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Blackouts, Boycotts and Regressing From Progress
A couple of weeks ago, the United States, and in fact, the world saw the internet grow up. Namely, through the use of blackouts – a previously unused tactic of protest and grassroots organizing – we saw the evil Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and it’s evil twin Protect IP (PIPA) anti-piracy legislation fail in…
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Congratulations, Internet. We Won the Day.
Today, I feel like a proud poppa. I don’t want to get too celebratory and put out some kind of aura that our battle against SOPA and PIPA are over. In fact, neither are over. But I’ll get to that in a minute, because yesterday was AMAZING! Yesterday, we saw the Internet come of age.…
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Open Letter to Congressman Lamar Smith Regarding SOPA Championing
An email sent to the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who insists on pushing the SOPA bill through committee. Dear Mr. Smith- This is an open letter which will be published online, and promoted on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. As a Texas resident, I find it egregious that you have decided…
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Your Fiefdom Doesn’t Matter (Or Get your Head out of Your Regional Startup Ass)
There’s this thing called Protectionism. Protectionism is largely a political word used to describe the retreat to self-isolationism for the sake of preserving well-being. It was a word tossed around in late 2008 and 2009 after the market crash when the international community joined together to try to stave off a global economic failure. There…
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Dude, Shut Your Effing Social Media Mouth.
It’s been awhile since I ranted. Like really ranted. I’m about to change that. <rant> It’s no secret that social media marketing has turned largely douchey. Self-important blowhards show up at SXSW, Blog World Expo and many other industry events every year with the sole purpose of being socialites and schmoozing with their peers and getting…
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Skunkworks
Back in October, I announced my departure from WP Engine. At that time, though I didn’t talk about it on this blog, I decided to take some time off, more or less. Since 2006, I’ve been hard at work with very little time alotted to myself. I spent 2 years with b5media and jumped immediately…
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The Top 50 Stories Since the Invasion of Iraq
War is over, if you want it. ~John Lennon This is a time of year, as we draw 2011 to a close and embark on 2012, to reminisce about the events of the last year. It’s a tradition followed by journalists, bloggers, and opinionistas alike. But since today marks the day where the War in…
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10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.3
WordPress 3.2 has been downloaded a killer 12M+ times. WordPress as a whole continues to grow and is touted to be in the approximate 14% of the web zone. That’s ridiculously huge and it astounds me how big the projects footprint has become in the 7 years I’ve been around the community. Well done to…
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TUTORIAL: Using Sass and Compass for managing CSS in WordPress
I don’t often write tutorials but since the rebuild of the WP Engine website some months ago, I have been turned on to the use of a brilliant combination of tools made for development in a Ruby on Rails environment. That doesn’t mean we can’t make it work for WordPress too. The tools are Compass…