Pete Warden makes a good case for using alternatives to Google’s geographical APIs in your projects, and gives a list of publicly available services. http://petewarden.com/2013/09/09/why-you-should-stop-pirating-googles-geo-apis/ Read more →
Year: 2013
Seal Pup on the beach
Considering a new web site… here are some questions to ask yourself.
Is there an existing web site that’s being upgraded or replaced? If so, what is it? Do you already own a domain name (for example james-landscape.com or some such)? Or does the project include obtaining one? Does your business already have a Facebook page, or will we want to set up one of those too? What is the Facebook page?… Read more →
Top ten ways to make sure your church website works
“Hey, it’s Easter tomorrow.” “Oh, that’s right. We should go to church somewhere.” “Pass me the Yellow Pages.” “Wait, I think the paper has a Church Services listing. Let me look.” Question: What’s wrong with this scenario? Answer: Nothing, for 1970. There was a day when publicizing your church was simple: spend three hundred bucks a year on an ad… Read more →
Animation and Imagination for Kids
Jarrett J Krosoczka, the author of the Lunch Lady books, gave a great talk about creativity. The Boyz Club guys love making stop-motion videos. We’re using an iPhone with the Frameographer app. It’s cheap but not free, and it works well. Here are a couple of videos made that way: I’m thinking about showing them the Scratch computer-animation (programming) setup… Read more →
Sample policy for sponsor links for nonprofits
Non-profit organizations often get asked to display sponsor links on their web sites. Here is a draft policy for doing that. (Of course, sponsors get what they want in a lot of cases, but if somebody asks for a policy it helps to have one.) On the sponsor page of our web site, organization displays a logo, company name, tag-line,… Read more →
Resources for WordPress plugin development
PHP Manual PHP The Right Way Vagrant Opscode Chef Cookbook sources php-o … some function wrappers Guidelines for theme development: some of this applies to plugins as well. Messing around with the new media manager Gmail Modern HTML/CSS tutorial PDF metadata http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.pdf.info.html From the CODEX http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin Hints and tips http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/08/ten-things-every-wordpress-plugin-developer-should-know/ Best practices http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/30/lessons-learned-from-maintaining-a-wordpress-plug-in/ Intro catalog http://wpmu.org/how-to-write-a-wordpress-plugin-12-essential-guides-and-resources/ Coding pitfalls… Read more →
Shortpack — a WordPress plugin
What is Shortpack? This Shortpack plugin is a straight ripoff from Jetpack, containing just its media shortcodes. I packaged it up it because of reliability problems I was having in the network connection between the wordpress.com servers and my hosting provider. It provides the same shortcodes as Jetpack: archives, audio, blip, dailymotion, diggthis, flickr, googlemaps, googlevideo, polldaddy, scribd, slideshare, slideshow,… Read more →
Filters in Jetpack’s shortcode implementations
This is a list of filters that show up in Jetpack (version 2.0.4). This information may come in handy for those who would write themese or plugins to extend or alter Jetpack functionality. audio_player_default_colors(color) This lets plugin code fiddle with the audio player’s color scheme. It takes one argument, an array of colors that looks like this. array( “bg” =>… Read more →
Setup for a new WordPress web site
WordPress setup is a task that some of us do a lot. If you’re setting up a site on WordPress.com, you really don’t need to do much; it’s all done for you. But if you’re setting up a WordPress.org-based site, you may find this little checklist helpful. Plugins When I set up a new web site with WordPress, I put… Read more →
