Speaking at WordCamp Philadelphia
I’ll be continuing my WordCamp speaking tour at WordCamp Philadelphia on October 30th. I’m giving the latest version of Parsing Strange, my WP internals talk that dissects URL parsing, SQL generation and user-serviceable parts you might run into. With custom page types and custom taxonomies gaining interest and traction in the WordPress community, this talk [...]
Northwest Corner Days
I am a visual learner and continue to use the school calendar image for thinking about times and dates. You know the calendar setup: it’s two rows of months, September to February on top and March to August on the bottom; our parents had them in planners and wall calendars in the 1970s. To this [...]
Passing The Hot Potato To Facebook
Aside from all of the unsettled feelings created by the Facebook Places privacy un-settings, there was other news coming out of the little “f” today: Facebook acquired Hot Potato. I’ve been a fan since Justin Shaffer first described the idea to me in the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. Anything that sounds good over heavy [...]
Last Writing Contest: Vote For Me! Don’t Win Anything!
I’ve entered one final writing contest this summer: Erika Napoletano challenged readers to come up with 300 words describing a picture. I made it well under the wire (time and count wise) this time, and you can see my tribute to urban cruft in the comments section of the entry announcing the contest. Vote for [...]
Valves and Hooks
One of the joys of having a bit of time off is that you can follow an interesting idea or thread to its illogical conclusion. There’s no concern about deadlines, work products, or meetings to snap you back to reality, pulling your head out of whatever cloud (private, public or hybrid) it was in at [...]
Robert Heinlein Had His Bad Days, Too
Robert Heinlein was the first science fiction author that I read. Not read as in one book or one story, but read as in going to the library (pre-Amazon days), finding every single piece of his work, and checking them all out early in the summer and using those long, hot days by the YMCA [...]
When New Magazines Go Old School
Here’s a point-counterpoint of the new and newer that’s left me scratching my head a bit. EPSPN Magazine and Stymie Magazine jointly announced a sports fiction contest, with the winner(s) gaining a highlight in ESPN, Stymie, or somewhere other than the tearsheet above the men’s urinal (or maybe there too, courtesy of the afore-mentioned bathroom [...]