Hey New Mexico.
Ignite is coming to Santa Fe. Ignite is a great speaking event, with a bunch of presenters on different topics giving quick presentations. They each get 20 slides that auto advance after 15 secs. Come out for the night to Sf Complex, meet some great people, and have some fun. The event starts at 6:30pm on April 29th. check out ignitesantafe.com for more info.
Hope to see you there.
Update (8/2/09): I did find some unofficial info about the google voice api. I still want more, but if you want to send sms and place calls, it can be done. Unofficial API docs
Google voice is the newly integrated grandcentral.com, which google bought long ago for the core technology. Google voice is awesome. Same great features, plus many more. I’m loving the SMS feature. You can interact with your friends via sms through google’s web interface. It is like gmail 160 characters at a time. Threading, search, etc.
Now I want that bought to XMPP. Imagine having a feature that allowed you to receive and send sms through your IM client, to contacts that are already on your list. I’ve used other service to take SMS’s to IM before (AOL has had this for years, and iChat use this directly) But this would be transparent to the person you are talking to. They would see the SMS coming from your google voice number (which there is talk of porting numbers to google voice). It would be as if you replied from your phone.
Tie in some features to only send to IM when I’m present, otherways forward to my phone, and I think we have a great feature. Google, please create a google voice api, and we will have features like this.
This came to my attention on Twitter yesterday thanks to @idesignstudios. The question is, how do you have a the link text and the page title different? Perhaps the In the Menu it should say “About” but the Page title should say more, perhaps “Read All about our Company”. You dont want the long title in the menu. How can this be done in wordpress?
Selene (@idesignstudios) found an answer to this here(cssglobe.com). The solution works, but it involves modifying core wordpress files. Which I would strongly recommend avoiding. Wordpress, as everyone knows, tends to release a lot of updates (Yes I have run into plenty of update fatigue myself). So dont make your update harder. When you upgrade, all of the core files will be overwritten, and you will have to remember to apply the patched code again. Perhaps having to lookup the article again, find the right file, find the right line… Can you see that might be messy 6 months or a year after doing it the first time?
But I’m not here to complain. In fact the code and idea on cssglobe.com handle the problem very well. However let’s move that into a plugin so when we upgrade the code our changes wont be overwritten. Here is my plugin for just that: Page_Title_Changer.zip
Here is an example:
I took 20mins to throw this together, so if you find something that doesnt work out as it should, send me an email, I’ll take a look.
I attended wordcamp in Denver yesterday. Wordcamp is Wordpress event that helps introduce bloggers and developers to the features of Wordpress, the community that is built around Wordpress, and other bloggers / developers in your area. It was a great event, hosted at DAM (Denver Art Museum). The content will be published on Wordpress.tv (Every session was filmed).
A few things that I learned:
Carrington theme (which is misleading as it is more then a theme) looks awesome. It modifies a bunch of wordpress functionality making some of the theming pains experienced by developers go away. The big feature of it is the ability to apply themes simply based on tag/categories/author/roles/post/pages/etc . You can find more info here.
Wordpress has a very healthy community. There are many developers(150 developers contributed to 2.7), millions of hits on wordpress blogs per day, both on wordpress.com and single installs. The second largest blog on wordpress.com is CNN…the largest, http://icanhascheezburger.com/
Wordpress: A Blog, a CMS, or a social network? Wordpress has more flexibility then I have ever given it credit for. With projects like Buddy Press (Which in Matt’s own words he says Automattic is ‘long’ on buddy press) wordpress shows that is more then just a blog, really it is a great core to build anything on.
Check http://central.wordcamp.org/ for a list of upcoming wordcamps. If there is one in your area, I recommend attending it.