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 … 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/ … 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, … 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 … 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 … Read more

What’s a date?

What is a date?  This seems like a silly question.  Indeed, if you are an independent local business person, it is a silly question.  A date is, for example, the seventh of September, 2011 (“2011-09-07”).  It describes a period of 24 hours that starts at midnight and ends just before midnight. If you only care … Read more

Processing dates and times in SQL

I’ve spent too many working days figuring out how to handle dates and times in relational data base management systems. From looking at the questions on stackoverflow.com it’s obvious that a lot of people have the same kinds of questions and confusions I have. I’m a lazy programmer. I’d much rather do this stuff right than … Read more