-
WP_Session: A Proposal
My first experience with WordPress was when a client asked me to hack apart the registration system to allow for simple custom referral links. They wanted users to be placed at different user levels depending on the URL they used to sign up for an account. My initial attempt was … atrocious When a user hit a referral link, I used a hook to change the default user level, then changed it back after they registered. The problems with this approach are so glaring, I won’t bother explaining them. Seriously, it was a stupid idea. My refined attempt tried to hack…
-
Haiti 2012
In October, 2012, I had the opportunity to take a week-long trip to Haiti. Below is a collection of photos from my trip and a recording of a sermon I presented about my experience. Enjoy! Haiti 2012 from Eric Mann
-
Twenty-Nine
That’s right. Today is my 29th birthday. Usually I take time on my birthday to write a to-do list for the coming year. It’s close enough to the end of the year that it serves double-duty as a list of New Year’s Resolutions. Unfortunately, I never bother to share the list, so no one holds me accountable. And like most lists of resolutions, I rarely complete all (any) of them and end up feeling guilty at the end of the year. So this time, things will be different. Instead I’m going to reflect on what I accomplished in the last year…
-
There’s Nothing Wrong with Comic Sans
When I was in high school, my favorite football team wasn’t very good. I was excited when we’d win at least half the games in a season. I also distinctly remember once when the cable company switched to a “more competitive game” during the 2nd quarter because we were losing so badly. When the Ducks started to get good, though, things changed. We rocketed up the national rankings and became a household name. We shot as high as a #2 national ranking in 2007, and everyone was proud to be a Duck fan. Then we stayed good. We even got…
-
jQuery as a Global Event Bus
Some time ago, I made a mistake. Rather than taking the time to truly understand how events worked in jQuery, I built my own JavaScript library to handle event delegation. It worked, but why reinvent the wheel? It turns out jQuery is perfectly capable of serving as a global event bus for all of your code. You just have to know how to use it.
-
Use Your Head
I know, a political article during election season. Sue me. In this year’s Oregon election, we’re being asked to vote on two somewhat controversial ballot measures – 82 and 83. Measure 82 will amend the Oregon constitution to allow casinos to be built elsewhere than on tribal land (we already have 9 tribal casinos in the state). Measure 83 will approve a specific casino – currently called “The Grange” – to be opened in Wood Village near the river. I think it’s interesting whenever two ballot measures are tied together – even if a majority of voters approve 83, it’s…
-
Flagship Store: Marketing Fail
While walking back to my car this weekend from the Portland Marathon Fitness Expo, I had the chance to swing by the Columbia Sportswear flagship store. I love that place, and I love seeing their new displays of fantastic products. Unfortunately, one major marketing failure made Saturday the exception.
-
Using XML-RPC in WordPress
It was brought to my attention last week that there aren’t very many good tutorials on the web regarding the use of XML-RPC in WordPress. Sure, there are plenty that talk about how easy it is to use and how great of a tool it can be, but few examples explaining just how it can be used. https://twitter.com/curtismchale/status/254356464154574848 I use WordPress for just about everything. For websites, for forums, for ebook sales, for presentations, and most recently for an SMS gateway to a travel blog. The thing is, I can’t always post to WordPress the way I want to. I will…
-
Theme-ready Shortcodes in WordPress
A few months back, I taught you how to make your widgets theme-ready by extracting the actual markup into an overridable template. Now, we’re going to do the same for shortcodes. And for those of you wanting to see this in practice, stay tuned for the release of version 2.5 of WP Publication Archive in a few weeks. I’m using this technique to make markup easy to change.