This site first came about over lunch in November with a friend and then got put on the back burner until recently.
The idea was to have a site where journalists / bloggers and anyone else who might conduct interviews (even applies to HR people hiring people), can keep everything organized in one handy place and refer to recordings of the interview later. The site itself is powered by Twilio and Box.net, and is hosted on a grid server at media temple.
How does it work?
You sign up for a free account and then add interviews. Give the phone number of the person being contacted as well as your phone number. You can also upload any related documents to from here as well to refer to later.
These documents are securely stored on box.net using their handy API.
On the day of the interview, you’ll get an SMS message to remind you about it. You’ll then login to your account, go to the interview and hit the big red call button when you are ready to begin.
Using Twilio’s also handy API, your call will be connected and you can conduct your interview. Then when you are finished, you’ll see a link to listen to the recorded interview anytime from the site. This is currently the beta, so there are a few things still to be added, but it’s a site that I’m looking forward to growing.
Developing on an iPad can be challenging, but more and more tools are making it possible to do serious work on the device. Heres a few apps that you might want do check out if youre a developer.
Have you noticed that software feels cheap when UI elements move around on the screen without notice? Web applications are particularly vulnerable to this problem. Browsers give image elements a default size if they do not have explicit width and height attributes. Once these images have loaded, they expand or contract to their full size, causing all other elements on the page to reflow in response.
Quite often when working with WordPress, I end up working with the multisite functionality, and usually the client (which can be myself) wants to show posts on the main site from across the various blogs. These functions make that possible, mainly the main function “multisite_latest_posts” makes that possible. The name isn’t entirely true, yes it returns the latest posts, but you can control the sorting, the amount of posts returned, add some pagination and thanks to the recent addition of meta table queries to the function, return only what you need. But I’ve use this function for a while and didn’t want to totally rename it: To start, I usually create a file in my theme called “multisite_functions.php”, or I copy the code into functions.php, your choice. But if you choose to create the file, then remember to include it in your functions.php file like so:
include("multisite_functions.php");
Again, there’s also no reason not to just copy these functions directly into your functions.php file if you choose. Anyhow, let’s get onto the code.
In a file in your theme, you can call the latest_post function like so:
$posts = multisite_latest_post( array(
"how_many"=>10,
"how_long_days"=>30,
"how_many_words"=>50,
"more_text"=>"[...]",
"remove_html"=>true,
"sort_by"=>"post_date",
// if paginating: (otherwise, set paginate to false or don't include it or the start or end variables):
"paginate"=>true,
"start"=>0,
"end"=>25,
// query based on meta values: (key / value)
"metas"=>array(
"tumblog"=>"articles",
)
));
echo "There were ".$posts['total']." posts found";
foreach($posts['posts'] as $item){
echo '<li><a href="'.$item->post_url.'">'.$item->post_title.'</a></li>';
}
And that’s it, you can now get the latest posts from across your sites and display them somewhere. How you choose to display them is up to you, this example just shows you a list of the 10 most recent posts.
Forgetting someone’s name in a social situation is embarrassing, but in a business setting it can be disastrous. In this week’s episode of Work Smart, I talk with memory expert Bob Gray about how to remember the names of the people you meet. Here’s a quick recap — watch the video for a more thorough explanation.1. Hear the name (really listen for it).2. Spell the name.3. Comment on the name.4. Use the name during a conversation.5. Use the name when leaving.
WordPress’s widgets are handy, they can simplify and also extend your site. But sometimes, you may have other widgets you want to use (for example, if you’ve built a theme that has it’s own custom widgets), or if you’re setting up a client site that uses widgets, maybe you want them to focus on specific widgets instead, so I like to add this to the theme’s functions.php file and simply remove any widgets from the list that you want to allow, or add any that you want to disallow that aren’t already on the list:
My 3 year old daughter is a huge fan of Shirley Temple, and with her own curly hair, gets told she looks like Shirley Temple all the time.
She also memorizes all of her favourite songs..
This song is one of the songs I get to hear her sing every day, so since I finally managed to catch her singing without seeing my iPhone, I decided to hit record and grab a copy to share with everyone.
So now, without further adieu, I give you “I want a hippopotamus for christmas”
The title of this post may sound a little strange, so let me first get into a little back story of something I witnessed last week..
Driving to my office as I do every morning, I watched a chipmunk run up from the bank of the lake on one side of the four lane highway.
Moving quickly, he ran in front of my car… ducked under a truck in the next lane… Took a quick break in the meridian.. Then bolted around another car… Followed by a quick heart wrenching dash in front of a car in the last lane. Finally, as he reached the side of the road, he gave himself a celebratory leap for joy… At which time, a pickup truck swerved over the side of the road and took him out…
Ok, that wasn’t really too inspiring in the end, but it made me think about projects, and goals, and a few other things like that. Everybody has goals and projects…
As a freelancer, I work on projects all day… And just like everybody, I have goals for my various personal aspects.. Goals for my various sites… Goals for my life… Goals for my family… The cars are your average roadblocks, regardless if they’re client related… Personal related… Skill related… Or just blocks from unexpected sources.
In this case, the chipmunk knew the cars would be there, so you can take a lesson from there..
You know you will face some sort of obstacle, so keep your eye out for you, and it won’t take you by surprise. In fact, if you watch for obstacles early enough, you can even see the obstacles coming from miles away.
Now for the sad part of the story, the pickup that swerved and took the chipmunk out… That represents the obstacle you can never see coming… Maybe if that chipmunk had continued into the forest, he would have been safe, but he had to stop and get ahead of himself didn’t he? He had to shout and say “Hey everybody!! I made it!!” When he really wasn’t done… That’s like saying “Hey, this project is done… But there’s really a whole other part of it left to do that I kind of forgot about”.
So what’s the moral of this whole article? Basically… Plan ahead… Keep an eye out… Keep your focus… And don’t get too ahead of yourself til the job is done.
Who here would consider themselves an old hacker? Whos here reading this because those words resonated? Some of you, I hope, or this might not make any sense. If youre a web developer, calling yourself an old hacker is kind of ridiculous, in the scope of computer programming as a whole. But, relatively speaking, I think we all know what that means. It means you tested in Mosaic. It means you had the lecture about how there was no upgrade path for IE5/Mac and therefore we were going to have to support it until the end of time. It means youve been guilty of table-based layouts and you had your mind blown by To Hell with Bad Browsers and then again by AJAX. Or maybe it just means you remember the browser wars and found it difficult to trust $ over getElementById.
