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:

• JavaScript / CoffeScript projects, including feathercache, a lightweight wrapper around HTML5 localStorage.
• WordPress SQL Update Generator, which will generate the necessary SQL update statements to help move a WordPress site from your local to production (or any other server environment you may have).

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!

Sometimes you need to move folders around, and when they are under version control, this can cause problems. If you’re feeling lazy and don’t want to svn export, then run this from the folder you want to scrub:

find . -name .svn | xargs rm -rf

Here’s a video of me explaining BarCamp to the folks at The Orlando Scene session at BlogOrlando 3.
Video after the jump.

Want to quickly add all missing files to an SVN repository from the command line? Here’s a recipe to do just that:

svn st | awk '{print "svn add "$2 }' | bash

Perform a check in, so that all modified files, and other file statuses are cleared, then you just pipe svn status into awk, which will prepare the svn add statements, and then pipe those into your shell to actually fire off the commands. Leave off the | bash part at first to make sure everything looks good to you, and then fire away.

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Building a custom theme for WordPress can be hard. Sure you get full control over ever square inch of your markup, but there are lots of variables and little tricks you have to remember to implement in order for your theme to support all of the WordPress features. Enter K2, a fantastic theme framework that you can use to CSS your way to a beautiful custom theme while providing a clean upgrade path so you can keep your WordPress installation secure and up to date. This presentation will show you how you can create the blog design of your dreams, using a single style sheet, and will be off interest to technical and non-technical users alike.

Register for Blog Orlando and let me show you how to CSS your way to a custom Word Press theme in K2.