Jason Cosper

Category: Geekery

  • I’m Feeling Saucy

    While trying to get Internet Explorer 8 installed on my Mac via the usually handy ievms — don’t bother, the 2nd and 4th RAR file are corrupted — I stumbled across Sauce Labs.

    Sauce Labs offers cross browser testing environments on totally clean virtual machines. That means no more having to deal with a bunch of half-forgotten virtual Windows installs or grabbing screenshots from BrowserLab. Just tell Sauce Labs what sort of browser and operating system combo you need and you’ll have access to it in seconds.

    But what’s most helpful (to me, at least) is that it records a video of the whole interactive session that you can then share with a developer or client.

    Plans with unlimited browser time — and a bunch of other useful stuff — start at $12 a month. They’ve also got a free plan that gives you 30 minutes of browser time every month to do your thing. But hopefully it’s worth enough that you’ll pay for it and I can keep my free account…

  • De-dupe “Open With…”

    A few weeks ago, I started seeing multiple entries for Pixelmator in the “Open With…” area of my Finder’s contextual menu. And while I thought it was weird, I didn’t find it too annoying. So I just ignored it.

    Then, last night, I saw multiple entries for Simple Comic when I was trying to open a compressed file in another app. So I did a little digging and found this simple one-line fix over at IT Pixie:

    Just copy & drop that into your terminal app of choice and let it run. Once it’s all done, Control + Option + Click the Finder icon in your dock and select “Relaunch”. Once the finder comes back, “Open With…” should be all clean.

    I’m mostly saving this here for my own benefit, but maybe it’ll help at least one other person out there.

  • Cache Rules Everything Around Me

    When it comes to speed, one of the easiest things someone hosting their own WordPress install can do is enable expires headers. Expires headers basically tell the browsers visiting your site to cache the static stuff — like images and scripts — so they don’t have to be downloaded every time one of your pages needs them.

    To do this, I’ve been using some fairly straightforward .htaccess rules that I adapted from the ones in HTML5 Boilerplate. But since version 4.0 of Boilerplate came out about a week ago, I went in and cleaned things up a bit. And now that everything is looking good, I figured that I should probably share them.

    So here are the new & improved rules I’m using:

    All you need to do to benefit from this is add the code above to your site’s .htaccess file. Just make sure you don’t have any rules pertaining to expires hanging around from an old plugin or something else and you should be golden.

  • Why jsDelivr, Doesn’t

    On the surface, jsDelivr sounds great. The WPMU post touting the service earlier in the week made a pretty compelling case for using it. Install their plugin, let it scan your site and they’ll host your JavaScript on MaxCDN’s super-fast network.

    What’s more, their CDN is already stocked with a bunch of great JavaScript and jQuery plugins. Seriously, go use their search.

    FitText? Got it. fancyBox? Got it. Lettering.js? Got it.

    You could build one hell of a nice site without ever hosting these libraries on your server. But you shouldn’t.

    Why? Put simply, it’s bad form to put your trust in an unknown entity. And while I’m sure the creator(s) of jsDelivr are the nicest, most trustworthy people in the world, outside of a personal Twitter account link buried in the footer, there’s practically no info about them. That doesn’t instill a lot of trust in the product. So for me, the trade off just isn’t worth it. At least not right now.

    Honestly, if I were someone who was considering jsDelivr, I’d probably just quit being cheap and pay for a proper CDN account somewhere. Especially if you’re getting to the point where you’re worried about your site’s performance.

  • Revelations

    Sorry, impress.js. While you were my favorite HTML presentation framework earlier this year, some new hotness just showed up on my radar…

    reveal.js supports Markdown, speaker notes & PDF export. Out of the box! Seriously, go take a look at the demo. It’s super slick.

    Anyhow, you can bet your ass that I’m going to use it to do my next presentation. Now all I have to do is come up with a new topic. [via]

  • Liveblog

    I’m looking for an excuse to use the new Liveblog plugin for WordPress after finding out about it. But it’s kind of “out of scope” for me to start doing that sort of thing here. Or is it?

  • Try Git

    Want to learn how to use git? Try this easy to follow tutorial, courtesy of the folks over at GitHub. [via]

  • HTML

    I want this t-shirt (and most of the other ones at The Unrefinery) so hard. They even come in 3XL! [via]

  • Feature Request: Tracking Plugin Updates

    You know what I’d kill for? A plugin that takes this info from a WordPress plugin page:

    And drops it into place here:

    Because keeping track of that sort of thing is becoming increasingly important for anyone who gives half a shit about keeping their site and its plugins up to date.

    So, uhm, does anyone have the free time to do something like this? Because I don’t right now — but I’ll gladly buy a nice bottle of something alcoholic for the person who does…

    Update: Request fulfilled by the exceedingly wonderful Pete Mall!

    Here’s what it looks like in action:

    Thanks Pete! I’ll have a bottle of whiskey for you at WordCamp SF.

  • WP201: The Video

    The folks over at WordPress.tv have posted my section of the day long class I helped teach on WordPress performance & security during WordCamp Phoenix 2012. The audio is a little muffled and the video is 10 minutes longer than the theatrical release of The Avengers — and nowhere near as entertaining — but I tried to pack it as full of as much information as possible. Enjoy!