Create Awesome

Twitter has been scaling down access to its API for some time now. But last night, it turned off unauthorized API requests entirely, breaking an armada of web widgets that didn’t route users through the awkward workflow of authentication.

If you’re anything like me, you find the notion of requiring a login for data that users have made explicitly publicly-available repulsive. So a couple of months ago, I threw together a little webscraper to return data I could publish in almost the same way as their API.
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If you’ve got a GoDaddy shared hosting account, you’re probably none too pleased with the Python support. After all, SSH in, type “python”, and you get a message telling you your version is horribly out of date:

$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#1, Nov 11 2010, 13:34:43)

But after six years of hacking around on their boxes, I’ve learned that the trick to getting the most of your $9/month is just knowing what hoops to jump through read more>>

If you’ve ever built anything from the ground up with HTML/CSS you know the issue: <div> only expands vertically to fit its contents. Put some of those <div> tags side by side to make columns and chances are, they’ll end up hanging awkwardly above where you want them to be.

The cannonical fix is the Faux Column, a slender, repeating image in the background behind the columns, colored to match the <div> elements that don’t quite make it to the bottom of the screen. read more>>

I’ve talked before about my much-diminished stoke for Tumblr as a platform.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who sees things this way, and a lot of great tools exist to help you migrate your setup to WordPress. There’s a built-in tool that pulls in your Tumblr blog into a WP install more-or-less intact, and if you are using a custom domain, you can point it to your WordPress install and use this plugin to redirect your old URLs in a line of code.

But what to do about all those [your-account].tumblr.com URLs? read more>>

While I love that WordPress has a huge developer community, a lot of plug-ins are overkill. WP does a great job of packaging CMS features into its core functions, meaning that a ton of awesome content is available, usually in a single line of code.

Let’s take the “about the author” boxes, popular on professional and non-anonymous blogs. A default install of WordPress 3.x already has a system for keeping track of user data (it’s under “Users” in the left-hand column on the Dashboard), and a function (get_the_author_meta) to call up that data at any point in any template. read more>>

I’m not sure to whom this post would be best addressed. Baby-boomers? Recruiters? Sales teams? All of the above?

Since you’re calling me, let’s assume you have a landline. When I was a kid my parents had a landline, and 95-99% of the calls that came in were obnoxious wastes of time. It got so bad that Congress had to pass legislation protecting people from the steady, inane barrage.

Though I’m sure your phone call is different, special, and important, it’s still an unknown number, and it’s still proposing an immediate, intrusive interaction between us. read more>>

From openings I’ve seen and interviews I’ve been to, there seems to be something of a fixation on coding things “from scratch”.

It’s as if hiring managers had stumbled across a WYSIWYG one day, realized that *gasp* applicants might not have written all the code in a website themselves, and issued a dictum that all future candidates for positions must be able to code things “from scratch”.

Ignoring the fact that WYSIWYGs seldom deliver decent (or even passable) results in real-world use, I think the line of questioning is ultimately self-defeating. read more>>

I recently updated my official online presence, and rather than toss attribution about willy-nilly, I figured I’d make a blog post to acknowledge the few bits of code that I didn’t write from scratch.

Of course, “from scratch” can be a slippery term as far as websites go, so I drew the line at any code on, or that helps generate, the index page at CosmoCatalano.com that isn’t 1) a documented library function in a default installation of an established programming language, or 2) that I didn’t write from a blank file in a text editor.

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I understand the intentions behind it. It was meant to be an engine of liberation, empowering a proletariat of print editors and writers bred on—or at least not terrified of—word processing software to quickly and easily deploy their skills on the World Wide Web. It was meant to free designers and developers friendly with HTML to pursue other, more pressing and complicated tasks.

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I was performing some housekeeping work on Twixcuse last night, and I was reminded of a conversation I had with the great Jon Shea much earlier in my programming career:

Cosmo: I look back at my old code, and I’m just like, “Who is the jackass that wrote this?”

Jon: Uh—yeah. That never stops happening.

He was right.