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Celebrate 10up’s Birthday – Three WordPress Events

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10up birthday map

On Monday, February 18, 10up will turn 2 years old (more on that in a future post). On Tuesday, February 19, a handful of team 10up employees will celebrate across the country by doing what we’ve done all along – playing an active role in the WordPress community at three different meet ups on the 19th (plus a belated fourth event on the 26th)!

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John Bloch joins 10up

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Hi! If you don’t know me from a WordCamp, the WordPress DC meetup, or the broader WordPress community, my name is John and I love LAMP. Building websites started as a hobby for me, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was my professional calling. I’ve always been fascinated by the process of architecting software; watching something I’ve helped craft come to life from mere concept still fills me with wonder.

I started working with WordPress in 2008 and it quickly became my platform of choice for building websites. After publishing plugins and engaging the WordPress community, both online and at the local DC meetup, I quickly became hooked. I started attending more WordCamps, and even had the privilege of speaking at a few. From multilingual sites to multisite networks, from store locators to TinyMCE extensions to combat shortcode madness, the applications and sites I’ve built upon WordPress testify to its flexibility and power.

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Come Work With Us: WordPress developer with a front-end focus

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At 10up, we say we’re always hiring, and it’s true. We’re always looking for WordPress engineers and web strategists, but right now we’ve especially got our eyes on hiring another WordPress developer with a focus on the front-end. We offer a competitive full-time salary and benefits. If you’re interested, send a resumé and code samples (like a WordPress theme) to [email protected].

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Returning to the desert; my start with 10up and WordCamp Phoenix

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WordCamp Phoenix 2013About a year ago I took two arbitrary vacation days that coincidentally aligned with WordCamp Phoenix 2012. As it happened, a long time friend of mine, Eric Mann, was flying out as a speaker. At the conference, in between sessions, Eric introduced me to Jake and a few weeks later I’m working for 10up. Eric joined 10up a few months later.

It seems fitting, then, that the three of us: Jake, Eric, and myself are returning to WordCamp Phoenix 2013 as speakers.

Jake is attending as a rockstar presenter. Eric and I are teaching Friday classes and Sunday sessions. I’ll be talking about developer tools and techniques. Eric will talk about leveraging WordPress and open source publishing in developing or low-tech environments. Jake will dive into the “core of WordPress core”, studying its most base level information architecture and database schema.

If you happen to be headed to WordCamp Phoenix this January, we’d love to meet up and say hello. We’re always looking for new employees and great WordPress stories.

Enforcing WordPress Image Sizes Within Your Theme

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WordPress Image Sizes

As a designer and programmer here at 10up, I have the unique opportunity to see my design through from the first wireframe to the fin

al product. There’s nothing that makes me grimace more than turning control over to a client only to see the design fall apart with use. Ensuring that as little as possible is “breakable” is on top of my quality assurance list. WordPress’s native, customizable image sizes is a common cause of breakdowns.

How I use image sizes in designs

Nothing disturbs my blank white canvas in Photoshop until I have set the grid and guides that will determine the structure of the layout. As I begin to flesh out the design, image placeholders find their way in, and they’re always made to fit within those guidelines. Common placeholders include a featured slider image, a thumbnail for the main index/search/archive post list view, and a special size for the “image” post format. Most of the time, I want images used within posts and pages to use these same consistent sizes so that the layout stays as clean as possible. Call me OCD, it wouldn’t be the first time. (Editor’s note: all great designers are a bit OCD!)

I could create predefined image sizes for each call to an image attachment (and I often do at least one or two of those), but defining an endless set of sizes has a real performance toll every time an image is uploaded, not to mention the bloating effect on the upload directory. If I define 5 custom sizes, and we add that to the 3 default sizes (thumbnail, medium, and large), we wind up with 9 sizes, counting the original. That’s 9 images generated every time an image is uploaded to the site. I always try to avoid the weight and clutter by using the default image sizes.

Enforcing the image sizes

It may have crossed your mind that this breaks my own OCD rule, as administrators can adjust default image sizes from the Media settings page. But wait – that’s what this post is all about! Let’s get to some code.

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Techonomy ’12 – Social *is* the message

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On November 11 to 13, I was privileged to attend Techonomy ’12 in Tucson, Arizona, with 10up founder Jake Goldman. Techonomy ’12 in Tuscon featured exciting content and internationally-known business, science, and political leaders focused on the intersection of technology and the global economy. Sponsored by companies like Forbes Magazine, speakers included technology, finance, education, and publishing luminaries like Steve Forbes, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, AI pioneer and author Ray Kurzweiler, and Nielsen president Steve Hasker.

Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick led and moderated the 3 days of talk about the accelerating speed of technological progress, driven by increasing availability of the Internet and mobile devices. And that change is not limited to just technological progress, but to human progress as well: the technology-empowered individual is affecting a major shift in economic and political power on a global scale.

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WordCamp Toronto: Developers

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This is a post about a WordCamp. It is far from the first one: we sponsor and send people to a number of them each year . This past weekend I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Toronto: Developers.

Toronto has now held the second developer-centric WordCamp. The idea—as it was explained during the opening remarks—is that these are viability tests of niche WordCamps.

The Toronto organizers are (rightly) considering the test a success. They sold out tickets with an attendance near 300 and a slate of talented speakers despite Hurricane Sandy forcing a last-minute call for speakers.

I had the opportunity to speak about how to create websites tailored to the people using them through a process called Interaction Design. This half science, half design discipline answers questions such as:

  • Who is the site being created for, what do we mean by “user?”
  • What tasks and goals should this website address?
  • How will someone interact with the website?
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