Month: December 2012

Snowshoeing through Yosemite

Over the holiday break I spent a week at my parents’ place in California. Got in lots of reading and family time and, on the last day, headed up to Yosemite for a short snowshoe trip.

We set out from Badger Pass Ski Area and walked along Old Glacier Point Road before cutting back and ending up at the top of the ski runs. Really fantastic hike with almost no one else out there.

Hanukah Challah

Dinner tonight along with tuna, spinach salad, and quinoa.

Making the WordPress fullscreen editor the default

A couple weeks ago Patrick Rhone mentioned that:

It is kind of sad that, in 2012, I have yet to see a blogging engine with a post editor designed for doing the very thing we online writers go there to do… Write.

Shawn Blanc mentioned that WordPress has a built in fullscreen editor that is pretty minimal. He’s right, the fullscreen editor is one of my favorite additions from the past couple years. The new media improvements are even better.

I decided to take a crack at making a plugin to automatically enable the fullscreen editor. Turns out it was actually pretty easy to do. 6 lines of PHP and 3 lines of JavaScript later the plugin is live. I tested it in WordPress 3.5 with a few other things installed but the testing was by no means extensive. If you find any bugs feel free to open an issue on GitHub.

The code is hosted over on GitHub in case you want to give the plugin a spin. I’m positive the plugin isn’t for everyone, that’s fine. 🙂

The Anthologists:

Anthologies have the potential to finally make good on the purpose of all our automated archiving and collecting: that we would actually go back to the library, look at the stuff again, and, holy moses, do something with it. A collection that isn’t revisited might as well be a garbage heap.

I dig the notion of this coming to pass. Between Twitter favorites, Pinboard, Instapaper likes, and links on this blog I sometimes wonder what percentage of things I mark will actually be seen again. Something I need to get better about doing.

The Employee Is The Company:

The employee is the company. Meet someone who treats you like you are a visiting alien from Uranus, and you will have a low opinion of the company. When a salesperson is rude, the company is rude. But when an employee provides outstanding service, we view the company itself as outstanding.

Journalism as service:

But instead, we got mostly articles. For that’s what journalists do, isn’t it? We write articles. We are storytellers! But not everything should be a story. Stories aren’t always the best vehicle for conveying information, for informing the public. Sometimes lists, data bases, photos, maps, wikis, and other new tools can do a better job.

It’s been said before and it still rings true. Related.

College was my biggest mistake:

$44,000 might as well have been a million dollars, because in my mind they were equally unfathomable- with only $300 in my checking account, I had to make a decision whether or not to borrow $176,000. Makes sense.

I remember facing a similar decision at 18. I withdrew the $6,000 from my savings account and wrote a $5,000 check to Whitman.

The other grand bought me a MacBook. On that MacBook I taught myself basic HTML, CSS, PHP, and eventually discovered WordPress.

I wouldn’t say my time at college was a mistake. Too much good came out of it to say that. But, I do know what the more productive use of my time and money was.

New Orleans

Gorgeous weather for the last day in New Orleans with the Social team from Automattic.