Going Commercial Free
Amanda Blum spoke at WordCamp Chicago about web site design and ensuring your content is reaching the desired audience, and that the audience can find and explore the content. Seems kind of obvious. But then she pulled the zinger: don’t display ads and don’t bother with a blogroll. You want readers on your site, not [...]
“Don’t Touch My Stuff” FanFic Entry
It’s been exactly a month since I was last employed full-time. One of my goals for the inter-gig session was to spend more time writing, and branching out from snarky blog entries and technical content in particular. I entered two short stories in the ESPN/Stymie Magazine sports fiction contest, and then only two days into [...]
Speaking at WordCamp Boulder
I’ll be giving an updated version of Parsing Strange: From URL to SQL to HTML at WordCamp Boulder on Saturday July 10. If you’re local, spend the $45 to get thoroughly educated in the latest on the WordPress high-powered, exceptionally low-cost, fully extensible content management system. In Boston, we’d call it a wicked pissah. I [...]
Simple Fatherly Advice
Proper subtitle for this post: How to tune a Schecter guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bridge. Sometimes the simplest tasks, performed hundreds of times, become herculean when the parameters change. And sometimes your good intentions cause those changes and leave you sitting with a half-assembled Schecter guitar and a somewhat confused teenage son. Backstory: Bubba [...]
Mr. Peanut At Cohen Fashion Optical
OK, so I’m not the only one who is totally weirded by Mr. Peanut. TImothy McSweeney collects fictional monologues, and in this one, everyone’s favorite legume sheds his British affectations.. Well, some of them.
Songs Through Darwin’s Radio
What do deception, love, redemption, mutation and perhaps a bit of science fiction have in common? It’s either Coheed and Cambria’s Year of the Black Rainbow or Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Children, or both. What if evolution breeds xenophobia, and subsequently fear and hate? What if evolution is forced, and therefore somewhat dangerous, grounding the fear? [...]
WordCamp Chicago Wrapup
Waiting for my outbound Continental flight at O’Hare airport (now there’s a surprise) after WordCamp Chicago this weekend. One word summary: Wow. I’ve been to the two WordCamps in New York as a part organizer and registration desk sitter, but not as a presenter or active attendee. Now that I’ve been on the stage, I’m [...]
WordCamp Chicago Slides: Parsing Strange
I’ve published the slides from my WordCamp Chicago talk this morning on SlideShare.net. While I had the evil hangover slot, nearly 200 fervent WordPress developers managed to make it into the (chilly) room to hear me rant about SQL grammar, inner joins and Cartesian table products, and why social graphs don’t fit data normalization rules [...]
When WordPress Permalinks Put Up A Fight
Backstory on last night’s side project: a friend was lamenting the horrendous performance impact of bad URL references to an image repository that shares a home with his WordPress powered blog. The images are in a directory that rides sidebar to his WordPress installation; he has foobar.com as the WordPress install root and foobar.com/images is [...]
Wheaton Unicorn Kitty Versus John Scalzi Orc
My wonderful wife and I often conclude a rather improbable, highly entertaining or four sigma to the right of center story with “You just can’t make this shit up.” For instance: What if Wil Wheaton, recently joining the ranks of my favorite authors, was riding a unicorn kitten (not a unicorn chaser, mind you, but [...]