Ne-e-e-e-e-erd!

WordCamp Winnipeg

Posted on by Patrick

One great Word­Camp, indeed.

I learned about Ian Stew­art’s jour­ney from utter Word­Press “noob” to mem­ber (lead?) of the Automat­tic Theme Team.

I learned that there are still sev­en or eight things I don’t know about Word­Press, cour­tesy of Sheri Bigelow.

I learned from tri.be’s Peter Chester how to fix Word­Press when it’s slow (Find the slow­est thing; fix it; rinse and repeat).

I taught an intim­i­dat­ing­ly full room of peo­ple that Word­Press Mul­ti­site isn’t real­ly all that scary.

I learned from Reid Peifer about how you should man­age a dis­trib­uted team (final rule: GIVE A CRAP).

And I learned from Dave Pen­sato that while Word­Press is awe­some, it could prob­a­bly be more awe­some still. (Blinky FTW.)

Then I had some snacks and went to vis­it my fam­i­ly. A good day all around.

WordCamp Toronto Dev

Posted on by Patrick

Yes­ter­day I learned about IDEs, debug­ging, geolo­ca­tion, rapid deploy­ment with Capis­tra­no, remote con­trol, all the things I’m doing wrong on Word­Press and how to fix them, and that I appar­ent­ly talk faster when I’m ner­vous. On today’s agen­da: mobile sites, struc­tured data, and oth­er goodies.

Aurora Borealis, July 14/15, 2012

Posted on by Patrick

Aurora Borealis

I set my cam­era up out­side at my in-laws’ farm, and set it to take 15-sec­ond expo­sures all night. I was hop­ing to catch some North­ern Lights, since the sun fired off a coro­nal mass ejec­tion on the 12th.

Thir­ty sec­onds before this pho­to, there was noth­ing.  Black sky.  Then, with­out any ramp-up, the sky turned green.

This shot is from mid­night, almost on the but­ton; prob­a­bly 12:00:30 or so.  The lights along the bot­tom are vehi­cles on the Trans-Cana­da Highway.

Shelf Awareness’ Q&A

Posted on by Patrick

On your night­stand right now:

Fic­tions by Jorge Luis Borges, thanks to an essay in William Gib­son’s Dis­trust that Par­tic­u­lar Fla­vor.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Strange­ly, it was prob­a­bly The For­ev­er War by Joe Halde­man.  I grew up in a house where my father’s sci­ence fic­tion nov­els dom­i­nat­ed every book­shelf — and there were a lot of book­shelves.  I did­n’t under­stand a tenth of what was real­ly going on in the book, but I read it over and over all the same.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Shelf Aware­ness’ Q&A” →

Smooth

Posted on by Patrick

Update:  it’s most­ly fixed now, though there remain a cou­ple lit­tle weird­ness­es to sort out.  I’ve learned two lessons from this: 1) back­ups and 2) child themes.

I just updat­ed a bunch of stuff  on this site, includ­ing my theme. And remem­bered moments too late that I’ve made some cus­tomiza­tions to the theme.

Which are now gone.

Whoops.

(For instance, right now, the Fic­tion links don’t work.  I’ll get them work­ing again soon, though.)

Typography

Posted on by Patrick

I was fid­dling with the Evans site this evening — adding a post about dona­tions, etc — and came across this post, which made ref­er­ence to the wp-Typog­ra­phy plu­g­in. I installed it on the Evans site and had a look.  I must say, I’m impressed.

It allows for hyphen­ation, for one thing; it also han­dles wid­ows and orphans, some­thing that I vague­ly under­stand.  More impres­sive­ly — at least to me — it also han­dles “smart” quotes prop­er­ly.  Smart­ly, in fact.

This is a buga­boo of long stand­ing for me; I find it irri­tat­ing to see con­trac­tions like ’tis start­ing with an open­ing sin­gle quote rather than a prop­er apos­tro­phe.  This plu­g­in seems to solve it.  (If “’tis” is spelled right in this post, it’s thanks to the plugin.)

Pedan­tic? It sure is.  But we all have our pet peeves, & for what­ev­er rea­son, improp­er punc­tu­a­tion is one of mine.  And I’m glad to have stum­bled across a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion to the problem.

Update: I see from the notes on the theme I’m using that wp-Typog­ra­phy is in the Rec­om­mend­ed Plu­g­ins list. I thought sound­ed vague­ly familiar…