Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.
Materials
Swan Lake
The Swan Lake performed by Sofia Ballet, end of the show. Teato Alighieri, Ravenna, Italy.
Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks
Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks
A nice article by Nettuts+ introducing Sublime Text 2 and its most noteworty features.
I’ve been using it for the last two weeks and suddenly became my text editor of choice.
Octopress Flickr Aside
After moving my blog to Octopress I was looking for a nice way to display my Flickr photos on these pages, but without using the ugly Flickr default banners.
Looking around the web I found a nice javascript example on how to get the latest picture of an user using Flickr APIs so I reworked the code and built an aside for Octopress that displays the latest Flickr pictures on the sidebar.
I created a repository for the code and after the break you’ll find the instructions on how to set it up.
Goodbye WordPress, Hello Octopress
This is my first post published using Octopress after several years of WordPress and I’d like to share the reasons why I choosed to change blogging platform and switch to a statically generated site.
Yes, because what you are reading is pure and static old-school HTML, generated by Octopress on my iMac. And there’s more: everything is served by GitHub trought the Pages feature, completely free, but I’ll talk about this later.
Simplicity
Octopress is a framework built upon Jekyll, the Ruby static site generator that powers GitHub Pages.
Jekyll takes a content directory, parses all articles and pages through a Markdown converter and generates a static website that can be served with almost anything.
Octopress leverages all the power of Jekyll adding a great HTML5 template, mobile ready, and a lot of features like archives, an xml sitemap, code highlighting, external services integration (Twitter, Github, Google+), and much much more.
This solution makes your website really fast because there’s no dynamic code that runs on the server and no databases.
Now I can write articles using MarkDown and the beautiful iA Writer. Furthermore I can easily version my articles on GitHub and backup them using Dropbox.
Reduced costs
One of my new year resolutions is to reduce costs for online services like webhosting, image hosting, backups, etc.
Having static html pages, I can host them on GitHub for free, while now I’m paying nearly 200$ every year for a linux/php/mysql hosting.
Maybe someday GitHub will start charging money for the hosting service, but for now I think is the best I can get.
Obviously I can’t host media files or archive on GitHub so I’ll use Flickr for image hosting and Amazon S3 for other files.
Multiple Categories Filter in WordPress Search
More than two years ago I wrote the post Add a category filter to WordPress search form to explain how I added a category filter to the WordPress search form using WordPress API and some custom code and one of the most asked question was how to add a multiple categories filter to the search form, so here it is, a tutorial that covers all the steps to add multiple category filter to WordPress search.
Learn to Speak Vim – Verbs, Nouns, and Modifiers!
http://yanpritzker.com/2011/12/16/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-nouns-and-modifiers/
A great clever way to use and learn Vim: speak to him!
What Powers Instagram
What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies
One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in the future. This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that we’ve been live, and while there are parts we’re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year.