1 May 2010, Moon Studios PDX.

I’ve recently gotten into the version control system Git. I’ll be sharing some good nuggets of information relating to getting Git compiled and set up on your Mac.

There’s also a few other surprises in store as well as a new theme for the blog in the works.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the dire need for this site to have an updated theme, more compatible with WP 2.7 features. The theme currently in use is a custom job I hacked together in less than a week last summer. It’s pretty stripped down but served it’s purpose for a short time… I originally intended this site to be just an portfolio type site featuring my CV and some work examples. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about WP Theme Frameworks and am quite intrigued with the possibility of writing a child theme for either Thematic or Theme Hybrid. Basically in the course of writing the current theme for this site I pretty much realized I painted myself into a corner in regards to the markup and use of WP Template Tags. In essence I learned how not to code a WP theme. Like most things in the web development world, I’ve learned things by trial and error. So I think now is the time to put the skills I’ve subsequently learned doing other WP-powered client sites and create a much more functional theme for this site.

Two articles I wrote last summer continue to get tons of traffic, which is very cool. They are “MySQL Administrator on Mac OSX Leopard: A Few Tips and Tricks” and “Setting up PHP, MySQL, and Apache in Mac OSX Leopard.” Both of those articles still get hundreds of pageviews every day. I had intentions of doing more posts along these lines to try to fill a niche that I saw was lacking. Particularly… clear, unambiguous tutorials on how to set up a Mac as a local development suite. I soon realized putting tutorials of that nature together were extremely time consuming. Plus on top of that I started to get really busy with client work the last 4 months or so of 2008. I work a day job too so keeping up with tutorials had to be put on the back burner.

As we are all aware, the current economic conditions have started to impact the frequency of my freelance activities. Put another way, freelancing has been pretty slow so far in 2009. So I’m hoping to provide some more tutorials in the near future. Even though they are time-consuming, I do enjoy writing them. It’s great to give back as I wouldn’t be where I am today if there weren’t hundreds of thousands of excellent web development oriented blogs out there providing top notch information for free! Plus I always learn something new when creating tutorial articles. I’m even considering some screencasts. I know how much I enjoy screencasts from Nettuts, ThemeForest, and CSS Tricks so this may be a good thing for folks coming to my site as well.

If anyone out there has ideas for articles and/or screencasts please leave a comment below or drop me a line.

That’s it for now. I promise things will get a bit more exciting around Superfancy HQ soon!

It’s official… I exercised my right to vote. You should too. I’ll give you one guess who I voted for…

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as WordCamp’s are intentionally kind of general in scope so they appeal to the most wet-behind-the-ears beginning blogger to power users to hardcore developer types. This one was no different as there were people of all stripes in attendance. There were people of all ages, but the scales definitely tipped to the younger end of the spectrum… lot’s of hip kids use Wordpress. I definitely felt like the weird old goth guy at the party, but that had more to do with the fact that I rarely go to events like this so I was a bit intimidated. I’ve never been very outgoing so meeting new folks and “networking” is not one of my strong points. There was a lot of “networking” happening.

From what I gathered, there’s a burgeoning tech scene in PDX so I imagine a lot of the people there were used to seeing each other at tech “social” events around town. I didn’t know a soul in the entire place. Being from little ol’ Olympia there isn’t a whole lot going on so I found the atmosphere quite exciting. And I was even able to put faces to a few names I’ve seen online. While I can’t say I made any “connections,” I did meet a few nice folks.

Anyway, the reason I attended was for information overload! And I was not disappointed in the least. The keynote address was given by famous blogger and WP evangelist Lorelle VanFossen. She shared a pretty amazing story about a blogger she met named Glenda Watson Hyatt, known as The Left Thumb Blogger, who was born with cerebral palsy and only has use of her left thumb. She uses Wordpress to communicate with the world — the theme of the keynote was “Changing Lives with WordPress” and this was a very touching example that I will never forget.

The morning breakout session I attended was presented by this bloke named Justin Kistner, “Using WordPress to Manage a Social Relations Program.” He talked about using Wordpress MU, BuddyPress, and bbPress as platforms for “social ecosystems.” Not sure how I jive with the terminology he used, but his presentation gave me many ideas that I think I can apply to my day job. Probably the most fascinating thing was watching the attractive young lady next to me display some pretty sick productivity skills on her MacBook Pro. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her screen and as a result I discovered some interesting web sites and a neat Twitter app for OS X I think I’m going to check out. I noticed she was attempting to live blog so I knew her URL had the word “hazelnut” in it. Being the curious type I looked her up later, checked out her blog, which left me with the impression that kids of today maybe aren’t as square as I thought (even though none of them seem to smoke). Seemed like a very interesting and intelligent young lady and I look forward to following her blog.

Next was lunch, which was WAY too long. We had about an hour and forty-five minutes to kill. Pizza was served, then devoured by all… leaving a ridiculous amount of time to “network.” I met this dude named Vin but I think I scared him away when I told him I work for a “non-profit trade association in Olympia.” He was a pleasant chap but he excused himself pretty quickly to go chat with people not as boring as I. Sometimes appearing like an adult on the surface has strange outcomes. I remember the world before the Internet so it’s hard to relate to these kids today who grew up in a vastly different world. Jeez… I’m starting to sound like my Dad. I should probably get out more…

So being the Gen-X’er that I am, I headed outside to smoke some American Spirits. Across the street from the space, there were a group of WordCamp attendees hanging out in the sunshine. Assuming these were the “smokers” I walked over and much to my chagrin, no one was smoking. Then I got glared at by these girls because I was smoking. What the fuck? Maybe these kids of today are totally fucking square? I understand smoking is kind of frowned upon these days in the sanitized version of the world we’ve become accustomed to living in. I guess the cool kids don’t smoke anymore. Such is life.

Headed over to my car, dropped off my swanky WordCamp t-shirt, gave the girls a call, then headed back in to grab a seat for the WP 2.7 demo given by Automattic’s own Jane Wells. She’s one of the newest additions to the Automattic team… a usability expert. Wish I could have caught up with her to ask some questions for Christina, who is desperately trying to figure out what to do with her Masters in Cognitive Psych. I guess a lot of people with Psych degrees get into usability testing… for obvious reasons. Jane’s presentation was fairly informal but certainly highlighted some major usability enhancements in 2.7. Highly anticipating its release on November 10th.

Woopra is pretty slick. And as it happens, Lorelle, who is involved in the Woopra beta, gave an extensive tour of many of its most jaw dropping features. Woopra is analytics in REAL TIME! Getting an invitation code to the beta is not the easiest thing on earth but Lorelle gave each attendee of the session one invitation code to hook up Woopra on their site of choice! Thank you Lorelle! Now I have three sites hooked up with Woopra. If you haven’t seen Woopra, go check it out and sign up for an account. It took about a month or so for my first 2 sites to be approved for the beta, so unfortunately no instant gratification. But the wait is well worth it.

Next was the session I was most jazzed about… “Extending your Blog through Custom Plug-in Development.” This cat named Dane Hesseldahl was the presenter. While waiting for the session to begin I took a look at his site and I almost peed my pants. Holy shit! This dude is super talented… both as a designer and a developer — which is exactly what I want to be when I grow up. You’ve got to check out his site and see his portfolio… totally drool-worthy.

Dane led us through all the essential aspects of WP plugin creation from initial idea to execution to helpful documentation available at the WP Codex to help if you get stuck. My ten dollar admission was worth it for this session alone. Dane posted his Keynote presentation as well as the files we worked through on his site. I really wish I would’ve talked to this dude but alas it was time for me to go.

I was exhausted and had a two hour drive back to Oly to look forward to. Kinda bummed I had to take off because I found out the evening breakout sessions were quite good. Oh well, there was just no way I was going to make it through the dinner and “networking” time with my sanity intact. It was a good day and my quota for information overload was certainly met.

One last thing… I would say about 90 percent of attendees, myself included, had a MacBook or MacBook Pro. And the number of iPhone’s was mind boggling. I felt like a dweeb with my BlackBerry Curve.

Going to conferences like this in a cool city like PDX, really makes me realize I need to get back to the big city!

A lot has happened in the last 4 weeks but here are few highlights:

I’m mostly finished with the revamp of Allied’s web site… just a few JavaScript tweaks and some content additions and it’ll be ready to go live when their new associate starts in early August. So yeah June was a profitable month which is always nice. But those months don’t happen very regularly at this point in my career.

Anyway, I certainly earned it as I had to do a lot of busy work. I think I edited in total about 70 images which took the good portion of 2 days. But the results I was pretty happy with (as was Greg). I got the feeling whoever initially designed the site kind of dropped the ball because there were a lot of loose ends I had to tie up with the CSS and XHTML. It was crazy because the CSS was written in a really confusing fashion… or written in a way that I wouldn’t do. Needless to say it was interesting slowly figuring out why it was written like that. It did have a lot of specificity with respect to some CSS rules, particularly list items, which taught me a few tricks I was previously unaware of.

I did decide to give jQuery a shot to do a couple JavaScript effects. It’s worked out well and I think I’ll be using jQuery again.

Lately I’ve been fighting with their Exchange server again trying to configure it for RPC over HTTP… which I will not go into as it will not make for good reading. However I will say it has been humbling. It would be nice though if the guy who set up their Win 2K3 Server was a bit more helpful. But I don’t see that happening.

Lets see what else has been happening?

Well I got a sweet Fender Highway One Telecaster at the Music 6000 parking lot sale a couple weeks ago. Been wanting a new Tele ever since I had to sell my American Standard for dubious reasons. Been enjoying it immensely. It rings so much more than the Jazzmaster. But that’s kind of what Tele’s are known for. The JM is still my Number One though. Maybe I’ll do another post why I love the Jazzmaster so much…

Speaking of the JM, it’s new body is here! A little background… About a month ago I was doing some maintenance that required removing the trem plate. In the process of doing that a thin piece of the finish about an inch in length flaked off the body just to the left of the trem plate. Yep it was visible even with the trem plate reinstallled. A couple days later I took it over to Peter’s house to have him help me with something. He noticed it and thought it could probably qualify as a warranty repair (he deals with the special orders at M6K). So he called Fender and they offered to give me a brand new body! So to make a long story slightly longer, the new JM body will be installed in a couple days.

People tend to complain about Fender’s customer service but I’m a pretty happy customer. I’m sure it helps that I know everybody at M6K and I’m a good customer to them too.

One last thing… I now have a bachelor pad. That’s right I’m living alone. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived alone but so far so good. Not getting terribly lonely yet! I can finally have my gigantic Cure poster in the living room! Definitely need some more furniture though…

Yep that’s right! It was announced late last year yet those of us who’ve been fans since the early 90s had many reasons to be suspicious. But they just played 2 warm-up gig’s at the London ICA Friday and Saturday night for their string of shows next week at the Roundhouse. Here’s a review from NME. And a Flickr set I found from Friday night’s gig. They’ll be coming to the states in the Fall. This all makes me very happy!

Got a call today from my friend Peter at Music 6000 saying they just got one of the Classic Player Jag’s. So I headed down there after work to take it for a spin. And…

It’s a winner in my book. Not sure about the grounding/shielding issues other Forumites experienced at GC… this one was just fine. Let me preface by saying I do not like Candy Apple Red… it is by far my least favorite finish. But this one looked pretty decent… it was a bit darker than other CAR guitars I’ve seen and the mint guard was a nice touch too. Like I did for my Classic Player JM review, I’ll go ahead with list format:

— So the burning question is the movement of the trem plate. As with the JM you probably won’t notice it unless you’re nitpicking or have an AVRI to compare it to. It’s of little consequence.

— The neck was amazing! It was nice and chunky and had a subtle flame to the maple if you’re into that. Felt better than a lot of AVRI Jag’s I’ve played.

— The hotter PU’s are excellent. It had a lot more presence and girth than I’m used to in a Jag. Still sounded jag-like but a lot rounder.

— Again the hardware could very well be AVRI. Unfortunately I forgot to ask for the trem arm so I didn’t get to check the trem action out.

— Fret work left a bit to be desired but nothing out of the ordinary for MIM.

— Set up was ok… action a tad high. Crappy strings but even taking this into account the sound was lovely. With proper strings (Pyramid Gold’s in my humble opinion) and a few setup tweaks it would be perfect. The angled neck pocket I think makes a bigger difference than on the JM.

— This is a hot guitar. I honestly feel in comparison to an AVRI this would be the clear winner, especially considering price point. If I was in the market for a Jag, I think I would get a Classic Player.

— I’m even more excited about the HH’s now which if it’s up to snuff may become my backup.

— Overall this is a solid guitar. Worthy of a backup if you already have a vintage or AVRI and/or great introduction to world of offsets for the uninitiated.

And now for the pics…

Starting on another wave of projects for Allied. I checked out 2 books form the library about working with MS Exchange. The big one is called “Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed.” It’s crazy huge… over 1000 pages. Pretty much everything I need to know is in the book and stuff that isn’t is just a Google search away. Strangely looking forward to mastering these MS enterprise products as it will look good on the ol’ resume.

I’ll also be revamping Allied’s web site, which is going to keep me busy the next week to two weeks! More on this later…

Now I’ll finally be able to pay off my Jazzmaster!