I take security pretty seriously. Some might even call me a little paranoid when it comes to password strength. It’s no surprise that I love two-factor authentication then. Not only can I have a super strong password, but I can now require that I have a security token in my possession in order to login. In other words, even if you knew my 16 character random password for gmail, you still could not login without also having my security token.
Thanks to everyone who attended my talk today, especially those that asked questions and gave me feedback afterwards. I’m posting my slides for the talk I gave at WordCamp Milwaukee today. As with most talks, there is a lot more information than what the slides contain, but at least it is something.
Just a quick note that I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Milwaukee on June 3. The talk is titled “Contributing to Open Source Projects”. It’s not really a WordPress specific topic, but more of a general encouragement for everyone to get involved in open source and how specifically to go about it. Read the official brief on the WordCamp site.
If you haven’t heard of it, go take a quick look at Twitter Bootstrap. As you click around the github project site, you’ll get the sense that all these layout guides and widgets and buttons and icons look oddly familiar. Part of that is the fact that Twitter itself is built with this style package. But even beyond that, many many many many sites are using this tool kit as well. I’ve sensed a little backlash, mostly from designers, at this rampant use of the Twitter Bootstrap. At a certain level, I agree, but I’m here to talk about why I love Twitter Bootstrap.
Over the next week, I’m going to be adding quite a few short posts chronicling my experience at the CodeMash conference. The event is a few years old, but this is the first year I’m attending.
Date and time manipulation is an area of programming that seems relatively simple on its surface, but lots of danger lurks just out of view. How hard could it possibly be to take a date/time and add 1 day to it? or 1 week? Piece of cake, right? You might do something like this: $eventTime = strtotime('2011-09-15'); //add one day to the date $newEventTime = $eventTime + (24 * 60 * 60); //expects 2011-09-16 and will USUALLY work echo date('Y-m-d', $newEventTime);
Most web sites use third-party code. This code comes in a few different flavors: client-side libraries (jQuery, dojo) server-side libraries (form mail scripts, oAuth integration) server-side frameworks (Zend Framework, Symfony) entire applications (WordPress, Joomla) As a developer, when you selected one or more of these tools, you hopefully picked a project that was active and well supported. This means there will inevitably be upgrades to that third-party code. Some of these upgrades add features, but most upgrades also include bug fixes and security patches.
I’m a huge fan of php|architect: the magazine, the books, the online training and especially their conferences. Living in the Milwaukee metro area, I have a short 90 minute drive to the flagship php|tek conference they host in Chicago each year. My schedule doesn’t always allow me to attend, but I do everything I can to make it. I’m still putting into practice the things I learned at php|tek 2010 and I regularly keep in touch with the many friends I met there.
WordPress has a concept called shortcodes. They’re very handy for inserting chunks of text or functionality with a simple text syntax. For example, one of the stock shortcodes allows you to type [gallery] in a post where you want a photo gallery to appear. But the real power is exposed when you start building your own shortcodes.
Let’s face it: there is a *lot* to know as a programmer. There is the syntax of your preferred language(s), the syntax and function library of your database technology and you probably have some sort of framework or common library containing dozens, if not hundreds, of classes on top of that. This can be overwhelming at first, but most programmers recognize the folly in trying to memorize everything. The reality is you probably only need to commit a small percentage of that knowledge to memory. The rest can be assisted by your IDE, the documentation or an Internet search. Lately, though, I’ve begun wondering if programmers might take this notion too far and rely too heavily on their “extended memory.” This thought occurred to me as I was browsing my Google search history. I saw a couple searches come up repeatedly every few weeks over the course of the last several months. Could it be possible that I was really searching time and time again for the same answer to the same question? It was a scary thought.