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What value is there in an idea that never sees the light of day? Many times, we come up with fantastic ideas. The next great American novel. The next great web project. The next multi-billion dollar disruptive innovation. But 99 times out of 100, the idea dies in its infancy. We create a great plan,…
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For years, I used shared hosting systems exclusively for all my websites. They were affordable, easy to manage, and required zero effort on my part to set up and maintain. Unfortunately, I have a habit of rapidly outgrowing hosts and usually have to migrate to bigger and better servers about once a year. I finally…
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This post is long overdue. For that, I apologize. Now, on to the fun! Everyone knows I love WordPress. I build my websites on the platform. I write plug-ins for other sites. I recommend it to all of my clients. I’ve even contributed code to core. Let’s stipulate for now that I think WordPress is…
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Last month, I joined with several developers in explaining my reasoning behind working with open source software. Like many others, I am involved in open source projects because I enjoy working with the community. Last night, I only reinforced that. For some time, I’ve been hosting all of my various WordPress websites on a multisite…
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Earlier this week a member of the WordPress community, Jacob Santos, aired his concerns with WordPress’ decision making process on the oft distracting WP Hackers mailing list. His argument, in response to a WordPress.org forum thread regarding 2011 roadmaps, comes from the idea that WordPress development is not driven by community input. On the one…
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From time to time, the GPL comes up in less-than-friendly conversation regarding WordPress. Everyone has their own opinion of what the license means, and strings of “but I am not a lawyer” litter every discussion. This turns any lively discussion into a heated debate because “well this is what I think” quickly turns into “you’re…
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First a caveat: JavaScript is a prototype-based language, not an object-oriented language. Now that we have an understanding of that very important fact, let’s learn how to use JavaScript as if it were object-oriented. A few weeks ago, I was asked to teach a couple of my colleagues how to code with JavaScript. We’re building…
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Open source is fantastic because you can build upon the code of others. It’s also horrible because you can build upon the code of others. This means someone can take a well-developed plug-in, make one or two minor changes, and redistribute an almost identical system to yours while taking all of the credit. So, as…
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This past week, several people related to the WordPress project have been discussing their motivations for working with free and open source software. There have people explaining the new business leads they get from being prominently listed as open source developers. There have been others lamenting the fact that free development is, by nature, free.…
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Those of you paying close attention probably noticed that I neglected to list a couple of the MetaWeblog API calls last week. That’s because they’re duplicated by calls in the “wp” namespace, and I want to keep everything you can call with a “native” WordPress method in one group. Luckily, none of the MovableType API…