Blog
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WTF is dial-up grandpa?
August 27th, 2010 at 4:40pm | No CommentsToday is my birthday. And although birthdays can be great for the gifts and attention, they are also a reminder of years gone by. In my annual birthday chat with my mom, I was telling her how my work was going and we started reminiscing of the challenges I faced when I was doing internet work in my teens. I thought I'd share. read more »
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Encrypting credit card information with OpenSSL
July 26th, 2010 at 9:10am | 2 CommentsRecently, when I researched the encryption of credit card information, or card holder data (CHD) as it’s known in the industry, I was somewhat frightened by what I found. Almost every tutorial suggested using MySQL’s AES functions. While AES is an excellent symmetric-key algorithm, a symmetric-key algorithm is not a great choice for storing CHD long ... read more »
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What does it cost to build a web site?
April 4th, 2010 at 11:08am | 8 CommentsI’m often asked by friends and family, “What does it cost to build a web site?” And although I’m sure none of them will read this, at least now I have something to point them to. Asking “What does it cost to build a web site?” is a lot like asking, “What does it cost to ... read more »
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Fix WordPress “Missed schedule” error on Media Temple (dv) / Plesk
July 18th, 2009 at 10:37pm | 9 CommentsAfter a lot of debugging, I was able to figure out that Media Temple’s (dv) configuration was responsible for the “Missed schedule” errors I was getting in WordPress. By default, the /etc/hosts file looks like this: 127.0.0.1 yourdomain.com yourdomain localhost localhost.localdomain To execute cron tasks, WordPress needs to post to the URL http://yourdomain.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron. This isn’t ... read more »
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Developing SharURL: Lessons learned developing a new startup
July 6th, 2009 at 1:15pm | 7 CommentsLast year around this time I decided to pursue an idea for a simple file sharing service without any real planning. Although it shouldn’t have taken more than a few months of part-time work, I just managed to launch SharURL today (you will need this invite code to signup: p9q1h). I made a lot of mistakes ... read more »
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Micro templates in PHP
June 8th, 2009 at 3:36pm | No CommentsHave you ever had the pleasure of reading PHP code with lines and lines of HTML jammed into strings and a ton of escape characters? I have. In fact, a lot of WordPress plugins are guilty of this. Perhaps you’re guilty of it yourself? This article will show you how to separate your HTML markup ... read more »
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Photoshop Tip: Hiding all other layers
May 17th, 2009 at 1:16pm | No CommentsIt's sometimes funny what new things you discover even after years of using the same tool. Photoshop happens to be one of those tools. The following tip is just a little something I figured out recently (by accident) that has really helped me when cutting up PSDs. read more »
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Redesigned and reorganized
February 8th, 2009 at 6:12pm | No CommentsIf you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed the changes I’ve been making to this site over the past few months. A redesigned header, a new portfolio page, and this past weekend, I launched the new homepage. It’s been just over a year since the last redesign. Last year, I added a ... read more »
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Twitter Importer for WordPress
February 5th, 2009 at 7:12pm | 35 CommentsUpdate: I’ve updated this importer to be a WordPress 3.0 plugin. Download it at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-importer/ Thanks to Stephanie for helping out. In an effort to regain control of my data, I’ve written an importer for WordPress which grabs all your tweets and inserts them into WordPress as posts. It allows you to choose the category ... read more »
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Font linking, type foundries, and DRM
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:45pm | 5 CommentsChris Shiflett recently wrote a great article summing up the current state of font linking. Font linking is simply using the @font-face statement in CSS to link to a font file, which can then be used by the browser to render text. Though the specification has been in CSS2 for over a decade, font linking ... read more »