Setting Up Demos

Posted on

I like making things as easy as possible, so every time I try to set up a decent “CMS” for doing demos on this site, I end up trashing everything a couple days later. I think I have something that’s useable this time though. It’s roughly based on Chris Coyier’s CSS-Tricks examples section. I think I’ve seen him talk about his method of posting demos before, but I can’t seem to find where that might have been.

Normally, I would turn to WordPress for my online publishing. With all the new features in the past year, WordPress can be form-fit to really anything you could need to publish on the web. I’m going a little simpler than that this time though.

(more…)

Google Redesign

Posted on

So apparently @sacca hates the gmail redesign. I love it. It’s exactly my style so maybe I shouldn’t be trying to convince anyone else to like it, but I’ll try to be objective.

I’m not sure what exactly he doesn’t like about it, but I feel like I have an idea. It’s like when Microsoft Office introduced “the ribbon”. People who had to use Office everyday hated it because they had years invested in learning how to use Office the way it was before. Why did they have to change it? The thing is, once they got used to the ribbon they realized that everything they were used to in Office was still there, just in a different place. Still, why did they change it? Right?

(more…)

Facebook Hackathon

Posted on

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.
(more…)

JB Shortener

Posted on

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.
(more…)