writing

As a parent, I read a lot of children’s books. Each time I pick up one of these literary masterpieces, I can’t help but stare at amazement at the words in front of me. It’s hard to believe that such a delightful work of art was…

Today I want to tell you about a piece of software I’ve been building for the last few weeks. It’s called Platen and it’s a Markdown WordPress Editor distributed as a Chrome packaged app.

With 2012 coming to a close, I wanted to take a moment to review another year in blogging.

Each time I redesign my blog, I try to implement some cool, visually interesting feature. This time around, I decided to build a widget to display post archives, styled to look like a vertical bar chart.

One of the more interesting (and useful) features in WordPress is custom post types. As the name suggests, WordPress allows you to define your own post types which are treated just like existing ones (i.e. Posts and Pages).

I’ve been looking into SEO recently and ran into a interesting nugget of functionality called rel=”nofollow”. Though I’ve heard about it before, I never fully appreciated its implications until now.

I redesigned my blog recently to improve readability, create a nicer home page, organize content better, make it easier to gain Twitter followers, and make the whole thing look nicer.

Since I had so much fun writing about comment spam before, I just had to do it again. This time, I thought it would be interesting to see which posts were the most popular with spammers. The results might surprise you.

I’ve known for some time that WordPress is an excellent blogging platform. It’s both easy to get started with and infinitely tweak-able. As it turns out, WordPress is also a great platform to develop themes for.

When I was younger, I used to like to tell people that kids ruin lives. I did it in part to get a rise out of them (because righteous yet unfounded indignation is often amusing). But I also meant it literally: once you have kids, your…

When first I started blogging about a year ago, my primary concern was to “not get lazy and stop writing”. Yet, somewhat surprisingly (and in spite of my strong natural tendency to “kick back”), I continued writing all through the year.

One of the things that makes Wordpress a great blogging platform is the plethora of available plugins. Here’s a small selection of my favorites.

As a blogger, I’m always curious about my (precious few) readers. I want to know who they are, what they find interesting, why, when, and how.

Writing on a computer is an inherently distracting experience. Words you type have to constantly compete for your eye share against all kinds of menus, toolbars, windows, popups, tray icons, and so on. With so much going on, it’s often…

Before I started blogging, I was only peripherally aware of an internet phenomenon known as comment spam.

Whenever I talk to my geek friends about how they keep up with their favorite sources of information, the obvious answer is RSS. Yet most non-geeks I know don’t seem to be aware of it, much less use it. So, in an effort to correct this…

I make it a point to back up as much data as I can into the Cloud. I didn’t always do this, but there were two compelling events that forced me to change. My path to the Cloud The first compelling event was actually two events.…

Software development is a team sport (Yes, I realize that lone wolf coders can accomplish amazing things, but that just doesn’t scale well). To succeed in a team sport, you need a good team. To understand how to build a good team, you…

I’ve put together a short list of books any software developer would greatly benefit from. Enjoy! Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, Robert Martin Maintainability is arguably the most important aspect of good…