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The Top 50 Stories Since the Invasion of Iraq

War is over, if you want it. ~John Lennon

This is a time of year, as we draw 2011 to a close and embark on 2012, to reminisce about the events of the last year. It's a tradition followed by journalists, bloggers, and opinionistas alike. But since today marks the day where the War in Iraq is officially drawn to a close, I thought I'd share some of the top stories of the past nearly 8 years. The world has changed drastically. For those who served, bled and maybe died… we salute you.

A mere 9 months after the U.S. Invasion began, Sadaam Hussein is captured by Special Forces and turned over to the interim Iraqi Government. He was tried and convicted for crimes against humanity and was later executed by hanging.

NASA Rover Opportunity confirms that the area where she landed on the surface of Mars once was covered in water. The discovery was m

Updated: December 19th, 2011 at 04:29 am  |  Posted: December 15th, 2011 at 02:13 pm
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TUTORIAL: Adding an oEmbed Provider to WordPress

I don't often write tutorials. I probably should. But normally it's only when someone asks me something and I think, "Hey, self… you should write up how to do this". As if a book wasn't enough.

Last night I was at the Austin Web Holiday party, a gathering of some 15+ technical meetup groups cross-pollinating over beer and socializing. I was introduced to one guy (can't remember his name!) who had built a video site and enabled it for oEmbed. He couldn't understand why WordPress wouldn't just automatically let users use his videos, like it does for YouTube, Vimeo, etc. The full list of default oEmbed providers are listed here.

WordPress doesn't allow automatic use of oEmbed for security reasons. Otherwise, someone could build a video service stuffed with malicious code that could potentially access your database or create a man in the middle attack or worse. WordPress.com certainly doesn't allow arbitrary

Updated: December 19th, 2011 at 04:29 am  |  Posted: December 14th, 2011 at 01:53 pm
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10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.3

WordPress 3.2 has been downloaded a killer 12M+ times. WordPress as a whole continues to grow and is touted to be in the approximate 14% of the web zone. That's ridiculously huge and it astounds me how big the projects footprint has become in the 7 years I've been around the community. Well done to all involved!

With that said, WordPress 3.3 is just around the corner and, as usual, it's chock full of goodies for everyone. I'd say that the notable changes for developers are the most significant. Improved metadata handling, improved SQL tools, improved cache API and deprecation of several venerable functions are all changes that developers should be aware of.

This article touches mostly on the user ex

Updated: November 20th, 2011 at 06:49 pm  |  Posted: November 17th, 2011 at 02:22 pm
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TUTORIAL: Using Sass and Compass for managing CSS in WordPress

I don't often write tutorials but since the rebuild of the WP Engine website some months ago, I have been turned on to the use of a brilliant combination of tools made for development in a Ruby on Rails environment. That doesn't mean we can't make it work for WordPress too.

The tools are Compass combined with Sass (which means Sytactically Awesome Stylesheets or some random crap like that).

Sass is cool because it lets you do a whole bunch of stuff with CSS that you couldn't normally. It's a kind of abstraction layer above CSS which means you can write normal CSS if you want, but then why wouldn't you just write normal CSS instead of using Sass?

I'm getting slightly ahead of myself, but With Sass you can do awesome things like variable/placeholders which is aweso

Updated: November 20th, 2011 at 06:49 pm  |  Posted: November 2nd, 2011 at 02:35 pm
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Platforms vs. Products: Google Does Some Soul Searching

A rant from a Googler comparing Amazon's focus on a platform vs Google's focus on products. Fundamental.

Updated: November 1st, 2011 at 03:25 am  |  Posted: October 13th, 2011 at 11:17 am
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