Spencer Fry, co-founder and CEO of Carbonmade, explains why you need to first build out a trunk when crafting your business. It’s the trunk, or core, of a business that gives it the possibility of becoming a billion dollar company.
Tag: code
WordPress theme function files
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.
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!
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. 🙂
WordPress TextMate Bundle
This WordPress TextMate bundle looks wonderful. Check out the feature list for everything it will add to TextMate.
12 characters and 12 months later
Andrew Nacin recaps his first year spent contributing to WordPress. Pretty cool story. The energy he brings to WordPress is tremendous, I’m definitely looking forward to the next 12 months of code from nacinbot Nacin.
The 37signals Suite and Ownership
37signals launched a bulk subscription suite for their apps a couple of days ago. In the launch announcement I noticed that they refer to users as owning their apps:
Currently the 37signals Suite is only available for people who already own a Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire account. If you own any one of these apps you can upgrade to the Suite in less than 60 seconds. We will be offering the ability to sign up for the Suite from scratch down the road, but we just don’t know when yet. Note: If you don’t own one of our products yet, and you’d like to purchase the Suite, just sign up for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire and then follow the upgrade instructions above. (emphasis mine)
Despite the fact that you pay a monthly fee to use those apps 37signals says users own the product. They back this up by allowing a functional HTML or XML export of most content at any time.
Compare that to Twitter, whose Terms of Service say “what’s yours is yours – you own your content.” Sounds similar right? Too bad Twitter does not provide a way to export more than 3200 tweets.
Edit Flow v0.6 is in the wild
Edit Flow v0.6 hit the plugin directory today. There are a lot of improvements in it. We’ve added features like custom editorial metadata and a new story budget view. Was a lot of fun to work on and Daniel, Scott, and Mo deserve props for their hard work.
Fluid and adaptive 1140 pixel grid
The 1140px CSS grid system from Andy Taylor looks stellar. Certainly would be what I would use as a starting point if I was designing a news site. Hat tip goes to Lauren Rabaino.
Apps That Do Not Sync via the Cloud
A useful-sounding idea from Shawn Blanc for what would be close to my ideal task manager:
And my next wish? A cloud-based service like Instapaper, but for to-do items. I want it to be available in apps like Tweetie, Reeder, and more, so when I click on “Do Later” it sends the link or item of note into a running to-do list that syncs with Things, of course.