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Helen Hou-Sandi on September 25, 2013 • 1 Comment

Although I only lived in the Midwest (specifically Wichita) for a brief 11 months, I enjoyed my time there and am very excited to head back to the area on Friday, September 27, to speak at 200 OK, Oklahoma’s premier web conference. I’m excited to be on a roster that includes a fellow WordPress developer from iThemes, as well as representatives of other open source supporters such as Adobe, GitHub, Mozilla, and Etsy. The WordPress Foundation is also proud to be sponsoring the event.

I’ll be talking about Tailoring the WordPress Admin for Workflows; not an uncommon topic for me, but to a non-WordCamp audience and as always, I’ll be similarly tailoring my own presentation. Tickets have sold out, but there’s a waitlist. If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet you there!

Webfonts, CORS, and IE

Helen Hou-Sandi on October 22, 2012

We do quite a bit of development on the WordPress.com VIP infrastructure, where sites are generally domain-mapped and theme files are loaded over their CDN. Recently we developed a site where the webfont needed was not available through a hosted service, so @font-face was used to include the font files. Once the site was off of our local and staging environments and moved onto WordPress.com, however, we discovered a number of issues concerning the fonts.

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Helen Hou-Sandi on September 7, 2012

I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Baltimore this weekend, giving a designer oriented talk entitled How to Help a Developer Faithfully Realize Your WordPress Theme Design. We’ll cover essential WordPress theme components, a little bit of Photoshop etiquette, and explore what goes on in a developer’s head when they convert your lovely theme into an interactive reality. I’ll be joined at the conference by fellow 10up engineer Taylor Lovett, so be sure to say hi!

Helen Hou-Sandi on August 22, 2012

This weekend will bring Zack and I to the Midwest, where we’ll be representing 10up at WordCamp Chicago. Not only are we excited to both be on semi-familiar stomping grounds, but we’ll be bringing you two brand new talks! Zack will be presenting “Grokking the WordPress Object Cache: Getting a Handle on the WP_Object_Cache Class“, an absolute must for developers and anybody else who cares about performance or the deeper innards of WordPress. I will be giving a talk entitled “How to Sneak Your Way Into Being a Rockstar WordPress Developer When Everyone Thinks You’re a Designer“, which, despite ironically being in the designer track, is about how I got involved with contributing to WordPress and how you can, too, whether or not you’re a developer-type. We’re excited to be at DePaul in the beautiful neighborhood of Lincoln Park, and we hope to see you there!

Helen Hou-Sandi on June 15, 2012

Before I move from Wichita back to the East Coast (my original home) in a couple of weeks, I’m going to meet the fine folks of the Kansas City WordPress MeetUp and reprise my WCNYC talk on “Making Custom Content Management Disappear into the WordPress Admin”, since I wasn’t able to speak at WordCamp Kansas City. We’ll be meeting at 1PM at OfficePort (details). If you’re in the area, please come join us!

Team Rep and Community Things

Helen Hou-Sandi on May 11, 2012 • 5 Comments

About a month ago, Jane Wells posted surveys for various WordPress contributor groups, including one for core code contributors on wpdevel, in an effort to begin getting them more organized and select team representatives. I’m very excited to have been chosen as one for the core contributors group. We’ll be aiming to have regular cross-group chats and an in-person summit sometime in the near future. This is very exciting, not just for those of us representing the various groups, but for the community at large. Some of the things that I know I’m looking forward to are more communication and collaboration across groups (e.g. UI and accessibility, core development and documentation) and encouraging more people to contribute in whichever way suits them as the WordPress ecosystem continues to grow.

Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin

Helen Hou-Sandi on February 28, 2012 • 1 Comment

I taught a two-hour section of WP401 (Advanced WordPress Development) at WordCamp Phoenix’s classroom day this past Friday, speaking on the UI of the WordPress admin and giving some examples and best practices for integration of custom content types and post meta. At 10up, we strive to create seamless and usable interfaces for our clients, reducing the amount of training needed to get editors up and running and keeping the WordPress side of content management easy and enjoyable.

The slides, which are built on Google’s HTML5 Slides, can be found at http://slides.helenhousandi.com/wcphx2012.html. In it, you’ll find resources, examples, and best practice code examples.

The Perks of Contributing

Helen Hou-Sandi on December 9, 2011

Behold this glorious little section of the WordPress 3.3 credits page.

I’m never in anything for the recognition or glory, but I have to admit: this is pretty exciting. As of this writing, WordPress powers 15.7% of the top million websites and at least 22% of all new active websites in the US. That is a mind-blowing number of times that the faces and names on the credits page might be seen, even given that it’s buried a little in the admin.