Albert Willis

"Actually, Ripple is open source—you can download the source for the web client right now. Ripple and Bitcoin aren't rivals; Ripple is an open payment network; BTC is just one of the currencies that can be used in the Ripple network. Everyone should read Introduction to Ripple for Bitcoiners just so we're on the same page." - Albert Willis

"It's not true you need fiat to create a Ripple account; you can just sign up for one at here." - Albert Willis

"This is pretty exciting news; I expect Ripple to be one of the crypto currency success stories of 2013." - Albert Willis

Server security doesn’t need to be complicated. My security philosophy is simple: adopt principles that will protect you from the most frequent attack vectors, while keeping administration efficient enough that you won’t develop “security cruft”. If you use your first 5 minutes on a server wisely, I believe you can do that. - Albert Willis

Flat UI toolkit - Albert Willis

I know, splash pages are wrong, evil, and will probably bring about the downfall of society. But what if you need one anyway? Say, for example, you are preparing to launch a site based on wordpress but while you’re still putting it all together you don’t want visitors poking around. How can you create a static splash page to tell people that your site is coming soon (whatever that means?) - Albert Willis

A module tab is a User Interface (UI) design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content’s corresponding tab control. - Albert Willis

EasyTabs is a lightweight jQuery plugin to provide full tab functionality, while leaving the styling up to you. - Albert Willis

WHEN working with Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X, I always forget which bash config file to edit when I want to set my PATH and other environmental variables for my shell. Should you edit .bash_profile or .bashrc in your home directory? You can put configurations in either file, and you can create either if it doesn’t exist. But why two different files? What is the difference? According to the bash man page, .bash_profile is executed for login shells, while .bashrc is executed for interactive non-login shells. - Albert Willis

Anyhow, I suspect that few people know when things like .bash_profile and .bashrc actually get executed. When I started, I just followed people’s advice of putting stuff in .bashrc, and then when it didn’t work, into .bash_profile. I could stop here and describe just the bash startup process (as silly as it is), but there’s a complication in that I switched to zsh a few years ago (and haven’t looked back), but occasionally use bash on machines which don’t have zsh installed. In order to handle this nicely then, I need to be able to specify things which are specific to bash or zsh in their own files, and then to specify things which any POSIX-compliant shell (like aliases and environment variables) can understand in a common startup file. - Albert Willis

This page contains technical instructions on updating a theme for use with widgets. Many themes can be updated in five to ten minutes. Others will take an hour or two to get all of the kinks worked out. Some will look awful no matter what you do. This document assumes basic PHP editing skills, though you probably won’t have to write any code of your own. - Albert Willis

When I talked about using Sass and Compass on Twitter, other WordPress devs made comments that made me want to write this tutorial. One person said that they were tired of Rails developers having all the toys – and it’s true. There are so many awesome things out there for Rails developers that we as PHP and WordPress developers don’t benefit from. This tutorial is non-exhaustive. There are tons of things that you can do with this that I won’t cover. But this should get you going with Mac OS X Lion, developing WordPress locally on your own machine and uploading to a theme file called “test” on a remote server. - Albert Willis

using Twig to make WordPress templates - Albert Willis