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WordPress XML-RPC – An Introduction
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 aggregation services that can remotely publish a Twitter feed directly to your site. The uses of a public application programming interface for WordPress are endless, so the development team has included a specific type of API in the platform to make our lives easier. XML-RPC…
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Motivation
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 for free, anyway.” All of this reminded me of a particular fact: you have to be motivated to work. Most of us look at our paycheck at the end of the day, week, or month and consider that motivation enough to do a good job.…
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A Manly Occupation
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 meaningful battle and bumping elbows with adrenaline junkies trying to claim skydiving, bungie jumping, and dirtbike acrobatics as our “adventure.” It’s somewhat an empty pursuit, though, because as adventurous as these activites might be, they don’t serve any practical purpose. This weekend I had the…
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The Dangerous Allure of the GPL
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, and one that’s attracted more than a few good developers. From the consumer side, it means I have the luxury of verifying that the application I install that claims to do X actually does X and not something malicious – I can look at the…
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What Bought You to Slavery?
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 that has money to purchase the item and rent it to you. If at any time you can’t pay this rent, they take the item back and either sell it or rent it to someone else. You’ll also be far less likely to convince someone…
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Reflecting on the Boundless Summer Challenge
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 promise to continue challenging myself in the same way on a daily basis.
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Boundless Summer Challenge – Task 9
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 definitely breaks you out of your weekly routine. Here’s what I did and my reflections on today’s activity: Today’s random act of kindness was to surprise my family with an evening dining out. It was rather unexpected … and they kept asking “what’s the occasion?”…
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Google Reader – Revisited
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 oAuth with the Google API as well. Initially, you need to request an SID from Google. You pass your Google username and password in a standard HTTP POST and the response contains a string that looks something like this: SID=DQAAAAAB8P9jygcxbrTzYknOWDDKZPSQbb8YJq30PDpbo2h-pPUrcODSbudpBK7rZjfjRU1rr___orLDYqcBX3ycBIKL5F20tv2hLyI_1k_iCsuRr82fORPIcxSm Yhs31A_5wKViHlXZ7HSoWcVFLZUqHyAdLBI3jDR7UkXJtX0-5LH6EBb_95DCPFchXbVDtuS YYWuyGmXo-EKvaPlTT-c LSID=DQAoAAAAySoTyd8B7uQ138aJTHjWdRtScsjuQJBQhkAuCqd0SJbgRCGXql6DgP_dw tTy1kKa1iKaNeXcCtNExYpE1FSeV2Xb1_JlWcowYhU5PVNNHtoTgqMMdtaNudNom1-Snh4Nz4O6ZXE8VG9cxxLx379_yjNuZip4orXHNwg7jT9oEq4F8yFWBTD7DejKpnY8n3PEJg bc5_9mqjewjVRQG0…
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JavaScript Event Bus
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 the most important of which is modularity – you can drop features or entire sections of code from one without damaging the other. Once your server-side and client-side code is decoupled, you can start packaging your object-oriented code in each module. This way, you can…
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Environmental Modeling – Part 2
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 knowledge. It’s a great theory when you think about software development – building an “intelligent” script becomes a matter of giving it the ability to learn from past events and make corrections. But you can also use this model in marketing … perhaps even more…