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For Photographers, Instagram Square Photos are Worse than a TOS Update
I’m a photographer and I use both my iPhone 4S and my Digital SLR to take photos. There’s a difference between taking pictures and taking photos, however, and the nuance is an important thing to understand. When you raise a camera and snap a photo, unless you’re paying attention to things like composition, lighting, depth…
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Contest: 3 free copies of the WordPress Bible [UPDATE]
Today marked the drop of WordPress 3.5 and I want to celebrate. Tomorrow, I’m going to give away three autographed copies of the WordPress Bible. You have to be on Twitter. I apologize to those who have chosen to abandon Twitter, or have chosen not to participate, but it is the defacto communications medium of…
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Prohibition in El Paso
Happy 21st Amendment Day (or the Repeal of Prohibition). 79 years ago today, Congress ratified the 21st amendment which repealed the 18th Amendment banning the manufacturing, sale or transport of alcohol in the United States. Here’s a fun story. In 1918, when the 18th Amendment was ratified, there was a healthy bar and saloon scene…
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Working With HTML5 Forms
I’m going to start a series of tutorials over the next weeks and months about HTML5. A lot of web developers are not leveraging HTML5 for a variety of reasons. We have been so trained over the past decade to embrace XHTML 1.0 that we’ve avoided the new DOCTYPE as something new that needs to…
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10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.5
For 7 years, I’ve been publishing these articles every time a new version of WordPress comes out. Since version 2.0. It’s been a long run. It began as a need to fill people in about new features in WordPress (and there were a lot in 2.0. There wasn’t anybody doing these at the time, and…
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HOLIDAY WORDPRESS DEAL: 30 Minute WordPress Consultation
As the holidays kick into full gear, and people start looking at a short sprint to gift times with family, I am offering a 30 minute phone consultation related to WordPress for $100. This is a great thing for someone who needs to figure out how to do something that may be unfamiliar for them…
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What Makes a Community?
I normally write articles that carry a bit of authority. I usually write what I know about and have a high degree of confidence writing. I don’t write often because I want what I do write to carry authority and be hard-hitting. This is not really one of those articles. I haven’t done what people…
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A Visual Tour of My Life
Google is really scary. On the other hand, Google brings the world closer together. And it’s with that idea that I’m going to take my readers on a little tour of my life. I’ve move around a lot in life. Such is the life of a minister’s kid. Spent years in central Africa. Lived all…
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The Science of Radio, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Pivots
Let’s talk science. We all occasionally listen to the radio. Maybe not as much as we once did, but we still do. Most of us listen to FM radio because the sound quality is better and, as a result, music is more often the stuff broadcast over FM stations. Probably fewer of us listen to…
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Presidential Debate Word Clouds: Romney vs Obama
Here is a data visualization word cloud of the presidential debates last night. I took all of the things said from both candidates, no matter how mundane, from the transcript. Then I removed common English words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ and I manually corrected for uncommon edge cases like ‘governor’, in the case of Obama.…