Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Your Daily digest for Tech Geek`s Tools, Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

Tech Geek`s Tools, Tips, Tricks and Tutorials
Pipes Output
Cyber War Manual Proposes Online Geneva Convention
Mar 20th 2013, 23:41

judgecorp writes "A new manual for cyber war has been compiled by international legal experts and published by NATO. The manual proposes that hospitals and dams should be off-limits for online warfare, and says that a conventional response is justified if an attack causes death or serious damage to property. The manual might get its first practical application today — South Korea's TV stations and banks have come under an attack which may well originate from North Korea."

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Bezos Expeditions Recovers Pieces of Apollo 11 Rockets
Mar 20th 2013, 23:00

skade88 writes "Jeff Bezos has been spending his time fishing up parts of the Apollo 11 rockets. From his blog 'What an incredible adventure. We are right now onboard the Seabed Worker headed back to Cape Canaveral after finishing three weeks at sea, working almost 3 miles below the surface. We found so much. We've seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program. We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.'"

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Ask Slashdot: What Is a Reasonable Way To Deter Piracy?
Mar 20th 2013, 22:17

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie developer about to release a small ($5 — $10 range) utility for graphic designers. I'd like to employ at least a basic deterrent to pirates, but with the recent SimCity disaster, I'm wondering: what is a reasonable way to deter piracy without ruining things for legitimate users? A simple serial number? Online activation? Encrypted binaries? Please share your thoughts."

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Google lancia Google Keep e sfida Evernote
Mar 20th 2013, 21:42

Google ha appena lanciato Google Keep un servizio che permette di creare to-do list, salvare note testuali, audio e video e sincronizzarle attraverso Google Drive su tutti i dispositivi in modo tale da tenerle sempre a portata di mano. Sul blog ufficiale viene presentato con “Save what's on your mind”.

L'interfaccia di Google Keep sul Nexus 4

L’interfaccia di Google Keep sul Nexus 4

Il nuovo arrivato in casa Google è una specie di clone di Evernote che qualche settimana, a causa di un attacco hacker, ha richiesto un password reset forzato per 50 milioni di utenti.

L’interfaccia di Google Keep è semplice e piacevole, in linea con il nuovo stile adottato da Google sia a livello desktop che su smartphone. Il servizio aggiunge una funzionalità interessante alla galassia dei servizi Google di cui al momento si sentiva la mancanza. Google Keep è attualmente disponibile solo per dispositivi Android ma non tarderà ad arrivare su iOS.

Samsung Also Making a Smartwatch
Mar 20th 2013, 21:35

New submitter evansspann sends word that Samsung will be making a smartwatch. Rumors have been swirling for a few months that Apple is working on a 'watch-like' device, but Samsung's CEO was willing to confirm that his company is working on such a product. "We've been preparing the watch product for so long. We are working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them." The companies are now likely racing to be the first to market. Production of such a device will likely be easier for Samsung, since it can produce its own screens and chips. It's also likely to work well with the popular Galaxy Phone lines. However, it will have a tougher time with app distribution than Apple, since it doesn't control Google Play the way Apple controls the App Store. "Apple's critics like to say the company's ideas are obvious, but as some pundits have noted, those very ideas once seemed unimaginable. The smartwatch will be a great test for that theory. It'll be interesting to see if Samsung can strike first in a nascent category and still rival Apple's work."

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Google Launches 'Keep' To Rival Evernote
Mar 20th 2013, 21:15

Today Google launched 'Google Keep', a mobile note-taking service to rival software like Evernote. It works on devices running Android 4.0 or later, and there's also a web interface (which is struggling under launch load as of this writing). Google describes the service thus: "With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand. If it’s more convenient to speak than to type that’s fine—Keep transcribes voice memos for you automatically. There’s super-fast search to find what you’re looking for and when you’re finished with a note you can archive or delete it." Fans of Google Reader will probably be a bit hesitant to pick this up.

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Gov't Report: Laser Pointers Produce Too Much Energy, Pose Risk For the Careless
Mar 20th 2013, 20:55

coondoggie writes "Commercial grade green and red laser pointers emit energy far beyond what is safe, posing skin, eye and fire hazards. That was the conclusion of a National Institute of Standards and Technology study on the properties of handheld lasers. The study tested 122 of the devices and found that nearly 90% of green pointers and about 44% of red pointers tested were out of federal safety regulation compliance."

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Could Twitter Have Stopped the Media's Rush To War In Iraq Ten Years Ago?
Mar 20th 2013, 20:12

Hugh Pickens writes "On the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Eric Boehlert writes that if Twitter had been around during the winter of 2002-2003, it could have provided a forum for critics to badger Beltway media insiders who abdicated their role as journalists and fell in line behind the Bush White House's march to war. 'Twitter could have helped puncture the Beltway media bubble by providing news consumers with direct access to confront journalists during the run-up to the war,' writes Boehlert. 'And the pass-around nature of Twitter could have rescued forgotten or buried news stories and commentaries that ran against the let's-go-to-war narrative that engulfed so much of the mainstream press.' For example, imagine how Twitter could have been used in real time on February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell made his infamous attack-Iraq presentation to the United Nations. At the time, Beltway pundits positively swooned over Powell's air-tight case for war. 'But Twitter could have swarmed journalists with instant analysis about the obvious shortcoming. That kind of accurate, instant analysis of Powell's presentation was posted on blogs but ignored by a mainstream media enthralled by the White House's march to war.' Ten years ago, Twitter could have also performed the task of making sure news stories that raised doubts about the war didn't fall through the cracks, as invariably happened back then. With swarms of users touting the reports, it would have been much more difficult for reporters and pundits to dismiss important events and findings. 'Ignoring Twitter, and specifically ignoring what people are saying about your work on Twitter, isn't really an option the way turning a blind eye to anti-war bloggers may have been ten years ago,' concludes Boehlert. 'In other words, Twitter could have been the megaphone — the media equalizer — that war critics lacked ten years ago."

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Fukushima Cooling Knocked Offline By... a Rat
Mar 20th 2013, 19:30

necro81 writes "The cooling system at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, responsible for keeping the spent fuel pools at an appropriate temperature, lost power early on March 18th. During the blackout, the temperature in the spent fuel pools gradually increased, although TEPCO officials indicated the pools could warm for four days without risking radiation release. Power was restored earlier this morning, and the pools should be back to normal temperature in a few days. During the repairs, the charred remains of a rat were found in a critical area of wiring, leading some to believe that this rodent was the cause of this latest problem. At least it wasn't a mynock — then we'd really be in trouble."

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Microsoft, Partners Probed Over Bribery Claims
Mar 20th 2013, 18:47

c0lo writes "U.S. federal authorities are examining Microsoft's involvement with companies and individuals that allegedly paid bribes to overseas government officials in exchange for business. The United States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into the bribery allegations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania. The China allegations were first shared with United States officials last year by an unnamed whistle-blower who had worked with Microsoft in the country, according to the person briefed on the inquiry. The whistle-blower said that a Microsoft official in China directed the whistle-blower to pay bribes to government officials to win business deals. U.S. government investigators are also reviewing whether Microsoft had a role in allegations that resellers offered bribes to secure software deals with Romania's Ministry of Communications. In Italy, Microsoft's dealings with consultants that specialize in customer-loyalty programs are under scrutiny, with allegations that Microsoft's Italian unit used such consultants as vehicles for lavishing gifts and trips on Italian procurement officials in exchange for government business. In a blog post Tuesday afternoon, John Frank, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said the company could not comment about continuing investigations. Mr. Frank said it was not uncommon for such government reviews to find that the claims were without merit. Somehow, given the way OOXML became a standard, it wouldn't surprise me if it were an actual fire that caused this smoke."

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Voyager 1 Officially Exits Our Solar System
Mar 20th 2013, 18:05

An anonymous reader writes "A new study released today (abstract) indicates that the Voyager 1 spacecraft has become the first man-made object to exit our solar system. Instrumentation data sent back to NASA indicate the historic event likely occurred on August 25, 2012, evidenced by drastic changes in radiation levels as the craft ventured past the heliopause. What remains to be seen, however, is whether Voyager 1 has actually made it to true interstellar space, or whether it has entered a separate, undefined region beyond our solar system. Either way, the achievement is truly monumental. 'It's outside the normal heliosphere, I would say that. We're in a new region,' said Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. 'And everything we're measuring is different and exciting.'" Update: 03/20 20:44 GMT by S : Reader skade88 points out that the JPL Voyager team is not so sure: "It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called 'the magnetic highway' where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed." So we'll probably be hearing about this again in a couple years.

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L'esercito dei "cattivissimi" giornalisti «spalamerda»
Mar 20th 2013, 17:36

Ma insomma. Ma basta con questo vittimismo. Basta con questo piagnucolare continuo. Ora che siete diventati "grandi" e sedete in Parlamento, fatelo pure un piccolo passo avanti. Non se ne può più di questo merda-cazzo-vaffanculo continuo. Cari "grillini", lasciatevelo dire, date tanto l'impressione di comportarvi col tipico atteggiamento di quelli che fanno fatica a mantenere a bada i propri umori e sbottano per sfogare in modo incontrollato un'atavica rabbia repressa.

Leggo questo articolo di Claudio Messora, il neo consulente scelto da Beppe Grillo per “supportare” (pilotare) il capogruppo del Movimento 5 Stelle al Senato Vito Crimi, che da degli «spalamerda» ai giornalisti. E poi, come se non conoscesse le regole del grande circo mediatico, si trincera dietro un laconico «da domani, non parlerò più con nessuno». Claudio, ma dai. Neanche i bambinetti dell'asilo.

Ora io dico, si può anche essere in disaccordo con certo tipo di giornalismo e sono il primo a ripeterlo in continuazione. Punzecchio, stuzzico l'interlocutore, faccio sempre un po' di sana polemica. Ma guai a travalicare il confine del buonsenso, del buongusto e dell'educazione. Dare dello "Spalamerda" a qualcuno solo perché non è allineato alla deriva totalitaria dell'informazione imposta al Movimento da Beppe Grillo è sciocco e denota una certa mancanza, oltre che di buongusto, anche di argomenti utili.

E poi, andiamo, non siete assolutamente credibili. Soprattutto perché, qualcuno di voi, fino a poco tempo fa, quando la "macchina del fango" dei cattivissimi giornalisti era rivolta contro Silvio Berlsuconi, lasciatevelo ricordare, ci sguazzava.

Apple Hires Former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, Destroyer of iPhones
Mar 20th 2013, 17:22

Nerval's Lobster writes "Why did Apple hire former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as vice president of technology? Adobe and Apple spent years fighting a much-publicized battle over the latter's decision to ban Adobe Flash from iOS devices. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability and performance. Lynch was very much the public face of Adobe's public-relations pushback to Apple's criticism; in a corporate video shot for an Adobe developer conference in 2009, he even helped run an iPhone over with a steamroller. (Hat tip to Daring Fireball's John Gruber for digging that video up.) As recently as 2010, he was still arguing that Flash was superior to HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content. It's interesting to speculate whether Steve Jobs would have hired someone who so publicly denigrated Apple's flagship product. But Jobs is dead, and his corporate successors in Cupertino—tasked with leading Apple through a period of fierce competition — obviously looked at Lynch and decided he'd make a perfect fit as an executive."

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V&A Scraps Napalm Death Gig For Fear Decibel Levels Will Damage Sculptures
Mar 20th 2013, 17:01

An anonymous reader writes "The Victoria and Albert Museum has cancelled an 'experimental' concert by a death metal rock band amid fears that the high decibel levels could destroy some of its most treasured artefacts, including Ming vases and priceless sculptures. The British band planned to play inside a specially-constructed ceramic sculpture with the idea that the piece would explode under the force of hits such as Order of the Leech and Fear, Emptiness, Despair" I believe this "death metal rock" is known as "grindcore." Maybe they should book Manowar next.

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T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling Was Vulnerable to Trivial MITM Attack
Mar 20th 2013, 16:40

wiredmikey writes "A vulnerability discovered by researchers at UC Berkeley enabled attackers to eavesdrop on and modify calls and text messages sent using T-Mobile's 'Wi-Fi Calling' feature. According to Jethro Beekman and Christopher Thompson, both UC Berkeley graduate students, when an affected Android device connected to a server via T-Mobile's Wi-Fi Calling feature, it did not correctly validate the server's security certificate, exposing calls and text messages to a 'man-in-the-middle' (MiTM) attack. ... '[An attacker] could record, block and reroute SIP traffic. The attacker could change it by faking a sender or changing the real-time voice data or message content. He could fake incoming traffic and he can impersonate the client with forged outgoing traffic,' the report, released Tuesday, said. Beekman and Thompson said they notified T-Mobile of their discoveries in December 2012, and worked with the mobile operator to confirm and fix the problem. As of March 18, all affected T-Mobile customers have received the security update fixing the vulnerability, the researchers said." By 'did not correctly validate,' they mean that the certificate was self-signed and the client blindly trusted any certificate with the common name it was expecting.

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KDE Releases Plasma Media Center 1.0
Mar 20th 2013, 16:33

jrepin writes "KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos. Media files can be on the local filesystem or accessed with KDE's Desktop Search." The screenshots look OK. You have to build it yourself to try it (looks easy on Ubuntu but not Debian unstable because of a few missing dev packages).

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Botnet Uses Default Passwords To Conduct "Internet Census 2012"
Mar 20th 2013, 16:03

An anonymous reader writes "By using four different login combinations on the default Telnet port (root/root, admin/admin, root/[no password], and admin/[no password]), an anonymous researcher was able to log into (and upload a binary to) 'several hundred thousand unprotected devices' and run 'a super fast distributed port scanner' to scan the enitre IPv4 address space." From the report: "While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage. All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study."

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Pierre Deligne Wins Abel Prize For Contributions To Algebraic Geometry
Mar 20th 2013, 15:34

ananyo writes "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest; his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. 'To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,' Deligne said, via webcast."

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Open-Xchange Launches "Open Source" Browser-Based Office Suite
Mar 20th 2013, 14:57

alphadogg writes with news on what Open-Xchange has been doing with the OpenOffice.org developers they hired. From the article: "Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced this week. OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company." The other claim to fame is that it supports collaborative editing similar to Google Docs. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to have a Free/Open replacement for Google Docs, it's not actually fully open source: the backend is (Apache/GPL dual licensed), but the front-end code is Creative Commons BY-SA-NC, which is unequivocally non-free and notoriously difficult to define. "Open Xchange CEO, told The H that his interpretation of Non-Commercial in the licensing was such that companies could use the software in-house, but not sell it as a service to others. Companies that want support will have to purchase the software from Open Xchange."

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Code.org Documentary Serving Multiple Agendas?
Mar 20th 2013, 14:16

theodp writes "'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for 'Superman', a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a 'Superman' cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft's Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be."

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First-Hand Advice: Practical Tips From Top WordPress Pros
Mar 20th 2013, 13:59


  

Recently I shared with you some advice from the WordPress community to beginners. But what if starting out is already a dim memory? What if you're already so immersed in the world of WordPress that you dream of Trac and you bore your partner with talk of your latest achievement with custom post types?

Below are some tips from WordPress pros from across the community. Many of the tips cover development, but there's also advice on business, running your website and, of course, getting involved with the community.

Wordpress-start-image
Image: Phil Oakley

Tips For Developers

Use Everything WordPress Has To Offer

WordPress' core can do a lot for you, without you having to write a bunch of code. WordPress is much more powerful when you make use of its APIs and built-in functionality. "If you use WordPress as your framework," says Trent Lapinski, "it will enable you to focus on developing an innovative plugin or theme."

Matty Cohen recommends always looking for and using functionality available within WordPress before creating a function from scratch. "Examples of this include, at the higher level, using the WordPress Settings API and, at the lower level, using the media_handle_upload() function to upload your files, rather than a custom upload routine." Matty gives an example of this with his WooSlider plugin. In order to create a familiar and consistent experience for WooThemes users, he did the following:

  • He used the Settings API for the settings screen.
  • He added a tab to the "Upload/Insert Media" popup for creating shortcodes. This interface uses a combination of the Settings API, custom form-creation logic, and some custom JavaScript to create the HTML output and the shortcode.

Screenshot of WooSlider settings
WooSlider uses built-in WordPress functionality to make the user experience better.

Making use of everything WordPress has to offer results in less coding for you and a better overall experience for users. But those aren't the only benefits. Amy Hendrix points out that the code you write will be future-proof. Writing your own scripts could eventually result in conflicts.

Use Hooks

Hooks are the means by which you hook into WordPress and add your own code without modifying core files. There are two types of hooks: actions and filters. Action hooks are places where you can insert and run code. Filters are used to manipulate output.

If you're working with WordPress' core and with plugins and themes, then you should be extending by making use of all of the hooks available. Adam Brown maintains a list of all of the hooks that have ever appeared in WordPress.

Implement Hooks

Create your own hooks. By implementing hooks in your plugins and themes, you create opportunities for other people to extend them and create add-ons. Shane Pearlman believes that by doing so, you "encourage plugin developers to make opportunities for the community to extend and also use them."

Not only does this create opportunities for other developers, but you make life easier for yourself. "With a 'well-hooked' theme or plugin," says Simon Wheatley, "you can make adjustments between clients, or between sites on a multisite setup, a lot more easily than by effectively forking your own code for every scenario."

Write Secure Code

If you write plugins or themes, keeping the code secure is critical. How bad would you feel if your code was responsible for websites getting hacked? Brad Williams recommends learning how data validation pertains to WordPress. A detailed page on data validation can be found in the Codex; so, if you're a developer, you have no excuse for writing insecure WordPress plugins and themes. Following the guidelines will ensure that your code is safe and secure from exploits and hacks. As Ryan Hellyer points out, "Having a beautiful website which does exactly what a client requires is great, but it's not so great when it gets injected with spam links and is de-indexed from search engines!"

Follow Best Practices

Ryan Duff and Brad Williams highlight some best practices that developers should stick to:

  • Make sure the data that you're passing is always being passed in the way it's expected to. Setting a variable on an incorrect line could result in a trickle-down effect of error messages.
  • WordPress has coding standards, so stick to them. This will keep your code in a format that all WordPress developers will recognize, making bug tracking much easier!

Embrace the Code Base

Both Helen Hou-Sandi and Jake Goldman of 10up recommend that you spend time looking at the code base. As Jake points out, "Relying on the Codex and Google searches for solving unique problems with WordPress is like trying to tune a car's performance without ever looking under the hood." Rachel Baker also suggests looking at the change logs, and Silviu-Cristian Burcă points us to his advice in "How to Become a WordPress Guru."

A good integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP — such as NetBeans, PhpStorm, phpDesigner or Vanilla Eclipse — will offer code auto-completion for WordPress functions and their arguments and will display documentation on functions inline. You'll be able to easily jump to function and class declarations to study them. "Think the core code base is too scary?" asks Jake. "Pick a file in wp-includes and start reading — you might be surprised by how approachable it is, and how much you can learn.”

Looking at the code, as Helen adds, also increases the likelihood that you'll find a way to contribute code to the WordPress project. You'll also become familiar with plugins and themes, understand how people do things properly, and recognize when they get it wrong.

Share Your Code

It's in the nature of code in an open-source project to be shared, forked and iterated on. If you're working on solutions, then share them with the community. "Share and publish your solutions, as a plugin, widget or theme," says Cátia Kitahara. "Not for every project, but with most of them, we end up with a solution that could be of use to many others. So, do it as a way of giving back to the community. I know it takes time to prepare something to be distributed through the repositories, but remember the time WordPress saves for us!"

You could put your code on GitHub, which Ben Balter recommends:

“GitHub's got a very different culture, and the ability for anyone to submit a pull request is a real game changer. It really lowers the barrier to contribute, and democratizes the entire plugin authoring experience. As a bonus, use GitHub's built-in wiki functionality to maintain your plugin's documentation (especially FAQ), so that anyone, even non-technical users, can contribute.

Lastly, if you have plugin tests, integrate with Travis CI so that you can automatically test pull requests before merging. To help you get started, a handful of tools are out there, such as GitHub → WordPress.org deployment scripts and GitHub wiki → WordPress readme converters.”

Eric Mann points out that if you've built your project in isolation, then you're likely missing out on different approaches. Sharing your code with people gives them the opportunity to point out how it can be improved. WordPress itself is built collaboratively and is the result of hundreds of minds looking at it from different perspectives. If you want your code to excel, you should be sharing it, too.

Use Custom Post Types

Taking advantage of custom post types for specific use cases is a great way to leverage WordPress. At the Theme Foundry, Drew Strojny has three custom post types: themes, stories and tutorials. This enables members of his team to quickly find and create content.

Drew recommends making custom post types even more flexible by adding custom meta data. This enables you to style your content and provides opportunities to reuse that meta data across your website. He provides the example of the meta data he uses with the "Story" post type in use on his "Customer Stories" page.

a screenshort of a theme foundry story
Theme Foundry uses custom post types to display customer stories.

Four pieces of meta data are collected: "Location," "Site title," "URL" and "Theme name." These are outputted as part of the post itself. But the meta data can also be used to output the latest story for a theme on the product page itself.

Think of Your User

When you develop with WordPress, you're usually producing something that will be used daily by the average WordPress user. So, the interface should fit their needs. Starting off with the user workflow and interface, while keeping code in mind, will make for a better experience for users. Helen Hou-Sandi points out the following:

“It is certainly harder to mold an interface to the unknown average user, but worth the effort. A user keeps coming back because they feel confident using your software, and the interface is a huge part of that comfort. Good code behind the scenes is good for the user, but unless they can see or feel the positive results, they may never know.”

Andrea Rennick takes this even further, suggesting that "every so often, spend some time with a new user. It will open your eyes to the things you take for granted." If you go to WordPress events, talk to novice users of your plugin to find out how they interact with it. If you run a WordPress business, spend some time with your newest members to see how they are getting on with your product. This sort of feedback is invaluable.

Provide Support

It's not for punishment that new Automattic employees spend three weeks providing support, and that each team does a week of support every year. It keeps the people who write the code close to the people who use the product. It's easy for developers to work in a bubble and forget about the users they are developing for. Stop seeing support as a chore; see it as an opportunity to stay in touch with the people who use WordPress. Andrea Rennick says this:

“I heartily believe everyone should spend a bit of time doing support, just to remember what it's like being a new user. It can also open your eyes to potential issues in the software, in the UX, and just give a better sense of people's expectations and assumptions.”

Even if you're in the enviable position of employing supporters to do most of the work, as long as you write code or create products for WordPress, take some time to answer support threads and to stay in touch with your users.

Tools

Developers have recommended a number of tools.

Use the Developer Tools plugin from Automattic to eliminate all notices, especially deprecated notices. You'll see a performance boost on websites that get a lot of traffic. Vid Luther points out that you slow down your side by 20 milliseconds for every notice your code throws out, and 40 milliseconds for every deprecated notice your code throws out. "Even if you have error reporting turned off," says Vid, "it's still shitty code."

Timothy Wood recommends using SublimeText2 as your development IDE. It's cross-platform, lightweight and fast, and it improves code. "The goal of a good developer," says Timothy, "is to be efficient in the code and to spend time using thought instead of (brute) code force." He keeps a list of SublimeText2 add-ons that he finds useful.

Managing Your Website

Keep Your Website Secure

Keeping your WordPress website secure is important. I wrote about this a few months ago, highlighting the types of attacks that a website could come under. The little guys aren't the only ones who get hit; huge websites are susceptible, too. Here are Dre Armeda's top tips for keeping your website secure:

  1. Don't leave outdated software on your server, including old installations that you no longer use. If it's not in use, remove it. If it's outdated and you need it, update it.
  2. Limit access. Not everyone needs to be an admin, and not everyone needs FTP or SSH access. Give folks enough access to do their job, nothing more. When they are done, remove access. This should include every account on the server that has access ranging from WordPress to the server.
  3. Managing passwords is key. Using 12345 is not a good idea. Use different passwords for your accounts, and use a lot of characters, including numbers, symbols and both cases. Using a password manager where possible is also wise.

You're going to feel stupid if you work professionally with WordPress and you get hacked. "This applies to everyone," says Dre, "and I think it is even more important for WordPress pros. You don't want to be in a position where you're hacked or infected with malware because you weren't taking care of the common sense basics. Be a pro, be a leader. Minimize the risk of security issues for you and your users."

Back Up Your Website

Good backup practices are really important. What if your website is hacked or your server fails? Syed Balkhi recommends not simply relying on regular database backups either. Without all of your other data, such as images and plugins, your backup is incomplete. Syed recommends a service such as VaultPress or BackupBuddy. As Collis Ta'eed points out, you should "test regularly, and make sure you do a decent verification to ensure the backup is actually, completely, fully there and working. You don't want to find out your backup wasn't working… on the day you need it."

Running Your Business

Collaborate in Business

Kim Gjerstad points out that the WordPress economy is a bit of a gold rush right now. People are rushing in, setting up businesses and making money. People assume that they should keep ideas to themselves, otherwise people will steal them. In reality, once you start to scale your business, you should start collaborating. The only way to do this is to start talking to other developers and business people. "Nobody's really going to steal your ideas," says Kim. "It takes a year to two years to become profitable in many start-ups, so it's not like your idea is going to be stolen overnight. Go find the right people; talk to the right people."

Similar advice comes from Josh Strebel, who recommends collaborating regularly, but choosing your partners carefully.

“It is good practice to collaborate as often as possible to avoid the duplication of effort and gain a wider audience for your wares. However, be diligent about who you choose to hitch your wagon to. Not all partnerships are in the best interest of both parties from a public relations or economic viewpoint.”

Know Your Mobile Audience

More and more people are using portable devices to access the Internet. So, we can't just build websites for big screens anymore. Isaac Keyet is the lead for the WordPress.org Mobile Group. He says:

“We constantly hear how important mobile is, and how people are using their portable devices more and more to access the Internet. But just how this happens varies widely from continent to continent, country to country. If you want to target developing countries, a responsive theme or app may not be enough — you may have to consider a very basic layout and/or a mobile site to gain full traction.

Other parts of this world do not speak English at all. If your site is not translated correctly, you'll miss out. It's a global world and mobile devices have democratized people's ability to access the Internet.”

Reduce Support Load

In addition to providing support, make an effort to reduce your support load. To do this Frederick Townes recommends consistency. "Cultivating success," he says, "is the result of countless small (and sometimes large) victories that occur in aggregate and culminate in some outcome."

By reducing your support load, you can spend more time creating value for customers. Frederick suggests the following ways to achieve this:

  • Create secure, well-documented and reliable code.
  • Pick the right tools for the job.
  • Remember that users don't read manuals, so design usable interfaces with pointers, tooltips and captions.
  • Localize wherever possible.
  • Make FAQs and canned responses available.
  • Iterate on feature requests.
  • Nurture advocates who love your project and who will help others and figure out how to get new advocates.

Find a Niche

Andrew Norcross points out that WordPress has a lot of venues for people to use their skill set. Expand your own skills, while maintaining a strong focus. This could be in themes, plugins, front-end design, support, writing, etc. You could focus on developing with a particular framework, such as Genesis, or with the products of a particular theme shop, such as WooThemes. As Christine Rondeau puts it:

“Saying you build WordPress sites is like saying you build houses. It's simply not clear enough, and you need to drill down and be really clear about your niche. It's also important that your niche brings you joy; otherwise, there's no point.”

Educate Your Clients

Mika Epstein notes that one of the most common reasons she hears people give for why they can't do the right thing is, "My client doesn't want it." Her reply is, "It's time to educate your clients." Don't let your clients force you into making bad choices. Remember that you are the expert — that is why they are paying you.

Mika has two recommendations for dealing with clients in this situation:

  • Educate them on why what they're doing is bad.
  • Make it easier for them to do the right thing for themselves.

By educating them and creating the right tools, you make it easier for them to avoid link scams, SEO black hats and other bad practices. This makes the Web better for everyone.

Get Involved In The Community

Whether you're a beginner or a pro, getting involved in the community is a great way to hone your skills. Mason James suggests getting involved with Trac. If something doesn't work, report it! The more feedback is provided, the quicker the software will progress.

Communicate with other members of the community. Pippin Williamson says that he loves a lot of different software, but most of them are just pieces of software, "whereas WordPress is a piece of software that keeps me involved with dozens (or hundreds) of the best people I've ever met. It's this involvement that makes my usage and development work in WordPress so fulfilling."

Paul Gibbs notes that he has become a better developer because he has worked with the people who build the software. He recommends taking every opportunity to meet new people, to collaborate on projects and to talk to your audience and customers.

"WordPress," says Paul, "gives you a sandbox in which to build your dreams."

Contribute

Once you become involved in the community, look at ways to contribute back to it. Marko Heijnen says that the learning curve is big and that you'll learn a lot from others. You'll also become more tightly integrated in the community. "WordPress has a great karma currency," says Tammie Lister. "From contributing to passing on what you learn, you'll reap the rewards."

Konstantin Obenland points out that there are plenty of ways to get involved in WordPress. You don't just have to get involved with core — you could contribute to the Theme Review Team, for instance, where you'll enhance your knowledge of best practices. Konstantin Kovshenin says:

“Get involved. Follow WordPress development, read the trac, follow changesets, follow weekly dev chats. Study the core contributor handbook, help with beta testing, help reproduce trac issues, submit a patch, write a unit test, go to a WordPress event (meetups, WordCamps, etc.), organize a WordPress event, spread the word and knowledge, blog about your experiences.”

Learn

"You're never too smart to learn," says Andy Stratton. "In fact, the smartest people don't know everything; they just know when to ask questions and learn." WordPress is vast, and there is always more to learn. Andy suggests making a list of things you want to learn in one month, two months, six months and twelve months. "Speak at a WordCamp, build a custom widget, work with the HTTP API, create custom rewrite rules, etc. At least every three months, you should be able to say you've accomplished or learned something new."

Do Peer Review

"Peer review is one of the best things you can do for your development workflow," says Japh Thomson. Ask a trusted friend or colleague to look over your plugin, theme or functionality. Japh outlines the ways that this helps:

  1. Your reviewer could remind you of any best practices that you might not have been aware of or had forgotten about during the development process.
  2. Your reviewer could also let you know about a better approach that you hadn't thought of.
  3. Your development will benefit just from your knowing that someone else is looking at your code!

Japh adds:

“If you think this is something that those holding the purse strings might consider an unnecessary expense, consider integrating it with other parts of the process — such as documentation, where the reviewer creates documentation as they review, and also knowledge sharing, so that at least one other developer on your team knows and understands the code you've written (you know, the whole "bus factor").”

Be Open to Criticism

Whoever you are, whatever profession you're in, taking criticism can be hard — especially if you've worked really hard on something and someone points out its flaws and tells you that you're doing it wrong. Yet the nature of an open-source community is for people to take what you've done and improve upon it. Kailey Lampert talks about this from the perspective of a developer:

“We can get to be really proud of code we've put a lot of time into. And we love it when someone agrees that our code is clever and clean. But believe it or not, sometimes we make mistakes, and people notice. It can be almost heartbreaking to hear someone tell you all the ways you could have made your code better. It may be tempting to never release code again for fear of being embarrassed, but with that attitude, how can we grow? Be humble, take the advice, learn from it, and make new mistakes next time.”

Read the News

There are a lot of ways to stay up to date on what's happening with WordPress. Mike Little recommends subscribing to the Make WordPress.org blogs, and even the Trac mailing list. "Keep an eye on them, and learn what is coming up," he says. "It may affect the work you are doing now, and certainly will in the future. If you are still writing the same code now that you were writing a year ago, you are out of date."

By following other WordPress developers on Twitter and GitHub, you'll find scripts and tools that others have written. Jared Atchison has developed his own set of tools but finds that the tools others share often do it better. George Stephanis and Kurt Payne have some great suggestions on places you can tap into to get information:

Staying up to date on WordPress will help you improve over time.

Dougal Campbell has this to say:

“If you stay isolated and develop in a vacuum, you are going to miss out on all sorts of useful discoveries. I try to keep myself on top of things, and I can't tell you how many times I've seen a blog post or tweet that made me say, "I didn't know about that function!"”

In addition to keeping up with what's happening on WordPress, Chris Wallace stresses the importance of keeping up with new plugins. You need to know whether the plugins you use do what they do best. You never know when a new plugin will appear that surpasses all of its competitors.

Do What Makes You Happy

If you work with WordPress, then you're probably in the happy position of being inundated with work. There is great demand for people with WordPress expertise, so make sure to get paid to do what you like doing. Market yourself to the types of clients who will provide you with work that makes you happy. Boone Gorges talks about his experience:

“I'm passionate about education and academic institutions, and about building free social software that helps these kinds of organizations do their work better. So, first of all, I market myself to educational institutions, and tend to turn down most work outside of that area.

Then, I only take on projects that either will become standalone free software projects or will contribute back to a project like BuddyPress. This strategy helps me to make the most of my time, since I'm getting paid to do work that, in many cases, I would eventually have done in my free time.”

Find clients in the field that you're passionate about. In the end, you'll be happier, and you'll do work that you find rewarding.

Some Final Tips

Below are some final tips that didn't quite fit elsewhere.

Seisuke Kuraishi says:

“Do ego searching. In most cases, people won't come directly to you to tell you the problem with your plugin or theme.”

Daniel Dvorkin says:

“Performance and ability to scale shouldn't come after the fact. It's a mentality you should have while developing. If you're planning to make your code public, always assume that your code already needs to scale.”

Mark Jaquith says:

“If you get a lot of comments, enable and learn the keyboard shortcuts for moderating comments. (This is a per-user option, so set this in your profile.) This will save you a lot of time!”

Magnus Jepson says:

“Use a child theme when customizing a theme, and keep the parent theme updated, along with WordPress and all of your plugins. Minimize the number of plugins you have activated, and delete any inactive plugins for security reasons.”

Got your own tips? Let us know in the comments!

(al)


© Siobhan McKeown for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

Possible Cyber Attack Against South Korean Banks and TV Stations
Mar 20th 2013, 13:50

B3ryllium writes "At least four broadcasters and two banks in South Korea are reporting massive computer accessibility issues, saying that their networks are 'paralyzed' by what looks like a cyber attack. Additional reports from Twitter suggest that hundreds of computers in the country powered off simultaneously at 2:20am, and reported "Boot device not found" errors. South Korea's military has upgraded its "Information Operation Condition (INFOCOM)" level from Level 4 to Level 3 in response to this situation."

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FAA Grants Arlington Texas Police Department Permission To Fly UAVs
Mar 20th 2013, 13:34

cylonlover writes with news that another police department has received authorization to start using drones for tasks like "...photographing crime scenes and searching for missing people." From the article: "The police department in Arlington can now use new tools in support of public safety over the Texas urban community — two small helicopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The FAA has granted permission for the Arlington police to fly these unmanned aircraft under certain circumstances: they must fly under 400 feet, only in the daytime, be in sight of the operator and a safety observer, and be in contact with the control tower at the nearby Dallas-Fort Worth airport — one of the busiest in the country." They're using a Leptron Avenger, which "has been designed with military grade features" but don't worry, "police are quick to emphasize that the 4- to 5-foot-long aircraft aren’t the same as military drones."

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Krebs Hacker Unmasked, Hit Ars and Wired's Honan
Mar 20th 2013, 12:50

altjira writes "Brian Krebs, hot on the tail of the hacker who DDOS his site and SWATted his home, followed up on a tip, found the dox, called and then outed his hacker. Turns out it may have been the same guy who hit Wired's Mat Honan and Ars Technica." The attacker is ... a 20 year old guy who apparently has too much time on his hands, and was surprisingly careless with his personal information for someone exploiting the personal information of others.

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Possible Chemical Weapons Use In Syria
Mar 20th 2013, 12:14

Hugh Pickens writes "Mike Hoffman reports that Syria's Assad regime has accused the rebels of launching a chemical weapons attack in Aleppo that killed 25 people — an accusation the rebel fighters have strongly rebuked. A Reuters photographer said victims he had visited in Aleppo hospitals were suffering breathing problems and that people had said they could smell chlorine after the attack. The Russian foreign ministry says it has enough information to confirm the rebels launched a chemical attack while U.S. government leaders say they have not found any evidence of a chemical attack. White House spokesman Jay Carney says the accusations made by Assad could be an attempt to cover up his own potential attacks. 'We've seen reports from the Assad regime alleging that the opposition has been responsible for use. Let me just say that we have no reason to believe these allegations represent anything more than the regime's continued attempts to discredit the legitimate opposition and distract from its own atrocities committed against the Syrian people,' said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. 'We don't have any evidence to substantiate the regime's charge that the opposition even has CW (chemical weapons) capability.' President Obama has said the 'red line' to which the U.S. would send forces to Syria would be the use of chemical weapons. However, it was assumed the Assad regime would be the ones using their chemical weapons stockpile, not the rebels."

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Schneier: Security Awareness Training 'a Waste of Time'
Mar 20th 2013, 09:12

An anonymous reader writes "Security guru Bruce Schneier contends that money spent on user awareness training could be better spent and that the real failings lie in security design. 'The whole concept of security awareness training demonstrates how the computer industry has failed. We should be designing systems that won't let users choose lousy passwords and don't care what links a user clicks on,' Schneier writes in a blog post on Dark Reading. He says organizations should invest in security training for developers. He goes on, '... computer security is an abstract benefit that gets in the way of enjoying the Internet. Good practices might protect me from a theoretical attack at some time in the future, but they’re a bother right now, and I have more fun things to think about. This is the same trick Facebook uses to get people to give away their privacy. No one reads through new privacy policies; it's much easier to just click "OK" and start chatting with your friends. In short: Security is never salient.'"

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Apple Releases Patch For Evasi0n Jailbreak (After It's Used 18 Million Times)
Mar 20th 2013, 07:29

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Apple has released a new update for iOS that prevents the jailbreak evasi0n released last month. But that hacking tool has already become the most popular jailbreak ever: It's been used to remove the software restrictions on 18.2 million devices in the 43 days between its release and the patch, according to data from Cydia, the app store for jailbroken devices. In its announcement of the update, Apple says it has fixed six bugs and was polite enough to credit the hackers behind evasi0n with finding four of them. At least one of the bugs used by evasi0n remains unpatched, according to David Wang, one of evasi0n's creators. And Wang says that he and his fellow hackers still have bugs in reserve for a new jailbreak, although they plan to keep them secret until the next major release."

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Paragraph, Word & Character Counting with Countable.js
Mar 20th 2013, 07:01

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The Nielsen Family Is Dead
Mar 20th 2013, 06:19

An anonymous reader writes "An article at Wired walks us through how the so-called Nielsen Family, responsible for deciding which shows were good and which were flops since the '70s, isn't the be-all, end-all of TV popularity anymore. Quoting: 'Over the years, the Nielsen rating has been tweaked, but it still serves one fundamental purpose: to gauge how many people are watching a given show on a conventional television set. But that's not how we watch any more. Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet—none of these platforms or devices are reflected in the Nielsen rating. (In February Nielsen announced that this fall it would finally begin including Internet streaming to TV sets in its ratings.) And the TV experience doesn't stop when the episode ends. We watch with tablets on our laps so we can look up an actor's IMDb page. We tweet about the latest plot twist (discreetly, to avoid spoilers). We fill up the comments section of our favorite online recappers. We kibitz with Facebook friends about Hannah Horvath's latest paramour. We start Tumblrs devoted to Downton decor. We're engaging with a show even if we aren't watching it, but none of this behavior factors into Nielsen's calculation of its impact.'"

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