Tuesday, February 19, 2008, 7:14pm
When I created this WordPress theme, I wanted to take advantage of many cool features buried in the template system such as custom fields, extensive tagging, etc. What I’ve found is that these are the very reasons why it is tedious to post to this blog.
Because desktop software like ecto or MarsEdit cannot send WordPress custom field information, I was married to the Admin editor to actually publish each post. This added at least two additional steps to the publishing process, which I feel hindered me from posting more frequently. Therefore, I needed a new solution to make posting as easy as possible.
This post is the first test of the new theme enhancements - essentially I can now use the excerpt and slug fields of MarsEdit to publish articles with the associated icons on the left without having to go into the WordPress admin and manually upload and assign images to each post via a custom field.
Once I tweak some code and make it presentable, I’ll happily document my customizations in a future article.
Friday, February 8, 2008, 9:33pm
Recently - well when NewsGator made all their consumer products free - I started using NetNewsWire on the Mac (and FeedDemon on Windows) to manage my RSS feeds. Since then, I’ve been a very happy man.
So I figured I’d give MarsEdit a shot after ecto didn’t sit too well with me. I like MarsEdit’s clean interface, and I love its support for Markdown, so here I am! I may update this post to fix a few errors, but other than that, here goes nothing…
Saturday, February 2, 2008, 8:51pm
Over the past week I’ve found that house hunting is a sure fire way to slow down your blog posting schedule. After going a full month without missing a day, I really dropped the ball this week as I took some time out to visit houses and the like.
A few people at work were joking that after I buy a house I’ll have very little time to update a blog, but apparently I can’t even update a blog while I’m looking for a house either.
Sunday, January 27, 2008, 6:34pm
Matt Cutts has a nice article and discussion about how to secure your WordPress installation. Security is a huge concern for businesses and organizations, especially when pitching an open source platform like WordPress. Therefore, any measures you can take as a freelancer to protect your client’s data is worthwhile. Matt mentions three tips, which I’ve summarized below:
1. Lock down your /wp-admin/ directory via an .htaccess file
2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog
All three tips will take you less than 10 minutes total to implement, so why not?
Saturday, January 26, 2008, 5:39pm
I’ve received a few emails asking whether or not I use freelancing websites like oDesk to find additional work when things are slow. I replied “no” for a few reasons, but the main one being that online websites like oDesk are not really geared towards the typical freelance designer or developer.
For example, do a search of available jobs with the keyword “wordpress”; as of this morning, there were 103 active projects. A few were PSD-to-theme services, but many were full redesigns of existing layouts or completely new WordPress-powered websites. (more…)
