On this week’s RP3 Magnetisms, I write about the art of the compromise, or how to balance a client’s wishes against your agency’s expertise:
Author: tracy
Taking My Passions to South Beach
#Announcement: this spring I'm taking my passion for #WordPress and #RWD to south beach and speaking at @wordcampmiami.
— tracy rotton (@taupecat) February 17, 2014
NSCorp.com Wins iNova Award
RP3’s big summer project — the Norfolk Southern corporate redesign — just won gold in the 2013 iNOVA awards for best redesign in technology and services. Yay, team!
Announcing a New Plugin: Flipboard Magazine Widget
Hey you, yes you! Take a look at my sidebar. See that magazine-cover-looking-thingy? That’s thanks to my new plugin, Flipboard Magazine Widget. You can grab it over here at the WordPress plugin repository.
Continue reading “Announcing a New Plugin: Flipboard Magazine Widget”
The Trouble with Jetpack
I’m not the first to write a post like this, nor will I be the last. But Jetpack, the ubiquitous plugin from Automattic, is likely one of the most polarizing collections of code in the WordPress universe. And in recent days it has occupied its own special level of hell for me.
Watsonbombing
Watsonbombing: when your response to a request for help consists solely of IM’ing a URL to a vaguely-documented API with the implication, “Get to it, kid.”
“Stop bitching and fuckin adapt”
I think I just wrote my fastest plugin ever.
Inspired by a Twitter request from Jeff Chandler, I adapted Matt Mullenweg’s classic “Hello Dolly” plugin to instead stream the words of wisdom from the NFL’s now most famous cornerback.
(For this, Matt, I’m truly, truly sorry.)
Download the awesomeness from my GitHub account and let Richard Sherman’s rant become a part of your WordPress admin experience.
(P.S., I’m still looking for that “Stop bitching and fuckin adapt” inspiration poster.)
CodeKit and Grunt and Gulp, Oh My!
[comment]Gather ’round children, and I’ll tell you how we did it back in my day. When I was a youngin’, not much older than you are now, we didn’t have any of that fancy CSS. JavaScript neither. PHP? Why, that was just a glimmer in Rasmus’ eye.
What we had was HTML, plain and simple. We had Mosaic, gray backgrounds, and animated construction guy GIFs. And we liked it that way!
Nowadays, we have CSS, Sass and LESS. We have CoffeeScript that compiles to JavaScript, and JavaScript that transforms back into CoffeeScript. We have minified, uglified, compartmentalized, and prioritized. And we have about a dozen different ways to do all of that.[/comment]
There is no denying that CSS was the first great revolution in the front end web world. Without it, think of what the web would look like; most likely, it would have remained limited to its academic origins, where style and design play a much less significant role than the multifaceted, visual web we have today.
In recent years, CSS has undergone a revolution of its very own, as preprocessors such as Sass, LESS, Stylus and others change our methodologies in creating our stylesheets. These tools allow for greater efficiency both in terms of creating the CSS and the final product that’s produced. I was slow to jump on the CSS-preprocessor bandwagon, but I am fully on board these days.
Of Books & Podcasts…
Quick update! Due to travel schedules, my podcast appearance will be on March 27. Please adjust your calendars.
Great news, everybody! Actually, terrible news. Well, a little bit of both, but more great than terrible. I hope.
Home Sweet Home
Today I returned home from my exile to the West Virginia mountains after receiving my iodine-131 treatment last week for thyroid cancer. While there was certainly a “vacation” aspect to the whole thing (yes, I got to do a lot of skiing, thank you very much), it’s good to be home and rejoin my family.
It’s kind of a weird thing to be away because you’re “sick,” but not really be sick. On Monday, a coworker set up a webcam so I could listen in on an all-hands meeting (I was still working remotely, after all), and one of the account managers asked how I was. I was fine, my coworker said. “She’s been skiing,” he told her. I suddenly felt a little guilty that I was spending a week at a ski resort in January, ostensibly for health reasons. It all seemed kinda shady.