Author: tracy

Last night, I had the honor of taking the folks at the WordPress D.C. meetup group on a tour of the awesome new features of WordPress 3.6.  Many, many thanks to Jorbin and Nacin for inviting me to do this.  If you missed the meetup, the recording will appear on WordPress.tv soonish.  You can also check out my slides, but since much of the presentation was demoing the features, the slide deck might seem a little thin.

But the best way of experiencing the new hotness in WordPress 3.6 is downloading the beta yourself, install it on a nice sandbox somewhere, and get to playing!

As a web developer, there are some things that consume a disproportional amount of my time (the whole 80/20 rule: 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the remaining 20% of the work takes 80% of the time). One of those things is creating and implementing sprites. Now, I could just use a super-cool tool like Compass to automagically generate and implement my sprites for me, but as I pointed out in a series of articles for the Treehouse Blog, there are some issues that make them kinda difficult to work with, especially when you’re dealing with HiDPI (let’s just call it Retina) displays.

Continue reading “A Small Request for Web Designers” →

I think by now, we all get it. Mobile is big. I mean really big. How big? Take a look at these pictures from St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City from 2005 and this week. Continue reading “Still Doubt Mobile?” →

Exciting news! It’s official, I’m writing a book. A real book, for a real publisher and everything. It’s exciting, yes, but it’s also very, very scary. Now there are deadlines to meet, editors to please, standards to follow, the whole shebang. Continue reading “Did I Mention I’m Writing a Book?” →

Looking for a faster, more powerful way of maintaining your WordPress sites without all the click, click, click? My latest post on the Treehouse blog will show you how to manage your blog from the command line with wp-cli.

No sooner had WP Daily lamented the fact that WPCandy hadn’t posted a new article in over a month, WPCandy responds in force by publishing four articles in a 24 hour span.

WP Daily’s piece went on about some of the other ventures of Ryan Imel’s that seem to have gone dormant as well. I’ve never met Ryan, and he wouldn’t know me from Eve (well, he might recognize me from my gravatar), but it seems to me that he might be the victim of his own success. When you build a site, and a community, that people rely on, it can be hard to continue to live up to expectations.

Continue reading “Expectations” →

Every silver lining has a cloud, it seems, and that’s as true with front end web development as with anything else. So as cool as all that making CSS sprites with Compass is, if you want to get into the least little specialized use-case, you’re in for a world of trouble. I explain here.

Allow me, today, to be incredibly pessimistic on the state of Robert Griffin III’s knee today, as he undergoes reparative/exploratory surgery.

This sucks big time.

Continue reading “The ACL Tear Heard Round the DMV” →

Want to make CSS sprites without having to cut images, mash them together, measure them out, yadda, yadda, yadda? Then check out my latest post for the Treehouse blog, “The Ecstasy and Agony of Compass Sprites, Part 1.”

Sure, I know you all love my “how-to” blog posts I write here, all fifteen of you (yeah, I see the Google Analytics).  But I’m taking my blogging skillz to the next level with my very first ever post to the Treehouse Blog.

Building WordPress Custom Post Types? Wanna add custom fields better than what WordPress can give you out of the virtual box? Read my post about Adding Custom Fields to a Custom Post Type, the Right Way.

Continue reading “Movin’ On Up” →