Pingdom is a website that many of us are very familiar with and it’s got a host of tools that have been very helpful to countless web developers and designers over the years. And their tools keep getting better and better! They announced a Real User Monitoring recently and even added a WordPress plugin to boot that will help ease the installation process of the code for your site. It’s a fantastic service that can give you some very interesting data: Now you can know exactly how your visitors are experiencing your website. Our Real User monitoring gives you insight into […]

Hate your job? Not exactly super-stoked about where your life might be headed in your current vocation? You’re not alone. Many of us are stuck in dead-end jobs that are incredibly difficult to be passionate about. In fact, you may audibly groan every time the alarm clock awakes you in the morning. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Honestly, I’ve seen more people start doing this thing called “web development” during their current 9-to-5 job and start not only loving it but making a serious living off of it. And WordPress is where it’s at. You can plug yourself […]

We love supporting our fellow WordPressers, especially those that are organizing the WordCamp events. Heck, we would know as we just got through hosting and organizing the Atlanta WordCamp. Whew, I still feel like we’re recovering! But we couldn’t have done it without the incredible community, the sponsors, and most importantly, the speakers! The speakers help make the experience memorable and they do an incredible job of exporting their knowledge, experience, and know-how to others. How awesome! That’s why when Aaron Holbrook pinged us to help get some love and support for the Chicago event we said YES! Hear him share his […]

We’ve all been circling the wagon in regards to the upcoming release of 3.6 and one of the hot topics of discussion has been the new yearly-based theme, Twenty Thirteen. Well, whether you like it or not it’s coming and it made landfall yesterday for those in the WordPress.com space. Lance Willett announced it himself when he said: This gorgeous theme is colorful, opinionated, and ready to give your blog a warm, welcoming vibe. And opinionated you will be, in a good way of course.

Unless you’ve been seriously living under a rock on an epic vacation then you’re already aware a number of security related issues that have cropped up recently that you should definitely be aware of. Most recently, just to backfill anyone who did in fact miss out, the brute force attacks and even cacheing plugins issue is something to take note of and remedy, not just for your personal blogs but all the customers and clients that you may manage as well. But there’s always more to do and more to learn and at times it can be overwhelming to think […]

If you’ve been a developer for a long time or a short time then you will likely have some sort of developer journal already. No, no, not like that type of journal that you keep under your pillow and that has a lock and key on it, but rather a “journal” or collection of articles, code snippets, and perhaps even lessons-learned from your previous work. You see, the best developers have their “tricks” and “personal dev secrets” not hidden in their brain pan but rather in a simple archive or note taking system and/or device so that they can do their […]

Jetpack is an interesting plugin mostly because it’s the plugin that people love to love and also love to hate. Whether or not you’re a fan or not is not the focus of this blog post (although we have no control over the comment layer to be sure); instead, it’s about a neat feature in Jetpack that you may not have known existed. For starters, were you aware of the Featured Content functionality that Jetpack 2.2 sported? As Kirk Wight points out, there’s almost no online documentation at this point and not even listed in the changelog: Automattic quietly introduced a […]

We’re fans of great products and one product that we think is definitely great is Gravity Forms, which has just seen their 1.7 release. We use their system here on this blog and it’s worked without problem since day #1. This major release is significant in that introduces a number of large changes to the admin and a complete overhaul of the confirmation and notification functionality. We did an update this morning without a hitch and I began looking at some of the changes that are now fresh before my eyes!

I’ve shared more than a few times about my interest in what Ev Williams is doing with Medium.com and I finally got my invite to try it out. Oh yay! I was so excited but I waited nearly a full day so that I could sit down and capture my first-hand experience on video, which I did in the following 8 minute video. What’s fascinating, as you will find, is that I “missed” a few features as I walked through it! Chris, who had gotten in months ago, casually signaled to me that I could do what I supposed I couldn’t do […]

We know that a bunch of you are designers and that you’ve got mad skills the pay the bills. In fact, you probably won’t need most of what this roundup has to offer since you can actually create them yourself, gosh darn it! But for those like me who are strictly developers (no unicorn here folks) we need all the help we can get and so I love to collect and save free GUI and UI kits that I find on the internet. Have at it folks and enjoy – give credit where credit is due!