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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.
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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…
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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.
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Hear the Cry
About three years ago, I turned down an amazing opportunity to spend a month building houses in Guatemala. I might give you all the reasons in the world for making that decision – it would be hard on my job, I had loans to pay, I couldn’t leave responsibilities with my church, etc. The truth is, I was scared.
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Marketing with Brochures
Your brand has a story to tell. Whether the customer remembers the story when you leave the room depends on the quality of the brochure you leave behind.
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Review: 3D Holiness
I had the opportunity this past week to sit down and read 3D Holiness, a new book by Dr. Paul Kingsbury. It was a quick read, and inspired me to focus more on some passages of scripture that I’ve merely glossed over in the past. The topic of the book is sanctification – the act of setting something apart as holy or sacred. Fundamentally, God is holy and pure and our goal of walking with Christ is to allow His Spirit to work in us to bring us more in alignment with his likeness. To sanctify us and set us apart…
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Why I Left My Job
As most of you know, I started a new job a few weeks ago with 10up. It’s an amazing job so far, and I’m thrilled to work with several developers I admire and am lucky enough to call friends. But deciding to take this new job was a difficult decision for me – because I really enjoyed my previous job. Some of my co-workers were, understandably, upset when I left. Some of my friends a bit confused. So I wanted to lay out for you the four biggest reasons I decided to leave a very good job with HawkSoft to…
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Character Quest – Service
We were made in the image of a God who works for the express purpose of performing good works of service for the benefit of others.
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The Anatomy of an Exploit
I’m a huge fan of security. I spend many a weekend experimenting with new encryption techniques, hash algorithms, and security protocols. As a result, I also come across several different server exploits in the wild. PHP hacks, [cci].htaccess[/cci] hacks, JavaScript injection, etc. I once even saw a server hacked through a corrupt PNG image that installed a PHP console when it was loaded. To a new developer, is is all pretty scary stuff. Here’s an example of an exploit I came across last week – and how to both prevent and recover from it.
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Goodbye, My Friend
I lost one of my best friends last weekend. Aaron Renner was one of the best men I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. He will be missed.