It’s often said that one should blog first and foremost for oneself. If you like a topic or post, you should write about it of you want to. While this is true, the next question I ask myself is, why share thoughts and ideas if I’m blogging for myself and, by association, not for readers?

I’d say a mix between the two works best for me. Blogging about what I like, as well as touching base with you all and finding out which posts you like best and ideas for topics to blog about in future posts.

So… what do you guys think?

While we all have our own preferences, it’s important to solidify a few areas when approaching code and to, ultimately, hone the developer’s mindset into certain guidelines. Below are a few thoughts I have running through my mind constantly while developing:

1. Minimize lookups.

This one is crucial when developing systems with heavy load. How many times are you hitting the database for information and how can you minimize that number? For example, when using the Transients API in WordPress, why would you run get_transient() again after you’ve just set the transient up? You’ve already got the data, so there’s no need.

2. D.R.Y (don’t repeat yourself).

This is a common development practice. Don’t repeat yourself. If you’ve got, for example, two functions that perform API requests, create a function that runs the API request with a few parameters to customise it in each case, rather than coding the request twice.

3. One function, one purpose.

This one helps me every day. It also ensures that your code is kept clean. If, for example, you have to display a collection of posts with specific criteria, why compile one function to do it all, when you could have a small function to get the data from the database and a second small function to output the data neatly? Surely that would make your code easier to read and maintain? Yep, it would.

4. Do I need this function here?

This one is about load and separation of code. Why load extra functions when you don’t need them in a specific context? Keeping this in mind ensures that you keep your code in “bite size chunks”, for example, splitting admin-related functions versus frontend functionality.

These items, while simple to adhere to, can alter the way a developer approaches a project, as well as creating a better end result. Most are also common development practices that most developers should be familiar with, making it easier for other developers to read and understand your projects.

Do you have any tips and tricks that help you day to day while developing?

As many of you know, I like to keep my computer as clean as possible. If I don’t use an application, it gets removed and everything that could go onto the machine is thought through before it’s loaded on. Thus, I don’t have PowerPoint, Keynote or anything of the sort… because I don’t need it. Suddenly, I did. Enter SlideRocket.

SlideRocket is a web-based presentation creation tool, similar to PowerPoint or Keynote. They also have a web-app in the Google Chrome Web Store, which is how I got started on it.

The team at SlideRocket have, by the looks of things, put much time, effort and thought into their product and how it interacts with it’s users. While the interface is familiar to anyone who has ever used PowerPoint or Keynote, it doesn’t get in the way of you creating your presentation. At no point did the interface bug me, crash or do anything I wasn’t expecting it to do. This is a welcome change in the arena of presentation tools.

My only concern was the lack of a free export of my presentation (maybe I didn’t see it?). While SlideRocket offers many export options, from PowerPoint to PDF, standalone OS X to standalone Windows, it seems I was unable to export my presentation for free (the above mentioned exports are available after a paid upgrade). While I understand the need for paid upgrades in a free application, I feel it would be advantageous to have some form of basic free export (even just to a set of static HTML files would be good… for simple, in-browser presenting).

To sum up, I really enjoyed my experience with SlideRocket… so much so, in fact, that I decided to blog about it. I needed a presentation quickly and was able to create one in a few minutes, with no hassle. Not only that, but with SlideRocket being a web-app, I could easily add Jeff into the mix and collaborate with him on the slides over the web-app (I mean, we sit next to each other at HQ, but still… collaboration of this nature is invaluable in a presentation tool).

The next time I do a presentation, I’ll most likely jump back into SlideRocket without thinking twice. Thanks for the awesome web-app, guys!

Over the past few years (I’d say, since about 2008), I’ve decided to approach tasks day to day from a different angle. How can we say that a task is “impossible” if we haven’t even yet attempted it?

This is quite a common occurrence in web development… developers looking at a task, attempting to analyze it, getting “stuck” at one point and then moving on, deeming it “impossible”. Why does it have to, all of a sudden, be “impossible”, if you haven’t even attempted it yet? Why settle for the “shortcut” when you could just sit down and develop it how you envision it in the first place?

It’s not about it being “impossible”… you just haven’t found the correct pieces yet, or how they fit together.

As a small example to illustrate how this approach sucks and how it could be improved with a simple re-thinking process, lets take a look at a real-world scenario I experienced last year.

During the development of our “Editorial” theme at WooThemes, we wanted to add functionality to provide the administrator with more control over how many columns their content should be laid out in. This, at first glance, seems quite straight forward. A simple PHP script to cut and re-arrange the words at certain points would do this.

What if the author wants to control where the content is cut off? What if they want virtually infinite possible columns? Well, a shortcode would do this, right?

What if they switch themes? Their content would look ugly and be riddled with a bunch of shortcodes that aren’t in use anymore. In a context like this, where the content is everything, we couldn’t have that.

This is where we got down to the drawing board and found the solution that stands to date. A simple button that adds an HTML comment into the author’s content. We then use a WordPress filter (and regular expression) to convert the HTML comments into semantic HTML tags on the frontend, keeping count of how many columns are being generated and adjusting the layout accordingly. If the administrator decides to switch themes, the HTML comments won’t affect the display of the content, nor the functionality of the WordPress admin. The button itself, as well as how the HTML comments are displayed in the WordPress admin, echoes how WordPress itself handles similar functionality, integrating seamlessly into the authoring experience.

To illustrate how this relates to the “impossible”, many would settle for the shortcode option, as it is the most direct and “obvious” choice, without taking into account the ramifications thereof.

We’ve taken this same approach on many other pieces of functionality within themes and functionality developed at WooThemes. I’ve made this concept a part of my day to day approach to things as well.

To sum it up in a sentence, I’d say, “don’t assume something is ‘impossible’ until you’ve tried it. You never know… you may just get a better result”.

We thought it’d be a cool idea to showcase what the recruits of 2012 have compiled.

Check out what the 2012 recruits put together:

• mtricam
• genevievedavids
• augustinemutale
• margofortune
• suzannesmith42
• justinejooste
• ricardoglittle
• thembil
• nathanieldicks
• gershwin21
• cyrilmphanga

Pretty cool, right?

These are the slides from yesterday’s presentation at the GROW Academy. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

E-mail, as a technology, is broken… and we broke it.

E-mail (electronic mail) was originally intended as a means of sending messages digitally in a similar form as a posted letter. A nice simple envelope with a hand-written or typed up letter, possibly to a pen-pal or maybe a notice to cancel an account of sorts… only digital.

As the internet became more popular, it became more a commonplace item in our lives. Nowadays, we almost assume that someone has at least an e-mail address, let alone a Facebook or Twitter account. E-mail is a common form of communication amongst the majority of us who are hooked into technology… so why can’t we use it correctly?

When e-mailing day to day for business, it is a common occurrence to need to share files of indiscriminate size with colleagues… JPEGs, design files, slideshow presentations, etc. These files can become somewhat larger than expected, ranging from a few (acceptable) kilobytes to several (unacceptable) megabytes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I pose to you this question: would you attempt to show a shoe down a hosepipe?

Exactly. Then why send such large files over e-mail? It just seems impractical.

For instances where this is required, I’d recommend services such as Dropbox or CloudApp, two of the many online storage services available today… for free. If it’s free and easy to use, why not use it, right? This means you need only send a few characters of text in your e-mail, rather than, for example, a 5MB spreadsheet. The e-mail should arrive quicker in the recipient’s inbox, meaning you’ll get a potentially quicker response. It’s a win-win situation.

As e-mail has become such a common and widely used tool in today’s society, it seems to have become easy for us to lose sight of it’s original intended purpose. When you next find yourself needing to send a (possibly large) file to a colleague, friend or family member, I implore you to think back on the tool’s purpose and ask yourself, “am I attempting to show a shoe down a hosepipe?”

The GROW Academy is an initiative to educate and empower the youth of today through technology. The Bootcamp session covers everything from social media and setting up e-mail, all the way through to search engine optimisation and an internet super-user course, for those who wish to continue on with more advanced studies. The GROW website’s “About” page (built on Canvas and Canvas BuddyPress by WooThemes) has a detailed explanation of the initiative and it’s founding partners.

This year, Jeff and I will be making some exciting additions to our presentation. While code, to some, can seem dry and boring, I can assure you that there’s nothing dry or boring about our presentation. We had such a blast at last year’s Bootcamp and are really looking forward to getting into some code with this year’s recruits.

If you’re keen to get involved with GROW, I’d encourage you to contact the GROW Academy and see how you can help out.

Remember: it’s all easy, and there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

“If X happens, do Y”. This could be replaced with, for example, “if you see a new blog post here, send a tweet out telling your followers about it”.

Enter Ifttt… simply named, “If this, then That”. Ifttt puts the internet to work for you. Offering a wide and ever-growing variety of channels to work with, Ifttt makes it possible to link various services to one another, based on various conditions. For example, when this post goes live, a tweet will be sent out, a status update posted to Facebook and a push notification sent to my phone, advising me that the post has been published.

Why stop there?

You could send an e-mail out every day at 5pm. You could sync up files with your Dropbox or keep an Evernote catalog of all the links you post on Twitter or save on Instapaper. The possibilities are only limited by the channels available and your imagination.

Ifttt is currently in beta and is, I believe, invite only.

I’m excited to experiment a bit more with it and see what it can do. If you’ve got an account or get an invite, there are also a bunch of “recipes” (Pre-made tasks, shared by other users) to help you get started.

Do you have an Ifttt account? If so, what are some of the tasks you’ve put the Internet to work on for you?

Image courtesy apple.com

Capes, masks and laserbeam-projecting eyes. Super strength, shape-shifting and characters from throughout history and the future. All this and more exists within the Marvel Multiverse. Yes, you read correctly… multiverse. How could all of this fit into one small device? Believe it or not, the tech geniuses at Marvel Comics have managed to cram all of this and more into the pocket-sized device that is the Apple iPhone.

The new Marvel Comics iPhone app arrived in the iPhone app store in early April of this year. The app allows users to download free and paid (approximately $1.99) comics for reading and archiving on their iPhone. Zooming, rotation and easy navigation between panels are just some of the features that make the comic reading experience on iPhone truly unique. The app was also released for the iPad, which boasts a significantly larger screen than the iPhone, more than likely better suited to eBook and comic book reading.

You see? The iPhone screen is too small for reading!

Incorrect. I thought this as well when I first looked at the Marvel Comics app. The screen is the perfect size for reading comics on the go. Any panels that are really wide can be read by rotating the screen horizontally. I find that I rarely have to zoom in on a panel to read the speech bubbles. While it may not be the same as holding pages in both hands, or the smell of a new comic, the experience within the stories is the same, in my opinion.

Okay, so where’s the catch?

At this point, digital comics purchased on Marvel.com are not synchronised with the app. Thus, a user would have to re-purchase any comics they would like to read on the app. I believe this synchronisation feature is in the pipeline and, plus, it doesn’t really concern me, as I don’t have a digital comics subscription with Marvel. The free comics available through the app are excellent reads and enough to keep one entertained and to afford the user the opportunity of deciding whether or not they like the app through actually experiencing it, instead of forcing the user to purchase comics from the outset, limiting the user’s potential experience within the app.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, I’d definitely recommend getting the Marvel Comics app for it. Give it a whirl and let me know your thoughts.

P.S I’d recommend starting off reading the New Avengers #1 and #2. Both are free within the app at the time of writing this.

The “Foursquare everywhere” service allows users to specify their current city via a text box instead of a dropdown selection menu of available cities. When logged in, however, it is displayed as “elsewhere”. Some form of moderated city addition would be really beneficial here, in my opinion. There are definite pro’s and con’s to the choice of retaining exclusivity within Foursquare. It is due to this choice, I believe, that many potential Foursquare users have chosen Gowalla, which has no restriction of exclusivity on their service and allows check-ins at any point as well as point creation, stamps for checking in, pins for accomplishments and various other features similar to those of Foursquare.

Over the last few years, each year or two has seemed to have had a “buzz word”. The last year or so was Twitter, the concept of tweeting and how it all worked and integrated into the average internet user’s daily online life. Before that was the Facebook craze, people finding old friends from their school days and joining groups about going out on the weekend, discussing popular topics of the moment or how much they love kittens. These trends don’t seem to fade away, but rather seem to overlap in a way, retaining their status while the next big one rises to the fore.

I see 2010 as the “year of the check in”. People will use services like Foursquare, Gowalla and any other services that arise from this growing trend, to share their experiences, find new places, meet people who share common interests and, essentially, as another tool in their social networking tool belt. Geo-tagging of images and tweets, Google Maps extensions for Flickr, Tumblr and WordPress.com exist. This (although having been around for some time now) seems to be the logical next step.