If you’re a WordPress Plugin developer, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to maintain one of your plugins across multiple versions of WordPress. Until recently, I maintained the IntenseDebate plugin for versions 2.5 and up of WordPress, including versions 2.6 of WPMU and up. That’s a lot of versions (10 actually, not counting minor revisions). Here are some tips I picked up/developed to try to make my life a little easier along the way.
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Earlier this year, my brother got me a pair of Vibram FiveFinger KSO‘s for my birthday. They’re pretty freaky. Here are some random notes on my adventures with these shoes.

Picture by yoavf
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A few weeks ago I had a pretty rough time with something I was working on, so I thought I’d take the chance to share some lessons with you that I learned along the way. I’m taking these specifically from my experience as a developer of web-based systems, but I feel like at least some of them apply to a lot of other situations in life as well. YMMV.
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I get really annoyed when I find myself having to do things over and over that a computer could easily do. I am also really bad at remembering to do small things that don’t seem that important.
The latest intersection of these 2 things is that I’ve been forgetting (or not bothering) to set my status as “Away” or “Back” on all the communications apps I have running when I leave the computer. This is something that a computer should be able to do itself, and something that I’m horribly bad at remembering to do.
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One thing that’s always bugged me in writing Posts/Pages content within WordPress is that you have to cater for different presentation possibilities. If you’re into web-standards, then that makes life difficult for things like headings (h1, h2, etc), when a block of content is presented in different contexts.
Ideally, your page should be structured with an h1 tag around the title of the most important concept on the page, an h2 around a sub-topic/concept, etc. On your home page, the h1 usually ends up going around your logo/site title, since that’s the over-arching concept. Then under that, you might have a listing of recent posts. Each of those posts should probably have their titles in an h2. No problem so far, right? You just set up your template like that and you’re good to go. Read the rest of this post…
Last night, I purchased “Awaken“, a pretty cool clock/alarm app for my iPad. I wanted to try it out as a bedside clock, but to do that I needed a stand of some sort so I could stand up my iPad on my bedside table. My previous theory was that a simple business card holder would make a decent iPad stand, but I didn’t have one handy. What I did have handy, was my Gorillapod (SLR). Turns out they make a perfect iPad stand. Rubber grips, flexible legs, works in portrait or landscape mode, super-stable. Perfect. I dub thee “GorillaPad Stand” (and yes, probably infringe on 2 trademarks at once).


$ svn up
Now running WordPress 3.0. This is going to be a game changer.
WordCamp Savannah, 2010
I was lucky enough to spend last weekend in Savannah, Georgia for their first WordCamp. This was the first time I’d ever been to beautiful, historic Savannah. The humidity/heat was a bit much for me, but in general I had a great time. I gave a short presentation on the new comment_form() function which is available for themes to use since 3.0. I’ve embedded my slides below, along with a link to download a PDF version.
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