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SEO: Gaming the System
When anyone asks me how they can focus on SEO for their website, I usually point out that they’re asking the wrong question. Optimizing for search engines is a waste of time. Instead, focus on optimizing your site for real people.
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In Pursuit of an Ideal
I met a lot of people in college. There was Frog, the guy who sold hand-illustrated joke books outside the campus bookstore. There was the leader of the college republicans who sat through most of our Political Science classes bragging about how he’d be on a houseboat rather than writing his term paper. There was […]
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Modular WordPress
Last weekend, Matt Mullenweg spoke at length about what the future holds for WordPress development. I took some time to share a brief proposal for one change that could be made farther down the road. Today I’d like to share another – more in line with Matt’s proposal that future WordPress development be focused around […]
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WordPress, Forking, and the Road to 4.0
Today at WordCamp San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg presented the plan for the upcoming 3.7 and 3.8 releases of WordPress. In a nutshell, they will be small, developed in parallel, and (assuming all goes to plan) both released by the end of 2013. This is hugely exciting! The plan for these two releases makes sense and […]
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Automated WordPress Development
Whether or not you make it to WordCamp Seattle, you too can benefit from merging Grunt into your WordPress development workflow! A best-practice in web development is to keep JS and CSS to a minimum by merging multiple files and minifying that file so it downloads quickly. This is a tedious process for many, and […]
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Securing Forms Without Captcha
Captchas are a terrible user experience. They put the onus of spam protection on the visitor filling out the form and, personally, show me how lazy you are as a site administrator. There are a hundred different ways you can protect your site from spam on the server side – why would you forego these […]
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JavaScript Astrophysics
As computers continue to develop and grow, so do the things they’re capable of; just about any laptop capable of playing FarmVille can also run a sophisticated astrophysics simulation. In college, it took me a few minutes with a room-sized supercomputer to derive the Chandrasekhar Limit. The same derivation can now run in JavaScript, embedded […]
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Plugin Review – Spam Free WordPress
Update 7/31/2013—The following review is of an older version of the plugin. As of the newer 2.0 branch, many of the issues below have been resolved. A friend of mine directed me to a new spam fighting plugin via a retweet today. My Latest Favorite Plugin: Spam Free WordPress http://t.co/3tQ3a573Ls — SureFire Web Services (@SureFireWebServ) […]
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Ludicrous Speed: WordPress Caching with Redis
When I first started hosting my own sites, I had no idea what caching was or why it was important. Then I wrote a couple of popular blog posts, and my server crashed. Fast forward a few years, and I’m running a few different websites on a few different servers. Some get a steady stream […]