All Forces

I am writing this post from the new Wordpress application on my iPhone.

As some of you know, Apple asked me give a session about WordPress at at their WWDC 07 conference this year. The session was titled “Designing and Extending the Mac OS X Blog Experience” and they gave me an hour to cover how to create a local development system for designing blogs with WordPress and Mac OS X. So I practiced, practiced and practiced my session and had my Steve Jobs moment with Keynote and a huge screen behind me… and I did alright. The video(audio and slides) of the session is now available in the iTunes Store. An Apple Developer account is required but you can get that at no cost.

Link: ADC in iTunes Store (Link Updated)
Look for it under WWDC 2007 Sessions > Content and Media - Video

I’m flying out tomorrow to San Francisco to speak at Apple’s WWDC conference. My session is titled Designing and Extending the Mac OS X Blog Experience and will be on Friday. I will be covering WordPress extensively, it should be fun. If you are at this year’s WWDC, please let me know, I would love to meet.  

Photo by John Keegan.

I will be at the WordPress today at 6:30 at the northwest corner (south of the Starbucks, east of the Verizon shop) of Bryant Park. Matthew Mullenweg, a founding developer of WordPress is in town and has set up the meetup. It will be raining tonight, but that’s New York I guess. I hope some of you can make it if you are in town.

UPDATE: John Keegan’s photostream at Flickr

This is definitely geeky, but I just started listening to the Wordpress Podcast and I am hooked. There’s a great interview with Wordpress lead developer Matt Mullenweg and some plugin news as well. An excellent addition to my subway ride commute.

Podcast Link: Launch in iTunes
Website Link: wp-community.org

This is a quick tutorial on how to have WordPress show a custom error page when there’s a database connection error. This tutorial covers WordPress 2.0.1.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s be frank here, WordPress rocks, no doubt, but since it’s early beginning, the interface design has lagged behind it’s technical powers. This is why since December of 2004, Khaled, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar and later Bryan Veloso started Shuttle, a collaborative effort to bring design beauty to the WordPress admin interface. Well, it’s been almost a year and a half and the Shuttle team finally release their final mockups to the public.

I certainly welcome any improvements to the WordPress admin interface, and I do hold the Shuttle team in the highest regard, they are after all the rock stars of blogging, but these mockups are a bit disappointing. There are plugins that look way slicker than Shuttle. I was hoping Shuttle would bring an Apple sensitivity to design and interface to the WordPress admin but I guess this was not the case. Expectations can kill ya.

Link: Shuttle

This actually makes a lot of sense. Very cool stuff WordPress has been supporting through XFN links.

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Link: Microformats.org

Just when I was debating not having a sidebar on my new blog design, the creators of WordPress release sidebar Widgets as a plugin. Widgets allows you to move around the order of widgets in your sidebar without touching a line of code. It actually looks pretty cool, specially the way that developers can write widgets just like they do plugins.

Link: Automattic.com

For those of you wondering how I got the heart in the post title “I ♥ Prints“, I have created my own cheat sheet of special characters for this purpose. WordPress supports special characters, but it falls victim of it’s own attempt to fix and correct things. It is possible write special characters in all fields in html mode (like when using safari). However, once a post is created, WordPress’ edit mode converts the special characters back. Since my chart includes some characters that might be interpreted as html code, I had to keep my chart on a text file so that I can copy/paste into my browser whenever I have to edit this post. Not an easy thing to do when yo edit a lot, but worth it in some instances where a heart says it all.

Instructions

Find the symbol you want, in this case “♥“, and copy the HTML code for that symbol. For hearts it is “♥“. Then paste “♥” into your title, excerpt or post field. If you use a visual html tool like the FireFox or ecto, you need to go to html mode, paste the code and switch back to rich text.

Read the rest of this entry »