xentek.net, rebooted

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Hello Readers, new and old!

For about the last 5 years, xentek.net has rocked the same look and feel, and in the last 2 years or so updates had slowed to a crawl. Well, I finally got around to dusting off the ol’girl, upgrading WordPress (ashamedly from some pre-release WP 3.0 to absolute 3.4-alpha), switching to a slightly tweaked version of Darryl Koopersmith’s Hum child theme for twentytwelve, and re-kajiggering my deployment process. I’ve removed a number of pages and assets, as I pretty much started over from scratch (importing my content into a new blog, instead of upgrading the existing one).

Hopefully by completing all of these long overdue upgrades, I will finally get back to putting out new content, and indeed I already have. I freshened up my about page, and updated my contact info. I’ve also cleaned up my the pages linking to my open source contributions, and added a few new items:

I can’t promise that I will write on a regular basis, but with a fresh start, I do hope that I’m more inclined to do so. Thanks for reading, and happy coding!

Enabling the Flash Uploader in WordPress on your Password Protected Dev Sites

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If you post the sites your working on so that your clients can show of your progress, no doubt you are password protecting it with .htpasswd. There is one drawback to this approach, the Flash Uploader will throw an HTTP Error when HTTP Basic Authentication is used. Put the following snippet in your VirtualHost file to fix that error.

<Files async-upload.php>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
Satisfy Any
</Files>

Time, Skill, and Vision

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Ryan Price and I have recorded the second episode of our occasional podcast, Our Yellow House. In this installament we trip over a new Iron Triangle: Vision, Time, and Skill and how it relates to doing creative work. It breaks down like this: With enough time, you can create. With enough skill and time, you can create anything. But creating something that moves people also requires a great amount of Vision as well.

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!= but ==

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In all the fervor surrounding today’s launch of the seventh major release of Drupal, I ran across a post pitting Drupal 7 vs. WordPress 3.0 in a basic comparison of features.

The post was not published recently or anything, but the underlying tone of the article is summed up in a couple of Tweets quoted near the bottom of the post:

RT @chx1975: WordPress is now approximately where Drupal was around Drupal 5 w/ content types. See you in 2015.

RT @newoceans_en: @Dries Drupal 7 will hopefully be where WordPress was around 5 years ago regarding UX.

I get it. Its all great fun to get into a pissing match with a friendly rival, at least until somebody gets wet, but to me this smacks of the ‘Editor War‘ between vi and emacs; forever the flame that lights the nooks and crannies of hacker culture.
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Image/Attachment Templates for WordPress

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Ever since about WordPress v2.6 or so, images you uploaded and inserted into a WordPress post were created as attachments, a sub-post type that belongs to the post or page they are attached to. These attachment posts can be given their own template, and indeed they look for one when you visit the attachment’s permalink. The K2 theme ships with image and attachment templates (named image.php and attachment.php in the theme template hierachy) and displays the file along with some meta data and, if the image is a part of a gallery (or there is more than one attachment on the post), navigation aids to move from one attachment to the next. For many sites this is ideal, but if you want to just give people the file, and avoid having to create these attachment templates, then here’s a neat trick I cooked up on a recent project.
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Our Yellow House

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Last week I had the extreme pleasure of joining Ryan Price of Drupal Easy on a new podcast he launched called Our Yellow House. This podcast takes an unstructured, conversational tone and attempts to really capture “two people talking”. We wandered around a bit, but in this episode we touched on the recent GPL/thesiswp debate, Chat Roulette and Freelancing. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

The GPL talk also spilled over into the Drupal Easy podcast, and tackles the issue from the Drupal community’s point of view (and also mentions my appearance on Our Yellow House). Checking that out is also worth your time.

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You got GPL in my peanut butter

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It has never been a more exciting time to be a developer. Numerous open platforms exist in which to ply your trade and make a good living doing it. A platform’s user base grows as it matures, and inevitably gives birth to a thriving developer ecosystem supporting that platform, selling services into it, and when the platform is any good that ecosystem will turn into a marketplace. There has been an explosion of these ecosystems as evidenced by the success of the Apple App Store, Facebook, Twitter, Sales Force and Google Apps. In the last few years, WordPress has come into its own and has generated its own cottage industry for themes, plugins, and other add-on services.

What makes WordPress unique is that the platform itself is open sourced under the GNU General Public License v2. This license imposes itself on derivative works by insisting that they in turn be licensed under the GPLv2 if and when they are distributed to others. Generally, this poses no issues, and everyone releasing plugins and themes on the WordPress.org Extensions db has chosen to release their code under the GPL.
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New Plugin: Private Email Notifications

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One of my clients runs a blog network for peace activists in the Middle East, where they discuss important news events and hold forth on issues such as Religious Faith, Tolerance and Cultural Identity. Their main blog is blocked by Iran, which they consider a badge of honor, and is routinely monitored by government officials to try to sniff out dissenters. To better protect the privacy of those who read and comment on their blogs, we have created this plugin: Private Email Notifications.
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