Despite having a rundown of each day’s activities in an evernote note, I am going to get this blog post written and published before I forget any details. This may be a long post, be warned.

Introduction

As some of you may know, I was recently invited to an in-person documentation sprint with Mozilla, in their California offices. We would be spending three days together working on Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), editing, revising, and creating documentation, demos, and examples for modern web technologies. For those of you who don’t know, MDN is Mozilla’s central location for documenting all of their projects as well as as much possible about the open web. I was thrilled to be invited, but was naturally hesitant because I was not sure how I would afford to make such a trip. However, Mozilla said that they were going to cover the costs of air travel, accomodations, and hotel. Once I realized that all of that was going to be taken care of, there was little that would manage to make me say no, and after confering with my parents, I happily accepted the invite, and started preparing for the trip.

I do not get to travel very much, and when I do, it’s usually not very far, so while I would be working on “web nerd” stuff majority of the time there, I always considered this to be a vacation for myself, in a state that I had never been to. As an added bonus, my good friend and sometimes work partner Amy Crook lived in the area and I knew I’d have the chance to meet her as well. I flew out from Sioux Falls in the early afternoon of Thursday, April 26th, and arrived in San Francisco around 4pm-4:30pm Pacific Standard time. This allowed me enough time to get to the hotel that I’d be staying at, get checked and settled in, and meet up with Amy at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. This building was within a block of the hotel, meaning I was very close to the San Francisco Bay for the duration of my visit. However, I did run into some small stumbling blocks in that my debit card was not liked by the hotel’s system, and I was not going to be able to use it anywhere inside the hotel. This proved to not be an issue at all as I avoided any charges the whole time, and I was able to get some money out of the ATM, just in case I needed some. After a wonderful meal and talk time with Amy, we parted and I spent the rest of the night in the hotel, waiting to hear of official plans for the next day. I didn’t want to go wandering around quite yet because I had just gotten there and knew no one. Finally Friday’s agenda showed up via email.

Friday

Friday’s agenda had us spending time in Mozilla’s main office, located in Mountain View California. In order to get there in time to put in a good hard day’s work, we needed to leave by about 7:15am. It was at this time that I started meeting everyone I’d be spending the weekend with, and getting to know them initially. We had a group of about 10 people, from as close as Los Angeles, and as far away as Bremen Germany. From here, we all proceeded towards the local subway station and made our way south. Once we reached the end of the subway system, we transferred to Caltrain to make the rest of the trip into Mountain View. Once we arrived, we had an initial discussion about what each of us wanted to work on and quick brainstorming for topics that people could choose from.

Firefox logo on the Mozilla Mountain View office wall

This first day was a slow start for me, and I didn’t do any hugely significant contributions, but did stick to minor edits and rewrites to help make topics more clear for others. Lunch was eventually delivered and we all enjoyed some sandwiches by a local business, and was a nice break. Otherwise, beverages and snacks were available in the kitchen areas of the office. Towards the end of the day, I noticed a note in the collaborative etherpad holding the group’s notes, that there was a request for some work to be done on the “Firefox for Devs” section, and some help with docs relating to the new developer tools that are being built into Firefox. Since this is one area I have interest in, I noted that I would work on it more on Saturday. After we were done working for the day, we headed to The Cantankerous Fish for dinner. I am not a seafood fan by any means, but I was not going to make myself the sore thumb of the group, and made do with a Roasted Beet Salad. After dinner, we reversed our path and made our way back to San Francisco. If we all learned anything on our official first day, it’s to make sure that when passing out train tickets, you don’t pass out the receipt as a ticket, and leave the actual ticket behind. Thankfully the crew on the train were kind enough to not kick one of our group members off, and we were able to finish the trip. Finally we got back to the hotel and said our goodnights after working out when we were meeting the next morning. I wasn’t quite ready to retire to my room quite yet, and decided to spend an hour or so wandering around the immediate area and made it my mission to find my way to the San Francisco office a night early. I made a couple incorrect turns, but thanks to GPS, I was able to get back on the right path, and found the location before returning to the hotel for the night.

Saturday

Since we were staying in town on Saturday, we were able to sleep a bit more, and agreed to meet in the lobby around 8:30am before making our way to Mozilla’s San Francisco office. This day was much more productive for me, as I created and wrote up a lot of documentation on creating and managing Firefox profiles for various reasons including testing out Firefox’s multiple development channels. I also managed to get other quick edits in, much like I did on Friday. The work portion of the day was very much like Friday’s, and lunch was once again provided by a local company. To end the work day, we had a brief presentation showing accessability technology used on the MDN website. This proved to be surprisingly useful as together we discovered that a hidden area at the top of the page was the first thing that the tab key went to. This is not optimal for someone who is blind, and I’m sure a bug was filed. Due to our evening plans, the work day was scheduled to end an hour and a half earlier. These plans included a ferry ride up to Sausalito for dinner. This was a very exciting chance for me as I knew we would be riding past the famed Alcatraz prison as well as seeing the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance(we’d be going over the GGB later to get home). Once we reached Sausalito, we had about an hour of time available before our reservation at Poggio, so we all went our separate ways to browse the local shops. This is really the first and only time I spent any money on something other than some coffee or airport food. However, what I did buy was candy, mostly salt water taffy, but also some other hard candies, including Atomic War Heads. Dinner at Poggio was extremely nice and easily the most expensive meal we had together. I went with a very tasty Margherita pizza and beer from Drake’s Brewery. After dinner and much non-business conversation, we took a taxi ride back to the hotel. Once again, we all agreed to meet in the lobby at 8:30am to make our way to the office for our last day together.

Sunday

The last day was pretty straightforward. We kept at it, doing what we could and getting stuff done. Lunch was pizza. Early in the afternoon our first person left, but the rest of us remained. We ended the work day with one last group discussion and thanks for all of the hard work that everyone put in. We originally didn’t have a set plan for that evening, but by the time sunday afternoon came around, we were all ready to find a bar and just kick back and relax together one last time. We made our way over to 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco, and had dinner and beverages. This location provided what ended up being my favorite beer the entire weekend. The name was “Monk’s Blood” and I found it extremely tasty. Sadly, it is not available in South Dakota, and 21st Amendment’s website mentioned that the brew will be going into hibernation in the near future. Finally we all made our way back to the hotel for the last time. I opted to stay in my room the rest of the night due to being tired from the long but productive weekend. My flight was scheduled for 10:50am the next morning. Due to three of our group having flights near the same time, and one of us having rented a car, we traveled to the airport in the morning together.

Conclusion

Overall, I am extremely happy with how everything went and enjoyed every minute of the trip. I am appreciative and thankful that Mozilla would be willing to provide the ability for their community members to get together and help make the internet a better place. Hopefully I can participate again in person in future doc sprints. If not, then there’s always remote help. If you are curious about details regarding who worked on what, you can read the official summary of the weekend at Mozilla Hacks.

This is an evolving list I’m sure, but I just wanted to get the initial one out the door. Feel free to add suggestions in the comments.

• Move myself up to a more competitive position in rates
• Better understand javascript and jquery
• get my finances to a point of stability and being able to afford the same perks that an traditional employer offers
• Vote in the South Dakota Primary Elections this summer, for the only candidate worth their weight in gold.
• Get at least three patches into the core code for WordPress
• Help make top-notch documentation for WordPress in their theme/plugin development areas of the Codex
• Help make top-notch documentation for the Mozilla Developer Network
• Locally network more and meet new people, both personally and professionally.
• Launch Hand.Writtentweets, my too long touted idea.
• Get this site here on an original design
• Drop support for IE7 in my freelance work
• Meet at least one of the WordPress Core commiters
• Attend a big-time WordCamp

I’d like to get some discussion going here.

Is the web design/development industry booming, a bit stagnent, or hurting?

Are you fellow web professionals doing well for yourself, managing to get by, or perhaps hurting a bit, especially with these tough economic times?

This is a follow up post to the one I made last spring, located here

I am not going to go into much recap for where I was at seven months ago. If you want to see details, please go read the post. In short, I was let go by the company I worked for since September, and dove head-first into freelance full time.

It has now been a bit more than half a year since I started swimming around the freelance pool, and I have to say that it is the best thing I could have done at the time. Since then, I have kept my eye open for possible positions with local companies, and even got to go through the interview process with at least one of them, but none came to to fruition. By late summer 2011, I had come to realize and decide that sticking to freelancing is going to be my best option and what’s best for me at this point in my life.

I have been very fortunate during 2011. I feel that I have managed to keep earning a living in web development by finding a handful of people that can benefit from having me be a part of their projects. They have always been the project managers of the work, and I’ve been hired for the developer side of things. This is from a mixture of both local and remote people, which is something I really appreciate. I like that I have been brought up numerous times by local businesses as someone who is both capable and able to do the needed work, and appreciate that they are willing to help me out. I can definitely understand that they can’t afford or don’t choose to hire a person for an in-house position, the steady work to justify just may not be there. Both the company and I benefit through contract work for the projects they do have. It allows me to rub elbows with them and the people involved, as well as help me earn my living, and they get the project done(and done well), and know that they can count on me for possible future work. Lasting relationships are being formed. It’s also personal hope that if some of these companies get to a point where they are looking to grow and can justify bringing in a new web developer to the mix, they can ask me if I would like to have the position, because they know first hand how I work and the quality I produce.

When it comes to the remote contacts, I feel that I am in a sweet spot. Some of them are people who dislike or struggle with CSS and getting the website to be like designed, but are perfectly capable of the actual design process. Others have definitely been capable of all the work I am hired for, but have so much going on that they contract people to do the work so they can focus on other parts of the overall project. With the help of these people, I have gotten the chance to work with people from California all the way to Ireland, on a wide variety of site topics. These topics include personal portfolio redesign, daily deals to save money, and even a karaoke band, among many others.

However, I can not claim web development as my only job. In late August, I also got myself a part time job in town helping a local grocery store, filling in for 10–15 hours a week. For me, the reasons are justifiable, as it gets me out of the house for a bit each shift, and gets me moving around and active, as well as providing a little bit of extra spending money. Who could argue against that?

In the end, I have gotten to work with people from a lot of different areas on a lot of different topics, doing what I love and enjoy, which is aiding in making stuff for the internet, and I don’t plan to stop. Once again, what can I help you with?

Warning, long post

The introduction

If you have ever seen my twitter interaction with Grace Smith then you know that we are pretty endearing to each other as friends and colleagues in the world of freelance. Over the past few years that we’ve known of each other, we have grown to trust each other and rely on the other’s professionalism and knowledge in our respective areas of expertise. Needless to say, we knew we’d work together professionally eventually, it was simply always a question of when.

Grace knew that her professional portfolio website needed a facelift in 2011. However, like with a lot of freelance professionals, personal projects tend to get the back seat frequently to incoming client work. This, she realized, opened the door for her bring myself into the mix and finally get us working on a project together. Grace proceeded to get the site to a certain point within her skills and knowledge, and then created a spec list of more advanced functionality that she had always desired for her site. The topic of this post was not one of her original requests. The “social” page was an idea that I brought to the table due to my desire to tinker and play with social media APIs. Grace ended up loving the idea of a single page showing her activity on many websites and gave me the green-light to have some fun and see what comes to fruition.

The Implementation

The files and code that I’m going to discuss are not the original implementation, but are what is live on Postscript5 Socialise page at the moment. I have taken only the relevant code/markup from the socialise page, as the rest is just a WordPress template for the page. I’m sure there is room for more consistency but I’m going to call that a work in progress.

Text files with the code. Viewing these directly may be easier to read than the Pre tags I’ll use below.

Socialise page code

PHP Classes for Twitter/Dribbble

Retrieving our data

include('ps5socialclass.php');
 
    //Twitter
    $twitter = new Twitter();
    $tweets = $twitter->getTweets('gracesmith', 'tweet-list', '1');
 
    //Dribbble
    $dribbble = new Dribbble();
    $shots = $dribbble->getShots('gracesmith', 'dribbble-shots');
 
    //Google+
    $googledata = file_get_contents("https://plus.google.com/_/stream/getactivities/?&sp=[1,2,'117113113218324562969',null,null,10,null,'social.google.com',[]]");
 
    //remove excess stuff
    $gplus = str_replace(")]}'", "", $googledata);
    $gplus = str_replace('[,' , '["",' , $gplus);
    $gplus = str_replace(',,' , ',"",' , $gplus);
    $gplus = str_replace(',,' , ',"",' , $gplus);
    $gplus_data = json_decode($gplus);
 
    //Sc.ripted
    $scriptedfeed = file_get_contents('http://sc.ripted.com/rss');
 
    //gracesmith.co.uk
    $blogfeed = file_get_contents('http://feeds2.feedburner.com/gracesmith');
 
    //last.fm
    $lastfm = file_get_contents('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/postscript5/recenttracks.rss');
 
    //Flickr     
    $flickr = json_decode( file_get_contents("http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.people.getPublicPhotos&format=json&api_key=KEY_HIDDEN&user_id=27475012@N06&per_page=3&nojsoncallback=1") );
 
    $photoset = array();
    	if(isset($flickr)) {
    		foreach($flickr->photos->photo as $thepic) {
    			$picid = $thepic->id;
    			$photoset[] = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo&api_key=KEY_HIDDEN&photo_id=$picid&format=json&nojsoncallback=1") );
    		}
 
	}

Most of this should be pretty easy to follow. I am using file_get_contents() to pull in our data from the various APIs and RSS feeds, with the exception of Twitter and Dribbble. I stuck with JSON when possible, but it wasn’t available for everything that Grace wanted.

Google+ doesn’t have a proper API quite yet, but searching around showed various methods to get a person’s public stream in JSON format, after a bit of cleanup. That explains the multiple str_replace() calls. Once one gets publicly released, I hope to return to the Socialise page and alter the working code.

Flickr didn’t offer a direct way, that I could see at least, to pull the actual image URLs from a person’s public stream. So I looked over their documentation and found that I could construct the necessary url with the Public Photo stream information and a second API call with each photo’s information. This allowed me to complete what you see on the page and get thumbnail versions of her three latest pictures.

Now that I had all of this information in arrays or objects, I could start to loop through them all and output the appropriate markup.

<div class="twitter">
		<?php if($tweets) { ?>
			<div class="social_icon">
				<a href="http://www.twitter.com/<?php echo $tweets[0]->user->screen_name; ?>" title="Twitter Profile">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Twitter-Social.png" alt="Twitter icon" /></a>
			</div>
 
 
			<?php foreach($tweets as $tweet) { ?>
 
			<div class="fake_lemon_quotes">
 
			<p class="thetweet"><?php echo $tweet->text; ?><br/>
			- <a href="http://www.twitter.com/<?php echo $tweet->user->screen_name; ?>/status/<?php echo $tweet->id; ?>" title="Permalink"><?php echo human_time_diff(strtotime($tweet->created_at)) . ' ago'; ?></a></p>
 
			</div>
 
			<?php } 
 
		} else { ?>
			<div class="social_icon error">
 
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Twitter-Social.png" alt="Twitter icon" />
 
			</div>
 
			<p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with Twitter. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
 
		<?php } ?>
	</div>
 
 
 
    <div class="flickr">
    	<?php if($flickr) { ?>
    		<div class="social_icon">
    			<a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/<?php echo $flickr->photos->photo[0]->owner; ?>" title="Flickr Profile">
    			<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Flickr-Social.png" alt="Flickr icon" /></a>
    		</div>
 
    		<div class="flickrset">
 
			<?php $counter = 1;
 
			foreach($photoset as $photo) { ?>
 
				<?php if($counter < 4) { ?>
 
				<div class="flickrimg <?php if($counter == 3) echo 'lastshot'; ?>">
 
					<a href="<?php echo $photo->photo->urls->url[0]->_content; ?>" title="<?php echo $photo->photo->title->_content; ?>">
					<img src="http://farm<?php echo $photo->photo->farm;?>.static.flickr.com/<?php echo $photo->photo->server; ?>/<?php echo $photo->photo->id; ?>_<?php echo $photo->photo->secret; ?>_m.jpg" class="flickrpreview" alt="Flickr image preview" /></a>
 
					<p><a href="<?php echo $photo->photo->urls->url[0]->_content; ?>" class="flickrlink" title="Shot URL"><?php echo $photo->photo->title->_content; ?></a> 
					<span class="datetaken"><?php echo date("j M", $photo->photo->dates->posted); ?></span></p>
 
				</div>
 
				<?php } $counter++;
 
			} ?>
			</div>
 
		<?php } else { ?>
			<div class="social_icon error">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Flickr-Social.png" alt="Flickr icon" />
			</div>
			<p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with Flickr. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
 
		<?php } ?>
 
	</div>
 
 
 
    <div class="theblog">
 
		<?php if($blogfeed) {
			$x = new SimpleXmlElement($blogfeed);
			$posts = $x->channel->item;
			$counter = 1; ?>
			<div class="social_icon">
				<a href="<?php echo $x->channel->link; ?>" title="<?php echo $x->channel->description; ?>">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/WP-Social.png" alt="Blog icon" /></a>
			</div>
 
			<?php foreach($posts as $post) {
 
            	if($counter == 1) { ?>
 
            	<p class="blogitem"><?php echo $post->title; ?><br/>
 
            	- <a href="<?php echo $post->guid; ?>" title="Permalink to <?php echo $post->title; ?>">Permalink</a></p>
 
            	<?php $counter++;
 
            	}
 
            }
		} else { ?>
			<div class="social_icon error">
 
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/WP-Social.png" alt="Blog icon" />
 
			</div>
 
            <p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with the blog feed. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
 
		<?php } ?>
 
	</div>
 
 
 
	<div class="googleplus">
 
    	<?php if($gplus_data) {
    		$gplus_data = $gplus_data[1][0]; ?>
 
	        	<div class="social_icon">
    	    		<a href="http://plus.google.com/<?php echo $gplus_data[0][16]; ?>/posts" title="Google+ Profile">
    	    	<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Google-Social.png" alt="Google+ Icon" /></a>
 
				</div>
 
			<?php $counter = 1;
			foreach($gplus_data as $plus) { 
 
				if($counter == 1) { ?>
 
				<p class="pluses"><?php echo $plus[20]; ?><br/>
 
				- <a href="https://plus.google.com/<?php echo $plus[21]; ?>" title="Permalink to <?php echo $plus[20]; ?>">Permalink</a></p>
 
				<?php }
 
			$counter++;
 
			}
 
		} else { ?>
 
			<div class="social_icon error">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Google-Social.png" alt="Google+ Icon" />
			</div>
 
			<p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with Google+. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
 
		<?php } ?>
 
	</div>
 
 
 
    <div class="scripted">
 
		<?php if($scriptedfeed) {
			$x = new SimpleXmlElement($scriptedfeed);
			$scriptedposts = $x->channel->item;
			$counter = 1; ?>
			<div class="social_icon">
				<a href="<?php echo $x->channel->link; ?>" title="<?php echo $x->channel->description; ?>">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Tumblr-Social.png" alt="Blog icon" /></a>
			</div>
 
			<?php foreach($scriptedposts as $scripted) {
				if($counter == 1) { 
 
            		$description = explode(": ", $scripted->description);
 
					$description[1] = str_replace('<p>', '', $description[1]);
 
					$description[1] = str_replace('</p>', '', $description[1]);
 
            	?>
 
            	<p class="scripteditem"><span class="scriptedtitle"><?php echo $description[0]; ?></span> - <?php echo $description[1]; ?><br/>
 
            	- <a href="<?php echo $scripted->guid; ?>" title="Permalink to <?php echo $scripted->title; ?> on Sc.ripted">Permalink</a></p>
 
            	<?php $counter++;
 
            	}
 
            }
		} else { ?>
			<div class="social_icon error">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Tumblr-Social.png" alt="Blog icon" />
			</div>
 
            <p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with the Sc.ripted feed. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
 
		<?php } ?>
 
	</div>
 
	<div class="dribbble">
		<?php if($shots) { ?>
			<div class="social_icon">
				<a href="<?php echo $shots->shots[0]->player->url; ?>" title="Dribbble Profile">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Dribbble-Social.png" alt="Dribbble Avatar" /></a>
			</div>
 
			<!--The Lemon would be dunking on you-->
 
			<div class="points">
 
			<?php
 
			$myshots = $shots->shots;
 
			$counter = 1;
 
			foreach($myshots as $shot) { ?>
 
				<?php if($counter < 4) { ?>
 
				<div class="shots <?php if($counter == 3) echo 'lastshot'; ?>">
 
				<a href="<?php echo $shot->short_url; ?>" title="<?php echo $shot->title; ?>">
				<img src="<?php echo $shot->image_teaser_url; ?>" class="shotpreview" alt="Shot preview" /></a>
 
				<p><a href="<?php echo $shot->short_url; ?>" class="shotlink" title="Shot URL"><?php echo $shot->title; ?></a></p>
 
				</div>
 
				<?php } $counter++;
 
			} ?>
			</div>
 
 
		<?php } else { ?>
 
			<div class="social_icon">
 
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/Dribbble-Social.png" alt="Dribbble Avatar" />
 
			</div>
 
			<p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with Dribbble. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
 
		<?php } ?>
 
	</div>
 
	<div class="lastfm">
		<?php if($lastfm) {
			$x = new SimpleXmlElement($lastfm);
 
            $songs = $x->channel->item;
 
            $counter = 1; ?>
 
			<div class="social_icon">
 
				<a href="<?php echo $x->channel->link; ?>" title="<?php echo $x->channel->title; ?>">
 
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/LastFM-Social.png" alt="Last.fm icon" /></a>
 
			</div>
 
			<?php foreach($songs as $song) {
				if($counter == 1) { ?>
				<p class="songlisting">Listened to: <?php echo $song->title; ?><br/>
				- <a href="<?php echo $song->link; ?>" title="Permalink to <?php echo $song->title; ?>">Permalink</a></p>
				<?php $counter++;
 
            	}
 
            }
		} else { ?>
			<div class="social_icon error">
				<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/socialicons/LastFM-Social.png" alt="Last.fm icon" />
			</div>
			<p>We're sorry, we seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties with Last.fm. Hopefully we'll be back shortly</p>
		<?php } ?>
	</div>

Hopefully this is also pretty self exclamatory. I either started looping through the data, or further manipulated the data with SimpleXMLElement for easier looping through the RSS feeds. A lot of the loops above include a counter because they didn’t offer a limit parameter and we only needed the latest post, or in the cases of Dribbble and Flickr, the latest 3 pictures. Each icon on the left of Grace’s socialise page links to her profile page, and then the right shows the latest message/item/pictures. I also included a general error message for each one in case there were any difficulties with retrieving the data.

But wait! You forgot to explain what’s going on with Twitter and Dribbble!

Ah yes, Twitter and Dribbble. On top of my interest in APIs, I have also recently formed interest in Object-orientated Programming in PHP, and viewed this as a chance to try my hand at it a bit more.

class Twitter {
	private $twitter_api_url = 'http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=';
 
	public function getTweets($twitter_username = false, $trans_name = false, $count = false) {
		if(!$twitter_username) return 'Error, you have not provided a Twitter username.';
		if(false === ($tweets = get_transient($trans_name))) {
			$this->storeCache($twitter_username, $trans_name, $count);
		}
		return $this->readCache($trans_name);
	}
	private function readCache($trans_name = false) {
		return get_transient($trans_name);
	}
	private function storeCache($twitter_username = false, $trans_name = false, $count = false) {
		$tweets = wp_remote_get($this->twitter_api_url . $twitter_username . '&include_rts=1&count=' . $count);
		$tweettext = json_decode($tweets['body']);
		set_transient($trans_name, $tweettext, 60*5);
	}
}
class Dribbble {
	private $dribbble_api_url = 'http://api.dribbble.com/players/';
 
	public function getShots($dribbble_username = false, $trans_name = false) {
		if(!$dribbble_username) return 'Error, you have not provided a Dribbble username.';
		if(false === ($shots = get_transient($trans_name))) {
			$this->storeCache($dribbble_username, $trans_name);
		}
		return $this->readCache($trans_name);
	}
	private function readCache($trans_name = false) {
		return get_transient($trans_name);
	}
	private function storeCache($dribbble_username = false, $trans_name = false) {
		$shots = wp_remote_get($this->dribbble_api_url . $dribbble_username . '/shots');
		$shotstext = json_decode($shots['body']);
		set_transient($trans_name, $shotstext, 60*60*24*3);
	}
}

The way that both Twitter and Dribbble work on the Socialise page is to initialize a new instance from the class, and then call the getTweets() and getShots() functions within the classes. Both of these functions utilize the WordPress Transients API to help with caching. So to pull the data for the user, you pass in the user ID, the name you want to use for the transients field in the Options table, and in the case of Twitter, how many tweets you want to retrieve. The classes will check to see if their is any valid cache stored. If there is none, it will make a new API call and set a new cache instance. If there is a valid cache record, it will simply pull that and not touch the API. The Twitter cache is set to expire every 5 minutes, since Grace tends to be a lot more active there than on Dribbble, which has a cache time of 3 days

Hopefully this makes sense to those with PHP experience. However, I’m sure not everyone who reads this will have a lot of experience, so if you have any questions regarding how any of it works, please ask in the comment section. I’ll do what I can to help clarify.

I know that I had fun with coding the socialise page and definitely learned new things in the process. Based on feedback from Grace and from my own twitter stream, the socialise page has been one of the most loved parts of Grace’s re-launched site, right up next to the custom 404 page with 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon.

As a front-end web developer, I am regularly working with clients and fellow freelancers, to create a wonderful looking, well working website that fits the client’s needs. With that, I am working in the browser and utilizing tools and technologies to achieve these goals. When needs are greater than my knowledge allows or budget/time restraints are in place, plug-ins are utilized to help get the job done in the end. With the proliferation of WordPress as more than a blogging utility, many use needs have risen, and many smart developers have produced the tools to fill those needs. It is with this idea that I write this post.

If you are a WordPress user, whether as an end user or a website designer/developer, what are some areas in your use that you find yourself regularly needing filled? I would love to hear from you with some of your needs that you’d love to have a plug-in solution for. I am interested in expanding my knowledge and I feel that developing some plug-ins would be a wonderful way to go about this. However, I don’t want to just re-create, for example, another Twitter WordPress plug-in. I’d prefer to do what I can to help fill a unique need or one that hasn’t been well addressed.

So please, let me know of any ideas you have or needs you’d like filled, and I’ll see what I can do for you. Hopefully it results in a plug-in for you and others who have the same need.

Here is a list of the Developer/Designer blogs in my RSS list in no particular order. Feel free to suggest more if you want!

• instantShift  http://www.instantshift.com
• Adactio: Journal  http://adactio.com/journal/
• For A Beautiful Web  http://forabeautifulweb.com/
• The Mozilla Blog  http://blog.mozilla.com
• Gadgetopia  http://gadgetopia.com/
• HTML5 Doctor  http://html5doctor.com
• Yoast & The WordPress Podcast  http://yoast.com/
• iDesign Studios  http://www.idesignstudios.com
• camen design  http://camendesign.com/
• WP Engineer  http://wpengineer.com
• Six Revisions  http://sixrevisions.com
• i love typography  http://ilovetypography.com
• Web Designer Magazine  http://www.webdesignermag.co.uk
• SimpleBits  http://simplebits.com
• Choose Opera  http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/
• Smashing Magazine  http://www.smashingmagazine.com
• Smashing Apps  http://www.smashingapps.com
• Andrew Nacin  http://andrewnacin.com
• Dev Opera  http://dev.opera.com/feeds/rss/articles
• Vectortuts+  http://vector.tutsplus.com
• Nettuts+  http://net.tutsplus.com
• Mobiletuts+  http://mobile.tutsplus.com
• Justin Tadlock  http://justintadlock.com
• WordPress Nettuts+  http://net.tutsplus.com
• phpied.com  http://www.phpied.com
• Nikki Jeske  http://snailbird.com
• Jonathan Snook  http://snook.ca/
• Post Haste  http://posthaste.henkinschultz.com
• Dave Rupert  http://daverupert.com
• Matt Martz  http://sivel.net
• Clients From Hell  http://clientsfromhell.net/
• Speckyboy Design Magazine  http://speckyboy.com
• Think Vitamin  http://thinkvitamin.com
• WordPress Development Blog  http://wordpress.org/news
• Webmonkey  http://www.webmonkey.com
• Alex Sexton  http://alexsexton.com
• John Resig  http://ejohn.org
• Fleeting Epiphanies  http://blog.w3conversions.com
• WpRecipes  http://www.wprecipes.com
• Color + Design Blog by COLOURlovers  http://www.colourlovers.com/blog
• Mathias Bynens  http://mathiasbynens.be/notes
• Microformats  http://microformats.org
• Nimbupani Designs  http://nimbupani.com/
• Cognition by Happy Cog  http://cognition.happycog.com/
• YDN Blog  http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn
• Paul Irish  http://paulirish.com
• Tammy Hart Designs  http://www.tammyhartdesigns.com
• mezzoblue  http://mezzoblue.com/
• Rebecca Murphey  http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com
• Erika Napoletano is Redhead Writinghttp://www.redheadwriting.com
• A Blog Not Limited  http://ablognotlimited.com
• Mark Jaquith  http://markjaquith.wordpress.com
• Oli Studholme  http://oli.jp/
• Aaron Brazell  http://technosailor.aaronbrazell.com
• Lisa Sabin-Wilson  http://lisasabin-wilson.com
• Perishable Press  http://perishablepress.com
• Stubbornella  http://www.stubbornella.org/content
• Dan Beam  http://danbeam.org/blog
• Michelle Thorne  http://thornet.wordpress.com
• Webdesigner Depot  http://www.webdesignerdepot.com
• Eric Meyer  http://meyerweb.com/
• Web Designer Wall  http://webdesignerwall.com
• Faruk Ateş  http://farukat.es/
• Grace Smith  http://www.gracesmith.co.uk
• Molly Holzschlag  http://mollydotcom.tumblr.com/
• SpyreStudios  http://spyrestudios.com
• Standardista  http://www.standardista.com
• Digging into WordPress  http://digwp.com
• Bruce Lawson  http://www.brucelawson.co.uk
• Graphic Content  http://graphiccontent.squarespace.com/graphic-content/
• Lea Verou  http://leaverou.me
• Christian Heilmann  http://www.wait-till-i.com
• Vectips  http://vectips.com
• Web Design Ledger  http://webdesignledger.com
• Remy Sharp  http://remysharp.com
• CSS-Tricks  http://css-tricks.com
• Viper007Bond.com  http://www.viper007bond.com
• Pro Blog Design  http://www.problogdesign.com
• A List Apart  http://www.alistapart.com/articles/
• 1stwebdesigner  http://www.1stwebdesigner.com
• Onextrapixel  http://www.onextrapixel.com
• The GitHub Blog  http://github.com/blog
• Darcy Clarke  http://darcyclarke.me
• WPCandy  http://wpcandy.com
• The WHATWG Blog  http://blog.whatwg.org
• Mozilla Hacks  http://hacks.mozilla.org
• Web Designer Online  http://www.webdesigneronline.co.uk
• Chromium Blog  http://blog.chromium.org/

Edit: It looks like mobile safari doesn’t like vcf files and will throw an error when trying to work with them. From what I can tell with some research, the app QRafter, with advanced functionality, can properly handle the downloaded file. You can read more here Download vcard on iPhone with Qrafter

Apple, get your shit together with this topic

With the recent job changes from this spring, documented here ([link id=‘243’]), I found need for a refreshed resume/portfolio site. I decided that I wanted to create an experience with the information presented, and break away from traditional methods used to show resumes or portfolios. I hope it ends up remaining my go-to spot to find out everything a company or person needs to see if I’d make a good fit on their team or someone worth collaborating with.

The proliferation of smartphones, holding capabilities unforeseen by previous generations, provided a chance for me to make my new resume website very mobile and smartphone friendly. I am proud to say that it renders very decently on a small screen. QR Codes are also very in vogue, and can hold many different forms of data. This fact got me thinking about the information on my resume site and how I could further share it.

My contact information is the perfect chance to merge these technologies. I know that address books utilize vcards. This is usually done through opening a file with a .vcf file extension. VCF generation is simple and with the help of online generators, anyone can create one for themselves. For the one that I have linked from the resume site, I used vcardmaker.com. For this case, I just entered all of the same contact information that I had at the top of the site. After I downloaded the generated file, I uploaded to my server space and copied the resulting url to the file for use with a QR code.

I originally wanted to use JQuery-QRcode as it creates the code with zero image use and would be extremely easy to update as time went on. However, there were a couple issues with it that resulted in no output of the QR code, so for now, alternatives will be used. I will definitely keep my eye on this jquery plugin and see about returning to it in the future.

I decided to go with Zxing Appspot for creating a QR code image linked to my .vcf file. Simply choose “URL” for the contents, paste in the .vcf url and hit generate. All that’s left is saving the resulting QR code image to be put into the site.

All that is left for this is adding it to the site and providing some styling. I decided that I didn’t want it showing all the time, so with a bit of jquery, I set up a link for users to click in order to toggle it on screen and then off again once done.

Now, all that a person needs to do is use their smartphone’s bar code scanner app to scan the QR code and download the .vcf file. Once done, they simply need to click on the file and your phone should offer to open with your address book. All of the contact information in the .vcf file should then be imported into a new address book entry.

I feel that this is a novel use for QR codes and makes adding someone to an address book a matter of a few clicks and a minute of time, instead of requiring someone enter all of the contact info manually. Hopefully others will see this as a good idea and implement it for their own online resumes.

This post has been stewing for just about three weeks now, and I realize that if I’m ever going to post it, it needs to be now. Out of respect to those involved, I will not list names or the official company name. From here on out, the company will be called “dayjob”.

On March 3rd, 2011, my time at dayjob came to an unexpected end. Reason given was stated as being a business decision, nothing personal, and a hard decision at that. No matter how my mind may try to reason for my departure, and what reasons bolstered the decision, I am believing that it was business only.

I was three days shy of my seven month anniversary, and after I was notified that morning, I was very nervous about my immediate future. I know that I did not want to revert back to my previous job state where I was working 40hrs/week in a completely unrelated field. I have had my foot in the field for seven months and I’d really like to stay there.

My time at dayjob helped me realize what truly interested me in the area of web creation, and, looking forward, I will be able to weed out companies that do not hire for my skills or interests. Front-end web development, WordPress, modern html/css techniques, the semantic web, API interaction, and creating tools for others to use are a lot of areas I want to explore with my time.

While I do have a degree in Graphic Design, it is not an area I want to attempt mastering, and will fall back to mostly hobby. I will never be able to shake my love for good vector art <3. These realizations are a huge step forward regarding job search as I can focus directly and not try applying for such a wide spectrum of specialities. That is how I approached job hunting my first 3.5 years in Sioux Falls.

First task I did once I returned home on March 3rd was locate my resume and get it updated. It definitely felt good removing experience listings dating back to 2007, when I was still in college. Given the direction and nature of web development, I felt that simply a pdf/doc resume was not enough in 2011. I am not excluding a printable resume, but an online version, I feel, helps to show what I can do as well, through the resume itself. That said, I refashioned my [link id=‘109’] page. While visually, it’s notably less than what I originally envisioned in my head, I find the simplicity more appealing. I was also able to control the markup and provide semantic meaning for the various parts using hcard, hresume, and hcalendar microformats.

After revising my resume, I did what any web creator in 2011 does, I went to social networks. I informed people, that I trust, about what had happened, and kindly asked them to keep an eye out for any opportunities that they could refer me to. Freelancing as a primary source of income was also immediately considered, until I could find another job locally. Tweeting about my sudden availability was done, and thankfully some people contacted me pretty quickly regarding possible work. One hasn’t had any work yet that they’d be able hand off to me, but they know my rates and have me down as available. Hopefully there will be something soon. Miss Loren Depalma saw a tweet from Miss Grace Smith and Loren contacted me over Facebook about helping her with some functionality for an art gallery she was putting up at lorendepalma.me. I am proud to say that the site turned out very well and a working business relationship has formed between Loren and I. I look forward to working with her more in the future.

I know that I am thankful for everyone who has contacted me about work, both mentioned above and some not mentioned. I am eternally thankful to them for bringing me in and I hope I am producing a quality even higher than they hoped for or expected . I was extremely touched by everyone’s generosity, especially with most of this happening the same day.

Dayjob did provide a severance check to me, and that, plus the regular paycheck I had just received, has covered most of the monthly expenses for March. Thanks to that coverage, most freelance income earned during the rest of March is going to be used to pay my mid-April bills. It’s a rare moment when I am able to work ahead like that. Frugal living is also a method I am trying my best at to keep expenses low, though coffee is still a hard item to avoid splurging on.

I am still worried and nervous about what lies ahead financially, and I fear that I won’t be able to find enough regular work to sustain monthly bills. However, I have finally increased my quoted hourly rate, which has been notoriously low at around $15/hr or below. I also honestly wouldn’t argue too much with the idea of a part-time only unrelated job to help cover most bills, and in my time away from that, focus on web development. That way, I still have most of my time for doing what I enjoy, as well as time for personal projects that I have going.

To wrap up this long update, I am forever thankful for what dayjob provided me, as it got me much needed on the job experience and got me away from being a security officer, which was not doing very well for personal morale. I really don’t know what my immediate future holds or where my feet will take me, but it is at least a little exciting to see where it will lead. I may actually find this to be a great opportunity to get away from always doing agency style work, and find opportunities for unique ventures.

My name is Michael Beckwith, and I make things for the internet. What can I help you with?