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JSConf: JavaScript, NodeBots & yayQuery

on July 16, 2013

Back in June, I attended JSConf, a three-day JavaScript Conference, where I participated in the Yammer and SpringSource track. JSConf is one of the best JavaScript conferences in the world; every talk was enlightening, every speaker was inspiring, and all the content was exceptional. I can’t even choose a favorite speaker!

The highlight of the event was the Bitovi NodeBots event on the second day. The event kicked off at 9:00 AM with an introductory course in NodeBots and how they can help us. Rick Waldron provided examples and connected us to the Johnny-Five Library to get us started.

Grant Landram brings his web strategy passion to 10up

Grant Landram on July 9, 2013 • 10 Comments

My name is Grant and I’m thrilled to be joining the 10up family as a Senior Web Strategist. Although I don’t feel very Senior, I do feel extremely excited to bring my 5+ years of experience in entrepreneurship, web strategy, design and development to team 10up.

As a young student in business school I had wandering passions for business, economics and mathematics, all of whose depressingly boring early career paths led me to find the world of startups and the Internet. In my pursuit for more engaging and accessible outlets for my creative energy, I started experimenting with web design, PHP, and eventually WordPress. After those actions, I was hooked (see also: bad puns).

As I learned more about the economics of the internet, I quickly began building a business around web strategy. Being self-employed since 2009, I accrued an array of experiences including SEO and link building, consulting for tech startups, speaking about organizational economics and business strategy, managing large projects for Fortune 500 clients, even a brief 11-month affair with my own SaaS startup. In the end WordPress won my heart, and for the past few years I’ve built websites and web applications with WordPress, spoken at WordCamps, and organized meet-ups and WordCamps in the beautiful, amazing, it-doesn’t-rain-as-much-as-you-might-think city of Seattle, Washington.

Aaron Holbrook on June 27, 2013

WordCamp Chicago starts this Friday, and runs until Sunday, June 30. I had the pleasure of organizing this camp, before starting at 10up. Even before I joined the team, I was eager to invite some of the experts at 10up, and was thrilled to welcome both Senior Web Engineer Carl Danley and Director of Web Engineering Jeremy Felt as speakers. Jeremy will discuss the benefits of using Vagrant as a local development platform; Carl will present JavaScript performance techniques. In addition to organizing, I’ll be co-teaching the HTML & CSS Foundations class and participating in a couple of panels. Hope to see you there!

Taylor Lovett on June 25, 2013

This weekend I’ll be traveling to Montreal, Canada for the first time to speak at WordCamp Montreal, which is also being sponsored by 10up. I’ll be reprising “What You Missed in Computer Science”, which applies some key Computer Science tools to WordPress. Team 10up has had the pleasure of collaborating with a number of Canadian partners, helping Postmedia launch the new Canada.com and more recently working with Shaw Media to relaunch Global News. We’re proud to give back to the Canadian community through our sponsorship and support. I’m personally looking forward to Matt Mullenweg’s town hall and WordPress.com VIP wrangler Mo Jangda’s presentation.

Inspiration at jQuery Conference Portland

Eric Mann on June 19, 2013

Last week, Jeremy Felt, Carl Danley, and I attended jQuery Conference Portland 2013. The Conference was a great chance to connect with and listen to web professionals experienced with jQuery.

From keynotes explaining the jQuery server infrastructure – an elegant use of Github and Grunt.js enabling websites to commit using pull requests – to speakers like Patrick Camacho, who detailed Twitter’s use of Backbone for Crashlytics (Carl’s conversation with Patrick about Backbone design patterns was his highlight), every speaker offered well-informed, broad, and fascinating content. In addition to solid presentations consistently interlaced with humor, participants had the chance to pick speakers’ brains.

I had the opportunity to speak before my largest audience on the importance of Unit Testing in a presentation I titled “Minutes Now Will Save Hours Later.” In contrast to presentations I’ve offered at other conferences, I’m still getting questions nearly one week later. It’s wonderful to have such an interested, interactive, and enthused crowd!
Read More on Inspiration at jQuery Conference Portland

Drew Jaynes on June 17, 2013

Documentation teams from some of the web’s largest open source projects have converged in Cincinnati this week to share knowhow at the Open Help Conference and Sprints. Not to be left out, I’ll be attending along with 9 other WordPress docs team contributors.

This conference affords docs team contributors a great opportunity to get a lot of work done in a short period, and a chance to meet-up in person (the first time, for many of us). The WordPress delegation will be holding three, day long sprints, where we’ll tackle a roadmap for the WordPress Codex, analyze survey results and, of course, write much-needed documentation. Big thanks to Siobhan McKeown for bringing all of us together!

Injecting Ads into the Jetpack Carousel

Tanner Moushey on June 15, 2013 • 3 Comments

This is really neat!

Kind words from WordPress.com VIP‘s rock star team after deploying our new ad integration extension to Jetpack’s Carousel. Built for 9to5mac.com, this extension appends a custom image to the full screen carousel modal. We’re excited to share it with the WordPress community, along with a few cautions and insights.

Rules are rules: no AdSense

If you were hoping to inject AdSense ads, we’re sorry to disappoint: AdSense policies clearly stipulate that an ad may not be “Displayed in pop-ups or pop-unders.” You may, of course, be able to leverage our approach for other, more forgiving ad networks. We envision the typical use case will involve an internal “house” ad image.

Hooking into Jetpack with JavaScript

Because the modal Jetpack Carousel is generated entirely by JavaScript, classic WordPress PHP API hooks do not apply. Fortunately, JetPack provides 2 JavaScript hooks: jp_carousel.afterOpen and jp_carousel.beforeClose. We hooked into afterOpen – which fires every time the carousel is generated – on line 14 of carousel-ads.js:

$( document.body ).on( 'jp_carousel.afterOpen', SELF.insertAd );

Aaron Holbrook joins 10up

Aaron Holbrook on June 13, 2013 • 2 Comments

I’m Aaron Holbrook, and I’m incredibly excited to be 10up’s newest Web Engineer, claiming the mantle as the first Chicago 10upper!

I’ve crafted websites since 1998, when I was convinced my GeoCities site would light the world on fire. Since resetting my expectations, I found a passion for HTML, CSS and PHP and even built my own content management system in 2004, only to stumble upon WordPress shortly thereafter.

After earning a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Augustana College, I became the full-time “webmaster” for a hospital. After spending 5 years managing content, I realized that my passion was building, not just managing, websites. Before leaving in 2011, I rebuilt the entire hospital website on WordPress.

Introducing Grunt for WordPress

Eric Mann on June 8, 2013 • 7 Comments

Since I’m always looking for ways to improve my productivity, I constantly strive to streamline my development workflow. Lately, that meant adding Grunt to the mix.

Grunt is a scripting tool that helps automate certain development tasks using JavaScript. It runs on top of Node in your local environment, and can handle just about any task you can imagine – from linting your scripts to minfying your stylesheets to running unit tests. A few months ago, at our first summit, our entire team had the chance to play with Grunt. As a result, most of us are incorporating it into our regular workflow.

To make it easier to use Grunt with new WordPress projects, we’ve created two project templates: grunt-wp-plugin and grunt-wp-theme. These templates make it easy to kickstart development of a new WordPress plugin or theme by building out the directory structure and project’s core files for you.

If you’re building a plugin, you will start out with the core plugin file, the basic WordPress.org readme standard, and a basic directory structure for all of your PHP, CSS, JS, and image assets. The template also configures your plugin textdomain and registers a few useful constants and core functions. Here’s an example of grunt-wp-plugin in action:

Jake Goldman on June 7, 2013

This coming Tuesday, June 11, at 10 AM I will be on Sacramento’s 105.5 FM Money 2.0 with Andrew Rogerson. I’m excited to talk about 10up, our distributed business model, and the future of web development. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Andrew a few times; he’s an experienced, savvy business thinker who always challenges me to rethink the business of marketing and building websites. I’m eager to tell 10up’s story to a different kind of audience, and to engage with Andrew.

To listen to the show, you can tune into Money 105.5 FM on the radio or online with TuneIn or on iHeartRadio.