to know when you reconnect with that old friend, who happens to also be an old friend of mine, so that I can reconnect with them, too. I just want to know what you ate for breakfast, what you think of the movie you just saw, what cute thing your kid did recently, and how disgusted you are with the latest political, economic, ecological, or social screwup.

I do not want to be your neighbor at the farm. I do not want to explore the frontier with you. I do not want to play poker, checkers, chess, or Bejeweled. I do not want a fish, unicorn, kitten, heart, or rainbow. I don’t want to help your mafia gang pull off a job, and I don’t want to become a vampire, werewolf, zombie, or other mythical creature.

Please don’t take this the wrong way. Just know that for 99% of the invitations you send, I will block the application, and never see it again.

This has been a Public Service Announcement from the I Wish We Could Have Facebook Without All The Annoying Add-ons Coalition. Pass it on.

The Business of WordPress Conference (Atlanta)

Jun152010

This may be kind of short notice, but those of you near Atlanta might be interested in the Business of WordPress Conference, taking place next week (June 22-23, 2010). The venue is the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Conference Center, on 14th Street (Midtown). This conference is aimed at non-technical users who are interested in learning more about the benefits of using WordPress to drive a business web site.

Over the past few decades the web has become an essential tool for business yet until recently it’s been very costly to continuously embrace the benefits the web has to offer business. Most small-to-medium sized businesses, departments in larger companies, non-profits and local and regional government agencies have just “made do” and not gained most of the benefits the web has to offer. Fortunately, WordPress changes all that. WordPress has emerged as the defacto-web presence platform for business and not learning what WordPress has to offer presents a huge opportunity lost cost.

This conference bills itself as having a “curated” agenda, meaning that the topics were chosen first, and presenters chosen based on the topics, rather than the other way around. Some of the talks will cover subjects like: eCommerce, choosing a consultant/agency, social media, membership sites, and incorporating photos and video.

Keep in mind that this is a paid, professional conference, not a WordCamp or other low-cost un-conference type of event. However, as professional conferences go, admission cost is pretty reasonable ($299 for the main conference day, $399 if you also want access to the “Boardroom Pass” roundtables on both days).

Disclaimer: there is a paid ad on this site for the conference, but I had planned to write something about it before I ever knew that the ad was going to be placed. Also, I would have liked to attend the event, myself, but will be unable to do so, due to timing issues.

Splintering the Community

Jun082010

Recently, Arlen Beiler created a proposal for a WordPress Answers site on the in-progress StackExchange network, which is part of StackOverflow. If you aren’t familiar with StackOverflow or any of its sister-sites, it’s a sort of Questions and Answers forum where good answers are voted up, and float to the top. There is also a reputation system which rewards users for being active and providing quality feedback. I was not previously an active member on any of the sites, but I had run across answers to some of my own questions in the past when using Google to search.

I signed up on the WordPress Answers site, which is currently in a ‘discussion’ phase, where it needs sample questions to help define the scope. I provided some questions of my own, voted on the ‘on-topic’ or ‘off-topic’ status for the sample questions, and provided feedback on many questions when I thought it was necessary to explain my opinion.

Meanwhile, back on the wp-hackers mailing list, there was a flurry of responses, including some people concerned that catering to this additional site might “splinter the development community” between the official and unofficial sites.

Continue reading →

Quick Tip: Faster WordPress News

May202010

By default, the “Other WordPress News” widget in your WordPress Dashboard only updates twice a day (every twelve hours). Personally, I like to get updates quicker than that. I check my Dashboard several times a day to see if there’s some new post that I should know about. So I set mine up to update every two hours. Frequently enough to keep me more up-to-date, but not so frequently that it might be annoying to the Planet WordPress server.

If you’d like to do the same, add this code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file, or add a plugin header to it and install as a regular plugin:

// Customize the Planet WordPress news feed update time:
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', 'dc_reschedule_rss_fetch', 10, 2 );

function dc_reschedule_rss_fetch( $lifetime, $url ) {
  if ( false !== strpos( $url, 'planet.wordpress.org' ) ) {
    $lifetime = 7200; // expire after 2 hours (7200 seconds)
  }
  return $lifetime;
}

This will set the cache lifetime for the Planet WordPress feed data to be two hours instead of twelve.

If you use this tip, I also recommend increasing the number of feed items displayed, as suggested in my Customize Your WordPress Dashboard article!

WordPress and Drupal

May112010

Dries Buytaert re-tweeted a couple of interesting things on Twitter earlier today. First was this one:

RT @chx1975: WordPress is now approximately where Drupal was around Drupal 5 w/ content types. See you in 2015.

Ouch. Okay, so we’re late to the game where custom content types are concerned. But I doubt it will take us until 2015 to catch up.

But Dries is even-handed, and calls fair game when someone retorts in favor of WordPress:

Agreed, and fair enough. RT @newoceans_en: @Dries Drupal 7 will hopefully be where WordPress was around 5 years ago regarding UX.

I haven’t had a chance to look at the Drupal 7 user interface yet, so I can’t say if that’s a fair comparison or hyperbole. But, I suspect that five years of catching up is another exaggeration. But these two statements do highlight one difference between where each project has focussed their attention over the years: Drupal has essentially been building a robust content management framework, and is working towards usability. WordPress started with ease-of-use and is becoming a more capable content framework.

I think that in both cases, this is a result of project leaders listening to their respective communities. I’ve seen many instances of WordPress developers saying “Drupal makes it easy to do X. Why can’t WordPress do that?”, or Drupal developers saying “People like WordPress because it’s so easy to use, right out-of-the-box. Why can’t Drupal be like that?” Each project is learning from the strengths and success of the other. And that’s awesome, because everybody wins.

It seems to me that both communities have a lot of good things to look forward to.