Facebook Hackathon

Posted on by Josh

Last week I competed in a hackathon at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California and I feel like I’m ready to write about my experience here.

This started in late September. I had been hearing for a few weeks that Facebook recruiters were going to be on campus to hold a hackathon. The idea was intriguing, but I wasn’t all that interested in staying up all night to work on a “hack”. Facebook didn’t seem like the type of company I would like to work for and it didn’t really seem worth my time. Yeah… I was wrong.
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JB Shortener

Posted on by Josh

Almost two years ago I wrote about a new short URL system I started using on this blog. I’m finally releasing this in plugin form with a few additional improvements. WordPress has support for “short urls” built in and will even let you use the wp.me system if you have the Jetpack plugin installed. Instead of using wp.me, I like using my own custom domain. This plugin gives you an option to set the short domain that you’d like to use and includes the helper files to install on the short domain.
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Forward to development dir, mod_rewrite

Posted on by Josh

Let’s say you have a new web project you’re working on. Sure, you could setup a web server on your local machine and develop locally. For some reason you don’t want to do that though. Anyway, with this setup we’re going to assume you have some kind of landing page at the URL – why not? And you have a development directory `dev`. Now, as things get more complicated with this project, it would be nice if you could just point your browser at the root of the domain instead of a development directory. After all, eventually that’s where it’s going to live. Luckily, the solutions lies in `.htaccess`.
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