Over the past few months, I’ve had to help several clients file DMCA takedown notices. Yeah, I think the DMCA stinks. But it’s also the most expedient option for squashing content scrapers and self-titled “curators” who don’t spend a lot of time worrying about things like attribution.
Anyhow, because of this, I keep finding myself in need of a well-crafted — but still fairly generic — DMCA takedown notice template. Which normally means I have to do a quick Google search for one. And then I have to spend a bunch of time doing boring, time-consuming find & replace work.
So the last time this came up, I swiped a publicly available example notice and made some edits. And, naturally, I turned it into a Gist so folks could fork it and use it for themselves.
The WordPress team just dropped what they’re calling their “first draft” of Twenty Thirteen into the wild. And while I know that it’s not a finished product yet, I like it so much that I’ve decided to use it here. At least for a little bit.
Can you blame me? I mean, just look at it…
Sexy, right?
But how did I get my grubby little hands on a copy of the theme before it was even released? Well, if you’ve got Subversion installed on a Mac, it’s as simple as opening your favorite terminal application and running this command:
cd ~/Downloads/ && svn co https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/twentythirteen/ && zip -rv twentythirteen twentythirteen && rm -rf twentythirteen/
What does that command do? Allow me to give you the step-by-step rundown…
Changes the working directory to your user’s “Downloads” folder.
Performs a SVN checkout of the Twenty Thirteen theme from Automattic’s WordPress.com theme repository.
Creates a zip file called “twentythirteen.zip” in your Downloads folder.
Deletes the “twentythirteen” folder.
Once the command finishes running, log into your WordPress dashboard, go to “Appearance > Themes”, select the “Install Themes” tab and click “Upload”.
All you have to do then is upload the theme from your computer and activate it. Simple!
And by “simple” I mean you have to be comfortable with the command line and hope to God that you have Subversion installed.
Should you not have the SVN binary on your Mac, perhaps the exciting world of pre-release themes isn’t for you. Don’t fret though, I’m sure Twenty Thirteen will find its way to the official theme repository soon enough.
P.S. Since Twenty Thirteen isn’t exactly finished yet, I wouldn’t suggest installing this on your production site. But if you’re borderline crazy — like me — feel free to join me in saying “fuck it”.
Just don’t come crying to me if something goes wrong, okay?
Since Christmas, I’ve been brewing most of our coffee through the Aeropress that Sarah gave me. And while we’ve really enjoyed the coffee — especially when you compare it to what we’d get out of our old $20 drip pot — the process has started to make me obsess over all the little tweaks I can make.
I mean, if there’s a better cup of coffee to be had, I seriouslywant to go to there.
To be perfectly honest, inverted brewing is kind of intimidating. Mainly because I don’t like the thought of “flipping” a cylinder of near-boiling water before I’ve, well, had my first cup of coffee.
So when gridwriter mentioned the Heart Roasters Aeropress method — which I seem to have missed in my fairly extensive research — I was really excited. I have yet to try it, but I’m really looking forward to giving it a shot.
For the folks who haven’t committed to cleaning the unused core files out of their WordPress install, the Old Core Files plugin for WordPress looks like it should be useful. I only say “looks like” and “should” because I’m already tidying my site’s files on the regular. But this’ll definitely save me from having to do my future sweeps manually.
I’ve been meaning to write something for almost a month now. It’s not like I have writer’s block or anything. Far from it. I’ve just been a bit preoccupied with work.
Fortunately, I’ve had this mix from DJ Shadow to help me crank through the past few weeks of long, 10+ hour days.
“All Basses Covered” is the set that got him kicked off the stage at Mansion in Miami for being “too future”. Which is a shame, because it’s fantastic.
If you haven’t heard it already — and you’re up for some next level shit — give it a listen. Or, better yet, download it directly from SoundCloud.
While helping a client come up with an alternative for the somewhat spotty Smush.it plugin for WordPress, I thought I’d do an extremely unscientific test to see what performed better. So I grabbed an image from Kanye Wes Anderson and got to compressing…
Let’s start with the original 221549 byte image. Feel free to grab it (just click on the image) if you want to play along at home.
To start, I tried uploading the file to PunyPNG. But I quickly realized that they cap their free compression tool at 150 KB. And since I didn’t feel like paying to run a one-off test, I gave Kraken a go instead.
Kraken losslessly compresses the image to 214233 bytes. Which gives a 3.3% savings in total size. In a later test, the OS X utility ImageOptim gave the exact same results. That’s not to say that’ll always be the case, but it was definitely interesting to see. Especially when you consider that the command line (see: Linux friendly) alternative image_optim only managed to compress the image to 214746 bytes.
Even though image_optim gave a respectable savings of 3.1%, I was surprised to see that otherwise insignificant variation. At least until the Smush.it web interface returned the “same” 214746 byte file.
So all of them do a respectable job, but it seems as if Kraken & ImageOptim’s lossless compression methods are slightly more aggressive. Since Kraken has an API, it’d be wonderful if someone could whip up a WordPress plugin to leverage it. But until they do, all of this crap needs to be done before the images are uploaded to your site. Which is a total bummer. It’s still better than relying on the really spotty and ridiculously laggy Smush.it API though.
Anyhow, I hope this was helpful to someone.
Oh! And if you want to see the images that each program outputted, feel free to grab them from here.
