Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Alex King Rememberances

I’ve just discovered some sad sad news.  Alex King, one of the bigger people in the WordPress community for years, is fighting a stage 4 cancer battle.  Alex is well known for a few things, most notably for his design of the Share icon, his contributions to WordPress core, and his work as a founder of Crowd Favorite.

I’ve never met Alex or spoke to him directly, but his work is a constant inspiration.  From the early days, when I was promoting WordPress as a flexible platform for web application development, I used his work for powerful examples.  I’ve also built projects using Carrington Core framework.  This blog ran both Carrington Blog and FavePersonal themes for quite some time.  I’ve used Capsule for a while to manage my code snippets and project notes, and I’m sure I’ll use it again.  I’ve used (and still using) quite a few plugins that he was involved with – Social, Twitter Tools, Old Post Alert, Delink Comment Author, and others.  I’ve been an occasional reader of his blog.  And, of course, like anyone else using WordPress, I’ve benefited from his work.

The time has come to return a favor.  Alex is compiling some information about his work and career for his 6 year old daughter to learn more about him.  So if you met Alex, communicated with him, or benefited from his work – take a couple of minutes to share your experience.  He well deserves that.

To Alex: thank you for all your work.  It’s inspirational and educational.  Stay strong!

Efficient Image Resizing With ImageMagick

ImageMagick is one of my favorite tools ever.  I’ve used for years for a whole lot of different things – from simple image resizing, through animation generation, to palette manipulation.  And still, I don’t really know it that well, so when I see articles like this – “Efficient Image Resizing With ImageMagick“, I get excited.  Not only it gives you a better way of doing things, but it also explains the path of how to get there.  From a simple command like:

convert input.jpg -resize 300 output.jpg

to something as advanced as this:

mogrify \
  -path OUTPUT_PATH \
  -filter Triangle \
  -define filter:support=2 \
  -thumbnail OUTPUT_WIDTH \
  -unsharp 0.25x0.25+8+0.065 \
  -dither None \
  -posterize 136 \
  -quality 82 \
  -define jpeg:fancy-upsampling=off \
  -define png:compression-filter=5 \
  -define png:compression-level=9 \
  -define png:compression-strategy=1 \
  -define png:exclude-chunk=all \
  -interlace none \
  -colorspace sRGB \
  -strip INPUT_PATH

What’s even more exciting is that it looks like this optimization will make its way into WordPress 4.4, together with some other improvements for the responsive images.

Super cool!

HTTP Status Dogs

HTTP Status Dogs – Hypertext Transfer Protocol response status codes. And dogs.  If you are even a tiny bit familiar with HTTP or dogs, this will put a smile on your face.  I’m thinking to use these as default error pages from now on.

502

Everyone needs a website

Matthew DiIulio shares a few good reasons for why “Everyone Needs A Personal Website“.  All are valid, even if simplistic:

Using social media for your web presence works wonderfully, but you don’t own and control your content. At any time your social media account could be deleted, and then your long time web presence is gone.

Seth Godin’s post “You are what you share” takes a different, deeper, world-changing approach:

Sharing an idea you care about is a generous way to change your world for the better.

The culture we will live in next month is a direct result of what people like us share today. The things we share and don’t share determine what happens next.

As we move away from the top-down regime of promoted movies, well-shelved books and all sorts of hype, the recommendation from person to person is now the most powerful way we have to change things.

I recommended blogging to everyone for years using a completely different set of reasons, varying from improved language and writing skills, through wider social and professional network, to useful memory dumping.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why you should do it.  Everyone has their own reasons.  But one thing I do agree with the gentlemen above – do have your own web presence, and keep sharing your stuff.

A Curated List of Tech Podcasts

It’s been a few month since I reviewed my podcast subscriptions.  Driving over 150 kilometers every working day gives me plenty of time to readjust my tastes and preferences.  Just doesn’t leave me too much time to actually do something about it.

Podcasts are easy to subscribe to.  Once you find the ones you like.  Finding the ones you like takes forever though.  Here’s where WP Tavern’s post “Awesome Geek Podcasts: A Curated List of Tech Podcasts” comes in handy.  Cause it provides not one, but two lists of podcasts:

  1. The best WordPress podcasts ultimate list
  2. A curated list of Awesome Geek Podcasts.

And while I’m familiar with many on that list, there’s a tonne of those that I haven’t heard, or heard about.

Any other recommendations?