2013 - Leonid Mamchenkov

WordPress 3.8 plans responsive redesign of admin area

WordPress 3.8 beta 1 has been announced a couple of days ago. As always, lots of fixes and improvements are making their way to the new version. But for me personally, the major change is the planned redesign of the admin area with responsive layout and support for mobile:

The new admin design, especially the responsive aspect of it. Try it out on different devices and browsers, see how it goes, especially the more complex pages like widgets or seldom-looked-at-places like Press This. Color schemes, which you can change on your profile, have also been spruced up.

Why is this so important? – you might wonder. After all, there are native WordPress apps for both iOS and Android. The thing here is that some WordPress themes and plugins modify the admin interface, and these changes aren’t supported by the mobile apps. For example, when writing a new post, post formats might be different between what’s supported by the web admin interface and mobile interface. With a responsive web design of admin interface, I’ll be able to use the web interface on my mobile and thus have the same options. It’s possible to do it now with a table – where the screen is slightly larger, but using it on the mobile currently is the pain in the back. So, that’s why I’m looking forward to WordPress 3.8.

HostGator.com website hosting for $0.01

This is not something that I personally need, as I have a dedicated server from RapidSwitch for all my hosting needs, but the offer still looks quite good for those cases when you need quick and simple web hosting for a site or two. I clicked through the Google ads to check it out and its true – HostGator.com offers a website hosting (not to be confused with VPS), for only 1 cent per month.

This is not bad at all for the unlimited disk space and bandwidth. And just in case you don’t trust them with your penny, they promise a 45 day money back guarantee.

John Carmack talks about the physics of light and rendering

For a while now I am thinking that you don’t really know something until you can easily explain it or talk about it, in simple words and with people who might not even know one thing about the subject. John Carmack is well known and respected in the field of computer graphics and gaming, and watch him talk about light and rendering! I now nothing of it, and I watch this whole talk, glued to the screen, catching every word.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UKhR0T6cs]

Apart from the physics of light, this provokes thought on other subjects too. The complexity of simple things comes to mind. Something that we all observe every day and seldom think about – turns out to be so complex. The importance of computer games is another subject. I’m a big fan of Quake in particular, and I’ve heard a billion times people asking questions on why is this important at all and how this makes the world better. Well, I guess, that question is easy to answer now. Some game makers push the technology, push the science, and they do make the world better. But they need us – gamers, once in a while, to pay for that and to provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

An Introduction To Full-Stack JavaScript

There is more JavaScript discussion and references in this article than I can handle in go. Reading it parts is recommended, if you are not too experienced with the recent explosion in all kinds of JavaScript tools and frameworks.