Eric Mann

  • WordPress XML-RPC – An Introduction

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    I’ve seen a lot of conversations over the past two months regarding WordPress’ built-in XML-RPC functionality.  What most of you might not know is that you can write to, read, and administer a WordPress site from anywhere.  There are iPhone applications for creating and revising content.  There are desktop applications for moderating comments.  There are

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  • Motivation

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    Once upon a time, I heard myself utter the phrase, “I’m not paid enough to care about that.”  Years later, a boss explicitly told me not to do something because, “you aren’t paid enough for that.”  The other day, I was told to excuse a volunteer’s lack of enthusiasm and follow-through because, “he’s doing this

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  • A Manly Occupation

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    I was listening to a radio show the other day that claimed there wasn’t enough adventure left in modern society.  The broad claim was that men needed some kind of battle to fight and some kind of adventure to pursue in order to feel like men.  Unfortunately, modern civilization leaves us struggling to find a

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  • The Dangerous Allure of the GPL

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    I am a huge fan of open source development.  From the developer side of things, it means there are limitless tools at my disposal for creating the next knock-your-socks off application.  I can build just about anything with insanely powerful libraries of code that the big guys like Microsoft can’t touch.  It’s an amazing power,

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  • What Bought You to Slavery?

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    Word of advice: Never borrow money to purchase a consumable item. Debt can essentially be lumped into two categories – rented debt and slave debt.  Rented debt is what you incur when you borrow money to purchase a lasting good.  When you borrow money for a house or a car.  What you’re really doing is convincing someone

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  • Reflecting on the Boundless Summer Challenge

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    Over the past month, I’ve participated in daily challenges sponsored by Boundless, a fantastic ministry for young adults. The challenges have helped me re-evaluate certain aspects of my life and reapply myself to certain standards and commitments to which I hold myself accountable. This essay is my reflection on the month-long challenge and a personal…

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  • Boundless Summer Challenge – Task 9

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    Task number 9 out of 20-something was to perform a random act of kindness either for someone you know or a complete stranger.  This could be anything from mowing someone’s lawn for free to paying for someone’s coffee at Starbucks or just baking something for someone else.  It was a great task, and something that

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  • Google Reader – Revisited

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    A few weeks ago, I published a tutorial regarding using the Google Reader API in PHP projects.  Since that time, Google has changed the authentication portion of their API somewhat, so I need to revise my instructions just a bit.  And some day in the future, I’ll even post a tutorial on how to use

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  • JavaScript Event Bus

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    I was taught some time ago to always focus on decoupling my code.  Your server and the client (browser) should not need to know anything about the structure of one another.  They can pass information back and forth, but that should be the full extent of their integration.  There are several reasons for this, but

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  • Environmental Modeling – Part 2

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    Last week, I proposed the idea that each of us is walking around with a model of the world inside our heads.  Every experience we have, every object we see, and every event we witness help build and refine this model, giving us the ability to predict future behavior and make decisions based on past

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