Jason Cosper

Category: Geekery

  • 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!

  • Related Posts

    Everything Merlin said about related posts plugins and social media icons in this week’s After Dark was totally spot on. If you’ve got a blog and can spare a minute and thirty seconds, you shouldn’t hesitate to give it a listen.

  • Sophomore Release

    Out of 2732 user submissions, I just collected and added 35 words & phrases to Hipster Ipsum.

    That means that only 1.281% of the stuff that people gave me was actually usable. The rest of it was names of people, inside jokes, repeats of stuff already in the database and a staggering amount of slurs and insults.

    So thanks for nothing, crowdsourcing…

  • Go Duck Yourself

    Following Ben Brooks’ lead, I’ve decided to replace my site’s search engine with DuckDuckGo. But all of the solutions he’s linked up have been a little fiddly and require editing your theme files. And while I’m okay with doing that, I realize a lot of folks probably aren’t.

    So I pulled together this little bit of form code:

    All you need to do is change “example.com” to your domain and drop the code in a text widget. Like this:

    Easy, right? Now nothing is stopping you from using DuckDuckGo as your WordPress site’s search engine!