I missed this in December but Justin Tadlock posted a few great tips on properly coding a WordPress theme’s functions file. Worth a read if you’re building themes.
Month: January 2011
WordPress link blog plugin
On Kommons Ryan Sholin asked me how I created a link blog option on one of my old themes for this site. Ryan was looking for a way to redirect post permalinks to a specific URL like the Daring Fireball linked list.
I whipped up a quick WordPress plugin, unimaginatively called WP Linkblog, that will do just that. It looks for a custom field titled linkblog_url and if that exists filters the permalink to redirect to that URL.
By default the plugin filters both RSS items and the_permalink in the theme. To remove the redirection on your site just remove add_filter('post_link', 'wplinkblog_permalink')
Find the whole thing over on Github. Enjoy Ryan!
The new rules of hip hop
The New Rules (and Kings) of Hip Hop. The take on Kanye’s album is right on. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is still on repeat a lot of days for me.
Scott Berkun on information overload
Scott Berkun theorizes about information overload:
There is a notion the world is polluted with information. And that reckless publishing or creation is bad. This might be true, but that ship has sailed. We won’t be eliminating information from the world. Therefore:
Hypothesis: It doesn’t make the world any worse to add more information to it, since we can’t be/feel more overloaded than we already do.
That’s why everyone deserves the digital equivalent of a printing press. The more information the better, what I’m overloaded with someone else will cherish.
RSS keeps me alive and kickin’
Dave Winer has been on a serious win streak for the last few days. On the 4th he defined what an open web means to him. If your web has silos then it isn’t really your web is it?
Then he talked about “A tool whose only output is a set of RSS feeds.” Which sounds like a lovely loosely coupled network. That’s a tool I’d want to use and experiment with.
Finally he weaves RSS, iPads, WYSIWYG editors, and a river of news into a tale of why first impressions are sometimes the most honest but are many times blatantly wrong.
RSS is quiet and fast and professional and largely hype-free. Perhaps that’s why it’s not the flavor of the day.
Flavor of the day or not it’s how I consume the vast majority of my news and it alone has radically transformed my consumption of information and acquisition of knowledge. So thank you Dave Winer and all the other developers who have contributed to keeping RSS thriving. 🙂
The attention-span myth
Virginia Heffernan disputes the traditional notion of an attention-span. Good to see someone confront Nicholas Carr’s notion that technology causes brain damage.
I’m surprised that anyone ventures so far into this thicket of sophistry. I get stuck much earlier in the equation. Everyone has an attention span: really? And really again: an attention span is a freestanding entity like a boxer’s reach, existing independently of any newspaper or chess game that might engage or repel it, and which might be measured by the psychologist’s equivalent of a tailor’s tape?
If material is engaging people will focus on it, regardless of what their supposed attention-spans are.
Rethinking money for the new year
Dan Ariely has sage advice for rethinking monetary decisions in the new year. The problem we run into is that, by basing our decisions off of past actions, we allow a few decisions to dictate our long-term habits.
Your child left behind
The Atlantic surveys a recent study that focuses on how individual states compare in international math score rankings. The results are fairly surprising. It all goes to show that for schools more money brings more problems.
Escape Route
Fascinating story of using libraries to create safe, human environments in prison. It turns out concerns over which books inmates read are unfounded. Libraries are more about how providing a place for interaction and skill development.