FancyFlickr Dev Help

Posted on

So, as many people know, I started development on a plugin called FancyFlickr a little over a year ago. Development went well at first at first, but it started to get slow and my lack of programming skills started to show. I originally got the idea for the plugin from a video Chris Coyier did on his CSS-Tricks blog. The main idea of the original is powered by a bunch of cool CSS3 and a bit of jQuery. This all works quite well, but when I started trying to add features it turned into a bit of a mess. The plugin currently functions and works in pretty much every environment that I’ve tried. There are some server requirements, like cURL, but if these are met it works fine.

I’ve known for a while that the plugin needs help. At first a few people wrote me asking for help sorting out problems that had to do with loading the images from Flickr. Recently, it really hit me when I noticed that Fred, from Fredstuff.com stopped using the plugin in favor of something that loads quicker.

The first thing that I want to do is make it more efficient, as it currently slows page loads significantly. I’ve also got some big dreams for the future of the plugin involving “WordPress gallery” style photo pages for individual photos and galleries. Basically, the WordPress gallery, but powered by Flickr.

(more…)

Why Free is Good

Posted on

I was orginally going to call this GPL: My 2 Cents.

As a web designer, I can create free themes and put them out in the wordpress theme directory for anyone to download. If I’m a good designer it will become popular and lots of people will download my theme. If I’m a bad designer, well, you know what happens.

I think that right there speaks for itself — it’s this idea that the cream rises to the top. We’ve been hearing this a lot lately. (more…)

Skype-o-Something…

Posted on

So it’s been a while since I’ve written here and let’s just say that I’ve been busy. We started a show, Sudo Make Me A Sandwich, a couple months back and I’ve been trying to figure a way to get the quality up without breaking the bank. There are some small things you can do, like invest in a quality microphone or headset. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy, I just bought a decent looking Logitech headset from BestBuy and it already sounds much better.

We were also having the problem of incorporating guests into the show. I bring my cohost in via Skype and we wanted a way to  be able to also bring in a couple more panelists if needed. Right away I thought of Leo Laporte’s Skypesaurus — maybe I even got the idea to do the show this way from him. He’s got a quite expensive setup though. Not only did he build four custom machines that are dedicated to Skype, but he’s also got the TriCaster, the IP audio mixer, and lots of bandwidth.

(more…)

Super Duper!

Posted on

Last summer I replaced the 160GB HDD in my MacBook with a 500GB drive. In the process I put the old drive in a new external enclosure and planned to use it to backup my home folder. Until now, that never really happened, but a few weeks ago when I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard I decided it would be a good time to finally get my backups going.

I already had a pretty good idea that I wanted to go with Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper!. I had already had some experience with CCC from my job last summer, but I had read an article on Daring Fireball about backup and he used Super Duper!. I decided to checkout Super Duper! first since I hadn’t really looked into it much before.

It turns out that you can download Super Duper! for free, but there is also a paid version that unlocks some more features. For the most basic backups either program works great.

(more…)

My Mac

Posted on

So I’ve been using a Mac for about 18 months now and since I’m doing a clean install of OSX Snow Leopard, I figured I would go through the apps that I use on a daily and maybe not-so-daily basis.

(more…)