Governance

Are You Kidding Me? Georgia Town Requires Every Home to Have a Loaded Gun!?

by  • May 17, 2013 • 0 Comments

I thought this might be a joke or an urban legend. But I checked it out and, unbelievably enough, If you live in Nelson, Georgia, you’re now required by law to keep a loaded gun in your home.

brady_campaignThe Brady Campaign has filed suit against the city, which says that the new ordinance is “mostly symbolic.” Symbolic of what? Ignorance? Pro-violence principles?

Regardless of which side you’re on in the gun safety/gun rights debate, this idea has to make you cringe. And it’s yet another example among mounting mountains of such ideas that the Red states that comprise the conservative movement in this country are lying through their teeth when they tell you they want a government small enough to shrink in a bathtub. What they really want is a government that’s just the right size for them to insert their bureaucratic noses into your business wherever they wish but that cannot force them to do things like pay taxes, obey basic laws about auto and driver registration, and otherwise interfere with their personal freedoms.

No wonder they are collectively the laughingstock of the civilized world.

Yeesh.

Miscellany

Colorado Keeps Looking Like a State I Could Love…Restorative Justice Adopted

by  • May 17, 2013 • 0 Comments

One of my favorite social programs is Restorative Justice. In a nutshell, this program connects criminals and their victims through a specific process designed to create reconciliation and forgiveness. The program is national. There is a chapter of it in my hometown of Monterey, CA.

The state of Colorado recently passed a bill authorizing a $10 surcharge on criminal fines to fund experiments aimed at integrating the RJ program into state correctional activities. This is a very progressive move, one that I hope many other states will emulate over time.

Remember, it was the principles of RJ at work in South Africa after the elimination of apartheid that held the country together under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. RJ has the potential to save billions of dollars as well because in a number of studies it has reduced repeat-offender rates from an average of 60% to about 10%.

If there’s an RJ chapter in your area, please consider joining it!

Meanwhile, if we can figure out how to get the weather to my liking….

WordPress, WordPress Methods Series

WordPress Adventure: Final Update and Wrap-Up

by  • May 12, 2013 • 0 Comments

required+themeslogoWell, my one-week adventure to discover the best methodology and workflow for WordPress site development to suit my tastes, skills and needs, has ended after a minuscule time overrun of 200%. Tonight, I made the last decision I had left when I picked required+ Foundation for my starter theme / mini-framework. I had the hardest time with this last step, in part because I wanted to get it right and in part because the damn ground kept shifting under my feet.

First, I eliminated Reverie because the docs looked pretty sparse compared to roots and required+, the other two candidates.

Then I discovered that roots had dropped support for Foundation, which I’d spent a lot of time selecting over Twitter Bootstrap as the core platform for my work, and gone with…you guessed it!…Bootstrap instead.

Then I very nearly made a classic mistake and took the word of some Web folks that required+ Foundation — which I really liked a lot — was stuck at Foundation 3 and had no plans to upgrade to Foundation 4. But before I eliminated it on that basis, I read their support forum and found they were already at work on a new release that will in fact be built on Foundation 4.

The required+ codebase is readable, well documented, support seems sharp and responsive and I like the way they’ve integrated Foundation. As added bonuses, it is fully responsive out the gate and ships with a nicely crafted and documented blank child theme. I’ve spent about two hours rummaging through source code and I’m comfortable with their coding style and the amount of commenting they include.

Meanwhile, I made two additional minor changes to my workflow methodology based partly on a video I watched of CSS guru Chris Coyier describing his personal methodology.

I had indicated earlier that I would wait to adopt LESS or SCSS for CSS development but Chris convinced me I should incorporate that in my workflow immediately. He’s a SASS guy and I’m probably going to be using LESS but the principles are the same.

And I decided that where I need JavaScript, I’m going to write my code in a pre-compiler and use CoffeeScript rather than raw JS.

keynote-logoThe one place I differ from Chris is in his use of Photoshop. I prefer to do my graphics work (such as it is; I’m not good at it at all!) using tools that are more comfortable. So I use some combination of Apple’s Keynote (a vastly under-appreciated tool), Graphic Converter, and my friend and business partner Chipp Walters’ ButtonGadget to create my simple graphics. I hire professionals when it gets beyond the basics.

So to summarize my final workflow decisions:

  • required+ Foundation as starter theme
  • always work on a child theme
  • Dreamweaver as primary code editor, layout tool, CSS creator/editor
  • Local development stack
  • LESS for CSS
  • CoffeeScript for JavaScript

So, end of road. Now I get to go back to work and start mastering this toolset.

I want to express again my great thanks to the folks on LinkedIn’s WordPress Experts group. A more knowledgeable, kind, courteous and helpful bunch of people it would be difficult to imagine finding.

 

Climate Change

CO2 Level Crashes Through 400ppm. It May Now Be Officially Too Late for Humanity

by  • May 11, 2013 • 0 Comments

Global-Climate-ChangeThe two primary research centers monitoring the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world’s air both reported an average daily reading above the dangerous threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm) scientists have been warning for decades is the Point of No Return on global climate change.

Justin Gillis of the New York Times, provided a succinct summary of the import of this news in his column when he wrote:

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

At this level, the visible and painful effects of global climate change will begin to accelerate rapidly according to every credible scientific model. Within 25 years, experts are convinced the 450ppm barrier will be crossed. At that point, the situation becomes irreversible. In fact, it already is irreversible with respect to some of the effects.

Historically, the United States is far and away the worst air polluting nation, although in the past decade or so China has begun to exceed U.S. CO2 output. These two nations — the largest economies on the planet — have steadfastly refused to take any meaningful policy action with respect to regulating and reducing CO2 emissions. Until and unless they do — and the likelihood of that is vanishingly small — we as a race need to divide our attention between trying desperately to avoid or minimize the horrendous effects of global climate change and preparing for the massive number and size of crises that will inevitably ensue as the earth continues to heat up.

This is not a joke. This is not a hoax. This is not a disguised attempt to destroy capitalism. This is scientifically verifiable truth the enormous consequences of which are not yet fully understood because frankly we have no precedent on which to rely. The last time temperatures were this high, more than 3 million years ago, oceans were 60-80 feet higher than they are now. Current projections are that sea levels will rise by several feet by 2100 (source: EPA):

  • 2.3 feet at New York City
  • 2.9 feet at Hampton Roads, Virginia
  • 3.5 feet at Galveston, Texas
  • 1 foot at Neah Bay in Washington state

And those are widely viewed in the scientific community as ultra-conservative projections in view of newer findings since that 2009 report was issued.

Time has now run out. We are no longer talking of being able to avoid all consequences of our centuries of destroying the Earth. We can still mitigate some impacts but not if we continue to allow near-term greed, profit motives and “me-first” thinking to dominate our society and its environmental policies.

Technology

An Upgrade Warning to Make You Feel All Warm and Fuzzy. NOT!

by  • May 10, 2013 • 0 Comments

I was asked to upgrade GoToMyPC today. This is one of my cornerstone apps, so I immediately launched the upgrade.

In the dialog box appeared this warning:

If the upgrade fails, you must log in at www.gotomypc.com to install and register this computer again.

Seriously? You can’t design an upgrade process that can fail gracefully? Wow. That gives me all kinds of jitters.

Warnings like this always suggest to me lazy programming and support-as-an-afterthought.

Yeesh.

Science, Technology

Using Atoms to Make a Movie Fascinates 614,000 People!

by  • May 9, 2013 • 0 Comments

I don’t know why I find this interesting.

A Boy and His Atom. IBM movie made by moving atoms. The one at the edge of the view is a single atom that plays the role of a ball.

A Boy and His Atom. IBM movie made by moving atoms. The one at the edge of the view is a single atom that plays the role of a ball.

IBM researchers exploring the use of atoms and small molecules as possible data-storage mechanisms, created the world’s smallest movie by moving a few atoms on a chip. It was, as you can imagine, a painstaking process. The resulting movie his mind-boggling.

Some 3.3 million people have watched that atomic movie. At the end of the flick, there is a link or an annotation that will take you to another YouTube video that is the “making of” for the atomic film. Almost 20% of the people who watched the movie (about 614,000) also clicked on that link.

Actually, we can’t be absolutely certain of that assessment because 614,000 is the number of total views the second video has received. Presumably, some people may have reached a dead destination by some route other than watching the original movie itself. Still, more than a half-million people expressed interest in how you use Adams to make movies.

And somehow, that just fascinates me.

Technology

Music Map by the Genre

by  • May 7, 2013 • 0 Comments

My old friend and colleague Lou Giacalone posted a link to this on Facebook the other day. It’s a very cool idea. The developer created an algorithm that generates a tag-cloud style map of all music genres. Click on a genre to hear a sample of its sound; click on the arrow if there is one to drill down a level to specific artists and their interconnections. Click on an artist and hear a sample of their work.

Way cool. I could waste…er…spend hours with this thing.

 

WordPress, WordPress Methods Series

Semi-Final Report on WordPress Best Practices Adventure

by  • May 7, 2013 • 0 Comments

Well, I’ve gone one day over the time I allotted myself to find my way out of the inefficient ways I’ve been approaching WordPress development for the past year or two. But I’ve finally settled on a methodology that I’m going to stick with for a long enough period to see whether it pays the kinds of dividends in efficiency and effectiveness I expect it will.

To cut to the chase for those who are tired of reading these long posts all week, here’s my new WordPress setup and practice. It’s how I’ll build every site I tackle until I see something a lot better come along.

  • dw-wpstart with a starter theme based on Foundation for WordPress
  • create a child theme off that Foundation-based starter theme
  • edit the child theme files principally in Dreamweaver
  • design new page templates and tweak existing ones as layouts in Dreamweaver
  • stay with CSS rather than LESS or SASS for the moment, reserving the right to switch later
  • do all development locally within Dreamweaver CS5.5 using Live View and a local WP server setup for test

What Happened to Drag-n-Drop?

I looked closely at three different drag-n-drop tools for WP, hoping desperately to find one that would essentially allow me not to have to use Dreamweaver for design. I’m a big fan of direct-manipulation UI design. Unfortunately, none of the three held up to my testing even fairly early in the processes.

After discovering some real weaknesses in Ultimatum and Pagelines, I thought I had a winner in Elegant Builder from Elegant Themes. It’s a plug-in that will work inside any theme, which I felt was a big advantage. But when push came to shove, I discovered that it fell short on too many fronts. Without dropping into CSS, e.g., I was unable to figure out how to control image size and alignment, the Slider element was not nearly sufficiently flexible out of the box and Simple Slider was just a bit better than a Lego. Overall, I just felt limited and hemmed in by it.

That was a big disappointment on my adventure.

Why Foundation?

At last report, I had narrowed my choices of a starter theme to Bones, Foundation and Roots. This turned out to be by far the toughest decision in this whole process. That was partly because I quickly saw that this was perhaps the most important decision I’d make and because the contest among those three was awfully close. I bounced back and forth a dozen times before I made my final decision.

And even that decision isn’t quite final yet.

While I originally intended to pick the FWP theme itself, I soon discovered that it appeared to be all but abandoned. Its online forum hadn’t had a post by the theme’s creator since last August or by anyone else since December. I posted a question about its support and viability on LinkedIn and three other forums. Nobody answered in 24 hours.

But I really liked so much of what I’d seen in Foundation I was reluctant to let it go. Until I discovered that there are a number of starter themes out there based on FWP. So I surveyed those and narrowed my choice to:

Again, what I’m looking for is a minimalist theme that is easy to extend and tweak. If anyone has experience with any of these themes and can offer some advice, I’m all ears! I plan to put each of them through its basic paces and make the final choice in a day or two.

Why Child Themes?

After studying not only responses here and posts on other forums but also advice from seasoned WP developers, I concluded that a significant percentage of the successful ones were using child themes essentially all the time. The model makes eminent sense to me.

I know some folks believe that child themes impact negatively on performance. I suspect that is probably even true. But I’m not sure the overall impact is in and of itself a reason not to adopt what is clearly a superior methodology from many other respects.

Dreamweaver? Seriously?

If I didn’t already have a license for DW, I’d keep looking because it’s almost certainly not worth spending a few hundred bucks on a glorified direct-manipulation GUI builder and code editor.

But since I already have it and am comfortable with it and thanks to a great tutorial on the Adobe Dreamweaver forums on how to edit WP theme files with DW, it makes great sense for me from an effectiveness perspective to extend my DW skills into WP.

Why Not LESS or SASS?

This was a close call. But with DW to do the editing (and its built-in CSS tools are great!), I decided learning LESS (probably won’t choose SASS) was just one more thing to add to my kit bag and one thing I didn’t necessarily need right now.

So There You Have It! And Thanks!

So I’m off to make the final choice of a Foundation-based starter theme (though a few Catalyst advocates are not yet giving up convincing me to go that route) and then start developing my six new assignment sites — four for my own business, two for clients — following this methodology and tweaking where necessary.

I really appreciate all the help I got from the members of this forum, including some who answered in private mail rather than here on the public forum. Without your experienced advice and encouragement, this project might never have been completed or, if it had, not as well.

I look forward now to working in WP rather than on it!

 

WordPress Methods Series

Update #3 on My WordPress Adventure: Miscellaneous Findings

by  • May 4, 2013 • 0 Comments

I eliminated Roots from consideration because it feels just a tad on the geeky side to me from a preliminary investigation.

You have to config the thing through a config.php file and you have to edit another PHP file to  setup custom navigation menus and post thumbnail sizes.

That’s two too many PHP files that must be touched for my taste.

I also eliminated Thematic for a similar reason. So I’m down to Bones and Foundation assuming I go the bare-bones starter route.

I wish there were some standards or conventions to define how themes are to be modified and extended. For example, some themes have all their contents in the library folder, others in the standard WP places. Some themes don’t even have a functions.php file but instead have two files: one called source-functions.php and one called custom-functions.php. Without study, it’s not possible as far as I can tell to determine which loads first and thus is overridden by the other, or precisely which one to use for custom functions we want to add. All of this may exist in WP Lore somewhere, but it’s certainly not easily accessible.

If I end up deciding to go with a fully-loaded theme, I have about decided to go with Catalyst. It  has a staggering array of things I can control via a property-sheet style interface and the notion of using a Dynamik as a Theme with dozens of “skins” creates a looser coupling between design and implementation. I’m somehow more comfortable with that notion.

At the moment, however, it seems likely I’ll settle on a minimalist theme over a decent lightweight framework or starter theme because the sense of lock-in I get from heavy-duty themes and tools like Catalyst is a bit too restrictive.

I have ruled out the major drag-and-drop theme approaches. None of them is quite what I’d like to see yet and, as with heavy-duty starter themes and frameworks, I’m just leery of the sense of closed-in restrictiveness that comes along as part of the gestalt.

At the moment, Elegant Builder is leading the pack for the drag-and-drop part of the story and as far as I can tell, I can implement it on just about any theme by anyone, which gives it another big plus.

I’m down to choosing a bare-bones theme to accompany EB. Bones is feeling a little too bare-bones. I feel sort of adrift on it. So I’m spending this evening and tomorrow morning running Foundation through its paces before making this choice. Elegant Themes’ Minimal is still very much in the running as well. I have a feeling this one’s going to come down to personal preference and taste rather than winning feature sets.

Then it will be Truth Time as I’ll have to make a decision between the two remaining combinations:

  • bare-bones starter theme or framework with EB for drag-and-drop layout of the easy stuff;
  • Catalyst (with the open remaining question of whether I can make EB work in Catalyst)

 

WordPress

Countering the Web-Site-in-15-Minutes-For-Under-$50 Misdirect

by  • May 3, 2013 • 0 Comments

As someone who earns some reasonable proportion of my income helping people design and build WordPress Web sites and apps, I constantly encounter prospects who have been sold a bill of goods by a plethora of people and companies who benefit from encouraging people to devalue Web development, particularly on the WordPress platform.

This morning on the LinkedIn group “WordPress Web Designers,” I posted a fairly lengthy semi-rant on this subject. Here is a condensed version. If you want to read it in its entirety, you can go to LinkedIn to read it (but you’ll have to be logged into your LinkedIn account).

your website in record time and at lowest priceAll of us who do WordPress development for all or part of our careers constantly encounter what I all the “dot-com misdirect.” This syndrome arises because customers and prospects have been told repeatedly by friends, colleagues, online advertising and promotions that building a WordPress site is a two-hour job.

This makes it particularly difficult to sell a prospect on a four-figure project to create what he probably sees as a simple site when we’re using this amazingly powerful tool that lets you create a site by answering five questions on a form or some such.

Our job in the selling process becomes one of clearly (and patiently) explaining the difference between a one-page, slapped-together brochureware site and an actual dynamic Web site. I find that this process goes fairly smoothly when I focus on benefits and not features.

Then they either get it and hire me (or a competitor) or they don’t and they end up with a disappointing brochureware site.

Sometimes I think we need a Word Press Developers Association that we’d all support and that would do branding work to counter the web-site-in-15-minutes-for-$50 messaging out there. :-)